What is left of us when we are gone?
In this assured debut collection, Alyda Faber examines the ties that bind us to one another and to the Earth we inhabit. Her unflinching gaze explores the imperfections of our fleeting existence, our ambitions, our relationships, our flawed humanity. In these quiet, sometimes unsettling poems, she documents the search for home, the longing to belong, to love, and to be loved. She also turns to the ways love can curve toward pain: how we carelessly hurt one another, yet find the grace to forgive and carry on.
“To open the pages of Alyda Faber’s Dust or Fire is to embark on a questing journey into the fragmentary elusiveness of family history, the threatened survival of Frisian — the language of Friesland — and the precariousness of life itself. Along the way, the reader is repeatedly left breathless by the shimmering images and the intricately clever metaphoric wordplay Faber wields in her remarkably accomplished debut poetry collection.”
— Ruth Roach Pierson, author of Realignment
“Family and its aftermath, how to honour the devastation and save the girl? Circling around her parents’ meeting in a Frisian train station, Alyda Faber, at turns austere and lyric, elliptical and direct, zeroes in on love and fear until the atom splits. She gifts us with some of the best writing about family by a Canadian poet in many years.”
— John Barton, author of Polari
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Goose Lane Editions
Copyright © 2016 by Alyda Faber.
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.
Edited by Ross Leckie.
Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.
Cover illustration adapted from Dybbølsbro Station by SirPecanGum, flickr.com
(CC BY-SA 2.0).
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Faber, Alyda, 1963-, author
Dust or fire / Alyda Faber.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-86492-922-8 (paperback).— ISBN 978-0-86492-942-6 (epub).— ISBN 978-0-86492-943-3 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8611.A23D87 2016 C811’.6 C2016-902438-5
C2016-902439-3
We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada,
the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.
Goose Lane Editions
500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330
Fredericton, New Brunswick
CANADA E3B 5X4
www.gooselane.com
In memory of my mother and father,
Jacoba Faber Houtsma and Pieter Faber.
That flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust
That measures all our time
— George Herbert, “Church Monuments”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Beginning
UNSAYING POEMS Jealousy
Cactus Essay
Topsy-Turvy
Inner Tube Run
Grace Unwitting
Treading Ox
Chaste
War Questions
Paperpants
Mole-Sick
Three Old Frisian Sisters
The Ones You Believe
The Visit
Looks
On Not Dying
Eulogy
LEEUWARDEN TRAIN STATION Leeuwarden Train Station
STILL LIFE, ANIMAL Still Life: Reprise
Berlinale Erotik
View of a Spring Evening between Porch Posts
Flesh-Ear
Goldfish
Hoarfrost
ARoS Museum, Aarhus
Accept Loss
Eucharist
SAYING POEMS On Looking Up into a Tree
Death at Five Years
Trespassing
Redress
My Mother, Far and Near
This Love for Mother
Suture
Meditations on Desire
Birthday Call
Arrival: Schiphol
Meeting My Mother in Rotterdam
Hawthorn
Housekeeping: Portrait of My Father at Eighty-Two
Obdurate, Infirm
Resurrected Body
Stockbridge Cemetery
Visitation for an Aunt in Holland
The last word that can never be spoken
Cronus
Portrait of My Father after Death
Speed Dating
Awry
Leeuwarden Train Station
Notes
Acknowledgements
Unsaying Poems
Jealousy
Hy mei it net lije dat de sinne yn it wetter skynt.
I had the misfortune
to be raised in a snake family
the father all jaws and stomach
long-nosed for frog hunting.
Like the despot
of a small country
his name is whispered,
his teeth grind every tongue.
Try to own a small corner
the nose finds its way in.
And the father-enigma drops
la jalousie down on my soul again —
he doesn’t want the sun
to shine on the water.
Cactus Essay
Byn it dy om de knibbel, dan slacht it dy net om it hert.
i.
On bright grass, the dead squirrel like a fur-cup,
its rib unfurls out of a minute red sea.
My mother lies in the hills, box-sealed from pain.
Out of my vision, now she lingers in my throat.
In an Ontario got
hic farmhouse, my mother remade
Dutch windows she left behind. Succulents tangled
in dusty friendliness. One winter she grew cacti from seed,
wood heat and morning sun warming cloudy tents.
If she’d met my father’s family before the wedding
she wouldn’t have married him, my mother often said,
but never told us of the conference of three,
her parents’ doubts pared down by her keen love.
Then a late summer ocean voyage to in-laws,
food put to combative uses, basket greens
of madness, wallpaper bullet wound,
no-turning-back pregnancy.
Remembering this is like opening the cellar door in spring,
beneath the kitchen tiles dark water rises to the third step.
Bind your grief under your knee
ii.
A nurse says my mother is dehydrating naturally. A week to dry out
and then she begins to bleed. Waters of veins and arteries leak
from the intestinal tract. Red weeping
cannot be stopped on that last night of clicking breath.
After fights, my mother would sit at the kitchen table long
into the night, turned into that secret place
she said a married woman
must reserve for herself.
Years later, she told me about chest pain and arm pain,
and conflict. If I die, I could get out of here.
She left one summer to live with her sisters in Holland
and, returning, said, marriage is for life.
A March visit to the doctor, her usual preparations neglected,
wearing a crumpled print dress, smelling like overripe cheese.
In the hospital lounge she touched my amber earrings
and said, I am almost down the drain.
