Dancing in the Dark

Copyright © 1996 by David Donnell

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Donnell, David, 1939-

     Dancing in the dark

Poems.

ISBN
0-7710-2833-4

eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-577-9

I. Title.

PS
8557.054
D
3    1996       
C
811′.54       
C
96-930054-9

PR
9199.3.
D
555
D
3 1996

The publishers acknowledge the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council for their publishing program.

McClelland & Stewart Inc.

481 University Avenue

Toronto, Ontario

M
5
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2
E
9

v3.1

For Tom & Sarah & Clarence, Alec Harrison aka “the Slacker,” Sandy & her famous Airedale, Martha as always, Wallace & his red Harley & a variety of others too numerous to mention, hello, sunrise.

“When Janis [Joplin] got it on, she got it on for everybody.”

Dave Marsh,
Rolling Stone
, Summer, 1978

“Music is a lot different than television. Music bypasses visual mind discrimination and envelops the inner mind.”

Marshall McLuhan, in conversation, 1967

“It’s extraordinary what Fugazi can do with a four-sentence song.”

David Donnell, September 1995

     Saturday we drove across three fields

for an hour, mostly stubble, & came back

onto the road. There was garbage

on the shoulder but it wasn’t ours.

                            It was a good day. Eric

is crazy. We broke 2 hampers at the picnic & the girls

left us; they said they would take a bus. Oklahoma,

west Kansas.

     O Wm. Pitt,

                       your Pennsylvania

doesn’t rock & roll but it rolls us. Like the old man

at the garage. He was funny. He wanted to know

where Eric got the black eye. Eric has blue eyes.

His wife gave us a piece of raw steak. We ate it at a diner

up the road. Steak & eggs & coffee. The waitress said she’d

already had breakfast, laughed at us. We have jobs waiting for us

in New York. Mine’s nothing fancy. I’m going to be a clerk

in a men’s store that sells Robert Stock shirts. 3 eggs

& some cayenne pepper. Enough money left over

for apple pie & 2 Stroh’s each. A dead dog by the side

of the highway, & endless fields of sweet green peas. I wrote

in my journal, The sun hangs over the fields like a disc

of butter. Pennsylvania is named after William Penn.

The white line keeps pulling like a magnet fixed

to your eyes. The horizon eats you up. Red-headed chickens

when we stop for air. We have cigarettes & gas. I feel excited

about living in New York for a while. I will never become a good writer

like my grandfather because I am too naive. But I am good-looking

& I have guts. I don’t think Eric has a job. Plus,

he’s crazy. More green peas, more butter that hangs in the blue sky

at mid-day.

I like
The Kingfishers
partly because I love the bird,

                                                    common

also in western Ontario. But you can look through most of Olson’s

poems

and you won’t find a clear description of himself [he

was an impressive looking man & a good agitator], or one of

his friends, or of a black child with an amazing face

modelling a Gap jean jacket in
Vanity Fair
.

Frank Gehry calls his new woven laminated maple strip chairs

after various hockey terms – Hat Trick, Power Play. It’s okay,

I think it works.

Some of Feiffer’s cartoons are better than most of Duncan’s poems,

or Olson’s
Maximus
.

I like some of his pamphlets, & I like his occasional use of

numbers.

Although Gloucester is a beautiful idea. A place

where

convention

doesn’t pile up and become confusing.

The grackles come out in the early morning and the fishermen

come in before lunch. And those are Atlantic fish, no

fresh water grub.

            I miss description in Olson

– I miss classic outline

                     and significant detail. But

I like
The Kingfishers
. He builds

a coherent & extrapolative world around his

indigenous

     image. Alludes to some events

in his life

   and has room left

in the poem for a sense

of their strange and almost comic funkiness.

     Here I go again – racing forward to catch

the sleek new 6×9 trade paper volume of Wittgenstein.

                                     his

name was Ludwig, you know that much. Nobody really knows

what he was talking about most of the time – it’s a long

slow rather dark & anal, if you want to know what I think,

emphasis

   on exactly how do we know (not what/

                                                  but this &

or that specific proposition)

                  which we seem to think

casually, I suppose blithely, even the way we might reach

with one summer tanned arm across a dish of orange sherbet

a mulberry smouldering bombe with a hard ferrous & slightly

bitter to my taste Italian biscuit tucked rakishly

into one bulging & voluminous side

                                        – for a refill

of the ice-cold Heineken just one more tall ½ full glass

before we proceed to eat the dessert &, of course,

                           coffee

always, always the rich darkness of different coffee beans

appear like dark oily cherubs in my last dreams

before waking up & rolling over on one long side my body

always seems extremely long at that time of the morning,

6:45 I suppose, 7:15, & cradling you in my arms

your curly dark blond hair & rocking you very gently

O I don’t know for about a minute or so I guess. What do I know,

that “I” which at this moment seems to be my shoulders

black Writers&Co sweatshirt crumb of brown rye bread

beside my coffee cup on a page of sprawled blue notes

about a pale young Jew leaning out of a third floor window

in Vienna

   where Mozart ate his kugel where

tribunes of the German Communist party were put to death

in an alleyway

        to throw a slice of bread to some brown

white-flecked & slate bluegrey pigeons

           it is me, of

course, but I doubt if that is the problem.