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Listen to Sharon Thesen & Paul on Trance•Cast

 

A Holy Experiment

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1. Jerry Geiger was a friend of Frances Boldereff’s when she lived in Woodward,
     Pennsylvania, many years ago.

2.  In worn-out chairs, we sat in his kitchen.

3.  For this ailment, for that, he had a cure.

4.  We were staying at an old, old inn.

5.  Expressways and turnpikes, off-ramps, antacid vapour lights.

 

1.

 

One night, he had her look at the sky through his telescope.

“That’s the MOON?” Frances said. It was sometime in the mid-to        

late fifties, “La Motz” was

one of her noms de plume.

 

After the funeral & the small

gathering afterward at the house, Jerry talked

about the massive heavy presses made of ancient

wood and stone that every autumn

were used to press the apple cider.

 

The icy cold cider lay in tanks in the earth.  Any

sort of jar with a lid stored it—

pickle jars, mayonnaise jars.  While visiting Jerry

the next day we had a glass or two each.

 

Up in the watchtower where he once

kept his telescope we ascended narrow stairs,

looked out as if we were Frances that night,

came back down the steep stairway with serious faces,

a wooden stairway more like a ladder.

 

Not far, over some mountains, the current of the Susquehanna River

pouring, the beautiful word “Susquehanna” new to my tongue.

 

We said goodbye beside the rental car in the rain. Along the path,

fierce little mottled apples strewn by the wind and at the cemetery

the ashes of Frances beneath a fresh pile of dirt in the family

plot, a dozen granite headstones all saying MOTZ.

 

2.  

 

Rows and jars of homemade reddish-brown &

dark green medicines, gathered from the

plush land at the end of the road. The world was different

and quite what I guess I would call “American.”

 

He had asked Frances to look at the moon through his telescope.

The night must have been clear and black, the moon

bright and full.  What did she see:  a bunch of 

shadows, crags, and valleys, craters full of

darkness. Were they lovers, we were dying to ask.  Whatever,

he had a Doctorate in the Metaphysics of Spirals.

 

That shut us up for a while.

 

He must have brought her over from Woodward

in his car to view the moon. She had already named him

president of her five-book publishing company,

where every cent poured, to which she sacrificed

the rent and went for years without a decent hairbrush.

 

3.

 

He could have been a soldier

in the last years of the war

or come of age around the time I was born.

 

Maybe this has to do with the weirdness

and warp of time, the spiralling, going nowhere.

One is neither here nor there

and doesn’t know what to say.

 

One sits in the perished chair and listens.

Like a bending of the rain the thought of William Penn,

said to have been fair and wise

which is why the Indians trusted him.

Attractive, idealistic, clear-eyed—

this charisma led them all to a holy experiment.

 

Science magazines in stacks

on the kitchen table, radio antennas

at several different angles conspire in the aether.

 

4.

 

What if something supernatural happened?

Floors sloped, ornate would be the preferred

decor of such a place, visited by tourists,

mourners, certain parties of folks.

 

The rain fell heavily on the Susquehanna

and on the Indians and the Germans

in their graves, if they had them

and didn’t just die in the woods with an antique

rifle or a hatchet in their hands.

 

And almost like those dead I slept

and forgot my tickets and passport

 

So I had to return

to the little house

and ask to use the phone

which ruins everything

since you’ve already said goodbye, you’re

in the past, and now

you’re back.

 

They dial for you if you can’t find your glasses

right away. And when you leave for the second time

let’s all hope it will be the last.

 

5.

 

The Susquehanna would reveal

what lay around the bend in the beauty and the silence—

the silence of nature, not silent at all.

 

In her night-time I wandered afresh with

the map obscure by my side,

a rough map the size of a place-mat. So many roads,

so little time! I tore along in the purple Galanta

looking for turnoffs, slowed on village streets, places

crowded close to the road like Aaronsburg,

Jerry’s place not far from there where hills

and woods began.

 

Farmland all around, farms out of a story-

book hugely romanticized.  Mennonite,

Amish, or just plain Yanks wearing rain jackets and

opening doors. Any autumn afternoon was sepia-toned

and frightened, like a commercial for insurance.

 

Long ago of course this was all moot or a moat.

Motz built Woodward and Frances, who, like a deity

had many names and situations sacred to her ups and downs

 

returned to be a Motz in the cemetery across the road

from her parlour, her library.

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first published in The Good Bacteria (Vancouver: New Star Books, 2006)

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Sharon Thesen grew up in small towns across Western Canada, and for many years she taught English and Creative Writing at Capilano College in North Vancouver and was an active member of the poetry scene in the Lower Mainland. Since 2003 she has lived in the Central Okanagan and is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at UBC’s Okanagan campus.  She is the editor of two editions of  The New Long Poem Anthology, and was an editor of The Capilano Review and co-editor of Lake: A Journal of Arts and Environment. She has also co-edited, with Ralph Maud, two editions of the correspondence between Charles Olson and Frances Boldereff.  Her recent poetry books include A Pair of Scissors, The Good Bacteria, and Oyama Pink Shale, from House of Anansi in Toronto, and The Receiver, from New Star in Vancouver. 

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