What I Remember from My Time on Earth

by Patricia Young

In this acclaimed collection of poems by 1993 Governor General's Award finalist Patricia Young, words cross the silence of the ages in poems that meditate on human estrangement and connection.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1997

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Once I climbed a wall in a dream.
Like the dream of flying -
that same effortlessness
and ability to overcome
the usual limits of the bones.

Took my skill for granted.
With agility and speed
I lizard-clambered to the top.

It did not sadden me
that only I
could scale that vast cliff.

The wall is not a metaphor.
I would not mislead you.

In life I make mistakes
but in the dream
my hands and feet held on
with an insect's grip.

It rose before me, a blank sheet
entering heaven. To climb
was all I lived for.

From a great height I looked down.
Your upturned face was inscrutable
as a white-washed surface.

I knew I would not fall.

The wall was what it was
and clung to me like a lover.

- The Wall, pg. 5

* * *

I was standing at the corner
when he came out of the cathedral
drinking from a bottle of champagne.
He had that imperious swing that's almost a command.
I thought, well, some suave character
I'd seen on the stage the week before.

Lord knows what you see in him,
my sister said, and left for the station.

We lived in a boarding house.
A little cross-eyed disc jockey and his wife
slept across the hall. He waited on her
like a slave. When we passed them on the stairs
they always smiled, cryptic. Fools,
my sister'd hiss behind their backs.

In an oak grove the man pulled me down.
His asymmetrical eyes made me think
of my childhood - climbing trees, jumping walls.

The first pub opened. I dragged my fingers
through my hair. God, I was thirsty.

Lovesick again, my sister said later
when I stumbled in, coughing
and feeling something like pride.

But what kisses, I told her, what raw blue kisses.

- Annie Stays Out All Night with a Man Called Death, pg. 13

* * *

I found the baby beneath a pile of rotting oak leaves.
I'd been looking for my garden clippers.
Skin had grown over the places where her arms
had fallen off, they were seamless
as though the missing limbs
had never been. Finding her
armless was unthinkable, and yet she was
plump as an October apple.
As though mother birds
had been syphoning milk from cartons
delivered onto a dewy porches.
I picked her up and realized
she was my own, I had given birth to her
one blue magnolia morning.
I remembered carrying her into the garden,
past the walnut trees, past the fish pond,
laying her on a blanket, but where
had I left her? How long
had she lived in mouldy darkness -
one week, two? My head was a tomb of dank air.
Back inside the house I never left her.
Soon she could roll onto her stomach, she
developed a swivelling crawl.
She kicked and cooed like any other
baby and when she lay on her back
her eyes moved in soaring circles.
I would like to tell you her arms grew back,
that hands appeared on morning -
dwarf fans waving through the air, I
would like to tell you fingers
sprouted from those hands
the way fingers balloon from rubber gloves
when you blow into their inverted,
pink digits.

- Blue Magnolia, pg. 26

* * *

Before turning out the light
I glanced at the magazine open on the floor.
The tree made me gasp the way trees
often do when you step back
into the glossy distance.
I got out of my pyjamas
and stood beneath its vegetable shape.
There was no name for the tree
though the sky was generic
in its grandeur and cumulous clouds.
I floated up into the network of green;
the birds seemed more themselves.
A boy pushed a girl on a swing.
His body kept rushing to meet the small of her back.
I will never know if their lives worsened like a rainstorm.
You have not asked about the dog
leaping at the girl's feet
each time she swung to the earth.
I stayed up there for as long as it took
to understand the theory that started the world.
Winter never arrived or if it did
it was brief as a shudder.
I will leave my heart out of it
though I give you the tree that stirs in my mind,
a tree so true to its sap and its roots
I have already begun to forget.

- No Name for the Tree, pg. 37

* * *

Last night both children dreamed
they flew to the same foreign country,
and the planes they travelled on
were so poorly constructed
they could look down between their feet
and see the world pass beneath them.
The woke broken-
hearted, longing to go back.
And their faces were uncertain
as though haunted by what they could now
only imagine - fields of sunflowers
and cyclamen. They stared
at the cereal soggy in their bowls and said,
it was green there, really green.
And what I want to know is
should we book a flight today, should we
travel to Tuscany now the children's inner lives
have spilled like Chianti into ours.
Small packs on our backs
should we rent bicycles and pedal
into that wet-grape darkness?

- Wheeling Through Tuscany, pg. 43

* * *

You're flying above a rhododendron forest
when a voice says You are Crow.
Just like that
you begin to steal things -
a jacknife, cufflinks, rare
books, their spines flecked with gold.
Why descend
into petty thievery -
the brass button pinned to his
jacket, his wife's earring
as it rolls off the dashboard?
You know only
his mouth is a silver cup
you long to pour yourself into.
You drop to your knees
and drink with the honey-badgers,
the giant hogs who rush in
with their brilliant
tongues of thirst.
It doesn't matter who's watching.
Beneath his gaze
you snatch hubcaps, wedding ring,
shoehorn. And when he laughs
his teeth glint intoxication. If
you steal parts of him
you can't give them back - his kisses
like the wet wings of insects
fanning your face. Who can forgive you?
You see what you want
and though it's not yours
you swoop upon it.

- Crow's Apology, pg. 57

[Lara Marie Reads · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read the first 21 poems, and then skimmed the rest.

