a thin line between Read online

  a thin line between

  a thin line between

  _____________________________

  wanda praamsma

  BookThug · 2014

  FIRST EDITION

  copyright © 2014 Wanda Praamsma

  Cover image: “Endless Road,” sculpture and photograph by Michiel Schierbeek.

  copyright © 2014 Michiel Schierbeek.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and The Ontario Arts Council.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Praamsma, Wanda, author

  a thin line between / Wanda Praamsma.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77166-065-5

  I. Title.

  PS8631.R32T45 2014 C811'.6 C2014-904787-8

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  In what can be described as a verse-novel for its lyricism and rhythmic structure, Wanda Praamsma crafts a story that transcends geographic boundaries and time periods, by weaving together lives from her own family’s past, including her poet-grandfather and sculptor-uncle. Subtle in its life lessons, a thin line between works at ‘peeling away the I’s’ to explore concepts of self and family in flux. What emerges is a poignant, and at times humorous, portrait of a Dutch-Canadian family and a close look into a young woman’s exploration of her own being and creative life.

  Praamsma’s writing draws comparisons to popular Canadian writers like Elizabeth Bachinsky, Phil Hall, and Daphne Marlatt, and will appeal to readers in their 20s and 30s who are coming to terms with issues of parenting and family, as they negotiate the spaces for their own individual lives and their creative selves.

  _____________________

  a thin line between

  ___________________________

  my mom says when she was little

  she would whistle and play games with the lines on the sidewalk

  and her brother

  would walk five steps behind her

  on a bridge

  a woman in a scarf

  hovers

  whispering to the damp air

  watching the tram rumble by

  like the loudest of snakes

  silently she shifts her weight and the wheels of her cycle roll

  down the hill

  again she hovers

  waiting waiting

  for cars to pass

  an elegant left turn

  she’s headed to the leidseplein

  and I follow

  until my road veers right

  and she decides to disappear

  nico comes for dinner and we all scramble

  michiel makes boerenkool and anita makes onion gravy

  and craig and I make soup

  nico wears four layers maybe five

  an undershirt and a collar shirt

  a sweater another collar shirt another sweater

  all of them only one guilder (he means euro) each

  he tells us how he beats the system

  on the tram

  with the new automatic peep cards

  it’s so expensive, he says

  so he goes into one tram going in the wrong direction

  he peeps

  then rushes out

  crosses the street

  and waits for the tram going in the right direction

  he waits

  gets on

  then peeps again

  and effectively

  goes nowhere

  according to the card

  but he’s peeped

  and effectively

  gone somewhere

  there’s a rhythm in the windows

  one line going this way another line going that way

  we drive in a roaring red work van

  and see the movement in a dull brick structure

  we race

  the bricks run

  the glass rides

  with the rolls of normandy’s waves

  michiel points

  and we swerve under his indication

  see this see that

  those rectangles form a perfect square

  stopping the mind, yes

  until we move again

  _____________________

  we are in france and arthur the contractor who refuses to drywall any more

  asks me

  what are you going to do when you’ve done it all?

  we are here and were there, in the balkans

  and we come from canada

  and I want to go to india

  and the point was to live in amsterdam and learn dutch and read opa bert

  yet the point is not always the point in the end

  since bert is dead and so is fried

  and the ones who are living

  are not the easiest to talk to

  and don’t necessarily want to talk to each other

  but I hope they’ll talk to me

  even if I don’t know what to ask

  I’m a foreigner and maybe that’s a plus

  we can behave like family and not like family

  which means we should be polite

  because we don’t know each other that well

  round is just a shape

  not round is also just a shape says anu

  the niece me

  the uncle michiel

  his eyes

  analyzing

  absorbing

  ingesting

  the way I stand the way I move

  my eyes

  my lips

  my nose

  a foreign creature filled with bits of his sister

  you’re 30 percent saskia, says nico

  the man fried married

  after affairing with lucebert

  after marrying bert

  at one point she had three men going

  jaaaaaa, says her son

  _____________________

  michiel I see saskia in the way you move, the way you stand there with your

  to the side (like a penguin, a gracious penguin)

  a woman

  graceful in every step

  walks along the road

  a bag of rice balanced on her head

  are you sleeping with your cousin? the girl in the bakery asks

  a motorbike races by and a woman’s shawl blows turquoise into the wind

  a bloated truck rumbles past, overloaded with coconut shells

  we laugh

  we sleep in different houses

  simone’s on the canal

  and I’m by the vondelpark

  but our heads are so similar

  our teeth so similar

  our minds so up and down

  our worries so in tune

  we might as well be in the same bed

  instead we are at festina lente on the looiersgracht

  we say, with this generation

  ours

  it is all on the surface

  you squeeze yourself into these profiles

  on linkedin on facebook on twitter

  I am this one long list of accomplishments

  I smile in every photo

  that’s what I am showing to the world and that’s what people are seeing and then they get

  JEALOUS that I am here and they are there and

  JEALOUS we are all longing for somewhere else

  _____________________

/>   it wasn’t intended for me to see but I did

  (in the subject of an email)

  the invisible mom

  on a hill in a suburb in serbia

  jon went back

  julie followed

  there were two weddings

  one in serbia one in canada

  two services two families two dresses

  two kids

  baby-girl baby-boy

  they are already more advantaged than most serbian kids, says julie

  they speak english and are half-canadian

  and she is happy they are growing up here: the serbs cherish children

  the schools are good

  so much emphasis on art and culture and languages

  this is europe after all

  but I don’t want my kids to go to university here, says she

  I want them to go in canada

  where there is more

  opp-or-tun-ity

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  the ripe red of an apple

  julie wants to be here but she also wants to be there

  chilies firing green spice from piles on a market floor

  but she knows that once she is there she’ll miss here

  saris singing in sapphire

  and between all the here-ing and there-ing

  you often have to ask

  are you ever here-here?

