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  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  about living in New York for a while. I will never become a good writer

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  BOOKS BY DAVID DONNELL

  POETRY

  Poems 1961

  The Blue Sky 1977

  Dangerous Crossings 1980

  Settlements 1983

  The Natural History of Water 1986

  Water Street Days 1989

  China Blues 1992

  Dancing in the Dark 1996

  FICTION

  The Blue Ontario Hemingway Boat Race 1985

  NON-FICTION

  Hemingway in Toronto: A Post-Modern Tribute 1982

  Copyright © 1996 by David Donnell

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Donnell, David, 1939-

  Dancing in the dark

  Poems.

  ISBN 0-7710-2833-4

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-577-9

  I. Title.

  PS8557.054D3 1996 C811′.54 C96-930054-9

  PR9199.3.D555D3 1996

  The publishers acknowledge the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Inc.

  481 University Avenue

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5G 2E9

  v3.1

  For Tom & Sarah & Clarence, Alec Harrison aka “the Slacker,” Sandy & her famous Airedale, Martha as always, Wallace & his red Harley & a variety of others too numerous to mention, hello, sunrise.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Disclaimer

  Open Fields

  Olson

  Wittgenstein Liked the Effortless Motion of Cameras

  Elvis Costello Sounds Flat & a Tad Sarcastic

  Dancing. Dancing in the Dark

  Jack Kerouac Drank Gallo & Wrote Desolation Angels

  July

  Brat Packs, Frat Packs

  Maybe She Wasn’t Very Interested in Fire Trucks

  Jeff Goldblum

  I’m 26, Martha, & I’m Tired of Slow Descriptive Fiction

  A Big Yellow Moon Coming Up Over Michigan

  Idioms Are Like a Package of Camel Lights

  A Story About Performance Poets

  After Many Staff Discussions, the New New Yorker

  At Home, Approaching Winter

  Tom & Slacker Coming Home at 4 O’clock in the Morning

  Slacker Dumps on Cushy Rock Lyrics

  Sam & a Circle of Friends

  Dark Pigmentation & Lightly Coloured Americans

  Great Danes in Autumn

  What Is Significant About the Contemporary Novel?

  Moments of Suspended Belief in Contemporary Fiction

  Blue Skies, 78°

  Stars

  Lester Young

  My Emma Goldman T-Shirt

  I Guess If You’ve Got 1000 Skinheads You Have to Codify Them

  Sinatra

  Morningside Drive

  Avanti, Avanti

  October

  Winter Books to Read in New York, Corn Chowder, an Empty Room, Chorizo Sauasages

  Postmoderns

  Mississippians

  O Hey, He’s Tall, but He’s Too Young to Drink Bourbon

  Dutch Tomatoes

  Lake Simcoe

  High Liners

  All the Cool Girls Have Bib Overalls & Ankle Tattoos

  Wickson’s Plums

  Harriet & Moira at Stratford

  Successful Young Toronto Chef Writes Home to Ottawa

  Buses

  Most Americans Have Never Been West of the Mississippi

  New York Just Thinks It’s the Biggest City in America

  Acknowledgements

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  a reference to? cocaine, come in me, which? are you sure?] Elizabeth Taylor

  To most accurately reproduce the layout of the text on the printed page, you may choose to decrease the size of the text on your viewer and/or change the orientation of your screen until the above line of characters fits on a single line. This may not be possible on all e-reading devices. Viewing this title at a higher than optimal text size or on a screen too small to accommodate the longest lines in the text will alter the reading experience and may cause single lines of some poems to display as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the turn of the line will be marked with a shallow indent.

  “When Janis [Joplin] got it on, she got it on for everybody.”

  Dave Marsh, Rolling Stone, Summer, 1978

  “Music is a lot different than television. Music bypasses visual mind discrimination and envelops the inner mind.”

  Marshall McLuhan, in conversation, 1967

  “It’s extraordinary what Fugazi can do with a four-sentence song.”

  David Donnell, September 1995

  OPEN FIELDS

  Saturday we drove across three fields

  for an hour, mostly stubble, & came back

  onto the road. There was garbage

  on the shoulder but it wasn’t ours.

  It was a good day. Eric

  is crazy. We broke 2 hampers at the picnic & the girls

  left us; they said they would take a bus. Oklahoma,

  west Kansas.

  O Wm. Pitt,

  your Pennsylvania

  doesn’t rock & roll but it rolls us. Like the old man

  at the garage. He was funny. He wanted to know

  where Eric got the black eye. Eric has blue eyes.

