Dancing in the Dark
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
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“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