Lances All Alike

Suzanne Zelazo

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781770565340
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Poesía canadiense

Modernist poet-painters Mina Loy and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven had many friends in common (including Djuna Barnes and Marcel Duchamp), yet there is no record that the two ever met. Their non-relationship presents a curious "absent presence" in modernist history. Zelazo weaves lines of poetry by both women into an imaginary conversation, exploring the way their work has been suppressed, stitched, spliced, and edited by male editors and arbiters of taste.

EXCISION 3

Sutured Portraits

Needlepoint

In the flesh
we are a century of catastrophic echoes,
a riot of stones
hurled against the afterglow.

Simmer of bone on bone,
missiles unfurled,
rapture on our lips
where the sutures were.

Sins of Splendor

Three Marys, one for each framed stagger.
Limestone statues in their honour
erected in basements.
They know about consumption.
They buy into dissonance
split three ways.

They are powder blue and unapologetic.
Together they follow the hound,
rooting prismatic,
shedding the century,
they turn uranium skyward,
unplug orchid bulbs and laughter.

Three Marys of the East and West,
sea-brine mothers
shrinking driftwood and glass.
They stroke the hound,
flowering its paws
of cranberry sunset and iron.

Vanished at the equator,
they have come back,
dreamt about Atlantis
on the shores off Nauset.
Hollow hemisphere,
the hound leapt over,
Sylvian Fissure.

Tender hesitation of whimsy.
Wheat gatherers and sonnet makers,
less easy than mink or wool
in the turret, after an evening
above the breathline.
The hound lets the Marys pass,
where coral and shellfish
leave us skeptical.

Three Marys splintered and resurging where
amethyst is Grecian.
Urns meant for hounding—
the afternoon spent basking.
Hind legs curled under belly,
sweet hollow of a canine roar.
Heap of bones in hexameter.

Blue Notes

I

I spill my centre into yours.

There’s nothing more beautiful
than your eyes closing over our uprising,
finger raised in silence
complicit in the resonance.
Celestial binding,
follow the lunar lining
of the fullness between us.

Intimate crimson peak,
vintage celestial.
These frozen rites homespun,
and embalmed.
Your gift, corrosive in the sun.
Our gifts, flippant and gorgeous with pallor.

II

Concussive
prowling of sinew and bone,
flesh notes in the cooling.

Pooled by the silence of your echo,
an impulse toward drowning.

Ours for the taking, not unmaking.

Atomic sky turns thick blister of flight.
Sibilant cadence of objection.

This stark minute undoes you.
Soon the sting will sting less,
mouthful of creasing and rage,
scurry the pedestal I stand on.

My wings,
thick petals and backbone,
fold to meet you.

Yet I am waiting,
less through vanishing than through interval.
Groping the rational toward a centre.

III

Acoustic single-sided love affair.
Scoop the clouds in an embrace.
Yet it’s yours I want, not the clouds,
not their indiscriminate longing.
We are that we are,
the two of us.

Nightfall surprised us both.
A botched and myriad encounter.
Shrink the narrative,
let it pass.
Illuminate the bias.

Select the freefall.
Turn the haze electric,
we stumble less now,
having found the gesture.
Hands fussed,
our bodies bent with accent.

IV

Breathing the floodlight of moon,
iron fisted and threadbare.
The gills of this frayed flag
surrender.

Dismembered chasm of words,
this bliss of reciprocity.
Crystal refraction mollified,
shattered by the language of mining.

Her eyes heard it all,
cloaked in blue,
ribbons of jazz set her bones,
her scars a honeycomb craving.

Cher Ubu
(with love)

Beloved bachelor
stripped bare of his brides,
sonorous dusk laugh
caught in fractal ease.

Automatic canon kiss
where sad gems sigh.

Beneath conquest poems
pipelines sunsquinting.

Beep-bopping firefly
becoming a peerless flaw,
polished links of Lego.

Precocious echo.

His tongue in chenille chemise,
hands on buttercup shoulders,
dreaming of octopus girls and ambush.

Weeping Willow

Rain,
and even more,
the crushing of a slow refrain.

Celestial mime
to insinuate
the movement your hands make. Sutures on a wet blank continuum.

Concussed

Here, the thinking is decorative, breathing out of range in myth. She is the deep blue quiver of its aftermath. Balance the ledger, tally the debt, it’s strobe-lit and coupled. He slips like her hand through a paper mantel, foresees its various symbols. The swerve of too-narrow wrists. Small alcove of sleep where his grace uncoils and her skull cracks golden fever. Reluctant mother tongue, elec...