  His wife gave us a piece of raw steak. We ate it at a diner

  up the road. Steak & eggs & coffee. The waitress said she’d

  already had breakfast, laughed at us. We have jobs waiting for us

  in New York. Mine’s nothing fancy. I’m going to be a clerk

  in a men’s store that sells Robert Stock shirts. 3 eggs

  & some cayenne pepper. Enough money left over

  for apple pie & 2 Stroh’s each. A dead dog by the side

  of the highway, & endless fields of sweet green peas. I wrote

  in my journal, The sun hangs over the fields like a disc

  of butter. Pennsylvania is named after William Penn.

  The white line keeps pulling like a magnet fixed

  to your eyes. The horizon eats you up. Red-headed chickens

  when we stop for air. We have cigarettes & gas. I feel excited

  about living in New York for a while. I will never become a good writer

  like my grandfather because I am too naive. But I am good-looking


  & I have guts. I don’t think Eric has a job. Plus,

  he’s crazy. More green peas, more butter that hangs in the blue sky

  at mid-day.

  OLSON

  I like The Kingfishers partly because I love the bird,

  common

  also in western Ontario. But you can look through most of Olson’s

  poems

  and you won’t find a clear description of himself [he

  was an impressive looking man & a good agitator], or one of

  his friends, or of a black child with an amazing face

  modelling a Gap jean jacket in Vanity Fair.

  Frank Gehry calls his new woven laminated maple strip chairs

  after various hockey terms – Hat Trick, Power Play. It’s okay,

  I think it works.

  Some of Feiffer’s cartoons are better than most of Duncan’s poems,

  or Olson’s Maximus.

  I like some of his pamphlets, & I like his occasional use of

  numbers.

  Although Gloucester is a beautiful idea. A place

  where

  convention

  doesn’t pile up and become confusing.

  The grackles come out in the early morning and the fishermen

  come in before lunch. And those are Atlantic fish, no

  fresh water grub.

  I miss description in Olson

  – I miss classic outline

  and significant detail. But

  I like The Kingfishers. He builds

  a coherent & extrapolative world around his

  indigenous

  image. Alludes to some events

  in his life

  and has room left

  in the poem for a sense

  of their strange and almost comic funkiness.

  WITTGENSTEIN LIKED THE EFFORTLESS MOTION OF CAMERAS

  Here I go again – racing forward to catch

  the sleek new 6×9 trade paper volume of Wittgenstein.

  his

  name was Ludwig, you know that much. Nobody really knows

  what he was talking about most of the time – it’s a long

  slow rather dark & anal, if you want to know what I think,

  emphasis

  on exactly how do we know (not what/

  but this &

  or that specific proposition)

  which we seem to think

  casually, I suppose blithely, even the way we might reach

  with one summer tanned arm across a dish of orange sherbet

  a mulberry smouldering bombe with a hard ferrous & slightly

  bitter to my taste Italian biscuit tucked rakishly

  into one bulging & voluminous side

  – for a refill

  of the ice-cold Heineken just one more tall ½ full glass

  before we proceed to eat the dessert &, of course,

  coffee

  always, always the rich darkness of different coffee beans

  appear like dark oily cherubs in my last dreams

  before waking up & rolling over on one long side my body

  always seems extremely long at that time of the morning,

  6:45 I suppose, 7:15, & cradling you in my arms

  your curly dark blond hair & rocking you very gently

  O I don’t know for about a minute or so I guess. What do I know,

  that “I” which at this moment seems to be my shoulders

  black Writers&Co sweatshirt crumb of brown rye bread

  beside my coffee cup on a page of sprawled blue notes

  about a pale young Jew leaning out of a third floor window

  in Vienna

  where Mozart ate his kugel where

  tribunes of the German Communist party were put to death

  in an alleyway

  to throw a slice of bread to some brown

  white-flecked & slate bluegrey pigeons

  it is me, of

  course, but I doubt if that is the problem.

  ELVIS COSTELLO SOUNDS FLAT & A TAD SARCASTIC

  Did I really like for real listen for 4 ½

  maybe longer blue jeans checked shirts years

  all through high school

  Malvern Collegiate

  when we lived in the east end

  & Jarvis Collegiate after we moved to Mount Pleasant

  & I had a big third floor bedroom to myself

  gabled but huge floor space & windows out on the street

  to

  this short, cocky

  somewhat acid tongued English guy

  a ripe huckster

  plus his borrowed name

  Elvis

  Costello? I guess I did.

