Two Bowls of Milk Read Online Free PDF Page A

the body in itself and not to let
    the breasts go loose. What child
    could your hips span other than yourself?
    In fear you’ve put on heavy necklaces
    as though you were not enough. Your
    painter must have thought you wanton,
    his neck aflush with shame at posing a girl
    unclothed for Art. Your shame at having
    flesh is greater. Would you rather lack
    a body and so be safe from probing
    fingertips and gazes, be safe from what
    that body wants? I have wanted
    to turn away from the sudden ivory
    of your skin, too rare a thing,
    endangered, endangering its self
    and mine by such exposure.
II. Fear of Enormity
    Hope I
, Gustav Klimt, 1903. Oil on canvas.
    Impossible the taut globe of your belly.
    What does it not contain? You trust
    that each nail, once born, will be
    immaculate, as you have become, having
    shunned man’s touch for months and carried
    in your body another body’s weight.
    Your feet are lost behind some monster
    wave of shadow those masks behind you cast:
    Death, Decrepitude. Against their knowing
    sockets’ gaze, you hold your elbows bent
    as wings to make a phoenix of your hair.
    He hated that your ordinary reddish
    freckles turned into a universe of far,
    insistent stars, that you were shapely
    and misshapen, vertical and utter, and loomed
    inside his doorway – his model grown
    to distances he couldn’t span. Your
    certain look fixes us both in our places
    and will not fix anything. How I narrow
    in your eyes to barren one, to mothered.
III. Fear of the Twenty-First Century
    Transformations No. 5
, Jack Shadbolt, 1976. Acrylic, latex commercial paint, black ink, pastel, and charcoal on illustration board.
    Yes, she is here, she is real –
    she smells of iron afterbirth; her mad
    red wingflaps knock loose chunks of dirt,
    shit, the hundred shades of myth.
    She’s the mess you were punished
    in school for making, she
    thinks herself resplendent, she thinks herself
    important. What have you given into the air?
    You’ve gone too far and already
    she’s beyond you. No one will rest.
    Not content to let you be the chrysalis
    that’s left, she breaks you as herself
    in fragments, she does not recognize
    any of our shut-tight shapes. Nightmare
    the caterpillar had, mouth made of wings,
    salamander come through fire,
    she bursts into bits of flag and firecracker.
    Father basks in her quick-given
    flame and says he has created.
    If she came to me I could not
    give my meagre breast to suck, I would want
    her every colour for myself and she would laugh
    with her worm-mouth she will devour
    the world as she must.

NOTES
    The first line of “
Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there
” is from “37 Haiku” in
A Wave
by John Ashbery. Copyright © 1984 by John Ashbery. All rights reserved.
    The title
Seawolf Inside Its Own Dorsal Fin
is used with permission of the artist, Robert Davidson.
    The opening quotation for “Red Stiletto” is from “Our Angelic Ancestor” in
Dime-Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell
by Charles Simic. Copyright © 1992 by Charles Simic. Reprinted by permission of The Ecco Press.
    In “Assonance,” the line “
Hurt bird in dirt
” was adapted from an unpublished poem by Christopher Patton.
    The italicized text in “Edge of the River” was adapted from informational signs in the Arboretum in Odell Park, Fredericton.
    The photograph that inspired “Virginia Woolf’s Mother in the Blurred Garden” depicts Julia Margaret Cameron’s niece, Mrs. Herbert Duckworth. Later known as Mrs. Leslie Stephen, she was the mother of Virginia Woolf.
    The National Gallery of Canada’s Library and Archives, particularly the clipping files, were indispensable in my research for “
Deux personnages dans la nuit
,” as were Madeleine (Beaulieu) Samson’s personal reflections on Lemieux as a teacher. Books by Guy Robert (
Lemieux
, Stanké, 1975), Marie Carani (
Jean Paul Lemieux
, Musée du Québec, 1992), and Marcel Dubé (
Jean Paul Lemieux et le livre
, Art Global,