Michael Knox‘s poems have appeared in a variety of literary journals across North America and Britain. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, and studied Philosophy at Queen’s University and the University of Toronto. He did graduate work at Memorial University of Newfoundland and the University of Konstanz in Germany. He currently resides in Toronto where he teaches English at an inner-city high school.

Play Out the Match No Edition

By Michael Knox, Michael Holmes

ECW PRESS

Copyright © 2006 Michael Knox
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55022-723-9

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS,
PLAY OUT The MATCH,
STRIKE TOWN,
FLEE,
NORTHERN EARTH,
LISTEN,
OUTPORT,
HEED,
SWIMMING IN THE BODENSEE,
WORK,
BENEATH,
PAST TRENTON BY BUS,
RHYTHMS,
NOTES TO A FATHER,
THE CHIPS,
GANONOQUE,
AND I WILL PASS,
1920,
THOSE DAYS,
NATASHA,
BITTER PILLS,
NIGHT ON ROBERT STREET,
THE DEEP,
VISIT,
SUBURB NOCTURNE,
APART,
ST. JOHN’S,
SIGNAL HILL,
THAW,
WAIT,
WANT,
GLIMPSE OF THE MYRIAD,
DREAMS,
DESCENT,
THE RACCOON,
WHEN,
LUCK,
KINGSTON TO HALIFAX,
THE LONG WALK,
MIST,
LEAVE YOUR LIFE,
CURSING YOUR NAME,
THE FALL,
THE DAY,
NIGHT NOISES,
FROSH,
COFFEE WITH MARINA,
JENNY,
MS. BECKETT,
THE DIMMING,
STRUGGLE,
THE COLLECTORS,
BILL,
OUR THINGS,

CHAPTER 1

    Play Out the Match No Edition

    You are ever huge and complacent
    miraculously balancing your width
    on a comically narrow bar stool in my mind.
    Drizzle spattering panes in that little Ayrshire pub
    a thousand generations of our families’ affiliation
    stretching back behind us.
    Old oak of a man. Body
    like a bunch of hard fists
    an easy clench on a pint of the black stuff
    wide knuckles reaching up halfway on the glass
    and that great watchful back
    probably better than your puckered eyes
    always trained fast on that blurry set
    for nothing but rugby or football matches.
    Glasgow brawls left stubborn nicks, ironic tears
    in the brow of the animated boulder of your face
    red like mine but heavier like your body
    denser more elemental.
    As if you’d sprung from the very highland earth.
    I admit I was always jealous of it
    your notched face merrily mocking
    that I was better off getting by on my looks
    and clapping the scarred weight of a massive unreal hand
    like a grown uncle on my stringy shoulder
    because we both knew strength is all you really loved.

    When the doctors said your liver’d had it
    and to lay off the drink and the smoke
    you regaled us. Told it like a joke.
    “Aye lads, dead in the face” — sip — “fuck’yu.”
    You weren’t the kind of man to hear things twice
    and they knew it. So you kept on
    boasting that you’d finish the match
    the way you’d always played it
    and — sly wink — hoped they were tapping a keg for you in     heaven.
    We lost our nerve to look scared.
    A coward, I put a loyal hand on your rocky shoulder
    and gave a stiff-chinned nod and a wink
    and got us a round of the pure.

    But somehow, I know you were scared.
    Faced suddenly with something
    you couldn’t square off with in the rainy streets.
    And on the way home at night
    splashing the trapped stars free of their puddles
    and laying in that tiny complaining bed of yours alone
    even through the drink you were afraid.
    We all feel about for the horizons of our limitations
    and yours were closer than you’d ever let on
    holding court at your bar stool.
    Mortality levels this playing field of ours.
    You knew you were too terrified not to drink all day in the pub.
    We both knew you were not indomitable
    in the world beyond that smoke-hazed little nook
    our world of cigars and malts and the occasional crunching punch-up.
    And stepping home needled with lowland rain
    I think that you must have resolved each night to stand
    tomorrow to take a new life in this world.

    But sitting up in bed in the morning
    with that blend whisky bottle on your nightstand
    you looking at sky the colour of smoke and thought
    on all the dispassion and resignation in things
    and with a belt or two to mash out the hangover
    you rose and in what you may have pretended was courage
    and integrity but was only soft submission
    said to the late morning, “Another day I’ve been given”
    and resolved in soliloquy that you would play it
    the best way you knew
    and really the only way
    and you probably even winked at yourself in the mirror
    swallowing your shame.
    And know that I forgive you your weakness
    though it was not your habit to do so in others.
    Only the most resolute of us will not buckle
    in the flicker of our strength —
    heaven or no heaven.

    STRIKE TOWN

    The snows came on early this year
    quiet banshee cursing our names
    and piling the streets.
    Heavy barricades at our doors;
    ours cars all wheezing shuddering junk.

    Striking fathers try to forget
    newfound anxiety insomnia alcoholism
    and build snowmen with toddlers
    that only come out warped.
    They must find something instead
    of carrots and coal for noses.
    Times are tight, Daddy says
    with a meek smile
    that doesn’t reach his eyes.

    Teenage girls flip sullenly
    through fashion magazines;
    sulk through windows
    at grey-lit streets
    heavy with cloud
    winter half-light
    and dream of other worlds.

      People go out as little as possible.

    Women boil water in cold kitchens
    and drink worried cups of tea.
    There is nothing to say
    when their husbands pass.
    The kitchen table fills with unopened mail.

