Play Out The Match

Michael Knox

Sujets

• Poetry

Informations

• Publié par: Ecw Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781554902675
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

PLAY OUT THE MATCH
PLAY OUT THE MATCH
MICHAEL KNOX
Copyright Michael Knox, 2006
Published by ECW PRESS 2I20 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E IE2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise - without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW PRESS .
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Knox, Michael, 1978- Play out the match / Michael Knox.
A MisFit book. Poems. ISBN 1-55022-723-8
I . Reconciliation-Poetry. I . Title.
PS862I.N69P53 20O6 C8II .6 C2006-900476-5
Editor: Michael Holmes/a misFit book Cover and Text Design: Tania Craan Cover photo: Craig van der Lende / Getty Author photo: Andrea McKenzie Typesetting: Mary Bowness Printing: Gauvin
This book is set in AGaramond
With the publication of Play Out the Match ECW PRESS acknowledges the generous financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( BPIDP ), the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Ontario Arts Council, for our publishing activites.

DISTRIBUTION CANADA : Jaguar Book Group, 100 Armstrong Avenue, Georgetown, Ontario, L7G 5S4
PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA
For my Mother
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PLAY OUT The MATCH
STRIKE TOWN
FLEE
NORTHERN EARTH
LISTEN
OUTPORT
HEED
SWIMMING IN THE BODENSEE
WORK
BENEATH
PAST TRENTON BY BUS
RHYTHMS
NOTES TO A FATHER
THE CHIPS
GANONOQUE
AND I WILL PASS
1920
THOSE DAYS
NATASHA
BITTER PILLS
NIGHT ON ROBERT STREET
THE DEEP
VISIT
SUBURB NOCTURNE
APART
ST. JOHN S
SIGNAL HILL
THAW
WAIT
WANT
GLIMPSE OF THE MYRIAD
DREAMS
DESCENT
THE RACCOON
WHEN
LUCK
KINGSTON TO HALIFAX
THE LONG WALK
MIST
LEAVE YOUR LIFE
CURSING YOUR NAME
THE FALL
THE DAY
NIGHT NOISES
FROSH
COFFEE WITH MARINA
JENNY
MS. BECKETT
THE DIMMING
STRUGGLE
THE COLLECTORS
BILL
OUR THINGS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to gratefully acknowledge the support of the following, whether moral, editorial or philosophic:
My Family, Lindsay Wilson, Michael Holmes, Eddie Gebbie, Ali Hejripour, Marina Mandal, Peter Fraser, Margaret Calverley, Andrea McKenzie, Jenn Doherty, Jenny Banks, and the University of Toronto Schools.
I would also like to acknowledge the following literary journals and publications for publishing many of these poems in slightly different forms:
Pottersfield Portfolio Ygdrasil: Journal of the Poetic Arts The Breath Magazine Forget Magazine Surface Online Journal of the Arts Ligature Stirring: A Literary Collection Subtle Tea The Malahat Review
PLAY OUT THE MATCH
You are ever huge and complacent
miraculously balancing your width
on a comically narrow bar stool in my mind.
Drizzle spattering panes in that little Ayrshire pub
a thousand generations of our families affiliation
stretching back behind us.
Old oak of a man. Body
like a bunch of hard fists
an easy clench on a pint of the black stuff
wide knuckles reaching up halfway on the glass
and that great watchful back
probably better than your puckered eyes
always trained fast on that blurry set
for nothing but rugby or football matches.
Glasgow brawls left stubborn nicks, ironic tears
in the brow of the animated boulder of your face
red like mine but heavier like your body
denser more elemental.
As if you d sprung from the very highland earth.
I admit I was always jealous of it
your notched face merrily mocking
that I was better off getting by on my looks
and clapping the scarred weight of a massive unreal hand
like a grown uncle on my stringy shoulder
because we both knew strength is all you really loved.
When the doctors said your liver d had it
and to lay off the drink and the smoke
you regaled us. Told it like a joke.
Aye lads, dead in the face - sip - fuck yu.
You weren t the kind of man to hear things twice
and they knew it. So you kept on
boasting that you d finish the match
the way you d always played it
and - sly wink - hoped they were tapping a keg for you in heaven.
We lost our nerve to look scared.
A coward, I put a loyal hand on your rocky shoulder
and gave a stiff-chinned nod and a wink
and got us a round of the pure.
But somehow, I know you were scared.
Faced suddenly with something
you couldn t square off with in the rainy streets.
And on the way home at night
splashing the trapped stars free of their puddles
and laying in that tiny complaining bed of yours alone
even through the drink you were afraid.
We all feel about for the horizons of our limitations
and yours were closer than you d ever let on
holding court at your bar stool.
Mortality levels this playing field of ours.
You knew you were too terrified not to drink all day in the pub.
We both knew you were not indomitable
in the world beyond that smoke-hazed little nook
our world of cigars and malts and the occasional crunching punch-up.
And stepping home needled with lowland rain
I think that you must have resolved each night to stand
tomorrow to take a new life in this world.
But sitting up in bed in the morning
with that blend whisky bottle on your nightstand
you looking at sky the colour of smoke and thought
on all the dispassion and resignation in things
and with a belt or two to mash out the hangover
you rose and in what you may have pretended was courage
and integrity but was only soft submission
said to the late morning, Another day I ve been given
and resolved in soliloquy that you would play it
the best way you knew
and really the only way
and you probably even winked at yourself in the mirror
swallowing your shame.
And know that I forgive you your weakness
though it was not your habit to do so in others.
Only the most resolute of us will not buckle
in the flicker of our strength -
heaven or no heaven.
STRIKE TOWN
The snows came on early this year
quiet banshee cursing our names
and piling the streets.
Heavy barricades at our doors;
ours cars all wheezing shuddering junk.
Striking fathers try to forget
newfound anxiety insomnia alcoholism
and build snowmen with toddlers
that only come out warped.
They must find something instead
of carrots and coal for noses.
Times are tight, Daddy says
with a meek smile
that doesn t reach his eyes.
Teenage girls flip sullenly
through fashion magazines;
sulk through windows
at grey-lit streets
heavy with cloud
winter half-light
and dream of other worlds.
People go out as little as possible.
Women boil water in cold kitchens
and drink worried cups of tea.
There is nothing to say
when their husbands pass.
The kitchen table fills with unopened mail.
Watchful listening nights
the husband sits and stares
hopelessly into
the pointed white pile.
On the picket lines the men huddle together.
They have left the enthused marching and chanting
from the autumn. No one drives by to honk support.
All watch the great shadow of the mill
and it watches them
quiet snow drifting down
on dead air
fearful silence everywhere.
Teenage boys go silent for weeks.
Gather to breathe bags of glue
in the parks at night
and sit alone with their nightmares
in their dark basement rooms
fierce and stagnant.
The girl suspends herself from a beam in her room.
A bell shadow of her dress across the wall
tolling silently over the whole town.
FLEE
All week I scan flimsy dollar store goods
and ride the bus benches home late at night
to a house that is all bent rum caps in ashtrays
and drone bleary-eyed through my school days
with everyone I don t know looking on with quiet concern.
My skin is curdled, the ugly pallor of milk,
and the other girls giggle together
and chat on their cell phones and are all smooth
brown legs and no-socks in fashionable sneakers
while I am inexplicably in tears in the bath or break room
or jostled by every bump on the last bus home alone.
And I stopped one February night on the bridge
that goes over the highway and looked
at the distant skyline from the very edge of this massive city
and thought how much I d love to flee its loneliness
and take a bus far away, because everyone can flee by bus,
even part-time dollar store cashiers,
and I could just forget all of them in a