Studies in Franco-America

French North-American Studies Class Project Fall 2004

Poetry and Music Links

• In The Sleep of Fathers
• La Bataille Des Sept-Chênes
• Manitoba Heritage Council Commemorative Plaque of Pierre Falcon
• To My Brother
• Figures In A Stranger's Dream
• The Front Parlor
  
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  IN THE SLEEP OF FATHERS

(This poem was selected from the book called, "Lives In Translation: An Anthology of Contemporary Franco-American Writings. The author of this poem is A. Poulin, Jr. In 1976 Mr. Poulin was the founder of BOA Editions, Ltd. in Rochester, NY. Mr. Poulin was born in 1938, in Lisbon, Maine, and he was the author of six books of poetry, a major translator of the French and German poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, and the editor of Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton-Mufflin). Mr. Poulin died in 1996. For further readings of Mr. Poulin and other poet authors at BOA Editions, please visit their website at www.boaeditions.org or write to: Marketing Director/Associate Editor, BOA Editions, Ltd., 260 East Avenue, Rochester, NY 14604 Phone: 585-546-3410 Fax: 585-546-3913)

A mist rose from the river and hovered
in the air, a heavy slab of granite.
Tongues of satin ribbons flapped Father,

Father, Husband, Brother from the wreaths
and baskets of dyed flowers on rented
artificial turf, while your casket quivered

on the tiny elevator that goes down forever.
An ancient woman watering her rock
garden in the rain, the priest sprinkled

holy water over you and intoned that last
incantation for the dead's longer lasting
life, for the deeper sleep of fathers.

The night before, when all your relatives
And friends had left, your sons and daughters
lingered in the mortuary with our mother.

We plucked flowers from the bank that rose
around your bier, a mad farmer's garden
cultivated on the face of some slate cliff,

and lay them as ourselves on your steady
chest, in your hands already grafted to
your ribs. My brother held you in his

outstretched arms, the son he never had,
and begged you to be born again, while we
held each other as we never would again.

Then it was over. Your brothers, sisters,
friends walked back to their cars and
slowly drove off through the cemetery ruled by

our family name. Our wives flanked our mother.
And the undertaker pulled back that blanket of
damp roses children buy to warm their dead.

My brother and I broke two sprigs of evergreen
and placed them just above your mouth.
We knelt and kissed your sealed, implacable

pod one last time. With our knees and feet
still wet with that rich earth surrounding
you as you root yourself deeper, sturdier

in this ground we walk on, in our dreams
we tend to our own families. No longer
sons, we work, we sleep in the sleep of fathers.

The following poems are posted with permission from BOA Editions, Ltd and are reprinted from A. Poulin, Jr. Selected Poems. For further information please view their website: http://boaeditions.org/books/poulin.html

TO MY BROTHER

You’d think there was no end to this

tribe. They set out and multiplied

as if survival of their species

depended on the acid of their sperm.

Now, in the middle of the night,

they call us to come bury their dead.

So we make that black pilgrimage

back to Lisbon to slide one more

familiar corpse into the holy hillside.

We’ve buried twelve of them, a dozen

deaths survived, with still a dozen more

or so to live through. The horror

of their deaths and lives lives on

and haunts us: Mandia bent and stunted

by that monster riding her shoulder,

lied into believing she was partly angel;

Blackie drunk before his couple suns

rose every morning of his life, except

the last; and Larry loving various wives,

not on of them his own, his children

strangers to him even when he hemorrhaged;

one Emile lingering for months in

hospital beds infested with leukemia’s

piranha, another dropping on the corner

during lunch-hour, gaping blindly back

at the mill hands watching our father

take him in his arms and whisper the act

of contrition to his soulless head.

Time and time again I resurrect them.

They gather in my head, eat, drink and

sing, celebrating their own wakes,

prolonging our interminable deaths.

But each time I return from burying one

of them, all the way back home from

Lisbon I can feel unremembered and

unknown parts of me vanish in the dark

and exhausted silence behind me.

They die, Normand, they die.

And, dying, they kill our only history.

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FIGURES IN A STRANGER’S DREAM

The day you knew your father would give up

his farm in Canada and pack the nine

kids in a hired car to Maine, where his

seven sons could get jobs in the wool

and cotton mills (maybe work a small farm

on the side), you slipped our your window

late at night and stole down to the pasture

where, over tender mounds of grass in their

green fire, spring’s cold moonlight hovered

like the dreamt-of echo of an absent snow.