  _____________________

  a cow lounges through a busy intersection

  no rush no rush we’ll wait we’ll wait

  op, she’s stopped to scratch

  aaaah, she moans

  she’s out of the road

  gears shift motors rev and we’re gone

  the cow is still

  steven, in those pants! says simone, of her brother

  worming his way into a rainsuit before the long cycle home

  after snow after snow after rain

  he stands like a stork balancing one leg in let’s push him over!

  the other leg in

  he hikes up the waist until we can see through the plastic

  the line that separates two bum cheeks

  he models

  holds the wall and moves his hips forward backward forward backward

  so sexy so sexy

  (suave cool steven has just stepped off the pedestal)

  _____________________

  he the mysterious he

  thinks you are like some greek goddess cleopatra

  you walk around with this air about you

  upward grace on a downward track

  because, with a perception like that there is nowhere to go but down

  nowhere to be seen but festering between your own lost ideals

  on the ground beside an ant

  crying

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  this is bert as I remember him

  only eyes that invite you in

  only wrinkles that invite you up into his head

  in his house on the koninginneweg with the paintings covering a wall, a collage

  a black table a red cupboard

  glass candies in a bowl

  the clinking they made when they touched

  bert gave me those candies

  I took them to canada, and

  that is how I remember him

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  (pause)

  bert wasn’t really a father, michiel says

  he was too busy being famous

  that’s what famous people do

  _____________________

  m says

  do you have that problem, all your socks disappearing into the washing machine?

  they slide into this hole

  there’s this whole mountain of socks in there

  he oh mysterious he tells me: intuition

  use it

  you don’t have to know what you’re doing

  just do it

  make something

  don’t plan it all out

  take something small and go with it

  at a reading at a library on a downtown ottawa street elizabeth hay says:

  you don’t always have to know what you are doing

  and so: I promptly go outside and call nancy cooper alice cooper

  she laughs

  like my mother and her coils

  she has a shape in mind and that’s it, start rolling

  the clay

  _____________________

  michiel says S & S did a good job as parents

  my father was like that, he says

  loved to be with people

  my father is like that, I say

  likes to be with people

  even if he’s not really there

  maybe in the other room

  playing solitaire

  in bed

  reading don quixote

  outside

  planting begonias

  we didn’t discuss the details

  was it because of this or that or was it him or her

  was it freedom

  unconfined to a pre-existing way of life

  of how they wanted us to be

  but they did want us to be a certain way

  (space) AWARE (space)

  aware of this violinist and that ballet and that bach concerto

  do you know what that instrument is?

  dad asks me in the car on the way home from basketball

  no I don’t know dad the oboe maybe

  (always say the oboe because it is a far-out instrument rather than a well-

  known one and at least you get points for being creative)

  yes, the oboe! he says

  do you know that the oboe...

  _____________________

  michiel often has wise words

  like

  keep one foot in at the newspaper

  like

  he should have waited longer

  like

  if I don’t put water on my mouth I explode

  (I feel pain

  in the tangled vines of veins inside

  I don’t sing, I don’t say anything

  without irresponsible exclamations

  of how inward I feel

  I eat ice cream and I really do explode

  without warning

  without withdrawal

  quick and easy)

  and yet he knows we won’t listen

  he didn’t

  when I was making my mistakes

  my father would say

  are you sure you want to do this?

  but I didn’t want to listen to him

  now he knows how bert was feeling

  those times with our fathers

  don’t push it, dad said

  he meant don’t go over to todd’s house and try to win him back

  things happen as they should

  _____________________

  the road slows and the bends make driving 100 kilometres per hour impossible

  so we gear up and we gear down and sometimes we pretend we are on a

  racetrack except then you miss the views

  the lakes with lilies

  the evergreens ever green

  the quiet quilt of a forest white

  blue sky

  green grass

  red bird

  how did we get so white?

  how did the tree get black?

  why leave me out here

  to tumble

  to whimper

  let’s go inside

  where we can wander

  together

  in indoor sorrows

  _____________________

  bert and margreetje used to drive around europe drinking genever

  michiel holds up a glass a dainty imaginary glass

  his eyebrows lift and the lines on his face crinkle outw
ards upwards

  lines on his forehead like bert

  the deep lines simone worries she will soon have

  and the lines I look at in the mirror

  pushing my eyebrows up

  thinking

  I look like bert don’t I

  there is something of him in me

  there is something of him in me

  _____________________

  the idea of associations

  bert wasn’t interested in historical novels, making this whole complex thing

  pasting all the parts on a bulletin board to help your mind sort it out

  that was boring

  but people read them, people like them, michiel says

  bert wanted prose he wanted poetry he wanted interconnectivity

  the Oneness of all things, dancing on a page

  the door

  a door is open

  or closed

  a door that’s open

  is a hole toward

  space

  a door that’s closed

  part of the wall

  marks off space

  if it moves

  it is a door

  so I am

  a door

  bert looked down at me, those eyes

  the kind your mind grabs onto

  holds melts marks

  me in my pink pajamas

  a huge sombrero on my head

  you can have it, he said, take it home to canada

  in the photo I look past the great brim and my eyes zoom into his

  and perhaps that is it

  the One moment I had with him

  _____________________

  nights on the news desk

  when a soldier dies and I don’t care anymore

  I just want to go home it’s one in the morning

  you’ve lost your soul, wanda

  I lost it back in santiago when I wanted to take out rebecca’s ellipsis