Chapter One

Dec 21 2015

You know, when a book grabs you

and the pages flip past

and you sit, entranced,

even though your butt-cheek's asleep

and the coffee's cold

and dusk crept in,

leaving your head bowed

in a dark room

in a small pool

of warm incandescence.

The bad cop, interrogating you

an inch from your face.

And then, close to the end

when you force yourself to slow,

stretching it out

making it last.

Every word, lingered over,

every sentence

savoured.

Which is how I remember.

Beginning in a giddy blur.

Then the middle

absorbed in us.

Like careering down a mountainside

thrilling, but hard;

how you kept on surprising me,

and all those story-lines

leading who knows where?

And then, when I could see the end

and knew that was it.

But hoped for a twist, nevertheless;

an epilogue, or sequel

a clever new plot.

And that the smell of your skin

and the brush of your lips

on that last night in bed

was a Russian novel

that went on, and on.

Or at least until death

did us part.

The book remains,

face down

on the bedside table

open to chapter one.

Which is how memory works.

Whole new worlds

opening up,

and so many pages to turn.

In a year-end review called A Few of Our Favourite Things, the Globe and Mail's Marsha Lederman wrote this about Camilla Gibb's new memoir: This is Happy kept me reading through the night on a hot summer weekend, so reluctant was I to put this sorrowful page-turner down -- and then I forced myself to slow down, so reluctant was I to finish.

For some reason, this struck me as a good metaphor for the dynamics of a failed romantic relationship. The result was this poem.

I pretty much always start off trying to write a prose poem; and, almost always, fail utterly. I think that's where the very uncharacteristic You know comes from: I was trying to shoehorn myself into a casual, vernacular, loose style of speech. Even though the poem ended up like most of my others, I kept this in because its instant presumption of familiarity makes a good start. Not to mention that it fits the first stanza, which is kind of pulpy and fun.

The second stanza contains my homage to Lederman, stealing her exact phrasing. It's also unnecessarily wordy, which helps make the point: drawing it out, slowing things down.

The 3rd stanza makes the turn into metaphor. Which may sound forced; especially the us, immediately followed by the full stop of a period, that closes the fourth line. Could I have foreshadowed this better, instead of so abruptly springing it on the reader? After that, the speed of the opening is resumed, and then the thing concludes with hints of complexity and ambivalence. (Careen is more often used; but career is more accurate. The first refers to a sharp change in direction, being whip-sawed from side to side. While the latter refers to sheer speed. I like the unhinged head-long feeling it conveys. Because when you change direction, you lose energy and speed; and there is none of that here!)

I really like the Russian novel in the 4th stanza. (Because they are interminable, and complicated, and everyone tragically dies in the end!) And also the way the short "o" sound gives the stanza an aural through-line (epilogue/ plot/ novel/ on).

In the final stanza, the novel becomes the object instead of its contents. And lives on in the selective magic of memory: the warm glow of nostalgia; the what-ifs and could-have-beens. The image is also a double-edged sword. There is the treasuring of memory here. But there is also something passive-aggressively hostile; because when you leave it that way, you break a book's spine.