HAND SPLINT
FOR LIMP WRIST
day
one - Tuesday October 2nd
the
boy on the flute is a fright
his face is a
horrible sight
when he walks his
knees knock
it creates such a
shock
his braces light
up in the night
Michael’s
doctor’s appointment was scheduled for one fifteen and his poetry workshop
started at two. The bus ride from Vancouver had taken an extra hour due to bad
weather on the Coquihalla. But he still had time for a bagel and some herbal
tea before his appointment at the campus clinic. There were six remaining
manuscripts to go over, and an exercise on limericks and villanelles to
prepare. He could have graded the last half dozen manuscripts on the bus, but
listened to a mixed CD of all girl singers instead. Falling asleep halfway
between Hope and Merritt, he woke up just in time to see the sign advertising
the country music capital of B.C. On his ipod Allison Krauss was just finishing
up My New Favorite and Norah Jones
followed her with Come Away With Me.
It was 2006 and, much to his surprise, he had made it into the new millennium
with his love for female vocalists fully intact.
As he opened his
eyes he found himself sweaty and drooling on his own shoulder, softly muttering
the lines to a limerick he had never forgotten, one he had written in high
school English class when he was seventeen. The exercise had involved giving
students the first line, and then they were expected to complete the poem
according to the form they had just been taught, and they were not allowed any
notes. They had to listen.
The point of no
note taking was to insure that the structure of the limerick would be imprinted
on their brains long enough to write one of their own. It was an old-fashioned
teaching strategy, before laptops littered the classroom and memory sticks were
a dime a dozen.
His high school
limerick had something to do with an unattractive yet musical young man whose
face was not a pretty sight. So he had to rhyme the word fright with another
word, and then make up three more lines comprised of one original couplet and
one more rhyming word in the final line that corresponded to the last word of
the opening line.
He didn’t have a
very scientific, structured brain, and found himself struggling with strict
poetic forms due to the rigid, manufactured quality of everything from the
villanelle to the anapest. But the limerick, that was his favorite, very
simple, very effective, and a perfect form for the comic edge that invariably
seeped into his poetic voice.
Having been a
precocious wordsmith from a very early age, his talent for writing short poems,
that the teacher often thought he had stolen, was quite sophisticated by the
time he entered high school. He once wrote a poem about the rainbow effect of
sunlight on snow for another student and the teacher refused to accept it,
claiming it must have been plagiarized from a poetry book.
Pink is blue is
green is white
The colors sifting
through the light
They crave the
shafts of absent night
Pink is blue is
green is white
This wasn’t the
poem he had written, just a sudden re-creation form the dregs of his
imagination. But he knew there had been something about the refraction of
colour and a list rainbow tones. At the time, in high school, he didn’t think
it was such a great poem, and had tried to dumb it down for the student he was
writing for, but as it turned out, the student was a pudgy strange looking
little creature with no mental capacity whatsoever when it came to poetry,
among so many other things, so it was a wasted effort and created no small
amount of conflict in the schoolyard immediately after English class.
“You fuckin’ homo!
I told ya to write somethin’ easy for me to understand. Like about a snowman or
hockey for fuck sake.”
And then the ugly bucktoothed bully
kicked him in the knee. It hurt but could not really be considered much of a
physical injury.
Later in life he
often wished he had kept a copy of the original snow poem he had written for
that hideous, taunting halfwit, but alas, it had been lost to the great vacuum
of unsung literature, sucked up into the not so literary stratosphere like so
much vacuum cleaner detritus.
He especially
liked vacuum cleaner metaphors for a very specific reason. They were so
efficient, and when they worked properly they could solve the most mundane of
daily problems, ridding one’s self of the excess that surrounded them. Had he
owned a giant vacuum cleaner as a high school student he could have taken it
into the schoolyard and vacuumed up all his shrieking enemies.
*
As the bus rolled
into Kamloops, about an hour after waking, he was putting the finishing touches
on a poem of historic and culturally astute proportions about a certain vacuum
cleaner that revealed his penchant for finding the erotic within humourous
semi-autobiographical modes, a style he had cultivated during his late teens
and early twenties, and something he had become known for as a middle aged poet
whose presence at readings was sure to arouse no small amount of laughter from
an amused audience. Michael called his new poem McLuhan’s Bride, acknowledging, in the title, that some of his poetic
voice, but certainly not all, came from an extended leap into a joint major in
Cultural Studies and English literature, a leap that had taken up over twenty
years of his life before landing him in the groves of a struck him as a comfortable but unstable
academic cul-de-sac. But he had some wonderful memories of his time as a
professional student, and the new poem spoke frankly of one of those memories.
