Poems from Rivard Street
by Benjamin Oldham
Almost June,
and where has summer been
but held up
in some waiting room,
hot and slow
and circulating?
There is always
another day for patience,
it seems,
always some enclosed place
with a gleaming
on the other side
to get to when I’m done.
Well, here I am
enclosed within my month
of rain,
waiting for the summer’s
ticket number
to be called,
and both of us released
from the bureaucracy
of weather.
Before I know it,
though,
we’ll have traded places:
I’ll be in some air-conditioned
waiting room,
thinking to myself
at least it’s cold
because the summer isn’t here
but somewhere in the grass
outside this boring
stuffy building
where no bureaucracy
can get to it.
I’ll imagine even
that the summer might be
right outside,
watching the swing
and latch
of double doors,
waiting for me
to hurry up
and come back out to it.
It is a landscape
that engulfs us,
always a landscape.
We are dots in the ocean
and all at once
dots on the shore,
drifting from a fixed position
to all at once
a temporary one,
like thin lines of motion
working to rest,
breaking against
thin lines of stillness
looking to be agitated.
It is a landscape
that sets within us this condition
in which we are small
and finite
in a thing that is strong and solid
and permanent,
and all at once giant
and everlasting
in a thing that will,
someday,
be dust,
drifting away from us,
engulfed in a greater landscape.
This is to tell you
how I’ve waited here for you
outside the theatre.
Though many acts by now
have played inside,
I have not seen you arrive
in blizzards
nor missed the show of leaves
in the streetlight
of summer nights.
I have not seen you arrive
the first of June,
that windless June,
and the dancing leaves are silent.
I have been downtown
and to the outer city
past the mountain.
I have not cared what plays inside
the theatres there.
I have waited
with my collar turned
against the biting snow
and my chin raised to the trees—
that is how I have waited.
This is to tell myself
that you must be inside already,
watching every act,
passing every season unaware
of the cycles of the moon.
Because you have not arrived
to find me waiting
in blizzards
or watching the show of leaves,
nor have you arrived
the first of June,
that windless June,
and you have not seen with me
how silently the leaves are dancing.
You’ll have to wake up,
my love,
and comb away the curtains
like hair from your eyes.
On the rooftop of the chapel
that burned last year,
they are taking down the scaffolding
around the repairs,
and the bell rings out again
from its defended silence.
Up here, the city parts,
at every street it parts
and falls
like hair to the side of the face.
When it burns again,
let us not be on opposite ends;
you’ll have to look for me,
my love,
if I am not in bed beside you
in the sheets we made;
you’ll have to look for me
if I departed
in the blazing night
into a defended silence.
You ask me
how I’m feeling today,
and all I can say
is that the form is foreign
to the sounds in my mouth.
But remember my mouth is frozen,
and the feeling will return like this:
cold hands in a hot shower
or the sighing expanding
of the door frame
in the summer heat
or footsteps on the street,
the sort of going out
into the loud night
that makes friends
and lovers
and memories
like flowers that
little animals eat all spring
with thawing mouths like me,
and they can eat
and grow strong again
and not have to say how they feel.
I have to figure out
how to say these mouthing thoughts,
and that is how I feel at all
the weakness of this state I’m in,
and that is why
you should just think of me for now
like I am eating flowers
until the feeling returns.