You tore your nightgown off, let fall your hair

until it flowed, a fountain’s shimmering

scrim around you, then, with a dancer’s breath-

less leap, you straddled your Pa’s old and docile

bull, spurred him with your naked heels and,

in a single ring of light, a sphere of

brilliant, pure, accelerating thrust

that fused your porcelain limbs with that

aging creature’s sheer brute bulk, you rode him,

rode and rode him, until dawn broke blood-red

under him, until the bull collapsed, until

your brothers came to lift your wet, exhausted

body off its haunches, wrap you in a blanket,

and carry you back to your bedroom in

a wordless covenant that would almost

outlast your lifetime and our own--

as if you had never lived that night, except

as figures in a stranger’s dream.

Old woman,

no one’s ever known the contours of your

dreams, the figures roaming at their centers.

You spent most your life nursing your father,

as his mouth and eyes filled with greater blank,

and your paralyzed, undying mother,

who fertilized the furrows of her bed

for years with the refuse of her own

decaying flesh until she seemed to root,

a ferocious houseplant feeding on

the breath of unmarried daughters. Breathless

with asthma, nights you spent by your bedroom

window crumbling your beads, novenas

herbicides ravishing your tongue while

more moonlight than your young heart could

absorb and hope to sleep began to flood

the field, foam and fleece and tide, until

the current in the knots of barbed wire

crackled blue, precise and absolute—

even on the night that old woman died,

your name filling her mouth with her last breath.

And you mothered your unmarried bothers

like three farmers’ loyal wives: cooking

as many as nine meals a day, cleaning,

hanging their washed underwear and pants

to dry on winter mornings when the cold

snapped at your fingers with the vengeance of

your mother’s gangrene. You put them to bed

when they come home drunk after one more night

with the bovine wives of friends and strangers.

And you buried each of them, one by one,

In that overcrowded family plot

where your name was already branded

in a slab of granite. You sold the farm,

equipment, furniture, your brothers’

hand-made tool-chests, mother’s linen, crystal

wedding gifts. For days you burned photographs,

love letters, postcards from honeymoons you

never had—anything that would light up the sky.

The last survivor, now the whole history

of the clan, from your great-grandmothers’ names

to the glorious fury at the heart of

an unreaped field in moonlight, burgeons

inside their collapsing chests as you live

out your days in a three-room apartment

that shelves on the parish cemetery where

from your bedroom window you can see snow

fall, the disintegrating petals of lost passion.

Tonight your cragged and ancient face is

a worn, familiar planet in slow orbit

above the family pasture where the cattle

of your dreams and mine gently graze a sparser

winter grass. And before your name breaks out,

blooms on the far horizon, obliterates

this small patch of moonlight I cultivate

just by dint of my own breath and hand

as a farmer’s son should do, I plumb

a history I have learned, hunch my shoulders,

wish muscles I have never had, flare

my nostrils, call down one last dream of

a young and porcelain woman,

Aurora,

Sleepwalking in a scrim of hair,

and offer you my eager, docile back.

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THE FRONT PARLOR

Whenever someone in our family

died, the wake was in our house,

downstairs, in the front parlor.

It was a spare room, really, and,

except for a few extra folding chairs,

empty and unheated. The shades were

always drawn, the best lace curtains

hung. And in that constant cool

twilight, the wall paper damp

as banks of carnations, when we

dared to go in, forbidden to,

we played like shadows under

the great cross, the enormous

suffering, dying or dead Christ,

the room’s only constant ornament.

It never was a living room.

I’ve slept above the dead before,

my bed in the same far corner

as their caskets. Assured their lips

were sewn, their arms clamped,

I’ve fallen asleep to the rhythm

of hummed rosaries. My grandfather,

choosing to die on New Year’s day.

His wife, big-boned and stubborn,

paralyzed for fifteen years,

bedridden five, decaying three,

gangrene growing on her back

like some warm carnivorous herb.

An uncle who never spoke a word

until the week he died, insane,

babbling the poison of his liver.

I’ve slept above the dead enough.

Whole generations of a tribe. Still,

in the middle of the night, I hear

the prayers of the living and the dead,

a crescendo through the floorboards,

filling my room like an ancestral chorus:

Que les ames des defunts reposent

en paix par la misericorde

de Diew. They have burned

the seams of their eyes, chewed

the nylon cord threaded through

their lips. They have cast off

their clamps. They stand at my

bedside every night moaning my name

off endless strings of beads, burning.

She plants a growing kiss on my forehead.

with her green hand, moist as moss,

wide as my skull and, forever free,

She stokes my back and thigh.

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