Automobile
In the public road like the embrace
of a two pronged compass,
the wind’s fingers in the mane
and miles in the belly,
us two were leaving, hollow,
whiplash for the soft gaze;
the mind a makeup, the blood make up
naked, naked, naked!
…On the bed with a soft
high pillow
how dizziness slipped away
like a fish in the sea…
In the two pronged public road
we were leaving, just bodies,
but with our hearts on each branch
separate, one left, one right.
An Old Man
In the back of the noisy cafe
bent over a table, an old man sits;
with a newspaper in front of him, alone.
And in the miserable scorn of old age
he thinks of how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, and eloquence, and beauty.
He knows that he has grown old; he feels it, he sees it.
And yet the time when he was young seems
like yesterday. How short, how short a time.
And he contemplates how Discretion deceived him;
and how he always trusted it—how foolish—
the liar who said, “Tomorrow. You have plenty of time.”
He remembers urges he restrained; and all the joy
he sacrificed. Now for every lost chance
he scolds his foolish Discretion.
. . . But from all this thinking and remembering
the old man gets dizzy. And falls asleep
bent over the table in the café.
Excerpt
Just as they had spent that first evening on the street, Jennifer and Volodya spent the next afternoon mostly on the street, in the peculiar privacy that Soviets find in large crowds. She bought him cognac and cigarettes at Beryozka the foreign currency souvenir store. He bought her Russian language books, stories of the city, and corrected her sentences. She showed him her contact lenses and how they worked. He marvelled. Such things were unheard of in the Soviet Union, he told her, but he had seen some Japanese tourists use them. That night Jennifer returned to the hotel, Volodya to his home.
The next day as they were passing the Hotel Europe, another accommodation reserved solely for visitors from the west, he grabbed her hand, glanced around to see if they were being followed and walked into the lobby, saying in English, “I want to show you something. Go along with me to the restaurant.” They strolled to the elegant restaurant portal and waited in the foyer. There was no one in sight.
“Hey, if you’re pretending to be an American, you’re holding your cigarette all wrong,” she whispered. “Don’t curl it under your hand. Just let it sit between your fingers. Like so.” She surreptitiously straightened his fingers, rearranging the cigarette. He grinned at her. She felt the warmth of the smile and let her hand linger on his.
“Thank you,” he said in English. “Now look over at that table under the light. I will not point. You see?” Jennifer peered. “See the centre arrangement? That is a microphone—how they listen. Only the ones with that arrangement—and some of the others there, that table and that one.”
Jennifer stared but couldn’t see the difference in the various tables.
“How do you know?”
Excerpt
with pleasant features which, at this moment, looked grim. But he
smiled reassuringly when he saw the fear on the faces of Carol Ann’s
parents. He nodded to Tyne, then turned to them.
“Mr. & Mrs. Shaughnessy, I’m Dr. Kendall. Your daughter will be
fine. She’s in the recovery room, but you can see her as soon as she
comes to the ward.”
Mr. Shaughnessy, who had risen to his feet, took a deep breath. His
voice was hoarse. “Thank you, Doctor. That’s such a relief.” He hesitated,
glanced at his wife, then turned again to Dr. Kendall. “Do you
know what caused so much bleeding? Is it likely to happen again?”
Dr. Kendall’s eyes opened wide, and for a moment he stood immobilized.
Tyne held her breath. Then, appearing to regain his composure,
he stepped further into the room. “I’m sorry. I see you were
not aware that Carol Ann was pregnant.”
“Oh, my God.” Mrs. Shaughnessy’s hands flew to her face.
Mr. Shaughnessy stood rigid, his face drained of colour. “What are
you saying?” His eyes, two deep pools of anger and shock, did not
leave the face of the man in front of him. “What are you saying?” he
repeated, his voice rising.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Shaughnessy,” Dr. Kendall’s
face registered genuine regret, “but I’m afraid Carol Ann went to
someone to have the pregnancy terminated. Whoever it was did only
half the job. She could have died.”
Mr. Shaughnessy sat down heavily and buried his face in his
hands. His wife broke into uncontrollable sobs as Tyne held her, her
own heart breaking.
Carol Ann came to the ward from the recovery room at eleven
o’clock. Tyne remained in the waiting room while Mr. & Mrs.
Shaughnessy went in to see their daughter. She thought they might
wish to speak with her before they left. But when they came out
of the room, grim-faced, they passed the open door of the waiting
room without a glance in Tyne’s direction.
Feeling light-headed from lack of sleep and food, she made her
way to the nurses’ station to speak to Sister Mary Louise. “May I see
Miss Shaughnessy now, Sister?”
Excerpt
distance away observing him. When they saw that he had noticed them,
they came to sit beside him. The man said, “My mother says you are a
very quiet Kabluna.”
“Maybe all Kablunat are quiet,” he said.
The man translated for his mother and said, “She says that all other
Kablunat that she has known are noisy. They talk a lot.”
“Maybe I don’t have much to say,” he replied. “Maybe I don’t know
very much.”
When Ken questioned the old woman about the Inuksuit she told him
a story that began a long, long time ago when there were very few human
beings. They travelled over the vast land in small family groups, following
the herds of caribou that were the source of their food, their tents,
their clothing, and their utensils. They could not afford to deplete their
energy by chasing the food. Instead, they made stone human beings and
called them Inukshuk, which means, like a person or acting in the place
of a person.
The people placed the Inuksuit in V-shaped formations. The caribou
with their poor eyesight, thought the Inuksuit were hunters and so it required
only a very few people to herd them into a trap. The closer they
came to the end of the V, the closer together the Inuksuit were placed.
