ossuary VIII (by Dionne Brand)

Griffin Prize for Excellence In Poetry, The (2001 - 0)

1 Havana. Yasmine arrived one early evening,

2 the stem of an orange dress,

3 a duffle bag, limp, with no possessions

4the sea assaulted the city walls,

5the air,

6the birds assaulted the sea

7she’s not coastal,

8more used to the interiors of northern cities,

9not even their ancillary, tranquil green-black lakes

10though nothing was ever tranquil about her,

11being there out of her elemental America

12unsettles her, untethers her

13being alive, being human, its monotony

14discomfited her anyway, the opaque nowness,

15the awareness, at its primal core, of nothing

16a temporary ache of safety,

17leafed her back like unfurling fiddleheads,

18she glimpsed below the obdurate seduction of Atlantic

19and island shore,

20when they landed, a contradiction,

21a peppery drizzle, an afternoon’s soft sun

22the oiled air of Havana pushed its way onto the airplane,

23leavened, domestic,

24the Tupelov cabin like an oven darkening bread

25she was alive in this place,

26missing forever from her life in the other,

27a moment’s sentimentality could not find a deep home

28what had been her life, what collection of events?

29these then, the detonations,

30the ones that led her to José Marti Airport

31so first the language she would never quite learn,

32though determined, where the word for her,

33nevertheless, was compañera

34and there she lived on rations of diction,

35shortened syntax, the argot and tenses of babies,

36she became allegorical, she lost metaphors, irony

37in a small room so perfect she could paseo its rectangle,

38in forty-four exact steps,

39a room so redolent with brightness

40cut in half by a fibrous bed,

41made patient by the sometimish stove,

42the reluctant taps, the smell of things filled with salt water

43through the city’s wrecked avenidas,

44she would find the Malecón, the great sea wall

45of lovers and thieves, jineteras and jineteros

46and there the urban sea washed anxiety from her,

47her suspicious nature found,

48her leather-slippered foot against a coral niche

49no avoiding the increment of observation here,

50in small places small things get their notice,

51not just her new sign language

52oh yesterday, you were in a green skirt,

53where’s your smile today,

54oh you were late to the corner on Tuesday

55don’t you remember we spoke at midday,

56last week near the Coppelia,

57you had your faraway handbag

58your cigarette eyes,

59your fine-toothed comb

60for grooming peacocks, anise seeds in your mouth

61you asked for a little lemon water,

62you had wings in your hands,

63you read me a few pages from your indelible books

64what makes your eyes water so,

65I almost drowned in them on Friday,

66let me kiss your broken back, your tobacco lips

67she recalled nothing of their encounters,

68but why,

69so brilliant at detail usually

70the green skirt, the orange dress, the errant smile,

71the middays all dissolved into

72three, five, ten months in Havana

73one night she walks fully clothed, like Bird,

74into the oily pearly of the sea’s surface,

75coral and cartilage, bone and air, infrangible

76and how she could walk straight out, her dress,

77her bangles, her locking hair, soluble,

78and how despite all she could not stay there

Publication Notes

Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2010). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2011 Canadian Shortlist).

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2011