BLACK ICE

It was the laneway in January that frightened me most;

the reaching-out branches of leafless trees; rumblings

of the all night streetcar; the one or two people walking

throught the dark and the snow stirring: all as it should be

when you have something to hide.  It was the cold, grey

clouds; and framed in a square of light, it was the man

in the second floor window yelling at someone

I could not see.  It was the way his fists pounded

the air and his shirt was off, thrown over the back

of a chair; the man was lean, his pounding and pointing

unyielding.  It felt as if the someone was me, unsteady

on my feet.  It was the falling, darkness and falling,

the time-crested glow of the moon reflected

in a sheet of ice and the thud that I heard was me

on my side looking up through the cold.  It was

the light gone from the window and silence

except the occassional streetcar rolling by.

It was the lane changing, deepening its shadow,

and I wanted to pull the ice like a blue-black

blanket over my feet and legs and fall asleep

because sometimes sleep is vertigo, the drawn-out

stutter of a radiant heart, the shifting plates of darkness.

It was stars, the upside-down naked-with-trees laneway at night.

(From: Narcissus Unfolding: Frontenac House, 2011)

 

29 July 2010


The Housekeeping Journals

Synopsis


In the Housekeeping Journals, the self-oppressed narrator, Tony, takes on a homemaking job to put himself through university as a social work student.  He performs domestic tasks traditionally deemed ‘women’s work’, and in the land of laundry and dirty dishes finds himself involved in the complex lives of his clients who live with addiction, AIDS, mental illness, poverty and shame. 

Chapters are introduced by Mrs. Neatson’s  Easy Steps to Domestic Bliss for the Busy Housewife, a voice from the nineteen-fifties offering tips to the Lady of that era.  These tips, with their surreal tone of glamour and richness, run parallel with the myth-making, real-life survival needs of the novel’s characters – an elderly, crippled man living with his drug-dealing grandson; a demented drag queen about to get evicted from his apartment; a mother holding the hand of her dying son as she reflects on her youth and her lost lover.

Although Tony is 6’ 5”, in his carnivalesque world-turned-upside-down, he perceives himself as small and invisible.  In the Housekeeping Journals, he “cleans house” as he explores childhood memories and his grief and guilt surrounding his younger brother Stephen’s death at the hands of his violent and mean-spirited stepfather, Frankie Pearce.  Tony learns through the courage of his clients, and ultimately emerges with grace and humour as an emotionally daring and sexually adventurous man.