Cathy Stonehouse
Dead Bear Skull (1996)
throw me out of my head
stage a coup on kindness
approach subject calmly from above below or behind
for those of you who did not make the final cut
there’s a word in the dictionary meanwhile cuffs
must be worn
while invoking ghosts
I fell into myself up on that boulder field
turned white in the presence of human snow
feasted on wildness
drank the voice of a fox from a creek full of winter
excreted Mars dissected the moon through my side
days spent
threading my I
through what sees me a heap of nothing a cairn of discarded bones
dolls no longer employed as transitional objects
their eyes of button done up as closed-cunt whores
what will you call me with rape-sharp expletive
crucifix of inner crossroad
where true poems live
wild, unwritten, unscanned & never recited
as unacceptable to the reading public
as handfuls of wolverine scat in a high rock crevice
or fresh cougar tracks filling up with sand
Truth (1993)
In a room full of second-hand toys a woman talks
of being her sister’s mother her father’s mistress
the cast of her father’s penis
displayed throughout her childhood in the living room the terror
she feels at the sound of a zip coming down
in a room full of listeners she speaks with the lisp of a child
who needs a smoke break
opens the door to this room of narrated secrets leaves us
by its barred window partially open
wondering if ‘self-esteem’
really does save lives
seeing home like eating stale ‘Nice’ biscuits
sweet at first but later a cause of discomfort
Trafalgar Square the pigeons the tourists the pigeons
myself beside myself standing in mid-air
is this my face bed beneath a bulb in a backpacker’s hostel
tourist’s tinted glasses stranger’s slurred voice
looking back from the ice of a Gower Street mirror
my father’s unconscious
cruelty, urge to name terror
plus the sound of a drawbridge visor
clamping down
The Faintest Resemblance (1992)
self in a sweater National Health spectacles body divided
an HMS Pinafore covering modest breasts
ethnically homeless
because the lungs did
something shameful
manipulating language at the light table
love’s virgin sheaf
dipped in develop
become to me a brief
flamenco of irritants : dust bees wheat pollen formaldehyde
phials containing feces, stagnant
career paths
the red mud of the truth traumatic opera
(shore of bleak unidentifiable stone
relatives)
subterfuge & typography
with God
(assaults on the future)
unless I can cohere virtuously, score
__________________________________
what we crave is what defeats
us, the loss of
an unbearably precise photograph
Knifed (1991)
once I saw coyotes walk through the grass on stilts
or so it seemed one slant-lit August evening
peering at poppies through Venetian eyelids
virtually destroyed by a day under glass
slicing language into letters with switchblades
steeping it in chemical baths of lies
high-heeled coyotes
cadged smokes crude truths
arraigned while shopping for vegetables
the rattle of a drunk man’s can-filled trolley
crack deals and other al-
chemical traffic a beggar
shot to death outside Shoppers Drug Mart
where Leo the lame ventriloquist voices his darkest thoughts
through the mouth of an ape
this is him still talking
once I was a coyote slashed deep past howling
but the night crawled in through slats and bound my throat
Hotel Evacuate (1987)
how does a woman escape
from her strangled body
except by traveling to Turkey or the bed next door
intimations of dysentery on the Tube to Battersea
women in fields men playing checkers
the interwoven wires some call nepotism “not the church
not the state women will decide our fate” a cluster in the shape of a peregrine
falcon
the shadow of a hawk on the hand sex touch
is elastic proprioceptive Nick thinks
he might have AIDS
Mick is depressed Jessica
still married Kate
drinks stale Mateus rose
smokes Silk Cut and vomits all over feminism
& poetry
while what she knows a Latin American dictator for example
rises like an anti-matter sun vengeance
now that’s an idea best abandoned on the border with Armenia
where Kurdish refugees
are smuggled past
burnt
with each joint smoked alone before sleeping
with my father his corrupt body bleak
in its yes its dress
its mess
oh Jesus Lord of Long Division and Multiplication
why did you ever teach us
girls can write
Misread (1986)
the one who knows
without the benefit of language
write us now
on glass
where have you gone
I’m waiting here for you
inside the side-in
speak to me without a mouth because
underneath the bed a manual typewriter underneath the typewriter manual poetry
