canada

GOLD AND BLACK

At night the gold and black slashed bees come
pluck my head away. Vague thousands drift
leave brain naked stark as liver
each one carries atoms of flesh, they
walk my body in their fingers.
The mind stinks out.

In the black Kim is turning
a geiger counter to this pillow.
She cracks me open like a lightbulb.

Love, the real,
terrifies
the dreamer in his riot cell.

This is from Rat Jelly, one of Michael Ondaatje's early books.

I first came across this poem in the Norton Anthology of English Poetry when I was in college. I went straight to the back, looking to see what the more recent poetry looked like (remember, like most people, I grew up thinking you had to be dead to be a poet). This is before the movie The English Patient came out, mind you. Something about the poem startled me, as it still does: phrases like “black slashed bees”, “vague thousands drift” and “the dreamer in his riot cell” still do it for me.

When I was in Vancouver in the summer of 1997, I picked up Rat Jelly (and about a thousand other Canadian books that you won’t find in the US) at Duthie's, a local independent bookstore. In my typical fashion it's only now that I've finished reading it. I was on a real Canadian kick then - oh wait, still am. Margaret Atwood, Christian Bök, Timothy Findley, Christopher Simons, Alice Munro, Douglas Coupland, and I'm sure a host of others I'm not remembering at the moment.