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Ecw Press - di Michele Mary

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70 pages

English

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'A masterwork from one of Canada s most important poets Referencing the post-war neorealist film by Vittorio De Sica, Mary di Michele s Bicycle Thieves commemorates her Italian past and her life in Canada through elegy and acts of translation of text and of self. The collection opens with a kind of hymn to life on the planet, sung from the peak of that urban island, Montreal an attempt to see beyond death. The book moves into a sequence of poems described by Sharon Thesen as the poet envisioning the passage of time under the full and waning moon of Mount Royal s beacon cross, recalling her Italian immigrant parents in Toronto and her current life in Montreal [. . .] a sort of Decameron. Thesen s description is apt for the collection as a whole, which moves into the poet s autobiography in search of catharsis through literature and pays tributes to poets who have been part of the literary landscape di Michele now inhabits.

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Poetry

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	11 avril 2017
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773050119
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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BICYCLE THIEVES
MARY DI MICHELE

for my mother and my father and for all those who seek to shape their life sentences
The past beats inside me like a second heart. — JOHN BANVILLE

CONTENTS
SCOTOPIA
i THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD
NOW HE DRIVES A TAXI IN COMOX
THE MOUNTAIN AFTER KLEIN
THE BICYCLE THIEF
IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE
THE WINDS OF HOMECOMING
LEFT BEHIND
FORGETFULNESS
THE UNTEACHABLE
THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD
THE POSSIBILITY OF TIME TRAVEL
LA VITA VECCHIA
THE TASTE OF LOSS
. . . AND THEN SHE WOKE UP
TURNING THIRTY TWICE OVER
BLACK DOG
ii LIFE SENTENCES
LIFE SENTENCES (An Autobiography in Verse)
iii AFTER
LIKE KAFKA’S APE (After Giorgio Caproni)
THE LIGHT IN EACH OF US (After Giorgio Caproni)
EVENING LIGHT (After Umberto Saba)
THE BLUE BOWING OF EVENING (After Dino Campana)
ARS POETICA (After Dino Campana)
ON STYLE (After Dino Campana)
BED OF ROSES (After Dino Campana)
LIFE IS A ROSE (Ronsard V)
On THE WAY TO THE VILLAGE STEAM BATHS (After Pier Paolo Pasolini)
THE BIG BANG
ENIGMATICO REVISITED
DE SICA’S LADRI DI BICICLETTE
ROBERT LOWELL READS AT SCARBOROUGH COLLEGE, CIRCA 1970
A POEM ABOUT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING
DEATH AND TRANSFIGURATION IN NEW YORK CITY (An Essay in Verse)
SOMEWHERE I HAVE NEVER TRAVELLED
AUTHOR’S NOTES
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT

SCOTOPIA
Beacon shining from the top of Mount Royal,
a cross, unblinking under Capricorn.
Beaver Lake is iced over. The ring
in his pocket stays in his pocket.
In the shadow of the red-tailed hawk, what’s left
of a crow is now just tail feathers and wings
splayed out in the arms of a maple. To look is
to look away. Where the earth is flat we forget
we walk on a planet, but, from the view
at the summit, we remember
we are not alone, married and unmarried
alike, the stellar bridegroom
orbiting above, astronaut or angel,
watches over us from the stratosphere.
In a flash — we see what he sees — the city
below from space: the mystery
illuminated. This island city — this
island, Earth. Animal or mineral,
we all bow to the darkness,
we all turn in the light.

i
THE MONTREAL BOOK OF THE DEAD
Still to be so poised, so Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.
— JAMES MERRILL

NOW HE DRIVES A TAXI IN COMOX
He remembers the darkness of winter
mornings when he was fifteen and helped
the milkman deliver milk door-to-door.
The wagon was drawn by a horse, hooves
on cobblestone, the only sound, and the milkman
humming under his breath while the boy
he was would run up to each house, a bottle
of milk in his hand, the glass slick with cold,
the wagon waiting, the horse stomping.
That was 1954, and before
the milkman bought his first truck; before
his father’s last transfer to the airbase
here in Comox. Now as he drives the taxi,
I transport him back — though nearly sixty years
have passed since those icy mornings, the boy
in him wakes up. Montreal is beckoning,
the city, luminous in his mind; he can see again
the copper dome of St. Joseph’s Cathedral
rising newly polished against the sky and not
blanched by snow and passing time.

THE MOUNTAIN AFTER KLEIN
I who first knew it as a dark stage for the shining
white cross in celluloid, with the reel
moon by its side, hovering
in the cobalt air of Arcand’s Jésus of Montréal ,
did not know the mountain at all, regarding
what was only the patina of the movie poster.
When I moved to Montreal at forty
I was young. It was easy then climbing
up its gentle slopes, clambering
all the way to the top to see the beacon
cross up close, where it was
unmasked, a charade of tin and wire
surrounded by a chain-link fence,
though at night, switched on, it lit the way,
declared to all: “I am not Toronto,
I am the full and unwaning moon for this metro-
polis of snow.”
In its layers the mountain keeps, not hours,
but geological time. In Mont Royal
find not a mount at all really
but a hill
of the Monteregian hills.
This fall the maples are ubiquitous, and in their regalia
of red and gold, blazing the mountain’s flanks.
O the amber light of abbreviated afternoons!
Montreal, my autumn will always be spent
with you. This November day, lazing
in amazing sunshine, thinking about “The Mountain,”
the Cartier Monument, where Klein and Lefty play hooky
and throw gravel against the bronze tits of Justice,
as I sit in Place Norman Bethune, by the sandblasted
figure of a man who spat on injustice.
He stands alone and unadorned, still striving forward
for the good of mankind. Such gravitas —
except that someone has put dark glasses on him.
Come spring I will climb the mountain
at night and, as if stepping into a film screen,
pale as Robert Lepage,
join the spring pageantry of pain,
carrying my coat as I warm up,
and visit the cross, illuminated, and illuminating
the city megaliths, the towers, the bridges, the river,
and even through the darkness and distance I will see
the old port, where cruise ships dock, and Jésus is
a sailor, walking on the water,
while revellers, all dressed in white, toast —
hooray and apocalypse —
His coming, their going.

THE BICYCLE THIEF
If I could go back to my birthplace, Lanciano,
wander all day up and down the corso,
stop by the cathedral built on the ruins
of a Roman prison and pray,
if I could
make my way at night by the glimmering
of my brief candle, and if I could see
into the darkness and find my father,
if he were still living
there in Lanciano.
Strangely it seems it was just yesterday
that I returned from Lanciano feeling
despondent because if I were pure
spirit I could have gone back
in time too
(traversed the years along with the miles),
and so have seen my father before
the World War, seen the boy my father was
before his father betrayed
a barefoot son
and sold his bicycle. If I call him
by his true name, Vincenzo, not Vincent,
will he recall then his life in Italian,
through eyes still clear,
through hopes undimmed?
If I were sharper, or indeed purer,
I might yet see that boy in the old man
in stocking feet at the nursing home
in Toronto, my father who
no longer knows
his life or his daughter in any language.
When at last he rises from his wheelchair,
when he leaves this earth to return to
earth, he too will go back
to Lanciano,
to the cathedral on the corso ,
where he will find his bicycle among
the stolen years of his life, and ride it,
not towards the future, but into
the past.

IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE
“I don’t need anything. I’m fine here. Take care
of yourself.” The last words your mother speaks
the last time you see her. Why was her death
the next day such a surprise? Did you not hear
the note of farewell in her voice? You remember
her words but translated. Sto bene qui , you wanted
to believe that. Badete . The wellness of where
she has gone.