hands are loose hands are so
rain on the skylight in Hurst Street tell me what’s humana dog in a coat or an elephant strafed on the wing
striped satin pajama-bottoms old man’s cardigan with Fimo buttons party-dress pigtails monkey-boots
does anyone suggest you might have been dressed by committee
or at any time place you in a drawerto be looked at later
the poems are breedingpromiscuous sluts
party policy dictates that pronouns be worn face downward please keep your real name ready for inspection at all times
the one who never reads is reading suddenly
the years stacked in two heaps
one for each life
loss is a time
machine
birds the one who never reads is reading suddenly
the years stacked in two heaps
one for each life
loss is a time
machine
dissolved into smoke at the river at daybreak
one left shoe
and a half
opened overcoat, love
Cut on the Bias (1983)
in style this autumn season are berry colours
shades of raspberry blackberry damson plum
the aisles of Chelsea Girl and Dorothy Perkins
filled with young girls in lip gloss pixie boots
each one with a brother always looking, a he in the head
by the name of Mike or Dave
poised before the mirror
selves from different body-states pour in
red whine of static radio interference
reports on the cold war waged
between good and bad
looking hot means developing
a research strategy, what skirt-length ensnares
the body most
when mirrors are weapons, erupt into threats
of military action against oneself
scarred wrists and tubs of cottage cheese
if it’s who you are that counts
then a size-8 dress and three-inch heel court-shoes
synthetic uppers
wrote this brief essay on D. H. Lawrence’s women
riding the ridges of words like the hot backs of horses
to that place between corners where unexpected bliss erupts
Fritz (1981)
navy blue V-necked sweater, purple-checked shirt my battle dress
I clutch this white clothbound
textbook
try to understand my role as reader
What passing bells for those who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns
active service first
then later mourning
shiny school skirt draped over a chair
amputated white socks
the stench that of fear
& other subtler gases
quick, boys — an ecstasy of fumbling
in the pencil case
for an eraser to rub oneself out
up in your room alone you revise quietly
guard the Maginot line of your half-open door
moans and grunts along the ward of survivors
red cross matrons
bloodied toilet
paper
I am the enemy you killed, my friend
the ghost of a child who no longer is
or was
God (1977)
As you cross the threshold of grammar
a hymn-like music happens:
the sound of Jesus finally falling apart
His legs and arms —
the x and y axes of sacrifice —
unhooked from each other
become blond 2×4’s of fake deliverance
lunging freely at you as night follows day
sleepless with grief
your dreams of Him are savage unforgivable
lurid as the circles under your eyes
syntax wears thin
cold northern seas
envelop you in glass and rain-dark summers
until
tense as a diving board
futures reverberate
you stand at the edge of the typescript
prepare to jump in
Flesh Pink (1976)
rinsed and set with curls of he & she
my skull a bath house
where dolls all lie and grieve in tubs of wool
I’m a deliciously decent round number
even and scientific as ‘vulva’
knee-deep in bruises of silk beneath the cherry tree
running through Brereton woods in only a sundress
plump self who despises indiscriminate
red crimplene smock with ecstatic hair
a house full of stone
its windows all bricked up
except for this bolt-hole
am I the quarry
or am I the stone
the chief of dolls
broadcasting across my nation —
Tom and Jerry, Top Cat or the test-card girl
surrounded by fat multi-coloured balloons—
BBC1 BBC2
where is the story of my life or has it gone now
all of a sudden
shampooed and conditioned with streaks of
perfect imperfect
dolls’ vinyl headpieces
tucked away in dryers of dead ears
Neither (1974)
there are many dolls each one is thinking
me I am a person but without a house
instead the cupboard
where we live is full of dark and dust
sometimes she takes us out
and changes our dresses
then we talk and drink
from plastic cups
real milk which doesn’t cross our lips
because we are all persons without insides
have no blood or guts to be removed —
but she does love us
is in fact the great big doll who thinks us —
in whose head our little heads have weight
I love you I love you
are filled with brains and lies and words like
I hate you I hate you
vinyl
adult
dolly
underpants of cotton
lime green dress with buttons made of glass
Bang (1972)