At the point of the V, hunters hid behind boulders while women
and children lay on the ground beside the Inuksuit. As the caribou approached,
the women and children jumped up, waved their arms, and
danced about, to give the appearance of many, many hunters. The caribou
would then stampede to the end of the V, which was usually at the
junction of a lake and a river. When the caribou plunged into the lake,
the hunters hidden behind the boulders would jump into their kayaks
and paddle after them, spearing them in the water. Then they would haul
them back to shore where the entire family, even the children, would
clean and gut the animals.
Inuksuit also took on many other shapes, the old woman said. The one
on the river’s edge where they were sitting was a fishing Inukshuk. She
knew this because it was topped with a smooth stone taken from the riverbed.
It indicted that the fishing was good here. Other shapes had other
meanings and the configurations of Inuksuit had meaning also.
To my mind, what I was hearing sounded like language but they didn’t
write the language on a piece of paper – they wrote it directly on the land.
And I was beginning to get the picture of absolute practicality. Here you
could live with minimum technology if you knew how. To think that you
could direct an entire way of life by putting a few stones together just so,
so that other people coming would be able to read the significance of these
things. The degree of sophistication of this began to seep into me and I realized
there was much to learn here. And this way of life was like the people
Excerpt
“Yeah.” Frankie smiled. “Movies. Look it up. It’s going places.”
“I shall.”
“Have a good day, Eteo,” Frankie said as his phone rang again
and he walked off to answer it.
Eteo had met Frankie when they both worked for Yorkshire Securities,
one of the solidest firms in Vancouver. He had known Henry,
Frankie’s brother, first, and through Henry he had met Frankie, who
had risen from a junior broker there to being one of the big wheels
in downtown Vancouver.
Frankie had important contacts all over, which meant he could
raise huge amounts of money for any deal he thought was good. Eteo
knew nothing about the film industry, but if Frankie said Lionsgate
Entertainment was going places, Eteo knew he should look into it.
He walked toward the 22nd Street dock. The water was beautiful
again, with small swells washing over the rocks on the shore and
making the sea weed and barnacles that covered them shimmer.
Countless sea gulls circled and swooped above calling out strange
messages that only gulls understood. Their screeching voices always
struck Eteo as almost out of this world. ey seemed to inhabit a
world of wonders and exaggerations. Did Frankie, who had le the
resource sector to get involved in the film industry, inhabit another
world of wonders now?
Eteo knew that a lot of brokers followed Frankie wherever he led.
They all wanted a piece of whatever action Frankie had. At one time
there had even been rumors that Frankie controlled Yorkshire Securities.
He had certainly seemed to have the biggest say in everything
the firm got into. Then the rumors were that he had left the firm to
develop something totally his, a company from scratch. Could this
Lionsgate Entertainment be the one? Eteo always admired people who
started from the bottom and became leaders in their field. Frankie
was such a man, and Eteo promised himself to look into Lionsgate as
soon as he could.
His eyes were drawn to a runabout coming under the Lions Gate
Bridge and speeding toward the outer area of English Bay. Runabouts
were used as water taxies to ferry harbour pilots, who by law were
assigned to command the vessels in and out of the harbour.
Song
I walked all around your house (the moth flew
around the lamp until it met its sweet death) though
you didn’t come out that I’d burn into the flame of your eyes.
Alas, the fragrance of the body and of the soul
contamination will spoil one night
even more alas since I won’t be the spoiler.
Leaves
In vain I hurried down from the third floor;
by the time I got down, it became winter.
This was not meant to be a message
but poetry.
Like the last leaf,
I fall among the others
who have gone before me.
Our mother is the trembling tree
leaning against the wind
so that she does not fall on her trunk.
But if she does, she falls softly,
we, her leaves, will take care of her.
Separation
With teary eyes I stared
at the woman
dressed in black with
her well-made hair
silver pin holding it up
surprise of the day
my sigh in the air
when she came near me
with open arms
as if to embrace
the whole world
that imperceptible laughter
on her lips burnt me
when she leaned
to kiss me
for the last time
Excerpt
Thank goodness for that.” She took a sip of coffee then put her cup down and sighed. “Working for Dr. Merkel has been good for him. He came home two days ago more animated than we’ve seen him since Barry died. He’d help deliver a calf that was coming backwards, he said.”
Tyne smiled. “We could have used him on the farm the other day.” And she related the details of Jezebel’s ordeal to her mother, not neglecting to mention her part in it, and how Morley had gotten after her for foolishly entering the pen.
“Well, I guess you deserved it. I’m glad someone is looking out for my headstrong daughter.”
Tyne wrinkled her nose, and they both laughed, but Tyne quickly sobered.
“How is Jeremy then? Do you think he’s getting better?”
Emily looked beyond Tyne to the living room, and took a deep breath. “I think so; that is, I hope so. The trouble is, your dad doesn’t have much patience with him. He thinks Jeremy should just snap out of it.”
Tyne toyed with the muffin on her plate. Oh yes, that was so like Jeffery Milligan – just buck up and get over it. But she wondered if it was simply her dad’s reluctance to show any weakness on his part – stiff upper lip, and all that. Lately, she had been inclined to allow him the benefit of the doubt.
She looked up. “Morley would like Jeremy to help him with the harvesting this weekend. Do you think he will?”
“Oh my yes, I think so. At least, he certainly enjoyed it last year, and it will give him a lift. Tell Morley thanks for thinking of him, dear.”
“I will. And Mom, I want you to know that Morley and I have been praying for Jeremy.”
Emily smiled and squeezed Tyne’s hand where it lay on the table. “Thank you, Tyne. I knew you would be.”
Manolis Aligizakis 