January 3, 2012

Heidi Garnett

A HUNDRED AND FIFTY KINDS OF GRASSES

The town ends at Pearl’s place,
a rough plank four room shack.
Half an hour to school walking
if you cut across open prairie.

Pearly, pearly-white, pearly-everlasting,
a head taller than the boys in the grade one classroom,
a p-p-pretty girl, raggy though,
like the scrub ponies roaming the Porcupine Hills.
You had to approach her slowly
                                    hand out palm up.

I think Pearl recognized something of herself in me,
the little refugee girl who couldn’t speak English
and cried when her father brought her to school.
It was April and the sun’s long processional had begun:
violets, shooting stars, pussy toes, wild roses.

Imagine,
a hundred and fifty kinds of grasses,
beak grass, fox sedge, purple love grass, silky wild rye
and big bluestem tall as a man’s waist.
We’d push the grass aside
and wade into the middle of a wind tossed lake
            where no one could see us.

In summer,
the cemetery became our playground,
a tangle of corms, rootstalks and headstones,
                                    inscriptions;
how the dead inscribe themselves on the living
though we didn’t know how deeply
until years later. Sadly missed,
my father with his brain tumour and your mother
so obese she sat in the double seats
reserved for smoochers at the Empress Theatre.

When I think of Pearl now I see her
married at sixteen, five children in seven years, a husband
who later drank himself to death. I see her
running across the prairie to meet me halfway
I see her running as if her life depends on it.

from Rattle #35, Summer 2011
Tribute to Canadian Poets

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July 11, 2011

Heidi Garnett

SIN OF UNREQUITED LOVE

In war there are no unwounded soldiers.
—Narosky

We had the problem of youth, the problem of desire,
our testicles pulled tight as empty purse seines,
the starved musculature of the heart.

We watched clouds move from east to west,
but with no real avidity. The sun rose and set.
We ate three meals a day, slept seven hours,

washed and shaved, listened to the radio. Mostly,
we followed orders, but some evenings desire
stalked us in musty theatres called Roxy or Empress

where we watched a film noir starring a blonde bombshell
who wore a tuxedo and sang with a voice like a grenade,
its pin pulled. She couldn’t sing worth a damn,

but who cared. She looked dangerous and life then
was all about severity, the sharp angles of cheekbones,
a white chalk outline drawn around a body,

the spasm of detonation. We said less and less
and spent our days drinking or lying in bed
and imagining our imminent deaths;

but this problem of wanting, wanting to stay, to fall in love
and plant raspberry canes, to swim to the other side of a lake
and stare at things as if they matter.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010
Rattle Poetry Prize Honorable Mention

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