Six sits on carpeted steps listening to her teacher describe chickens
while a fourth-year-junior girl dies suddenly
running to her friend across the school field
she had a-hole-in-her-heart our headmaster tells us
Six imagines a
slumped striped her disappearing down the hole in its
self like a sock’s toe
pulled up and out
Mummy green paint has bubbles in it
the animals of the spring are foxes and badgers
baby birds and moths and prim-noses too, are clouds
animals? the poster is flat
the sky is flat the spring is in the poster although God is
infinite
my first story Polly and her Dollies
appears in a red-backed ‘Silvine’ exercise booklet with two staples holding it
together & imperial measurements listed on its textured sides
: the Gill the Foot the Stone the Mile the Acre
while a girl with mouths in her hair
combs out the infinite
& dies again and again
through the whole of her heart
Won’t (1970)
school is a game of tag
of ladybird-backed dominoes falling down, down
into the tied-together segments
of a plastic fan — everything folds up
and then the irrevocable happens
first a parting
of hairs in the middle
or a lopped-off toast slice
then a division of pear drops
two on either side of the me / you line
one self holds a book and looks outward,
“reads”
about Peter And Jane
while the other
turns her back completely
away
“dears” upside-down and right to left
unzips the stupid dress picks off its pockets
turns her mind the other way about
resolves to
study all that is never verbally recorded
grow fins and gills again in blood’s undersea
meet the bat flying squirrel or furred owl
that lives inside all of us
hanging upside-down in the cradle of the pelvis
its one yellow gleeful
and searching eye
Listen (1968)
language peeks out of you
like children-of-other-countries from a cloth-bound atlas
its thousand
smiling faces, all in national dress
was that your name
or the scratch of a gramophone needle
a chaffinch scrapping for lard
at the wooden bird table
or a teaspoon mining the depths of a soft-boiled egg
the dance a word makes —
Our Father Witchart
Leicester Grandma
Whose Dress Pats Against Us
Time for Bed—
like
one of the strands of your inner river
come apart
round a fish or fist
or rock
or a reality
flowering up through your mouth
that very first time
When I grow up
She stands at the window and looks out over sunset roofs, the last birds of evening
scattered like seed corn across red fields of sky, imagines herself engraved upon by star-boned
angels,
the Word of a bronze-winged trumpeter calligraphed into her naked back. What names she has,
each the perfect initial to a text flattened against the glass of time, the story
she reads from there of apple trees and bridges, swineherds and swans.
As the night bleeds down its vast lexicon of untransmuted shapes, she reads
from left to right, right to left, until her hands turn blue, flutter and are gone.
I don’t remember anything
Breath disturbs the fall of leaves, swells the fold of cloth on which is written all she considers
safe.
The face of an intruder rises so quick against the pane, black shirts of cloud flying across each
eye,
that she can smell the blood upon his hands even as the curtain draws its cataract of chintz across.
How can this be, seeing I know not a man? Who is it that she can feel the quickening of, in blood
stalled between her womb and air, in veins slim as vigil candles?
And behold, thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and bring forth a son, and shalt call him Poet —
as the Godhead enters, her souls break, like dictionaries rent apart —
and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee and all the pieces that remain of thee:
Mary, Martha and the Magdalen, her spirit split three into one,
in the miracle of a slaughtered beast that does not know the hand of its priest.
my fat stomach
In the dark, Mary offers up the scent of hallucinated hay, Martha smoothes down sheets across
her body, plans to hide the lump another week. The Magdalen withholds the truth inside her
scarlet wings:
it is Bible-thick, Second Testament long, covers all she knows about this child,
still barely the size of an angel, who dances and drinks her in,
covers all she knows about the stranger,
whose Jesus-coloured fingers
broke the skin between her ribs, left bleeding footprints in her hair.
tender breasts
The girl she is sings carefully of blue. She knows nothing of what shifts inside, the head that
swells
inside its uterine cradle, imagines nothing of her newborn’s saintliness,
until his voice of agony uncoils.
