Where affliction conquers us with brute force, beauty sneaks in and topples the empire of the self from within.

—Simone Weil


(Dad, I dreamed about you last night. Mom showed me your stiff hand open at the

top of the bed and said “See?” I had to agree it was stiff and dead alright. And I was

freaking out because I’d missed a meeting at work so was relieved Dad had died so

I’d have an excuse. But then he returns, is walking around like nothing happened

though he looks pale and frail and soon to die again, possibly). He would sing,

Go to sleep my little pickaninnie

Underneath the silver sunny moon

Hushabye, lullaby, mama’s little baby
and before that my grandmother’s red coral brooch—

Grandma: pianist, good-time girl, Rosicrucian—

the brooch I lost one night at one of those parties

it took days to recover from, beating myself up—
the good lickins with wooden spoon with branch from Sacred Grove

with belt with whatever was to hand & we were lucky

because when the kids down the street were bad

they had to go find and present to their mom

their own stick for the good lickins they got at the Shuswap
their dad would walk out

into the lake holding up a bottle

in one hand, a glass in the other, and hoist himself up

onto the raft, us on the beach

laughing & waving, he was an okay guy,

a great joke teller, I’d always listen hard from

the bedroom when I heard Bill’s ice cubes quieten down

& he’d say “So okay a Jew and a Catholic

walk into a bar” but even better were mysterious

filthy jokes that would emerge from—

stupefied silence at 3:30 in the morning

and the laughter was tired or maybe

there was some sort of decorum such as when

someone would leap across the living room

to light his wife’s cigarette, he was so in love with her

my mother said, she’d barely have the cigarette

out of the package before he’d be over there with the lighter—

Poetry: a bright flame.

I always knew we were in for a long night

when Dad got out the banjo and ripped into Bye Bye Blues

& who knew how the evening would turn out,

in joy or in sorrow.
Sometimes the parties would take place at Bill’s or

somewhere else in which case there might be a phone call

at 4 a.m. to come and drive them home even though I couldn’t

drive yet so I’d walk over and get the keys,

just put it in Drive, Dad would say, & off we’d go

with the high beams on & the birds beginning to tweet.

Brett Enemark used to say this was Young Driver Training

in Prince George; he’d done it, too. At least they were being

responsible by not getting behind the wheel in a condition

Mom referred to as tight. This was poetry: terms like

getting tight. 
Both Bill and Dad were good joke-tellers but Dad,

a big fan of Bob Hope, had a more technical approach.

He’d study Hope’s routine on the Ed Sullivan Show

“Listen to this” he’d say, as we scrutinized the timing.

Dad could even imitate Bob Hope’s little smile.

Poetry: timing, a little smile, the lyrics to Ragtime Cowboy Joe:

he’s a high falutin’, rootin’ tootin’, son of a gun

from Arizona! Dad would finish

with a flourish of his pick hand, whirling it around

like a pitcher on the mound, and give his little grin and

shake his head as if to say, Boy, that was fun! And reach

for his topped-up Bacardi & Coke.
He transferred mandolin-type playing to the banjo & worshipped

the guitar moves of Les Paul. I can still hear the wall-of-sound

playing and singing from the radio, a drone poured off the surface

of the tight harmony with Mary Ford. The World is Waiting

for the Sunrise was Dad’s most soulful cover—

you’d hear him practicing in the basement, tiki lights

parsing the dark little bar.
Before that, in Kamloops, when grandma’s piano arrived

after her death Dad drove me over the bridge for lessons.

My first piece was called Indian Dance, a steady

single-note repetition on the left hand and a simple

two-note slightly sad yet menacing-sounding melody on the right.

Poetry: something out of whack. Grandma had played that same piano

for friends and guests both whites and Haida thirty years before

in Massett, accompanied on violin by her husband Edward.

It was known that in the hands of certain women, red cedar bark could be pounded

to a softness greater than cashmere. But most of those women

if not all of them were dead by then. Most of the artists, carvers, and poets were

dead by then also, or crippled by disease.

Mom’s biodad, an O’Donnell, accountant and charmer,

Drinker, brawler, persona non grata, left early.

Her grandfather James Martin was then

her father until he died when she was seven, and then

tubercular Edward arrived from Germany with his violin and soon

he died too. Poetry: consumption and epitaph.
Mom would be homesick for the sound

of the canneries and salty crashing ocean,

kelp and sand dunes north of Massett

toward Rose Spit where Raven discovered Humans.

Every Christmas a dozen cans of Alaska King crabmeat

would arrive from what she called The Islands.

She’d tumbled down the white dunes & gone out after storms

with a can opener to see what had washed up from shipwrecks:

mostly pork and beans. Poetry: a can opener. Treasures

were the glass buoys—large, pocked, thick-glassed orbs

from the Japanese fishing fleets out somewhere in the

four thousand miles of open sea to the west of Rose Spit.

In the sanitarium Mom

and her friend from The Islands both at death’s door

in young womanhood with children at home later sent

Haida bracelets for Xmas—mine was of Dogfish Woman

crafted by someone whose signature was “XX” and

whose carving was a bit off on an angle. Poetry:

off on an angle, amidst the TB and the whalers and the moieties.