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Forcing the Narcissus
Book by Susan Musgrave
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1994
6 people want to read
About the author
Susan Musgrave
78 books44 followersSusan Musgrave is a Canadian poet and children's writer. She was born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents, and currently lives in British Columbia, dividing her time between Sidney and Haida Gwaii.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 22, 2022
and now he's in the bathtub
where my mother is trying to drown him.
She holds him down by the ankles
while he does a back-stroke rapidly.
In real life he was good
at the breast-stroke. Something is wrong
and my father has an erection
for the first time since 1956,
the yeas I was conceived if I am
to believe in anything.
I'm embarrassed by what I see.
Later when, without dignity, he's floating
with my sister's bath-toys beached on him
I think, "He has lived." That's all,
there are no other words for it,
nothing to say how degrading death is,
and all the more so for its pettiness.
My mother remains calm and picks up
her knitting. She's making a pair of sleepers
for the baby she'll never bear.
My sister puts her feet on the coffee table
and weeps. I go out the back door and squat
beside a garbage can to piss. When the stray
dog stops to sniff I kick him until he's sick.
I'm so heartless it would take a stone
to break me, my mother says. She doesn't
drop a stitch. Blesses our home
* * *
I was in Fredericton when you went
into a coma the last time, asleep
with some new stranger beside me.
The last thing you said to me
before I left you how long will you be
gone? I do't know I said, and from Fredericton
phones home to see if you had forgiven me
for leaving. I love you I tried to say
over the long distance, then my mother
came on the line. I knew you wouldn't
speak to me because you had nothing left
that would give me anything to hang on to.
Then the line went dead.
And then you died and I didn't know who
was to blame for it.
* * *
I show him what he doesn't want
to see - love is a blind man
playing dice in a blizzard.
He swear these bright flowers
like words when cut will sing or bleed;
I believe he is only grieving
or that grief has a lot to do with it.
Blindness or too much brightness can be
the same thing. He says he wants to see the world
but lacks the simple means of getting there.
I tell him what he doesn't want
to hear - how I woke to find my father
forcing the tears that hung on my eyelashes
like wet gravel, how I felt the wind through
my rice paper door. How can I tell him life is less
than he imagines it to be, at the same time more
tangible than anything we know? It is
hard to believe plump bulbs sucked dry
as an old man's testicles will ever sing
or amount to very much. I carry them in
out of the ice-storm to the calm centre
of my father's room where, I'm told,
anything might bloom, it's no sin
to be surprised. In us grows the strange
and the wild barely covered by skin
yet I think how much thinner
is the membrane between myself and the world.
* * *
Last night I took a gun
and fired it at something, maybe you.
Afterwards, after the silence,
there was a hole as big as my heart
and the light shone through.
I keep trying to believe in pain
because pain, like love,
so easily mystified, holds true.
We woke the baby with our singing
and crying. Her heartbeat was something
always to be remembered, something
to love forever.
* * *
You wee on a roll.
There was bad weather behind you
and a good woman waiting
and the whole world was singing
of the day it was born.
You were going for broke, going down
alone. I was in a room writing poetry
for someone I loved and I didn't know then
the road you were on.
If I'd known I would have come to you
with this light around my body.
Made an effort to come toward you:
can you imagine the kind of emptiness
I've grown used to?
It's like someone in the same room telling
a joke that's on you.
You don't understand the punch-line.
You laugh anyway.
* * *
I'm leaving again
and Stephen's sad-night eyes
fill the darkness. Behind his eyes
the world's pain becomes
something I'm grateful for,
something tried but unpredictable
that darts into the heart and leaves
its ragged truth there.
I've got scars to prove it.
I've never belonged to anyone.
Now his eyes fill that emptiness
with something beyond love
and I can't get enough of it;
like grief, there's never enough.
* * *
What could be more frightening
than living? Why didn't you take
a later boat to Vancouver?
Why couldn't we stay in bed
forever, smoke dope, talk dirty
and not try to change anything?
Why didn't we? Why?
* * *
the way you do.
You're out to kill
the love in me, the alternatives
to living. Now I'm just waiting
for a look, a call
I want details - how do you do it
that you do it so well?
Did you plan it or was it
spontaneous? I am no longer
identifiable. I'm an amputee.
You hacked your way in
and out of me.
Even my blood was turned off
at the source, you see
little by little you're using me
up. I'm almost empty, full
of this sad love.
So if I come back,
if I cross continents to see you
and you're not expecting me, remember -
for thirty-three years
it was the wind that took
the better part of me
and nobody gets over me
the way you do.
Not even you.
* * *
I have nothing under my skirt
bu a whole lot of lessons I never learned
properly. The man labouring on the road
senses that, and waves a fingerless hand
hoping for a quick throw over the lunch hour.
Your life isn't your own any more
when a man like that can bruise his eyes
on emptiness, and leave you wanting.
In a huff I move from the stoop
into the house where my friends have laid
a feast around my body. It's been dying
for days and they've dusted it
- "she would have wanted it that way" -
with cake flour to make it look ghostly.
I don't want it, who would want anything like it?
I fume around the place for awhile
but there is no outlet now, there never was.
It seems a shame to have loved a man so long
who was the wrong man
bu suddenly there come a day when I can move
through a room without you. And this
is the day.
where my mother is trying to drown him.
She holds him down by the ankles
while he does a back-stroke rapidly.
In real life he was good
at the breast-stroke. Something is wrong
and my father has an erection
for the first time since 1956,
the yeas I was conceived if I am
to believe in anything.