And his mercy is on them that fear him from generation to generation.
A girl at school asks if she is a virgin; membranes that protect
the truth strain with the act of speech, yes I’m not
pressed out through the teeth as no I am.
Then Martha rises up to take the skin, to steal the memory of skipped periods, fitted skirts
tightened by the thirteenth week;
Mary thumps the belly several hundred times,
fasts on lettuce, cuts the skin inside her cold bruised hands,
yet the minute heart pumps:
up inside that vase, a fated amaryllis blooms.
What can each tell the others, except that they share one flesh, and that its spongey inner layer
now glues them fast against this place?
Only the Magdalen grieves —
for she has washed the feet of horror with her hair, tended it and received its blessing;
only she can clamp this baby with her hips,
can hold its blackened head out of the range of photographs, can wait until the body says it’s time.
Mum says it’s only growing pains
She hears the first birds of morning gather against a silent waving sky,
no inner world to fly back into, only the printed pages of her skin,
her closed eyes cased in quilts that hold the ghosts of others: Martha, Mary and the Magdalen,
who press their M’s against her
like badly-crayoned seagulls, while the sun rises like an eyelashed coin, wax-flat token of light.
She is the teenager they fly back into, so unreadably still, her body
curled around the weight of hidden lives destined to fall off time
yet strapped to it,
like the body of Christ to the cross,
or the Gospel of Lilith that slipped off her tongue an inch before sleep
and landed in God’s left hand.
When the baby dies, it will be the vengeance of that black-winged maid —
Take heed that the light which is in thee be not darkness —
it will be the vengeance of all.
but what would It feel like
It will be the vengeance of all
who eat the flesh of pain in remembrance of
who drink the blood of horror in remembrance of
it will be the light it will be the dark it will be the whole body
cried out in ecstasy the high heels and miniskirts your mother cursed
a cicatrice across the belly of youth
The light of the body is in the eye
with nowhere left to look but in
drown the bloody fetus in the bath
She stands at the window and looks out over sunrise roofs,
the baby in her belly a strange sigh
that has no written equivalent,
a flat text, landscape empty of morning’s road.
What name for the beast within, who slits membranes with a single cry,
slides across the kitchen floor in crinolines of blood, breathes
through nostrils blue with the scent of sex, only to die face down
in a chlorinated bath of shame, air bubbles rising off its chest
like cultured pearls too delicate to string? Through the tender mercy of our God
she stands naked at the curtained glass,
presses her hands against its chilling verb
and pretends not to pretends not to pretends not to
not to know.
nice short hair
And it came to pass that the Magdalen watched
the girl from her place at the back of the body,
watched her fairytale hands weave soap out of tomorrow,
wash themselves in nutmeg, milk and hope, watched her become a boy
with breasts, bicycle oil
smeared down the seat of her shorts, folded maps of Cheshire for her wings,
become a boy, who did not fear incarceration, who could not be mounted by a nose-ringed bull
and bred, become an angel, of medieval purposes, sandalled with long-sleeved ascent,
become a prophet, who wore her names tucked inside the collar of her shirt, whose stigmata bled
with the red-veined leaves of seasons that could not ever be predicted, flowered with the scent of
genitalia, whose glistening fronds could not ever be identified, whose fertility existed
in the secrecy of parchments covered with essene psalms, rolled up in earthenware jugs,
whose pollen-dusted epitaphs could not ever be printed, much less sung. And so.
feeling quite poorly
And behold, thou shalt be dumb, and not able to speak
except in tongues, the pieces of your broken teenaged self
placed concentrically around a hidden corpse,
each ring a different dialect that no longer understands the rest.
