Einstein's Tongue
Poetry by Susan Musgrave:
"MY STUDENTS DARE ME TO WRITE A HAPPY POEM
INCORPORATING THE WORD BOSOM,
AND ON TWO COUNTS, AT LEAST, I FAIL"
About the Author
Susan Musgrave is the author of more than twenty books of fiction, non-fiction, children's literature, and poetry, and has won awards in each of those categories. Of her work, a Toronto bookseller writes: "The ultimate combination of books for anarchist grade 9 to 12 girls: Story of O and Things That Keep and Do Not Change.” A new novel, Given, will be published by Knopf in 2009, as will When the World is Not Our Home: Selected Poems 1985-2000, by Thistledown. Susan teaches online with UBC's Optional Residency MFA in Creative Writing Programme and divides her time, uneasily and unevenly, between Vancouver Island and the Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands). You can visit her online at www.susanmusgrave.com.
MY STUDENTS DARE ME TO WRITE A HAPPY POEM
INCORPORATING THE WORD BOSOM,
AND ON TWO COUNTS, AT LEAST, I FAIL
“There is never any healing. Ever. When a wound ‘heals’ it leaves a permanent scar that never goes away, but merely fades a little.”
-George Carlin
The poem I have not allowed myself to write
is the happy poem, the one where all the catastrophes
I have spent my life suffering
never happen, like the dream where my breasts
break free of their restraints and pop up again
in front of a train on the newly established
Rocky Mountaineer Fraser Discovery Route,
where the driver, who “never saw them coming”
develops a phobia about airbags and is caught
puncturing hot air balloons at a Canada Day
parade. The happy poem is one where my ex-better
half Bob does not run away with that mud-bogger
he met at AA, the “guy” with the pierced nipples.
The poem I have not allowed myself to write
is the one where ex-Bob never
finds out I told my writing class he goes to AA
because “at least he can get an effing cup
of coffee there.” Ex-Bob tells his ex-
drinking group I wouldn’t know what to do
with a coffee pot if he hit me over the head
with one. The happy poem is the poem where
my ex-best friend doesn’t cook and eat her lover,
then go on TV to explain how she did it
to spice up her common law relationship
before spontaneously exposing her weapons
of mass distraction on Larry King Live. The happy
poem is the one where ex-Bob does not find out
I wrote a poem about him quitting AA
the same day he told me he had always preferred
my ex-friend’s ham curtains to my own –
there are some things you can’t take back once
you’ve stated them, ham curtains being a bodacious
example. The poem I have not allowed myself to write
is the one where I start to obsess about worse case
scenarios, my brain over-percolating like the aluminium
coffee pot with the dent in it Bob made hitting me
back when we still loved each other enough
to want to kill each other on a daily basis.
The happy poem does not include the stick
drawings my daughter makes of her perfect body
lacking only a full complement of limbs.
My therapist says this means she has difficulty
expressing her feelings and cuts herself
off, symbolically speaking, instead. Ex-Bob thinks
self-harm reduction is the menu of the day, he who
drinks surreptitiously and crash-bangs the family car
when he isn’t up in his ivory soap tower where he
sequestered himself the day I confessed I had gone
from a 42C to a 36B on account of a cosmetic bust
reduction offered on sale at Walmart. Ex-Bob
used to brag I had floaters the size of the inflatable
life rafts on the Titanic before she went tits up after
being punctured by a bergy bit. Until he saw my ex-
friend’s silicone earmuffs on Larry King Live and split
with her to Amazonialand where she stars in her own
cannibal cooking show, part of her healing process.
But who am I to judge, I who abandoned
my drastically reduced Dolly Partons in a Quesnel
Walmart? The poem I have not allowed myself to write
until now sings Release Me in the shower,
a half-way-to-being-happy poem soaping its cut-price
wounds. Easy-does-it, as ex-Bob used to say, just
for today. Let the scarring process begin.