  That was years ago. Before college. Funny isn’t it

  how time

  & Elvis Costello

  & Kate Millett slip away? Somehow the story

  of Johnny Rotten

  tearing the Pink Floyd t-shirt,

  & writing “SUCKS” across it in large letters

  & then putting it on,

  seems easier

  to identify with than abstract Ping Pong.

  DANCING. DANCING IN THE DARK

  ½ of this generation

  is going to hell in a basket,

  or an ABC Dish

  or

  an Ottawa flatbed railway car.

  And ½

  of this generation

  as long as we’re not wiped out by a plague

  or personal disaster

  or a wave of developers

  is going to be just fabulous. That’s

  what I think,

  Tom, okay?

  And it’s all out there, Dancing in the dark.

  JACK KEROUAC DRANK GALLO & WROTE DESOLATION ANGELS

  Jack Kerouac was a big idol for me when I was 17

  in Toronto

  & just going into 1st year college –

  Trinity for some reason.

  I was the odd guy in 1st year. I was fresh from Gravenhurst

  up deep in the red & yellow Muskokas;

  & by 4th year I was the moody

  intellectual

  walking around Trinity College on Hoskin Avenue

  with my hands in my pockets & my tweed jacket

  over my shoulders.

  People told me I looked like Jack Kerouac

  & I thought that was cool. This was 1984, Kerouac had been dead

  for I don’t know

  a long time, but I had a big b&w picture of him

  leaning against a brick wall in New York City smoking a Pall Mall

  up on my residence bedroom wall. What else can I say?

  I’ve been reviewing books on & off for 2 years now. Part-time

  bartending on weekends in the east end & on Queen Street West.

  I’ve never picked worms with a flashlight at 4 o’clock in the morning.

  And I’ve never been a railway lineman in west Texas.

  I’ve got ideas that are different from the ideas of my generation

  but I think it’s too soon to release them –

  interesting ideas about intellectuals & contemporary music,

  new ideas about intellectuals & the labour movement.

  So I’m reviewing a few books & taking my time. But as far as

  drives go,

  what about Miamiiii? Miami in the middle of frozen

  New York & Ontario cold weather warnings? What a blast of colour,

  forsythia, sweet bougainvillea, the lush blue line of the Florida

  coast?

  JULY

  “Hush now,” she says, “I’m going upstairs

  to talk to the baby Jesus.” The big upstairs swinging

  door swings open & shut behind her. A house big enough

  to give the 3rd floor over to a kind of retreat.

  I lie with my hands behind my head & the sweat

  drying slowly invisibly on my thighs, one knee & on my

  shoulders. So she’s a go
od-looking young white woman

  with a big house but I don’t think she’s really serious

  about this baby Jesus stuff. Maybe,

  who knows?

  Puts her hand between my legs the way you would stroke

  some tomatoes or green peppers in a Loblaws

  if you weren’t too sure of what you were buying

  but we’re talking about crisp fat fresh radicchio here

  not that wilted kind they serve in restaurants

  & she says, “Tell me about Mississippi.” She’s drunk,

  I guess. But I tell her a few things I’ve heard

  people say. I don’t know anything about that

  Mississippi shit. I’m just lying here looking out

  at the moon, ½ full, yellow moon behind some clouds,

  numbers don’t really interest me. I’m on the cusp

  of turning 21, now that’s important, either this man

  I am goes back to school or I don’t go back to school.

  All I really want is to come & go, leave this city

  after the trees, there are trees everywhere here, start

  tumbling down & go somewhere & sit tilting the Jim

  Beam & the Jack around in my glass watching the Mets

  come up from 2nd place, fall weather, an old sweater,

  Gooden pumping up the steam; the steam from really good

  rich dark coffee beans is different from other kinds

  of steam, it’s deeper, richer, it draws me in

  & I tumble like a butterfly, that’s a funny image,

  & beat my wings I guess, lift up & away

  & watch the game in some neighbourhood bar

  where an old woman, Irish maybe, asks me to move

  my chair a bit because I’ve got such a big head. O

  yeah, I guess so, but I don’t know shit about Mississippi,

  & I don’t think I like baseball so much

  because my father was a black dentist in Boston

  or because my mother sings in a choir in Toronto;

  it may have something to do with colour,

  but I think it’s mainly because I don’t want to be a

  lawyer, and because I don’t want to stay in one place