And behold, thou shalt be amnesiac:
Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven,
and shalt reach up high out of the body into a place worn blue by clouds,
and shalt starve thyself of nourishment, and become dictatorially thin.
And behold, the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth:
on a morning risen out of loaves, an afternoon whisper-thin as sliced fish,
a night when wine poured into her mouth like honour or delight,
and the virgin and the prostitute, the priestess and the nun,
how they ran, but could not run further than the sole on solid ground,
baby and his rounded baby-lungs ripped out of her next like grammar, like indigenous speech.
Therefore is the name of it called Babel;
because the Lord did there confound the language of
prostitutes, whose bodies glow with longing for a phallic, self-combusting cigarette; children,
who live inside the teenager, who lives inside her mother, the renowned saint; names, names,
names that beget and beget names inside of her, riddling inside,
as she spits up wordlessly her mother’s home-made soup the morning after the unrecorded birth
For he that is mighty hath done to me great things; and holy is his name.
in senior choir
Oh baby, baby stained into these cells
who carries sin on every thumb print — how you press into my voice,
like fingers pressed into a sterile latex glove, my throat ripples
visibly qui tollis peccata mundi suscipe suscipe
deprecationem, deprecationem nostrum I make no sound
your dancing feet batter the verb to grieve
Oh baby, baby hear me as I reach for thee
eyeshadow and lip gloss
The Magdalen weeps and dreams of feet
walking over a chalk cliff
into the spacious lap of a pelican-speckled sea.
Where do babies come from but this void, this rise toward death
when rocks hurtle up, tip blanket-wrapped prophets into bulrushes,
stork and his mistress dancing on air up
to their savage nest of foam-laced pillows and wings.
Where do babies come from but the girl’s own body, her annual growth
out of the pummelled pink, into the lush blue treason
of Dada’s colder sky. Where do babies come from but the thought
that body has a secret life: dirt seeps out of her in dark brown trickles of blood, membranes
deep inside her flesh that separate the growing from the grown;
when she places school bags on her hip, zips open knowledge like a pocketbook,
everything she’s known catalogued from A to Z
she finds no entry for the self still manacled to hotel beds
who fucks customers and gyrates hairless hips, who memorises columns of figures,
the names of girlfriends tattooed on the arms of reckless gods, the sweat and blood of them
meticulously washed off before her school bus arrives
for the Magdalen who wakes and desires a conscience: her fingers valued
at ten pounds apiece, she has no need for pens,
has never improvised such touch, knows only the scripted dialogue of limbs
that advertises sex, those secret words her father knew
Martha Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things
placing washed underpants and condoms in her bag, leaving lipsticked lips behind,
sinner sinner, catch yourself in the mirror,who watches Mary stoop to pray
while angels levitate through parking lots, falter at the back door of the cheap motel
where her pimp, the Holy Spirit, waits: then falls back out of this
in thirty minutes sits down on her bed, an atlas of the human world
propped open, the names of clients, lists of their preferences
an undigested meal she’d never sleep through, prayers to the Lord her dad
fallen into dreamrich scraps
Thy faith hath saved thee
his hand upon her brow that lets her dream again, while a stork steps
light across the belly’s mound; weep, he tells her, go in peace—
where do babies come from but this void?
my baby left me
Lift up the body of this fragile twelve-year-old girl, let her stand beside the glass
through which the night descends, dark rain of shawls, condensation that arrives softly
as dew rises, stars form, her hair now filled with the purled memory of hate
twisted into a cloth she covers the blunt ends of the day with, its lit stalk of moon
a face still humming from afar —
her murdered baby, its six-month body
furled and wet as a puppy slick with fur,
now smaller than a vinyl doll, bigger than her father’s fist, her fear
suddenly fresh now the stiff white body rough as linen lies in its box away from God.
