Shawna Lemay is the author of The Blue Feast, All the God-Sized Fruit, Still, and Against Paradise. The title of her M.A. thesis (U of A, 2005) is Red Velvet Forest. She lives in Edmonton with her husband, Robert Lemay, a visual artist, and their daughter Chloe. She works part-time at the Edmonton Public Library.

Doe in a Mint Green Clearing

Rachel Ruysch, 1664-1750. Not exactly
a household name. Painter of bouquets, blossoms.
Most men wouldn't touch the subject with a ten
foot pole.
Too feminine. Too mired in detail.
Great thoughts don't waft from carnations,
they said.

Perhaps she wanted to paint the bodies of gods
in white gauzy robes, damp, billowing.
An unsuitable subject for a woman.
She wanted to paint her own unsuitable body
the delicate rivers stretched into her belly
the purple tributaries of her ankles.
She wanted to paint life and death and love,
great tragedies, battle scenes, myths,
the terrible weakness of beauty,
a doe in a mint green clearing,
wild flowers in a field without end.

She worked in the kitchen, one eyebrow cocked
the smell of dying flowers always in her hair.
Oil paint on her fingers, cheek smudged red.
If you look closely at her paintings
you see the intricate systems of veins
below the surface of petals, leaves.
And in one arrangement, there are twelve assorted
winged insects, one butterfly, one beetle.
Vying for nectar.
The cruel beauty of the ordinary moments
before war.
The bee, that is Zeus disguised.
The beetle Ophelia attending her own funeral.

There is something else you should know.
The bouquet. It was not there to the side
of the easel.
The tulip does not bloom beside the rose,
beside the lily, the poppy, the iris.
She painted them one by one -
little white and pink and orange lies
refusing history, seasons.
The impossible bouquets a way of passing
knowledge on
the curious difference of flora.

And see there, tucked behind a tangle of foliage.
The invented flower, the most fragile one
its petals almost transparent.
It is the most beautiful bloom. The hidden one
the one she most wants us to know.
This is the knowledge passed down
through the bones of the wrist
back of the eye.

Source: "Doe in a Mint Green Clearing" from All the God-Sized Fruit by Shawna Lemay (1999). Reprinted by permission of McGill-Queen's University Press.

Book

Certainly, this one book
is an interpretation of yearning.
Contains a moment--
that which cannot be wished for-
as it is unknown,
but its fleetingly and involuntarily longed
towards.

Right fine manners, it has, perched there, unruffled
beside heaped tantalizing berries
a bird made of leaves and pressed flaking petals
like the tears of a great and full detachment
surfaces closed upon surface after surface.
Its somnolent struggle-
an object's resistance to the labyrinth
and to gravity and to the squeals of silence.

Uncradled, its composure aloof
the terrible exhaustion of being
flawed
flame and rainfall at once.
The terrible exhaustion of containing the word
disavowal.

Here, perchance, is your hidden soul
heart's clumsy desire
enthralled keeper of dark fruit
unsourced beams of light.

Here, alongside cardoon and quince
the unwritten book of unseeable mirrors.
Here
the preliminary catalogue
of the universe of the insignificant

Detail of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Cupid Complaining to Venus

In her hat I find an essence
that inspires confession.
A need arises to tell how Venus keeps
recurring in my life
all the conversations I've had in broad daylight with goddesses.

The hat proves a real weakness.
The kind that we all have I suppose.
Which upon examination is tinged with the ridiculous.

I find myself wanting to talk about my old age
when I plan to wear grey
six outfits all the same.
By then, too, my hair will be thinning
from years of pulling at it
in hopes this process will draw out
that one essential poem.

I expect to imagine myself
wearing a hat like this
and sauntering down a runway in Milan
as I would saunter through an orchard in full fruit.

The hat is both elegant and foolish
and says nothing whatever about deep love
of the sort you would expect to inspire
the wearing of such a prop.
But I like that it's frivolous
cloud fruit strung like beads into a wreath or halo.
And if I in my grey have given up speech
you'll think of pondering a life, at times pure
of imperfections, both beautiful and not.

Wonder Woman

Going through my drawers
as though I'd died a suspicious death
even I didn't know
what to make of Wonder Woman
small plastic figurine.

This particular friend has lived too hard
since the time she gave this to me
which must be why I cannot return her phone calls
from out of the blue.

I was always a little afraid of her
this friend who was once at the center of
my universe
and even now I can't say exactly why.
Please don't tell me it was in part that I saw her
as my twin
and that if I had ever once been able to smoke
a cigarette without spectacular coughing
then maybe I too
would have become a beachcomber
topless, sunburned, aimless
uneasily beloved by lost friends
who can only face memories
and then only partially.

Red Velvet Armchair

Because I have reveled in the poems and passages
of women describing the rooms
where they write
I add mine to the clamoring
without fear of reservation
for this common room
that will speak and hear only love.

It's a quiet room that means nothing
without the window
without the more rambunctious rooms adjacent.
A room that allows a love for the self too
after all the other loves.

