Now You Care

Di Brandt

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781770561694
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Now You Care, her fifth collection of poetry, Di Brandt voices a passionate argument against environmental degradation and a plea for psychic transformation in our violent times. Tuned in to the toxic fallout of over-industrialization and war, these poems face the dark side of our postmodern climate with a language that doesn't give in. They tremble and shake, they rage against despair, they speak against death and wrestle with the fateful spirits of Armageddon to loosen their choke-hold on humanity. Perhaps we won't figure it out and the horizon is already on fire, and our best love will never be more than an approximation of regret, but grass still grows between the cement blocks of the sidewalk to 'grin of the wild.'

Heart

And that was your mother that night,
on the dark water of Lake Winnipeg,
come, she beckoned, come, in the silver
moon’s wake, and you and I dazzled
by her light and her shadowy siren song,
and you, braver and more desirous
than I, swung out onto the diamond
studded waves to greet her, and I
pulled you back onto sand, stony
arguments of earth and grass and trees,
I meant to say, but you had tasted sky,
and knew the delicate armies of the air
could enfold you against cradled
knife wounds and abandoning, and why,
you thought, and so did I, that night,
should we linger when she aches
for us too, her spirit arms lighting up
the lake, her song rippling the dark
water, the wind whispering in the reeds
behind us myriad promises

Now that the secrets of seeing double
have been revealed, there is the luxury
of comparing landscapes, horizon lines,
the exact angle of walls, ceiling, arches
colliding, dividing, sharp lit edges, now
in focus, these two bright grey blue lakes,
two skies ringing round eternal intimations,
and I and I sliding around these surfaces,
no longer grasping for solid ground, no,
waiting rather for the noman’s space
of grief and frayed nerve ends between
these severed eyes, torn limbs, shattered
heart, to embody itself, hater and hated,
embracing across these thousand
slivered lifetimes, O baby, that was
enough terror to paralyze a people,
see now you have endured, here on these
swaying shores I call you back from
horror through white bright flashes, wild
swinging across the waters, tender
rejoining, in this little upstairs room
with its infinite little windows, beloved,
to joy

after Martín Prechtel

Who would choose such a family, you ask,
a stone hearted mom and a dad made of fire,
imprisoning, flaying you on their Mennonite
farm like Tall Girl in her ancestral Mayan
hut? I chose a lover, like she did, who would
run away with me to sea, and was struck, like she,
by jealous lightning, and shattered, scattered
then, all over the singing fields, this is the work
of ecstasy, says Martín, cracking us open so
we can shine, and here in the cooking pot, under
our mother’s contrite stone bed, I gurgle and
burble and stew, preening my scales and feathers,
as always she is too impatient, and I will be
let out too soon, and my voice will have turned
to raven’s, and instead of embracing her I will fly,
toward the never before seen beautiful shining
thing, already the Sun and Moon are plotting
to live the whole story again, and we not done
weeping, the funeral meats furnishing as usual
the marriage table, and Tall Girl running down
from the mountain across the yellow prairie
with her forbidden wild secret lover, saltily,
north to the sea

These ways we can and cannot touch, and I
wanting to bring you armfuls and armfuls
of light, and shells, and bits of bone, from
this magical lake, with its whimsical, many
coloured heart shaped stones, and wild
diamonded waves’ wombed cadences,
and mothers with young children, and boys
on motor bikes, insisting noisily they are men,
to stretch out the moment of our meeting,
in the room, in the house, on the street,
in the city, its proper beginning and end,
somewhere in another galaxy we are lovers
in that other way, this also is plenitude,
this spirit ride through the outer dimensions
of human space in search of my lost face,
and you there holding me against flying apart
with your wise grace, these inland seas we
carry in us, deep tides, these waves we can
ride quantumly to dream time and back,
laced with this sweet exquisite painful edge,
this other worldliness

Hummingbird whale vibrations rippling
out across the ocean sky, fast and high
and deep and low, and we, our old griefs
unfurling under the ash trees, nosing
the elements for their interspecies song,
these long aerial arcs, these wide under
water glides, earth hooting cooing her
large pleasure, north to south and south
to north, her global sonata, her Madonna
cello suite, here they come winging
diving through us, here, hold my hand
in all this space, dear friend, this open
field, fall and rise, and we mere grace notes,
small decoration to this huge symphony,
we with our thin paraphernalia, here,
under the ash trees, this sweet night,
our cement lanes and sidewalks, our
caught breaths, our pesticides, wild
pebble consciousness, blood, dreaming

‘On some sophisticated taping machine he slowed down the hummingbird songs until they were almost a set of subsonic twinklings. … For days on end, pods upon pods of whales of every kind came rolling in, breaching and blowing along side the ship, diving and gathering around the underwater speakers, chattering, hooting and cooing in courteous, measured replies between the hummingbirds’ phrases. Slightly chagrined, the elated ship’s research personnel recorded the whales’ exuberant conversation and after speeding them up found themselves listening to some very ornate hummingbird songs!’ Martín Prechtel, The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun: Ecstasy and Time (Cambridge, Mass: Yellow Moon Press, 2001), 128.

Trudging slowly across the pasture
in single file, chewing, flicking flies
with lazy tails, 7-Up, Coca-Cola, Orange
Crush, Betty and de Roude, named after
our neighbour Izak Feah, his car a ’58
blue Chevy, no red in her anywhere,
Na nü go, Roude, Izak would chuckle,
slapping the steering wheel, slamming
the accelerator, whoa, Roude, he’d say,
knocked backward, stay Roude, lurching
forward, our Roude was in fact red,
nothing horsey or carlike about her,
a bland do gooder, but what about
Betty in her quiet stall, nearly invisible
among all the loud cows, neutral and mild
like our aunt Nettie, who never ever
uttered an angry word, while the others
bellowed and kicked and pissed loudly
during milking, even after our dad
started playing Mozart on the barn
radio to calm them down, preferring
Grandma’s raucous hymns, Washed
in the blood, her rough cheek caressing
their hot flanks, instead

Here at the heart of the ravaged heart
of the Dead Land, lilacs mixing with
the dead rain, we like to kill our gods
and eat them too, like all good christians
do, no mystery moths or beetles for us,
or locusts shining in the grass, nosiree,
all our trillion little winged deities, bees,
mosquitoes, houseflies, butterflies,
fruitflies, fishflies, horseflies, Junebugs,
cicadas now in radical chemical jeopardy,
and our lettuce and raspberries, and yet,
and yet, deer graze in the forest along
the ravine, grasshoppers and crickets
miraculously sing in forgotten ditches
along the fields, wasps stray through
chlorpyrifos clouds to out of the way
sweet milkweed, thistle, goldenrod
clumps, just then for a moment, above
around below the shadow of the shadow
of these endless depleted uranium driven
grey grey grey grey grey apocalypti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Zone
• Zone: <le Détroit>
• Afterworlds
• Castle walk
• The poets visit the Rosewell Arms
• A modest proposal
• St.Norbert in August
• St.Norbert in July
• Accidentally
• Dog days in Maribor
• Tally
• The poets reflect on their craft
• Forest slippers
• Wake up
• Interspecies communication
• Songs for a divorce
• Portrait of the artist as a young hero
• Dreamsongs for Eden
• Horizon on fire
• Which side of the ocean
• Exhibition notes
• Heart
• Heart
• Notes and Acknowledgements
• About the Author