STEVIE HOWELL
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
I NEVER SAW A THING IN THE WILD FEEL SORRY FOR ITSELF
You can’t catalog a litany. I’m trying to figure out what to do with the remainder of my life. I taught for decades. Was demoted to subbing. But showed up at the wrong schools. At 19, I earned a basketball scholarship. But fell apraxic. One dose of Remicade stripped myelin. Unsheathed involuntary laugher at monotone voices, and multiples like SALE! SALE! SALE!, or crowds. I’ve worked as a counsellor, and You can catalog a litany. I see the cracks in things. You from afar, for instance. Given time, something will strike one of us. Then what? Bedside. Recognizing the grip-strength of a certain hand without needing the voice. Who am I to play God? Not w/birth or death or health—but forgiveness. Mercy can be misplaced as easily as keys. Eyeglasses in the fridge. Remote in the liquor cabinet. I’d do anything to re-gift this love for you, this empathy, this pathetic mimicry, to— inject concrete in sponge, remodel as bone. It aches malignant, but I admire with my whole heart that you won’t miss me, or won’t say so, or won’t feel mortal, or won’t suffer regret—you Stoic, you stone. I never saw a wild thing feel sorry for itself, the way I should know better, the way you don’t. If I’m wrong about what “they” feel, I’d be the last to know. *title and 4th/3rd last line refs D. H. Lawrence poem, “Self-Pity” HOLLOW ALL THE WAY DOWNA hand in a curtain,
soil on fire He can still play the piano but can’t remember where we are North England, by the sea, 1983, might as well be Centralia, Pennsylvania underground, coal that won’t cease smouldering for _____ miles and X # of years. Can’t snuff itself. Tried. Every three minutes his breaker resets, 0:00, then 0:01 etc., his wife emerges from the other side of the wall and it’s a new birth the first birth, the big bang, ecstatic. His eyes, his luck! Doesn’t know she’s been here all day, all week, all month, all year. Was just mucking about in the garden. He still knows his love—love lives in a different region from the one carved out by the clot. A town with a population <8
grumbles in rockers lined up on a house porch perched on stilts. Soil remediation, lap quilts. A buckled road too weak to hold anything but foot traffic. Graffitied. A person procures a tool and the sensation is charged, metal sheathed in chi, I could say nothing or everything hi mom! more zeal! you do you. for a good time, call 911. A black lab bolts like he broke
through a fence to the real field (was released from a hatchback, but pretends). He bounds elliptically, b/c the magnets are stronger here. What is he eating now. Must he always eat cellulose and scat? Owner hollers, claps, and lab coils reflexively into a c-clamp. Braced for the smack. A hand in a curtain, soil on fire, neurons de-linking, a man clings to a woman
he can’t place, another person is a carbon sink, a man’s best friend is his diary it’s hollow all the way down and I am waking up I am finally awake, no now I am actually awake, fully and totally, no now I am awake for real, no now I am really awake, no now the secret’s out, to turn the town slo-mo into a quarry exploding homes, civil suits, a gossiping chorus. They say I know it in my heart, I just know it. But you can’t know anything in your heart. |
STEVIE HOWELL is an Irish-Canadian writer and worker. A first collection of poetry, Sharps, was released in 2014, and was a finalist for the 2015 Gerald Lampert Award. Poems have been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry (2014 and 2015) and The Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library journal, So It Goes (2015). Poetry has appeared in The Walrus, Hazlltt, Maisonneuve, Eighteen Bridges, Geist, and Prelude. When not writing, Stevie studies psychology and works as a psychometrist. www.steviehowell.ca