She can cry now the man who came in through the light,
through the beam of heat seared between her eyes
has passed and gone, her conscience split at the thought of him, a silver birch
straddling the ax
until there’s no wood left to cut;
woodcutter woodcutter lend me your eyes:
she would half-believe that she is dead, this indigo winding sheet
close about her washboard ribs, her mother’s voice
now calling her back to bed, an angel of death she fails to recognise,
who turns back sheets, places prayerbooks on her pillow
Anglican Hymns,
red, white and blue, blood, death and drowning,
colours woven into a savage quilt
that she will never rest or sleep upon,
the flat lamb that decorates her cereal bowl
Agnus dei Agnus dei
running off into the dawn-streaked sky,
while her fleshless body waits in its cotton shroud
for tomorrow’s wounds to close,
those red mouths in each hand that speak,
precious star-shaped scars
And ye are witnesses of these:
her risen son, who flies through the morning rain
with three flowers stitched into his crimson wings:
Mary who carried him, Martha who buried him, and the Magdalen,
who fucks the cross and weeps.
slipped heaven I
lost my body armless statue
devolved into a hundred tongued sense nations
***
baby lip
burst vaginal coinage
moon despot
snagged on the horn of symptom
***
retinude of tiny laid-back stars
slow , broke
pathology of witness
averted syntax
stroke
comprehension )
no milk left in these dumb breasts
) incest whores
the unsayable : crutchlike
plated with gold
derision or epidural
proof against kindness
honey that does not destroy
bargaining with wooden
entryways of trust
the eye the esophagus the authentic
DNA of infant demons
nonbeing’s fascia
iridescent with human bliss-lusts
holy child , do not swim
to be small
is not a contraceptive
suicide
hope : law’s
boneless knife
cuts away at face
frail neuroleptic :
tend me while I turn aside my faith
I know murderers
they are not black but white
paper sperm
ensuring minute
social rips
night-light
knife-wiped
is not contagious silence
mother
take the long view
grief that is not expressed
suffocates future beings
do you understand why you are here
dark integer
stepping through the lock
you cure lucidity
detach retinas of fire
to voyage mentallic , heart-soaked
into the unmedicated beyond
strapped to her cradleboard
unlyred tomorrow doctor
don’t drink blood unless it is a toast
I birthed oblivion
it was a small soul
sharp-toothed animal brain
softened with lenses
nest that lived
unruptured by heat song
fathers , dresses , gods
what do you wish for?
grammar:
blood transit spasm
do you believe
contracted
into birdvoice
iron
opened
mouth
the chill of
red harm , leaving
epileptic with scarring
no anal sphincter
to speak of
love
in this context
is paradise
wrapped in a shroud
grace shiver
where is swaddled safety
but the axis
__________________________________
a beloved’s ribs
circled by compass needles
hold my feet oh god
grease me with rest
night lice
a scuttled warship’s armour
navel of tender slaughter
touched by the hem of light
oh kissed, lost one
let me breathe
your breached sensorium
in scission
________________________
aurora’d precipice
fall
into your thousand-saddled wake
Notes on the poems:
“Annunciation” was written over a decade ago. Italicized fragments are mostly from the Gospel of St. Luke.
35: An Autobiography is a series of 35 poems exploring the role of language in my life, written a few years before becoming a mother. Looking back, they are a riposte to repeated comments on my previous work that it was obscure, too personal or insufficiently disciplined, and mark an attempt to return/ move on to truer, wilder speech.
Cathy Stonehouse was born and raised in the UK and emigrated in 1988 to Vancouver, Canada—the city in which she still lives, along with her husband, lively two-year-old daughter (“don’t talk to me I’m talking to myself”) and two aged cats. She has published one volume of poems, The Words I Know, now sadly out of print, and a volume of juvenilia, Keys to the City. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a wide range of journals and anthologies, mostly in Canada. She has studied for varying periods of time with Olga Broumas, Eleni Sikelianos and Alice Notley, and is extremely grateful to each, for their work and example.