McLuhan’s Bride
Once, at a
graduate student soiree
the Professor’s
wife told him
that Mcluhan’s wife
was afraid of her
first vacuum cleaner
clearly shaken, he
hesitated to add
that he, on the
contrary, felt little techno based fear
when it came to
small appliances
and all of the
strained emotional ties
they liberate
their lovers from
and had, in fact,
experienced a prolonged affair
late sixties, with his
mother’s first vacuum cleaner
an avocado green
Westinghouse
amply
accommodating his great pubescent shaft
in a most
delightful way
stored in the
basement
this mechanical
bride
this compact
galaxy of carnal pleasure
pre-dating certain
groundbreaking
post-structuralist
thought
stood proud
alongside boxes of
old clothes, hunting rifles
bewildered WWII
army uniforms
broken rear view
mirrors
pocket westerns
and his father’s empty Mickey’s stored in heating ducts
among the detritus
of lives infused
with sex and booze
standing squat and
satisfied
his thoroughly
modern fully equipped paramour
astute and
wild-eyed in ‘her’ stolid ambient purring
giving him
uncomplicated joy
strengthening his
love for his mother
her taut brisk
arms pulsing, strong around her fervent breasts of steel
pressing that
small appliance into layers of 1950’s synthetic pile
the charged erotic
ways of her domestic engineering
giving him pure
uncomplicated joy
and reminding him
of the ways in which she kept her house in order
providing sons and
lovers with the necessary tools
to survive in a
world where
as Mcluhan once
said;
“each of us lives
hundreds of years in a single decade”
and
“when you are on
the telephone you have no body”
inspiring one to
think
when you are
screwing a vacuum cleaner
you have no
conscience, no need of one
save the sudden
onset of a short circuit
as you engage in one
final perfect act
of consummate
industrial self indulgence
and the grand
sweep of history
that will one day
go the way of
items stored in a
musty basement
works of art,
mechanical reproductions
boxes of old
clothing, hunting rifles
bewildered WWII
army uniforms
thoroughly modern
fully equipped paramours
canisters, astute
and wild, eyeless
in their stolid
ambient purring
having borne
silent witness
to the grand,
eternally pubescent
shaft of time
Michael didn’t
think it would be a good idea to share his new home appliance poem with his
students. Generally speaking, bringing one’s own work into a creative writing
class that one was teaching was frowned upon. He did it the odd time, but due
to the sexual nature of this one, he felt it might be best to show a little
restraint this week. Little did he know, on the five hour bus ride form
Vancouver to Kamloops, as he scribbled the final words of his poem into a
notebook, that quirky written sexuality would be the least of his worries by
the time he arrived in the classroom at two fifteen.
He apologized for
being late and began to wittily improvise limerick exercises from his rough
notes. To hell with Villanelles. They could wait until next week. Under the
circumstances, the limerick was all he could withstand for now.
In the classroom,
despite being visibly shaken by the news he had received at the clinic, Michael
still managed a bit of pseudo-prudish humour by telling students that he would
prefer that they did not use the word Nantucket in their limericks because it
had become such a clichéd occurrence within this particular form.
Faintly vulgar
innuendoes often managed to work their way into his teaching style. It was
something he couldn’t seem to resist, and on this particular afternoon it
lightened the load of his astounding diagnosis.
How was this
diagnosis even possible?
It must be a
mistake.
But he knew it
wasn’t.
Although he had told the doctor not
to call him regarding test results over the weekend, she still managed to leave
a message asking him to come to see her at the Royal Inland Hospital during her
weekend maternity ward shift. He had said to her, clearly and emphatically,
that he would be away so there would be no point in having any information
until he returned on Monday. But
wouldn’t it have been lovely to have been able to walk over to the hospital,
through the sound of wailing newborns and joyous parents, only to receive grave
tidings from an over eager health care worker with the timing of a rattlesnake
at a baby shower.
The first thing she
said to him after revealing the results was, “a lot of people are prone to
suicidal thoughts when they first get the news. Perhaps you might consider
counseling?”
He
had one gay nerve left, and she was all over it.
She had ruined Michael’s weekend. So
he retorted, as gently as possible, without resorting to an excess
manifestation of his signature sarcasm - yet managing to fill each word with a
subtle, underlying rage over her forgetfulness about his wishes regarding the
results.
I appreciate your
concern, but no, I won’t be experiencing any suicidal feelings. I am well
acquainted with the immediate emotional effects of this sort of thing and on
several occasions have helped others deal with their initial response. Thank
you for your time. I have to run or I’ll be late for my limerick workshop. I’m
really looking forward to it, especially after you’ve managed to inject such a
strained poetic rhythm into my weekend. I’ll contact you later in the week if I
have any more questions or concerns.
As
he walked toward the classroom he thought of how he often liked to alter the
final rhyme of a limerick in order to punctuate the brief narrative with a
slightly jarring tone, bringing faint chaos, and a kind of contradictory
open-ended closure to an otherwise ordered poetic microcosm.
the man with the lisp is afraid
he hides his rage in a cage
as calm as can be, he makes merrily
concealing his status
regarding HIV
stay
tuned for day two… of
hand splint for limp wrist