I'm embarrassed by what I see.
Later when, without dignity, he's floating
with my sister's bath-toys beached on him
I think, "He has lived." That's all,
there are no other words for it,
nothing to say how degrading death is,
and all the more so for its pettiness.
My mother remains calm and picks up
her knitting. She's making a pair of sleepers
for the baby she'll never bear.
My sister puts her feet on the coffee table
and weeps. I go out the back door and squat
beside a garbage can to piss. When the stray
dog stops to sniff I kick him until he's sick.
I'm so heartless it would take a stone
to break me, my mother says. She doesn't
drop a stitch. Blesses our home
- My Father Came Back for the Furniture, pg. 16-17
* * *
I was in Fredericton when you went
into a coma the last time, asleep
with some new stranger beside me.
The last thing you said to me
before I left you how long will you be
gone? I do't know I said, and from Fredericton
phones home to see if you had forgiven me
for leaving. I love you I tried to say
over the long distance, then my mother
came on the line. I knew you wouldn't
speak to me because you had nothing left
that would give me anything to hang on to.
Then the line went dead.
And then you died and I didn't know who
was to blame for it.
- The Last Thing, pg. 24
* * *
I show him what he doesn't want
to see - love is a blind man
playing dice in a blizzard.
He swear these bright flowers
like words when cut will sing or bleed;
I believe he is only grieving
or that grief has a lot to do with it.
Blindness or too much brightness can be
the same thing. He says he wants to see the world
but lacks the simple means of getting there.
I tell him what he doesn't want
to hear - how I woke to find my father
forcing the tears that hung on my eyelashes
like wet gravel, how I felt the wind through
my rice paper door. How can I tell him life is less
than he imagines it to be, at the same time more
tangible than anything we know? It is
hard to believe plump bulbs sucked dry
as an old man's testicles will ever sing
or amount to very much. I carry them in
out of the ice-storm to the calm centre
of my father's room where, I'm told,
anything might bloom, it's no sin
to be surprised. In us grows the strange
and the wild barely covered by skin
yet I think how much thinner
is the membrane between myself and the world.
- Forcing the Narcissus, pg. 31
* * *
Last night I took a gun
and fired it at something, maybe you.
Afterwards, after the silence,
there was a hole as big as my heart
and the light shone through.
I keep trying to believe in pain
because pain, like love,
so easily mystified, holds true.
We woke the baby with our singing
and crying. Her heartbeat was something
always to be remembered, something
to love forever.
- Something Has to Give in a Life, pg. 48
* * *
You wee on a roll.
There was bad weather behind you
and a good woman waiting
and the whole world was singing
of the day it was born.
You were going for broke, going down
alone. I was in a room writing poetry
for someone I loved and I didn't know then
the road you were on.
If I'd known I would have come to you
with this light around my body.
Made an effort to come toward you:
can you imagine the kind of emptiness
I've grown used to?
It's like someone in the same room telling
a joke that's on you.
You don't understand the punch-line.
You laugh anyway.
- Tonight at Sunrise, pg. 59
* * *
I'm leaving again
and Stephen's sad-night eyes
fill the darkness. Behind his eyes
the world's pain becomes
something I'm grateful for,
something tried but unpredictable
that darts into the heart and leaves
its ragged truth there.
I've got scars to prove it.
I've never belonged to anyone.
Now his eyes fill that emptiness
with something beyond love
and I can't get enough of it;
like grief, there's never enough.
- In the Small Hours of the Rain, pg. 67
* * *
What could be more frightening
than living? Why didn't you take
a later boat to Vancouver?
Why couldn't we stay in bed
forever, smoke dope, talk dirty
and not try to change anything?
Why didn't we? Why?
- Stopping By the Mailbox on a Snowy Evening, pg. 74
* * *
the way you do.
You're out to kill
the love in me, the alternatives
to living. Now I'm just waiting
for a look, a call
I want details - how do you do it
that you do it so well?
Did you plan it or was it
spontaneous? I am no longer
identifiable. I'm an amputee.
You hacked your way in
and out of me.
Even my blood was turned off
at the source, you see
little by little you're using me
up. I'm almost empty, full
of this sad love.
So if I come back,
if I cross continents to see you
and you're not expecting me, remember -
for thirty-three years
it was the wind that took
the better part of me
and nobody gets over me
the way you do.
Not even you.
- Nobody Gets Over Me, pg. 86-87
* * *
I have nothing under my skirt
bu a whole lot of lessons I never learned
properly. The man labouring on the road
senses that, and waves a fingerless hand
hoping for a quick throw over the lunch hour.
Your life isn't your own any more
when a man like that can bruise his eyes
on emptiness, and leave you wanting.
In a huff I move from the stoop
into the house where my friends have laid
a feast around my body. It's been dying
for days and they've dusted it
- "she would have wanted it that way" -
with cake flour to make it look ghostly.
I don't want it, who would want anything like it?
I fume around the place for awhile
but there is no outlet now, there never was.
It seems a shame to have loved a man so long
who was the wrong man
bu suddenly there come a day when I can move
through a room without you. And this
is the day.
- This Is the Day, pg. 90-91
November 28, 2018
This book changed my life. When I first heard Susan Musgrave speak, when she came to my high school in the mid-90s, I couldn’t breathe. I had never met or experienced anyone like her. Her writing, her life, her story - all of it overwhelmed me. I was given this book as a gift a couple years later - personally autographed by the author, and I was once again transfixed by her words. Every time i read it, for the past 20+ years, I experience the same feelings.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews