outskirts

By Sue Goyette

Winner of the 2012 Pat Lowther Memorial Award

Winner of the 2012 Atlantic Poetry Prize

Sue Goyette's outskirts is a tour de force. Its originality lies in Goyette's refusal of despair, her conviction that the connections among people, their conversation, curiosity, empathy and awe, can help us see a way forward. Her aim is to find energy in human love, a way to walk the darkness rather than hide from it. This book will name you, and frighten you; make you laugh, and arm you for what is to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781771311472

Sue Goyette

Sue Goyette lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia and has published three books of poems, The True Names of Birds, Undone and outskirts (Brick Books) and a novel, Lures (HarperCollins, 2002). Her fourth collection of poems, Ocean, is forthcoming from Gaspereau Press in 2013. She's been nominated for several awards including the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Pat Lowther, the Gerald Lampert, the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award and won the 2008 CBC Literary Prize for Poetry, the 2010 Earle Birney Prize and the 2011 Bliss Carman Award. Her poetry has appeared on the Toronto subway system, in wedding vows and spray-painted on a sidewalk somewhere in Saint John, New Brunswick. Sue currently teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University, is faculty for the Banff Wired Writing Studio and works part-time at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.

Book preview

OUTSKIRTS

outskirts

Sue Goyette

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Goyette, Sue

       Outskirts / Sue Goyette.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-926829-68-5

      I. Title.

PS8563.O934O98 2010           C811’.54           C2010-907674-5

Copyright © Sue Goyette 2011

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada Pantone version through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The cover image is a painting by Laura Dawe.

The author photograph was taken by Robyn Murphy.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

CONTENTS

my darkness, my cherry tree

Persist

I’m Sometimes Haunted

We Lean In, Closer

Heavy Metal Night at Gus’s Pub

Audition

Memoir

The New Mothers

Snow Day ( # 14)

A Tired Woman Lies Down

For the Rescue Dogs

A Tired Woman Lies Down

Territorial

Courage

Disrupted

In Your Wake

Memoir

Obituary

It’s Not Keening, It Is a Kind of Hunger

This Fear of Being Forgotten

This Fear of Being Touched

Girl Gathering Girl

Introducing the Tree: A Lather of Green

A Lament for Wasting Time

Bad Dinner Guest, Bad

The Cloud over My House

Recession

To the Thief

My Darkness, My Cherry Tree

Lost

Kitchen Party

U-Pick, a Triptych

The Canadian Apology

Mission

the last animal

fog

Aquifers

fog

The Coastal Headlands of Our Sleep

The Four Main Actions of Sleeplessness

fog

Erosion

Getting in the Ocean

A.K.A. the Foghorn

This Collapsed Section of Time

Clear-cut

fog

This New Hunger

Sacrifice

Custodians

A Dark Thirst

Bargaining

This Last Lamp

Outskirts

notes and acknowledgements

biographical note

my darkness, my cherry tree

PERSIST

The boy moves like a long-necked creature, a horse or a giraffe. With the same arc of reach, a gracious hunger, he lunges in front of my car impervious to its heft. His body is wily and wired for adventure though the soft skin of him still nuzzles the woolen mammal of family. His father, a force across the street, watches. We are in a globe theatre rehearsing tragedy. There are no lines. We are poised to remember each other for an eternity of remorse.

Forgive this enterprise of engine and fuel. Forgive its pads and pedals. The beast in my hands has escaped and gone feral. Listen to me blame the weather with its curdled clouds and tidal surge. Listen to me say you came out of nowhere. Are you the child chosen to draw satellites raking their slow trench across the heavens? Are you the child chosen to draw water into jugs for the thirsty tribe? Or do you simply draw the level of video game that is the present challenge? The toadstools and the capes, the crooked mountains and the secret keys? Weren’t you chosen to be treasure?

Later, I will drive through the town of Economy and think of the way you looked at me in that second. The joy of seeing your father slurred with sudden panic. But only in your eyes and only for that moment. Immediately it wavered and delight moved back in. And such a force of delight, how it spread, the opposite of shadow, its hands on the heavy back of time, pushing it, shoving it still to let you squeeze by.

I’M SOMETIMES HAUNTED

by the smell of my son’s old room, the battle fume between Peacho the hamster

and Lego pirates. The vapour of their souls entwined in a kind of territorial

clash of cedar shavings and carpet. The mist of neglected math books,

the algebra of disregard and doodle. And the common denominator: socks.

Rolled up sneaker sweat, the grub of toes. Underwear everywhere. And socks.

I miss the poster of the phases of the moon hanging over his pillow

like thought bubbles in the graphic novel he narrated, the waning moon

of high school. The inevitable bong, that lava light of bright ideas

and the munchies, then the long moon of a new silence.

How else can they leave, our boys, but slowly?

His hand on the small of some girl’s back, behind him the ruins

of dirty plates caught in a late-night computer search for other life forms

and the iPod he left plugged in, a vein of song recharging.

He’d come home to eat, stand at the fridge and graze.

And graze. Often we’d pass each other in the morning, me waking,

him a walking ad for the somniferous. Hi, I’d say. Oh, yeah, he’d reply.

And I’d miss the boy then who coloured drawings of his stories

with blue that actually matched the inside fruit of the colour.

His enthusiastic grade one I love chicks – how he meant it, literally,

a plump exuberance of pale