Usually there's a desk
a beloved trinket on it
that tells a web of stories.
Oh, and the books, filed neatly or haphazard,
the glue holding all the rooms together.

In mine, besides the desk,
a red velvet armchair, bought secondhand.
You can hear it between words
old comfortable creaks.
The claw feet I've always felt are stately
but have been battered by vacuum cleaners
and tricycles and old farm boots in its past life.
There is a wooden grip on the arm
used once for steeling oneself against news
of God only knows
and now coming out of the writing, that joy.
The colour is that deep red, which is every life force,
and held in a hush of velvet, so silent so soft.

Alone in this chair at last I remember
whatever I have loved
I remember again husband, daughter
whom I had banished completely from my thoughts
while focusing on a word, a string of words.
In this chair I begin to imagine
morbidly mythic events
the end of time.

Also, I remember all the walls described
in the poems of women.
The way light falls differently in each
in sheets, or strips, patterns.
I remember a kind of barrenness
mingled with clutter.
Cold teacups, neglected plants.
The way a scent from the garden
finds its way, impossibly, to the room.

I remember how the rooms are still
and how a single chair seems to hold so many
calm and consoling thoughts
souls, reduced and kept warm
like a velvet epicurean sauce
tired and meditative.

Source: "Book", "Detail of Lucas Cranach the Elder's Cupid Complaining to Venus", "Wonder Woman", and "Red Velvet Armchair" from Still by Shawna Lemay (2003).

Regimens of Beauty

What, then, did I know of the regimens of beauty?

My greatest feat, greatest grandest failure--
I have stolen everything
and no longer fear being caught.
My confession, after all, was written crossways
in the manner of 18th century letters.

I am never naked.
So many fine jewels adorn me.
They leave faceted indentations that never rub
out, lift.
It hurts only somewhat.

When I refute the charges
it will only be because of my shamefully
poor memory
my useless clamoring memory.
After torture, maybe I'll confess to my confession.
Sure I will.
It was self-defense, I'll insist.

But who believes what's written in
the future tense?
I can't decide to believe that when one door closes
another opens.
They're all swinging.
Who needs the illusion of imprisonment.

My horoscope this morning said
today my high expectations will be dashed.
I'm not afraid to answer the phone
for once
I'm not afraid to begin with nothing.
Tonight before I sleep I'm going to write
a screenplay
of pleasant dreams and when they don't conform
I'll yell cut, cut.
I've had it with the constrictions of dreams.
I'm done with beauty.
I'm done with having it all add up
with symmetry
with powdering my nose.

I'd never have been caught if I hadn't tipped
them off.
What I could tell you now about ugliness
after all those years entangled in that regimen
of sparkle and glints
no, I'm unable.
May I say, though, I learned less about beauty
than about the effects of a strict debate with fear.

To Avoid Mirrors

How much easier for a beautiful woman to avoid mirrors?

I know not.
Only my own aged quarrel with them.
I drag one along with me
furrowing a path behind.
I am the mirror's oxen
a pair of me.
Dull cow eye looking
into dull cow eye.
Though it only seems so.
See how it waters
the teeming waves, the sheen - see there.

The mirrors in my dreams
go on cracking and shattering
of this I have no control.
In the morning I wrap my bloodied feet.
What other course is there?

Is it thanks to the enchantment of the glade
or to what, or to whom,
that I have recourse to one poem.
To one poem
I return and return.
When I read it
I fall into various rooms
of the palace of mirrors
and it saves me consistently.
Never once has it let me down.

In the mirrors, anyone, any visitor,
can say,
It is I.

Having written this
the secret of the mirror poem
will it disappear
or close its doors?
And if so what of the glass chair
I am become so fond of sitting in
and what of my mirror-tiled dancing shoes?
And what of me?
Do I turn to silvered glass?

The Blue Feast

Sometimes a city, sometimes a clearing
or a veranda hanging under the plain miracle of sky.
I want to escape.

It's better to sit
after all the interruptions
and drink silence
or whatever resembles silence.

I think draped thoughts about those moments
of limitlessness
where you see your life could be anything
that there are a thousand eyes in each moment.
After, I reach my hand to the shelf
and open a book and there it is.
How can this happen so often?

How is it that every animal
that has entered my heart
has always had a small white diamond on its chest
Arabian horse, black lab, blue tabby.

Our honeymoon on Sardegna.
The blonde lab that followed us for a week
so that she seemed to own us.
Up the long paved road from the grocery store
to the villa with the red tiles
and the rosebush by the stone bench
where I read Italo Calvino while
the ants crossed my feet.
I knew this dog who watched over us
this dog with the white kiss on its chest.

I want to escape, it's true.
But I've no need to travel.
I want to escape into, not from.

It's enough to sit and remember
the smallest markings, repeating.
It's enough to fix my eyes on the horizon
as though standing on that stone bench which overlooked the sea
filling myself on the blue feast.
It's enough to feel again
the stabs of recognition
how fetterless they are.

Source: "Regimens of Beauty", "To Avoid Mirrors", and "The Blue Feast" from Blue Feast by Shawna Lemay (2005). Reprinted by permission of NeWest Publishers Ltd.

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