Designated Mourner

Catherine Owen

Description

Designated Mourner is a collection of elegies for an unconventional spouse and artistic collaborator, lost to addiction at a young age. These poems keen on the page, tracing tenderness and sorrow while raging against his night. Well-crafted and intimate, Designated Mourner engages with a range of forms. It is timely as grief is a misunderstood and often shunned emotion in North American society, as is drug addiction. The poems allow emotion while never losing their aural power.

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781770905344
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Much more often than not,
women were the designated mourners.
~
KATHERINE ASHENBURG


DESIGNATED
MOURNER
POEMS
CATHERINE OWEN
ecw press / a misFit book


For Chris Matzigkeit
(1981–2010)
When I am dead,
even then
I will still love you,
I will wait in these poems
~
MURIEL RUYKESER


THE LUNG POEM
The poem breathes for you some days
It’s okay
The poem never says he isn’t, entirely,
Coming back
The poem has too many lungs to accept
Death completely
The poem, as it sings its dirge, notices
A poppy
Opening like a soft heart in the sun
The poem
Cannot tell you with finality it’s over
The poem takes your breaths for you
Some mornings
The poem is a lung


CONSANGUINITAS


CONSTELLATION (2008)
How the poem isn’t written
out of the what’s there,
the who is,
the cruelty in this but also
the sacred remove of you
with your anxious sea eyes
nerved touch of flesh
after seven years
as if you are still
new, fragile in your reaching for me,
miracle-held by us
beyond all hurt’s unwording chaos
telling me
of the perfect 6 a.m. sight —
Orion, his belt triad in the morning sky, spear
unkilling as starlight
and I watch you, in the darkness,
smiling.


THANK YOU NOTE
for how you — serving me coffee in bed, Saturday mornings —
have endured my ever-moonings, first love, other elusive
muses, knowing poems are there & are breath.
for how you’ve never intruded in my journaling, that text of
solitude, despite its incriminations,
its dream worlds.
for how you gaze up at me after one of our simple meals —
artichoke hearts, olives, rosemary bread — as if my face contains
all wilderness, all domesticity.
for how you have shown me toes can be adored, that too-short
strand of hair you won’t let me cut and for those (o many) small
of the back kisses.


BLOOD
the part about falling on the ice
I liked —
my kneecap opening against the slick sheet
beneath the truck as I —
clutching the door jamb
crashed ass-end on the sidewalk rink —
was the panic in your eyes mouth O-no-ing
high-pitched and the smoke you had just lit
tipping from your lips into the Big Bubba travel mug
as you stuck your hand out
to stop me — the love in this gesture —
from leaving you further, no further
than this.


NINE HOURS AWAY FROM THE SIXTY-SIXTH AVENUE TURNOFF Cariboo Region, BC
In the truck plastered with Kelowna mud, we leave Blue
River, head down the seasonal Neapolitan hues of the minor
highway: ice,
gravel, rubbed black of asphalt peeled up by the 4x4s & logging
rigs pulling lengths of frozen forests past the powdered-over
signs marking
flooded creeks & trestle bridges, only one sign still fresh — a red
diamond with the words Accident Scene stamped inside and
around the corner
the usual hulk of metal, glass, me staring at the eyes of each
driver in every car that passes us, asking, is it you my executioner,
is it you
my victim, remembering stupid, inconsequential things from
the trip: overcooked broccoli, too many pairs of socks under the
tree, the off-key
incessant carols, nothing I want to be thinking of as I die.


DOWN JOB’S COVER St. John’s, NL, 2009
Already you’ve brought yourself here,
rain and the ships named Jacqueline
or Cher , all moored in the narrowest
of harbours, hulls painted with their origins:
Iqaluit, Ottawa, Alaska.
There is nowhere else for you to go.
There is fate and then there are the defeated,
those who suddenly cast away largesse,
the too-much beauty of it in the ache
of their own unworthiness.
I never wanted this for you but what was
my small hope so lost in the wake
of what came before it.
Every wave hosts its salt gull and the anchors,
the moorings are far heavier than I’d imagined
living with you in our fantasized home, the dry,
bright promises between us always surmounted
by this trudge to the lacking wharf,
the collapse of love.


