Beating the Bounds (by John Steffler)

Beating the Bounds (by John Steffler)

Original Text
John Steffler, Lookout: Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from a volume on the 2011 Canadian Shortlist).
1When I was six years old, my parents,
2along with other adults who’d never spoken
3to me, came laughing and acting silly,
4picking me up, giggling, "Now we’ll show
5you a house you didn’t know about."
6"A big house."
7"A secret house you knew about all the time."
8So I was frightened, seeing how serious
9it was that they were so strange,
10although I was probably smiling,
11and they carried me and other children my age
12to the river and said, "Here is the marble
13floor," and put my bare legs in the fast
14place between stones and it was colder
15than I remembered it and the tugging of dark
16cold water became my legs, the Fox Island
17River became my legs--afterwards when I
18was falling asleep or sometimes just walking
19along, the bottom of me would be moving away
20like that--and they carried me, tickling me,
21singing ridiculous songs among rough
22brown stones up a valley past caribou
23where it was cold and held me up on top
24of their palms so I faced the sky and someone
25with fat fingers that smelled of sheep held
26my eyes open until the cold air and white
27sky burned and were too bright and my eyes
28brimmed like two cuts and I felt those cuts
29go right into my name and they said,
30"This is the roof up here, you can’t go
31higher than this," and that wind and sky
32were my eyes then, they were in my name,
33and the people pushed me through a patch
34of alders and a patch of spruce the wind
35had bent, saying, "Here’s a young cub
36we’ll take home and raise," and "Push him in front
37so we won’t get scratched," and my skin
38was crisscrossed with cuts, so I felt
39those branches, smelled the alder musk,
40the sharp edge of spruce like a coast,
41a burning fringe, a noise around me holding
42me in and they said, "This is the west
43wall of the house you live in, remember
44it," and the day went on like that, they
45pushed me against a cliff to the north
46so I felt its jaggedness in my spine,
47they sat me in black soupy peat and said,
48"Here is your bed, it is nighttime," they
49took me down to the sea and made me
50drink it and told me that was the south
51and the kitchen, "the garden," someone
52laughed and give me a capelin to eat, rubbed
53scales on my face, the backs of my hands
54and "Over there," they said, meaning
55over the hills across the gulf, "that is not
56your house and the people who live there
57are strangers to you, not enemies if
58you deal with them properly." "They
59speak a language of farts," someone said,
60"they gobble like turkeys when they fuck,"
61and although my body was made of all
62it had touched that day and my ears were full
63of my parents’ voices and the voices
64of their friends, in my heart I was still
65frightened and felt like a stranger among them.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011