Hagiography

Jen Currin

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781770560888
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Her acclaimed debut collection, The Sleep of Four Cities, announced the arrival of a fully formed, arresting new talent, and the poems in Jen Currin's new collection, Hagiography, see her trademark cunning wordplay and entirely contemporary take on the surrealist image moving into new and more personal territory. In a style that regularly pushes life's barely hidden strangeness into the light, Currin's poems present thought as a bright, emotionally complex event, a place where mind and sense and the natural world they move through become indistinguishable elements in a mysterious, familiar, vexing, fascinating, and continuous human drama. There are no saints in this hagiography – only ghosts, sisters, spiders, birds … This is an anti-biography. It starts with death and ends with birth. In between: life after life.

DEATH

CHANTING INDOORS

For the fish are drunk again
in the streets of your city.
It can be hard to find a ring
for every finger.
With the beads and the counting and the indoors.
With the mountain at the back gate.
And where to house the glass star.

It happens in myth
every time a woman looks over her shoulder.
She wants lunch. Points to her elbow.
First salt then boiling water.
Demons soaked in the sink.
It happens wherever we are silent.

For a pilgrim needs water. Weariness.
Two fish saved in a jug.
The pilgrim is a body
poured from cup to mouth.
In the end it will be as when we first shook hands.
Fires near the city.
The mayor rinses her vest.
We look at our legs and ask will they save us.

LYRIC

Your friend and his brothers of coastal address
don’t look good on paper.
In every corner a ghost
falling to its knees,
too much hope at the mouth.
They study English desperately
but won’t remove their shoes.

This is being light.
The best light we can find.
A woman gives a man
her intuition.
He pockets it in a game
called Pass the First Jewel on Your Left.
And your friends, the whites
of their eyes are blue.
They make our nipples into poems
in neighbourhoods where coffee is roasted.

Even when we are naked
lions caught in traffic,
we stupidly split our lips
remembering.
A woman kills a man
and he becomes a piano.
The next time we meet
it will be too romantic,
just a few words and a thousand
intricately carved boxes.
Let us breathe into them
until we are dead.

IT WAS ONE OF US, NIGHT OR DAY

I asked to follow the thread and you said,
Have faith and drink water.
Leaning on your language,
I forgot my luggage:
pictures of a many-tiered virginity,
unlikable characters, their battered shoes.

Each tree had to be thanked
so I set to my task.
Some of the spirits were eating candy,
some had apocalyptic faces.
They asked after my bags,
if my brother had given me vitamins.

Dogs named after our distant relatives
dropped bones at my feet.
The spirits urged me to hold up a branch
and act like a magician
but I refused.
Since birth I have been afraid of stories.

It was my mother
who took the oranges to the border,
argued with the guards.
She made appearances in cash only.

We woke frenzied, unable to spell.
It fell from our mouths: We are bridges.
More and more of us resonate.
I can’t remember, but I’m sure it was you who finally told me
it doesn’t matter if we run toward it
or run away.

ONCE

It can be had
by friends adult and elderly.
Lonely – a finger without a ring.
In the depths of sobriety
I’m hiding the string
we use to discern a woman’s character.
A train platform in the middle of nowhere.

Travelling south with a bag of licorice,
a tea jar from Japan.
The city is always late and missing
its panties. It’s best to pretend
we don’t know why.
I don’t want you to ever lie
next to someone and not touch her
because of me.
In the dark you have to trust
the stairs.

To be tall and naked
as a tree. Transient –
we’ve already seen the bones.
Two fish cradling the family.
Two sisters and I am
one of them.

FOUR BRIDGES

Death speaks like a feather: yellow.
Green: death’s mountain at the foot of your youth.
Red: assume death.
Love: too many poems death would rather forget.
Love: just like a little storm it topples,
making a name for itself.
River: not a thin blanket,
never a narrow
pair of shoes.
Laughter: spilled passport.
Knock: down.
The silver: walls.
If death is speaking
(sunset: specific: pleasant clock)
I’d like it to get to the point:
the boys running into the house
for her glasses.
Later she never wore them
and claimed it was our wish.
Black: as she remembers.
Tremor: you’d think it was her coffin.
Lilacs: where the old kings
are sleeping I heard
eleven ring twice.

FAIRY AND FOLK TALES

A practice of breaking night
over your knee, never lifting
a finger in the larger struggle.

New arrivals lurk outside the candle’s circle.
My clinic is full of intelligent people.
My husband pregnant and no memory.
For facial hair
I use coffee grounds.
The world is very tender;
we are a village together.

Now the tongue our parents spoke of
is proof we are decaying.
Piece together the sweaty children
and yo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Death
• Intermission
• Childhood
• Intermission
• Birth
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author