|
Jan Conn
Jan Conn's most recent book of
poetry is Botero's Beautiful Horses (Brick, 2009); others include Jaguar
Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems (Brick, 2006) and Beauties on Mad River:
Selected and New Poems (Véhicule, 2000). Her work appears in How
the Light Gets In: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry from Canada (Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland, 2009); Regreen: New Canadian
Ecological Poetry (Your Scrivener Press, 2009); and The Best Canadian
Poetry in English Anthology (Tightrope, 2009). She won the inaugural Malahat
Review P.K. Page Founders' Award Poetry Prize in 2006 and a CBC Literary Award for poetry in 2003.
Born in Asbestos, Quebec, Canada, she studied in Montreal (B.Sc. Biology, Concordia University), Burnaby, B.C. (M.Sc. Entomology, Simon Fraser University) and Toronto (Ph.D. Genetics, University of Toronto). Jan now lives in Great
Barrington, Massachusetts, and is a research scientist who works on the
ecology and evolution of insects that transmit pathogens to humans.
www.janconn.com
Background of Enchantments
Matchstick stairs lead to a dollhouse kitchen,
twig bridge from one box to the next,
roofs with near-perfect pitch
slumped in exhaustion, a bust of a man
in jaunty sailor hat digresses frantically from prepared
speech,
chimneys bob up and down
like player piano keys, a Russian farmer
steps out of
Tolstoy and finds the old wood-framed church
aslant, his hat and potatoes sunk in mud, a parachutist
behind enemy lines 50 years out of date.
*
Night the wide unblinking eye of a chameleon,
we’re afloat in the unconscious,
motor cavalcade and Jackie in a pink lamé suit, longing for
a handshake or a goodnight kiss, my appetite, your mouth.
Love is now a view of an interior in flames, a metal jacket,
in lieu of touch there’s an earthquake,
we’re pitched forward on hands and knees, coming to rest
face to face with
a depot of used tires, a parking lot.
Autobiography of a Turquoise Necklace
The beads originate in a market in Puebla.
Shot through
with gold, impurities reminiscent of the emotional wreckage
of my earlier life.
They express a single desire:
to adorn the neck of a Modigliani
nude
in place of the famous coral.
Triumph instead of grief.
Into the chaos of Paris, World War I
they beg to be catapulted,
to be throat-close, igniting ardent passions.
Letting the present surface in the past,
a sinuous candelabra, alternating guttering flare
with
unmanageable darkness.
In Montparnasse
in an upstairs room
Zborowski pays models,
and blue-chinned Modigliani
heaves everything around him
upward,
reciting Verlaine and Dante.
Paint flecks in his hair,
newly traded turquoise beads
named Sleeping Beauty and Lone
Mountain
pulse like constellations in his hands.
The Character of the Accidental
Light beaming from the roses at dangerously slow
velocities makes a pact with the subliminally erotic.
Why don’t you?
Blurry circles, aka soap bubbles in
infrared time, are strewn across the seascape,
so provocative and distracting we suspect
they are harbingers of bizarre, conical cloud formations.
In one of her introspective moods she wears
cherries hooked over her ears.
Her irascible pet iguana, sunning head-first
between her breasts,
scares off prospective beaux.
Unexpectedly the cold swells and billows over us—
it’s how we recognize it, the way forward,
negotiate with ice crystals
and hope the violent wind
doesn’t whirl the nearly empty house off to Kansas.
The Former Danceuse Contemplates an Eggplant-Tinted
Galaxy
The former danceuse contemplates an eggplant-tinted galaxy.
Daffodil on a stick, or pinwheel, discarded magic wand,
the usual array of exploded stars, a vast indifference.
Skirt froths and bubbles like Hokusai’s surf, electric antique
lace. In the deep shade of her eccentric hat a great stir
of electrons, a shimmy in the opalescent air—
poised to push against some larger circumference.
Fragrance of forgotten choreographies.
Windows silver-streaked and back-lit. Ice-yellow radiates.
Now she’s elusive, then stratified, now transparent.
She fears only the hazards of nightblack.
*
Into the pulsating silence she is flung,
uranium-eyed, imprisoned in static electricity.
She becomes the horizon, black-outs
emanating from so many paper cuts.
Lava bubbles into her sleep, subterraneously she inhales
volcanoes. She plots an expedition
to her interior, lit by a rapidly sinking moon.
Crunch of bones and charcoal
underfoot. Tread lightly. Oh Siquieros! One
gloved fist raised, calling down fire.
*
She has a tambourine, not an obligation to family.
A dead ringer for no one, she’s a slurry of human feeling
travelling the barren topography, captivated
by its misdeeds. Slowly, she lifts one foot.
Romantic suffering is everywhere. There’s a scorpion
with its stinger raised, constructed of ornamental
Japanese armour from the 18th century, burnished
but brooding, like a scholar.
In the second take, she lowers her foot, flings sand,
then her tambourine. The scorpion jumps sideways,
uncannily, levitating.
*
On the ground appears a labyrinth of ink cubes and variations
on blues. She is loose in the semi-darkness, at a loss.
The magnified tenor sax hyperbolic;
the Mickey escapade, did you catch that?
Her fingers elongate into piano keys, flashing ecrú,
then iridescent blue. She’s in search of the separation
of body and mind; everyone else foments
amalgamation, gluing together: sticks, straw, memories.
Nothing seems true. The labyrinth has no heart, and the exit
is blocked. So she takes a long detour, through saturation
into virtuosity, and beyond.
Arrival of the Nightingale
The pavilion by starlight is dim, unexpected,
Klee changes
the viewpoint like the atmosphere
on the edge of a tropical
storm.
Red half-moons like sliced blood oranges.
The exposition is complicated by the arrival of the nightingale.
The Middle Ages are not heaven-sent
but
arrive fourth-class, behind the engine,
covered in soot and grime.
Despite migraine the nightingale attempts to please
the burgeoning, erratic winds,
lurid green in crepuscular light.
Easy to believe visible reality is merely one isolated phenomenon
among many,
the drops now falling
faster and harder.
I know in the desert we’d live for such rain,
and the ensuing rainflowers passionately bursting into bloom.
Here, we walk hand-in-hand, the road
down-at-the-heels,
about to lead us astray
like a bus ride across the continent, and we’re inside the storm
sitting wide-awake, passing
circular trees, some
sliced
neatly in two as though a madman had visited
with plumb-line and saw.
The bus veers
west, then the storm passes,
trailing an exhaust of murky sky.
Night seems endless, the road
follows
painted rocks back and forth across a plain
—birdsong
become birdbones, lost melody.
|