11-20-2024
Sue Goyette
A VERSION OF COURAGE
It’s easy to be brave when you’re home. Try coming outside,
under the moon and saying it. There are hollow trees about, tell them about being
done.
If I had to do it again, I’d place a stethoscope on the heart of us
sooner. I’d prescribe Neruda, not the despair but the slow blossom of 20 kisses.
Goodbye, goodbye to the slippery duvet of this bed. The cold floor
of awake and how hope can have insomnia, spend the whole night wishing.
Heartbreak is a geological occurrence. It takes years. Seams, faults
have slowly broken our days apart, their history dates all the way back
to the ocean floor.
Memory is a snare that catches moonlight in its teeth. We’ve gnawed off
limbs to escape, hobbled to the clearing, each of us with a different story.
BACK WHEN WE’D TRY ANYTHING TO FIX IT
One day, neither of us will be around to explain
the baby bathtub in the attic. It’s the only thing up there.
Not even an attic, really, just a space
in the beams between room and ceiling. We put it up there
on a day like this. Back then, everything was still intact. It was January
and snowing the way it does in Nova Scotia,
foreshadowed and followed by rain. I remember you
saying there is something about the way the gulls look
against the snow that speaks of distance,
the blur of white bodies and the lift of their flight,
camouflage of the brief blizzard abandoned
for grey, indifferent sky. I remember trying to figure it out
what you meant, what was being foreshadowed
and would follow. Anything spoken with the word
distance in it used to interest me greatly. I thought something
sacred was being said, some celestial message
for me and the direction my life should take. Now I think
you were talking about seagulls, the way their bodies
disappear in snow only to reappear against sky and finally, now
that’s enough. Beauty isn’t as hard to reach as I used to think.
It was work, emptying the closet so you could get the ladder in.
We spoke about clothes we don’t wear anymore. We spoke
about sweaters. Once in a while the wind would whirl up
and the window would whiten. We both agreed we were glad
to be inside. I remember holding the ladder, watching you disappear,
head first, through the attic opening. I remember thinking it was a type of birth
or rebirth, that something was changing or about to. But I used to
think that way. Life was often just verging on, about to, had to
get better. You kept talking after you disappeared in the attic,
as if the house had found its voice. Are you sure, it said, deeply,
forlornly. Are you sure this will work?
FOR WOMEN WHO CRY WHEN THEY DRIVE
Blame it on CBC stereo if anyone asks. Blame it on
the viola. I did and it worked. I never had to mention locksmiths
and lovers, how close the two are. I never had to name
each white-knuckle grip of his on the steering wheel. I’ll name it here, though,
for you. Surrender and all its aliases. I feel at home in two places now.
One’s here, the other in the library surrounded by reference books
to the stars. Driving doesn’t help. But you already know that. Remember
when you stopped, pulled over on Cole Harbour Road and wept,
bowed to the wheel and the long road ahead, the long road behind. I tried
signaling, pulling over, but the traffic was stubborn. If you are reading this,
I did try to stop. The passing lanes of loss and love and the speed limit
to this life. I held you for days in my heart, dear sad woman in the dark green Volvo
next to the Dairy Queen, next to the Royal Bank, feeling like you have no choice.
And you don’t. You don’t, except to fasten your seat belt
and yield.
Sue Goyette has published nine books of poems and a novel. Her collections include The Brief Reincarnation of a Girl, Penelope and Ocean (for which she was awarded the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award). She is the editor of Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #MeToo (University of Regina Press, 2021), The 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology (Anansi, 2017) and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013 (Tightrope Books, 2013). Her work has been translated into French, Spanish and German and has been featured in films, subways, buses, spraypainted on a sidewalk and tattooed. She was nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several national awards including the Pat Lowther Award, the Bliss Carman Award, and the CBC Literary Prize for Poetry. She is the Artist in Residence in the Max Rady College of Medicine at the University of Manitoba and Poet Laureate for Halifax Regional Municipality. She lives in Halifax (K'jipuktuk) where she teaches in the creative writing at Dalhousie University.
