A Woman Clothed in Words by Anne Szumigalski Page B

ultimate perhaps in ideogrammatic expression.

    I would like to be able to say that I went right out and learned this new and powerful way of communicating. For lack of a teacher I did not. I still hope one day to do so. I did however have a vision of a world in which perhaps every one of us could become free from the restraints of the word. If we could all learn our mother tongue and besides that a non-
verbal language such as asl wouldn’t we be able to communicate with each other around the planet with a certain degree of ease?

    There remains, of course the problem of a script. Perhaps my friend the deaf poet could help us there. What we would
need is an ideogrammatic script something like Chinese characters, one that would lend itself to a Braille-like embossing technique.

    But can we hope that literature, even poetry, could be expressed in such a script? We can never be sure of that. Yet every written language, and every oral language too, has so far been able to produce its own stories, poems and liturgies. There is more danger by far that over the centuries and millennia one of these languages would triumph over the other and we would be left once more with one mode of communication. Which would be the victor, the wordless expression of ideas? The naming mode of the verbal language? I suppose that in spite of my interest in the non-verbal, the ideogrammatic, if I had to make the choice I would do what my ancestors did and choose the Word made manifest in the mouth.

The Thin Pale Man
    (In the city smoke rises
    from the hulking concrete
    horizon is huddled with it
    sky yellowish as snow
    dirty as february
    •
    and the sound is broken
    with stopping and starting exhaust
    K says clouds but can
    there be clouds in such a sky
    I say K says
    we just passed him
    going the other way
    •
    across the street she says
    the thin pale man bluebottle
    bearded I ask perhaps
    she answers absently
    •
    not yet she says perhaps
    she says one day
    •
    what’s all the fuss
    in winnipeg in winter
    surely fifty poets pass by
    at least that many in an afternoon
    not like this one she says
    his book has made a buzz
    a living fly in winter
    •
    unexpected and annoying
    wave wave she says before
    he’s gone ah well
    he’ll be back he’ll
    be back)

    ~~~

    the women are sturdy and strong
    sun glints on their skin
    they let down their hair
    and smell of honey in the night
    the light down on their arms
    glows palely under the moon
    •
    rooster crows the sun
    the page tells me
    and it’s day again
    all this light he says
    all this cold cold light the shunning
    •
    ... the sky over the trees grew red
    •
    (the words of the book melt into the head
    you have to listen)
    •
    curling at its edges
    like paper the yellowing moon
    •
    what’s written on a paper plate
    words at the edge of dreaming
    and the dream is desperate
    •
    if this is such a dream
    how can I believe
    the strawberries
    falling into the cupped hand
    those women with the mien
    of earthangels
    •
    how can I believe the
    history of terrors
    grounded in believing
    watching the sun dappling the horses
    the moon whitening the trees

    ~~~

    (after the reading
    we arrive at the house
    our feet mumbling in the dry leaves
    drifts of leaves rising towards the door
    drifts of leaves washing against the door
    •
    in the house plates are handed
    for those who sit on chairs
    on the uncovered floor
    •
    all those hands holding flat white plates
    hands handling plates
    white knuckles of grasping hands
    plates flat and white like poems
    poems rounded in colours, lilac mauve
    blue and grey and ah the dark road
    and oh the purple air
    •
    now food is bandied about
    obscuring the plates
    and I had thought the plates
    the poems were the reason for everything
    representing the possibility
    of anything
    don’t cover the shape
    of my printed plate
    I want to make out
    what the whole thing’s about
    •
    ergo the sound of brown leaves
    shuffling on the doorsills
    the taste of a word