    Watchful listening nights
    the husband sits and stares
    hopelessly into
    the pointed white pile.

    On the picket lines the men huddle together.
    They have left the enthused marching and chanting
    from the autumn. No one drives by to honk support.

    All watch the great shadow of the mill
    and it watches them
    quiet snow drifting down
    on dead air
    fearful silence everywhere.

    Teenage boys go silent for weeks.
    Gather to breathe bags of glue
    in the parks at night
    and sit alone with their nightmares
    in their dark basement rooms
    fierce and stagnant.

    The girl suspends herself from a beam in her room.
    A bell shadow of her dress across the wall
    tolling silently over the whole town.

    FLEE

    All week I scan flimsy dollar store goods
    and ride the bus benches home late at night
    to a house that is all bent rum caps in ashtrays
    and drone bleary-eyed through my school days

    with everyone I don’t know looking on with quiet concern.

    My skin is curdled, the ugly pallor of milk,
    and the other girls giggle together
    and chat on their cell phones and are all smooth
    brown legs and no-socks in fashionable sneakers

    while I am inexplicably in tears in the bath or break room
    or jostled by every bump on the last bus home alone.

    And I stopped one February night on the bridge
    that goes over the highway and looked
    at the distant skyline from the very edge of this massive city
    and thought how much I’d love to flee its loneliness

    and take a bus far away, because everyone can flee by bus,
    even part-time dollar store cashiers,
    and I could just forget all of them in an instant

    and be gone for somewhere else. And I often think
    on the wind in my face that freezing night
    watching the cars beneath whip and shrink into oblivion,
    and how perhaps one day I’d join them, and simply be gone.

    NORTHERN EARTH

    You are the northern earth
    Sparing and tough, all shoots
    And moss and slender trees
    Hardened in a still violence.
    And ever so watchful.

    Unfarmable;
    An inspiring austerity
    That can be traveled
    And learned but
    Never made home.

    That thick plate beneath;
    Ten fathoms of stone,
    But beneath that, soft earth
    That may go down forever.

    LISTEN

    In the moments before the dazed room closed
    Over him, he strained his ears in vain
    Listening for something beyond
    The rushing sprinkle of the shower
    Pouring cold over dead nerves
    Running numb in eyes and ears.
    He’d left everything as though he weren’t ending it.
    Said good-bye to Simon after class
    Who he’d crushed on since sixth grade.
    Hard click of finality at his locker
    The tortured creak of the side door he slipped through
    Avoiding the berating halls
    Straight home in spring humming streets.

    With solemn ritual he stepped into the shower
    Doused himself with the glugging gas can.

    First try: the lighter slipped in his slick fingers
    Jostled thoughts almost broke the fragile meditation.
    Quiet sustained him. A second slip then.
    The third time, almost a surprise: it lit.

    In a muted woof
    Flame filled everything.

    No pain for a stunned second;
    Then horror.
    Horror rushing in every crevice
    Every corridor of his body
    Skin eyes screaming silently.

    Without knowing it he lunged
    And pulled on the water
    Body drumming the tub in collapse.
    A melting marathon runner.

    Then the room closing over him
    Still listening — for anyone.

    OUTPORT

    My ancestral ties in this outport
    sunk Irish spades into gritty earth
    and with that first scratch metal slit sliding into futile soil
    they looked to the tossing grey above them
    and the great black mirror that stretched
    all the way back to famished Dublin
    and just sat in the dark with their hungry wives
    and farmed the treacherous seas.

    What would I have been three centuries ago?
    I’d have worked net in hard fingers —
    gave sallow kisses ankle deep in frigid Atlantic
    and went out
    into the wide gape of the sea skimming
    precisely parallel infinities,
    black shadow teeming abyss beneath
,     white gull flocked boundlessness above.
    A cold death in both.
    Whales blasting and bodies bursting free
    about the bows of tiny cod vessels
    ice mountains sailing manned by starving crews
      snow-coated bears
    endless forest dense as bookshelves
    and haunted with all the myths of the old country.
    Old Nick prancing in the blackest nights on distant crags
    or peeping up out of the night from the shored boats,
    pushing men overboard and sending sudden storms.

    Those were hungry days on farmless lands
    where my ancestors’ hands hauled thrashing rope traps
    from the murderous depths and knew that this place
    from the ocean to the howling barrens
    to the silt soil and stone lands to the ambushing maelstroms
    rolling with ungodly speed from the northern Viking tombs
      like revenge
    to the devil peeping into their hobbled huts
    to the forest filled with beasts and brutes and banshees
    is a stand against death.

    My wiry body is my great grandmother’s.
    A body that withstands the cold and the endless toil
    and the black pessimism of the overplucked seas.
    Fingers of salt hardened bone.
    Eyes quick but without that psychic stare
    she learned from reading clouds and Atlantic scents.
    It is a body that could starve or eat for years without changing
    cagey ribbed torso always at the ready
    built to withstand, labouring baskets about the uneven
      rocky ground,
    surefooted for this place, hard as cold hammer rings.
    She was all tight-lipped unconvincing smiles
    cynical crow’s feet by her tiny ugly eyes
    and hands and knees and elbows knuckly.
    The skin on my forearms is translucent in the sun,
    generations of February light has seen to this,
    eyes lined already for the grief of dubious relentless love
    veins like white-filtered trails of seaweed up ghostly limbs.
    This island has built us of bone.

(Continues…)Excerpted from Play Out the Match No Edition by Michael Knox, Michael Holmes. Copyright © 2006 Michael Knox. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
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