The composition and the writing was pretty. I felt zero feelings towards any of them and didn't feel like I wanted (more like I couldn't) to reflect on anything I read. Each poem was extremely fast paced and I don't think thats the style of poetry I like.

[Aloysiusi Lionel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Patricia Young is a poet of questions. In her poetry collection What I Remember from my Time on Earth (1997), she threw a lot of question we might bother ourselves to reflect on, not necessarily to answer. These questions range from practical questions on repairing the leaks on the roof to ones on getting prepared for an impending earthquake. In “Even the Brilliant Chimpanzees”, the readers are welcomed in the book by the question “…if we were to climb up / on the table between us, / go for each other / smelling of ginger root and lime / would the sky / cease pouring its grief / into every crevasse?” and these lines were followed by the poet’s exhortation that even chimpanzees with their brilliance are able to protect themselves from downpour. This leads to questioning our instinct, should we say our intellect, to survive and thrive on the natural, sometimes demeaning, flow of nature and the universe.

As her daughter performed nightly rituals before going to bed in “Shaky News”, we are for the second time around on the spotlight of answering “If she plays three notes on her flute / will the intervals ease stress / along the fault lines? If she bangs / her tennis racket on the wall / will the double thud / prevent molten rock from welling up” as if we are imagining ourselves staring at her daughter doing what sufficed her penchants. This collection is evidence pointing to poetry as a device for putting man in everlasting questioning, rather than accepting and conforming to “infallible” doctrines.

Patricia Young is a poet of propriety of abstractions. She gave out all what she had to say in her poems, even her personal stance that need not be straightforwardly expressed. She described things and concepts as how she looked at it, particularly the ones she possessed for a long time, not to mention the sentimentality of these collectibles. In “Letter in Flight” she doubts about the news she read from a Japanese daily, a piano tuner missing over the Pacific ocean as it hung from 32 balloons, then enumerated her sojourns and stated that she could not fly as high as what would tickle the dreamer in her. Instead, she accepted a loved one’s forgiveness by saying: “On postcards I scribble short prayers / before dropping them into the waves”.

Another testimony to this premise is “Our Lives Together as a Small Green Book” where she declared: “For a moment I understood / it wasn’t love that had made and unmade us / all these years but something / inarticulate as the ether.” With the least of all intentions to place herself as the center of the narratives, our dear poet could not resist to articulate her propriety over these abstractions that envelop, suppress, and haunt her while living a comfortable life with her family.

Her family as the recurring motif of the majority of the poems in this book is attested by some verses that stand as fragmentary reminiscences fused with language that resonates the chirping of the birds and even the moaning of lovers in the hotel room. “Letting Your Daughter Go” is a poeticized pronouncement of allowing her daughter to embrace own adolescent exuberance, concretized by the imagery brought out in the poem: “she is not confused by constant daylight. / The midnight sun is her guide, it / draws like a boy’s warm mouth”. In these lines, one is able to look at Patricia Young’s elusive affections towards her family, rendered with vivid and vibrant comparisons.

Patricia Young is a poet of vivid and vibrant comparisons. She chose the most delectable yet appropriate metaphors and similes to reverberate her adoration towards God’s creation. Furthermore, she devised natural forces and ecological phenomena to make her attempts on expression and argumentation more rewarding and convincing. One fine example is “The Meteoron” as she described what a meteoron is: “the fantastic distance between heaven and earth. Why we must face a surreal landscape / needles and sugarloves / architecture of dizzying blue.” She has the knack of captivating her readers with euphony as she fused fragments and details from different scenes and events and came up with decompartmentalized view of the world in its surrealism and pulchritude.

[Andrea Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Patricia Young writes with a sense of memory as the book's title would suggest. It touches on all aspects of life with words and imagery that bring a reader to a memory and sense of place in their own lives, at least that's what it did for me. As a writer and aspiring poet I am so pleased to read work of this caliber to teach me the craft. It is all about the translation of the soul and the spirit as it remembers the human experience. Patricia Young gave me a sense of myself once again, she made me remember why poetry is such a wonderful craft. I love lines such as:"He follows behind, all his mute passions folded inside like sheet music." from Walking Down the Staircase(p.49)or "They say there is an aquamarine room facing the river where even shadows have shadows" from The Place Where Souls Meet(p.60). There are many more and to read this work is to follow those lines of thought.

[Paulo Costa · Rating 4 out of 5]

You will remember, Even the Brilliant Chimpanzees, Pompeii, 17th Century, Walking Down the Staircase, you will remember a journey of eloquent and primitive emotions showing us that in the end what we will remember from this time on earth is the place where souls meet: in relationship, excavating the soul/soil of our lovers, our children, friends, even strangers, finding each other in separation, in togetherness, the places between.



For years you have been my excavation, I

have been yours. Together we have

dug and tapped and silted

through layers so that now sometimes

we break through these walls

with all their contradictions.

- from "The Place Where Souls Meet"



What I remember from my time on earth lays another stone in Young's poetic castle. A castle constructed to last.

[Theryn Fleming · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the poems in More Watery Still seem centered around the theme of family, those in What I Remember from My Time on Earth seem more focused on a sort of fantastical history (though there are still lots of family mentions). In WIRFMTOE, there's a scotch broom (the invasive pest counterpoint to the indigenous dogwood) poem, "Walk in the Broom Stand": "Would you accept as your own / each of her small, selfish acts, / ask her to accept each of yours, / dried pods bursting open like coiled springs?"

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful look at some historical events and what they meant to people.