Volume 16 ~ Spring 2004 ~ ISSN 1543-6063

Liar


You’re in suspension/You’re a liar/You’re a liar a liar a liar/You lie

                                                                         —The Sex Pistols


Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned.

                                                                         —James Joyce



In the summer, your mother’s cucumbers
in the Bayou of her backyard, sunning themselves and snapping at the grass,
cater-corner to the lawn gnomes, boxes of pansies, gauntlets of marigold.
Arriving in the fall, shrunken in brine, and forced behind the milk and cheese,
diminished and ghastly green, swaying

in some awful memory of what it is to be possessed of one’s self, entirely.

That night I collected her freezer bags of cubed meat and tubby margarine
containers, housing orange mush, fiddleheads, larded gravy.

Called you and left, as a message, the sound of the jar sailing over the hedges
and crashing.

In the morning, I picked up the shards of glass, thinking of the pigeons
stupidly pecking at the glitter,

the pickles had vanished. On stout angry legs, briny and furious,
they marched.

Aching with the indignity, the affront—your mother’s capable hands reaching out
and snapping them at the source.


*


Your parents dropped you off to take away more of your things,
and I asked, Did you tell them?

You nodded, and I raced out the door, banged on their car.

I suppose this is goodbye, I said, as your father cracked the window an inch or so.

I just wanted to say that—

They barked at me, Take care, and drove away so fast they scarred the road.

It is almost two years now.

I hear cars ignite and I think of them, taking the corner as I stood on our street, one hand extended,

as it always was, in fear and uneasy love.


*

Your brother’s self-portrait hung in our hallway for seven years. Its title cryptic,
something to do with private offenses that did and did not involve us.

In it, he holds his hand over his mouth.

His wife Debbie with a man named Rico, a big shot at the company where they worked.
I never liked her.

When he learned the truth he came to you, he came to me and rested his head on my shoulder, cried.

I never liked her, I said.

Debbie and Rico would pass him in traffic and sneer.

He is fragile and ill, paints in egg tempera—reproduction of Flemish paintings your parents hang by the decorative plates engraved with puppies of many breeds.

When you left, and since, I have never heard from him.

I want to call Rico sometimes, sometimes, I think of all of Debbie’s restive secrets.

I feel his head, lying against me, and wonder at his tenderness, consider all the times he will reach for certainly and fail:

the deformed hand of the Frans Hals painting, dominating the entire canvas, the puppies,

the contours of that disconsolate room.


*

We never had an anniversary, it was too difficult to calibrate.

The first time you cheated on your girlfriend, with me; the first of many times
we would visit the sordid hotels you liked,

rife with vermin, jets of blood, the sound of screaming in the hallway, men smashing
telephones down, cursing this bitch or that.

Infinite variations on the theme of sexual misconduct. You were so wild then,
you once said.

I didn’t care who I hurt, I was wild for you, which is what you meant and what I mean
when I say, I am ashamed.


*

The first time we met you were crashing my friend’s wake.

You swept into the bar in a motley of scarves, your long hair
tumbling, a cluster of black grapes.

You had met my friend briefly; still, we were aghast.

Imagine a murder of crows passing through a stone deity; imagine confetti
commissioning the heads of prone invalids,

thrown from your graceful hands, you shook our hands and introduced yourself.

My friend was a trouble-maker, who thrived on dissension.

I would wonder for years if he rigged this moment—

through the scrim of our tears, your gaudy arrival,

all the tears that would accumulate, unfallen, in the years to come.


*

You loved poetry, which is why you came—you decorated your body with
words and images, wrested from the untimely dead.

I see myself talking to the daughter I never had: Do not fall in love with poets.
They are always in love, Robert Lowell said.

To this I would add, Many of them will maintain, eventually, that it is not a lie,
but a metaphor.

For example, I killed the daughter I never had.

*

A girlfriend of mine was crying and you homed in on her,
patting her back, There, there.

You moved in with her two weeks later: you had a distinctive voice.

Low and larded with innuendo, lulling and sweet.

I think of this, remembering you wrapped around her.

I think of her shoulders heaving, her body’s rigours.
A quiet drone surrounding her—

blowflies moiling among the dampness, the recesses of her sorrow.

Soon, you turned to me, as you would, for over seven years,
solemn and watchful.

As my own miseries pitched me into bed, deep into the filthy
nimbus of blankets and disfigured pillows,

you at the black post,

offering tea and handfuls of paper towels; I would refuse them,
and you would pad, quietly, away.

Poem © Lynn Crosbie 2004. All rights reserved.

Lynn Crosbie is a Toronto writer. Her most recent book is Missing Children (McClelland & Stewart, 2004). She is currently completing a new collection of poems called Liar.

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