BEYOND COBEQUID BAY Halifax, NS
Down the length of the Chévarie
you point out how the ridge gets older
& older the farther one walks, trees
receding into rootlessness, then grass,
the rocks below becoming gradually
more deformed, becoming ridges
that swell with fossilized trunks, caliche
and decayed foliage dotting their tops,
oxidization veining stones and all about the sand,
discarded pods of fish eggs, bladder wrack.
The cliffs age & age the farther you walk,
from a mere 200 million years to the sinkhole
of 450 million deposits of sediment, erosions of salt.
The shock is how close the eras are; a relative
youth of green merging into the black echoes of a planet
that was, within steps of each other,
the before of us,
the after.


THE CRACKHEAD’S ROUTINE: A FUGUE
It is there when he gets up in the morning
& grinds the beans and lets a cat out or in.
It is there — this calling for nothing.
When he gets up in the morning, like a thief
he scans the house — this calling
needs to be fed, not for nothing can he
breathe in that poison, it is there
in the furniture, in what he once worked hard for;
when he gets up in the morning, he is surrounded by this calling,
it is there, what can always be sold — everything —
where he cannot stop to eat, where the car waits
to get him there, get him there to It, when he,
in the morning, gets up, woken by this nothing that calls.


CIRCULAR
He wakes and what he’s left behind is there
The dark more than the dark when darkness falls
The echo in his mind when nothing calls
It’s not as if this caught him unawares
The stranger wandered long his life’s dim halls
Still he wakes and what he’s left behind is there
The dark more than the dark when darkness falls
Who first, if for himself, he shouldn’t care?
Bright image of a boy that time now palls
As on his hands and knees to death he crawls
Though he wakes and what he’s left behind is there
The dark more than the dark when darkness falls
The echo in his mind when nothing calls.


THE CRACKHEAD’S PALINDROME
It comes right down to this. Just one more hit
and he will be cured of the need
for this frenzy in the dark, this scrounging:
things he can pawn, lies he can tell.
She will know then; all will be revealed.
Something will save him from the sharp,
tight hankering in his brain, this net
he’s cast around the world: the feel
of pressing the glass mouth full, sucking
and the sense that he is everything
in that one split second rush.
Now he is Hercules eternally, is he not?
So surely this time that will be it.
O surely this time that will be it.
Now he is Hercules eternally, is he not?
In that one split second rush there
is the sense that he is everything, sucking,
pressing the glass mouth full, the feeling
he’s been cast around the world, a net
tight & hankering in his brain.
Something will save him from the sharp. She
who will know then; all will be revealed —
those things he’s pawned, the lies he can tell.
All for this frenzy in the dark, this scrounging
to be cured of the need.
It comes right down to this. Just one more hit.


migration: just before this, recovery, and.
Two months since I first became ill — that strange
spiral of sicknesses that left me uncertain of respite
and you kind, bringing me finely cut sandwiches
when I finally had an appetite, your forehead runneling
as it always did when worry claimed your skin.
And now, suddenly, you are gone.
Not gone in the way of death but just as lost
to me and I so close to being well, though there
is no one to draw pleasure (as once, you would have)
from my vigour, the way it brought our lives richness.
I don’t even know where you are, only that we will
never lie in bed together again as we did for eight years,
in both health & sickness, the awkward beauty of our bodies, breathing.


migration: things taken, what of this counts.
Leaving, a thief of your own life, not to mention:
the dog, that humble, loyal, ear-
flapping creature and all her forays
to the back fence, the bread I tore for her,
mixing it with a little egg, her fur shimmering,
this familial mirage.
one kitten, furzed, a brand-new thing, rescued
from the tool crib a week prior, all cold mewlings
and now.
Too much music, too much.
~
Thinking there would be a list, I find.
It’s not even what you took.
Heedlessly, perhaps a pleasure in it.
But simply that.
~
Returning to a house once so
plenteous, gifting us with routine,
chaos: fucking on the summered
sharpness of grasses by the fire pit,
brewing tea afterwards, a room for everything,
we thought.
But thief, there it was all the time.
The terror of happiness, success or
what was it that led.
You in the dark of yourself, always.
And the door, locked against the angel,
that burning, irreversible sword.


migration: the flight between, loss.
Turning away from the islands of ice,
the sunrise behind us, a tight cell of breathing.
But why do I say us when you are not with me,
when us has become a useless sound,
the exhale of settling into emptiness?
We never flew together, not even once.
Does this tell me anything now when why
has replaced nearly every other word?
This descent through the clouds, how
quickly it happens, really, and if