Bind your grief under your knee and it won’t rise
iii.
Trees tell light.
If only we could marry trees.
My father found my mother lying in the yard
under the maple tree, wearing a T-shirt and underwear.
The feed man arrived.
They carried her into the house.
Three days later her eyes drift over me
as if watching from the bed of a fast-moving stream.
Her words roll out over stones.
Under water, maybe I could understand.
Cacti still occupy the north and west windowsills.
On the floor, a cactus my mother grew from seed.
Its fleshy stem strains against ceiling tile and plaster,
reaching as if believing in a desert.
Bind your grief under your knee and it won’t rise to your heart
In my mother’s last days her flesh recedes —
tree sculpted bone.
Topsy-Turvy
It is der alhiel holderdebolder.
Always topsy-turvy here.
She called it the household of Jan Steen
and there on the Rijksmuseum wall
dogs and people in a tangled
mess and pots boiling over
and somewhere in a corner someone
has a psyche with no gates —
a person bent over with
socks half off and eyes sunk
down to his kidneys.
The entry gapes. No resistance —
it’s already patterned
and you’re there without
knowing there or here
or me or you in that
interior household
without
advantage
of standing back,
looking,
without chiaroscuro.
Inner Tube Run
Sy kin net fan it aai ôfkomme.
A child watches other children sliding away
from her over the edge
of the round hill.
Their faces reappear
and disappear again.
She’s held back
from plunging into a deep
white sea with them
on rudderless inner tubes,
weightless speed.
The sinking children throw
laughter back up the hill
but she hears a dirge
and waits
until the sun tilts
and tree shadows stretch
out long in the fields.
She can’t get off the egg
until another child lures her
into a squeaking black boat
over the edge
and down.
Icy whirling wind
and gentle spin.
Grace Unwitting
Dêr’t de hûn syn sturt leit, is it skjinfage.
If God writes
with a child-thick marker. . .
Note this — bones
in sockets rotating, inner folds
digesting, electrical
fields balancing, vast interior
surfaces thrumming on —
but on our surface
so much debit accounting —
ink gauged,
lines measured
exact, one thin-skinned tit
scratched on another’s tat —
But note this
where the dog’s tail lies
the floor is swept clean.
Treading Ox
De swarte okse hat dy noch net op de foet west.
i.
At nine years this is her experiment.
Earth’s hardback trod by cows, cars, tractors, milk trucks,
open sun outside the tree-surrounded house yard
beyond the barn yard’s fenced peak of manure.
Her uniform the required dress — girls wear dresses.
The driveway’s hard surface cants
as she tests the learned familiars —
this is my body these my hands this my face.
Who am i? Who am i? Who am i?
One question asked and asked and asked
rips down shelves holding things
used to saying i am:
falling clay pots, boxes with last year’s seed packets,
torn tops folded down, dirt-caked gloves’ crooked fingers.
Sun lances the sky, wrongness feels right.
Why here looking out —
these feet, these arms?
Why this brain thinking behind these eye sockets?
Who thinks this body that others know
and call variations on a name?
Why do they think they know her when the familiar seal
holding the envelope this body this brain
can be slit open
exposing the private letter?
What do they know when they say
the black ox hasn’t trampled on your foot yet?
ii.
An unread letter opened other places too:
Sunday-after-church,
parents having coffee with parents,
children scattered in the house. She stops midway
in a room with oak mouldings, brick fireplace,
face pointed to the dining room table, some chairs askew,
legs inches from the deep sofa where her mother’s nyloned ankles
and Sunday-shoed feet are entwined.
Not knowing how to act in company
stops her — her lack of polite questions — stops her.
She doesn’t know how long she stands there.
Wills herself into motion, enduring
another twist of the hidden corkscrew.
Chaste
In soad wurden folje gjin sek.
A man, let’s call him Door.
That quaint impossibility
a look sealed.
More looks, trembling hand on coffee cup,
more impossibility.
All on my side.
Those sensual autumns
unwanted chasteness.
Interior so lit up, the running
landscape dark and unreadable.
Words won’t fill a sack.
Bushels of words even.
Door wouldn’t come closer
when my conflicted limbs and bones and kidneys
said dont touch dont touch dont touch
even as their needle-thin mewling says touch.
War Questions
Hy sjocht as in kat yn de foarke.
Questions slide fingers
under an arm’s pale
frog thigh Clenched
tobacco lid pulled
open roll out stock pieces
He’s in the passenger seat
I’m driving each query
drawing out a bare answer
from the interrogation chair
Splintery obedience
He looks like a cat caught
in pitchfork tines
Cannot tell his distress
Sits unmoving, his hand
cutting an angle across
his chest and a sound
like low tired exhalation
Fear of being shot
he doesn’t say
Guilt leaving his father
he doesn’t say
Returning home without
his father he doesn’t say
Lost respect he says
Lost respect how I want
to know what that means
I don’t ask
Escape from Germans
in his socks klompen kicked off
Running across a beet field
Escape socks Germans beet field
Socks beet field escape Germans
All these years alone in the story
This telling he and his father
captured by Germans rounding
a corner in the village one year
before war’s end Beginning
of his father’s bitter cinders
Marched in file with neighbours
and a neighbour’s hired
hand to a hotel
in the next village
His only chance for escape
outside the village
Kicking off his klompen
and his father he ran
into the beet field
In a camp near
the German border
prisoners dug tank traps
to keep the Allies out of Holland