The Education of

His sister Jane was nearest the green couch when its phone rang

And she jumped at it to shout at it: "I listen to CHUM!"

How was he to know, back then, she was the best of all?

The couch itself he burned a hole in it a while later

With a pointy thing, a burin, that was made for burning wood

But his brain said: "Burn it" and so he did. His brother Pablo

And his sister Jane knew he'd done it.

He really should thank them both, you know, thank them for putting up

With a retard like himself, all through nineteen sixty-eight to

Nineteen seventy-four, when he pissed the bed every night,

And Pablo, and Jane, and David, they took it for what it was:

They had a brother, meaning him, who was exuberantly pissy.

 

Can any memory be happy? They had bunk beds, and Pablo

Was on the top one. He made his models of automobiles

And they walked to School. Along Arden and to Adelaide,

To Harmony Road, their schools, to the dull schools in which

No-one has thought to murder everyone, a place which has not now,

In retrospect, become bloodbaths.

 

They were sure that fortune would come, if only they said:

"I listen to CHUM" to the telephone whenever it rang.

They lived in a pre-organized universe, Arden Drive,

They thought there were killer satellites overhead

And they were all so stupid, David, Pablo, Jane, him,

When, he couldn't talk about it, but he was thinking

That every part of the whole universe would come apart

Some day, nothing would cohere: he'd read about that in Omni.

 

And the teachers at the first school, who were they?

Mrs. Zimmerman taught something, and who else taught there?

One of them looked really pretty to him, it seems likely

She taught language: spelling, comprehension, grammar,

From the simplest materials (though he remembered

They were given Moonfleet to read: Moonfleet, of all things!)

There was a French teacher there too, and they all

Had to learn something of the language, leastwise to him.

His brother came home from school one day and said:

"We're learning the times tables," and the boy tried

To imagine what these exotic things looked likw, they were tables;

He had to look it up right away and understand them.

 

Bullies, too, though he can't remember their names,

Some real sadists were of his age and lived in that area,

And they did some mean things to him sometimes:

They shoved fibreglass down the back of his shirt

And he's sure there's still some fibreglass

Back there, because he can feel late at night, and

Not only when he's drunk, it's all the time

When pain is all that can be heard.

 

He taught himself how to ride a bicycle, formerly his brother's,

(His father was probably too drunk that Saturday),

By rolling down the gentle slope out front, walking

Back to the top, and over and over until he had balance.

The bicycle was orange and unadorned, put cards in spokes

Did wonders for its self-presentation, ticktickticktick,

Where ever he felt like being obnoxious to anyone nearby.

It was a kind of a way to get an education, testing the limits

Of everyone who came within earshot. In any case, it was

Much quieter than a lawnmower, so it was a gentle test.

 

The French teacher (who was Belgian, and probably a refugee,

He realized much later) told them about learning English

In her country (namely, Belgium): To make how to make a 'th' sound,

They would put potatoes in their mouths to get the feel

Of the foreign sound, 'th', 'th', 'th', and she nearly

Got it out of her, though it did sound a bit weird and forced

When she talked English. There was a whole history he didn't

Know, all he has were fragments of the past, like a jigsaw

Puzzle that had lost its illustrative cover. The pieces

Fit, he knew they had to fit, he was conscious of that.

 

Some clues were at home. His father had been a warrior.

One afternoon, snooping around, he found in his father's

Desk (yes he was that much of a snoop) an identity card

That wasn't his father's identity card; in fact, it was German,

And it had a soldier's picture on it, a German soldier's,

And the text was all in German. Also, in the folded book

Was a black and white photograph of a girl, the girlfriend

(It seemed pretty certain) of the German soldier. He pieced

All these facts together, that his father had taken it off of a corpse,

The corpse of a German he'd killed somewhere in Europe.

He regretted not having asked any bit of it ever.

 

The world was wide, and he only knew some odd square miles.

Going with his mother to the public library was a treat,

Though they had a limit of five books at a time.

Then there was a used book store (Morgan Self) nearby, two blocks away,

Where you could exchange books not to be found in the library, for other books likewise

Not to be found in the library: if you gave Morgan two books, you could

Get one you hadn't read yet: mostly horror novels,

By James Herbert or English people like James Herbert: Pan books, the Pan Books of Horror Stories volumes 1 to 5 or so,

And the more morbid the better: All too shocking for a

Public library.

 

And, in an effort to expand the classroom,

He almost innocently got his teacher to read a couple pages

Of 'The Survivor,' out loud, to encourage reading widely.

She got to the little sex scene, and cried out: "Oh, I can't

Read this," and all the kids laughed because of his 'prank.'

 

On the hammock out back on weekend afternoons he'd pile

Up comics and so on, on his tummy, and read them,

but eventually he'd simply fall asleep. In the outdoors,

Spreading for miles, there were vast fields, and a burned-out silo

From a long-gone farm, with dirt paths for bicycles

Created from use, through the sandy soil surrounding.

(Makes you understand why the farm failed long-gone.)

A concrete silo open to the sky, and inside he knew

That bad things took place there, some nights, with teens,

But for some reason he never went there at night to do ...

Whatever it was. It was drugs and sex and booze, sure,

As he later deduced, but for some reason he never went.

 

And, on that topic, down near the back fence of the school,

The subject of sexual intercourse came up in conversation.

One trustworthy lad told him how dogs managed to have sex.

"They stand up, and they put their paws together; it's like dancing.

Then they get closer and closer together until his penis

Goes into her vagina. That's how dogs do it. I've seen it."

The explanation was believed, because the lad was earthy,

And he knew the ways of the violent world more than most.

Our hero was well on his way to understand what made the world.

 

For surely there was a light, and there was a star,

And everything could be explained by a wise teacher;

The ideas that glowed and summarized everything else

Would shed its light upon his rather dreary head.

 

He learned about music, too, how to read music, he knew how

To read music almost intuitively, at least the basics of it.

It was rhythm, and the tones moved up when the circles went up,

And while he didn't understand key signatures and the circle

Still he could make it out, and read along in the scores.

In California, aet. 12, his great-aunt had an electric organ

And a book of familiar songs, and he worked on plucking out

The melody of 'Here Comes the Sun' and other popular favorites.

 

Musically, he started with maybe the first single he ever bought

Which could have been 'Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves' which

Undoubtedly made him want to know what the words really meant;

Plus at about that time he listened to 'Hair' a lot,

And he even made something of a puppet show for his mother,

Performed from behind a clothes hamper with the record playing

On the little orange player ... but his mother was not impressed.

She had laundry to do.... She must have known this kid of hers

Didn't understand at all what it was about, and was merely

Latching onto radio music like 'The Age of Aquarius' and

'Let the Sun Shine In' by the 5th Dimension. (And about

That time, 1971, she gave him a shirt with a zipper up near

The top, and suspended from the slider, was ... a peace sign!)

The kid was appropriately naïve, appropriate for his age,

And maybe he wasn't that much different from other kids everywhere,

But there was something special about this kid, really special!

 

He learned about nature, not only, as I already said, because

He was surrounded by it on three sides, but also because

He found himself in certain Muskoka Region cottages by choice

Or chance, i.e. friends of his parents, his aunt and uncle,

A rented place for just the family, or, at times, the cottage

Of his best friend (of that more later, if he lets me tell).

Imagine being nine years old, set loose in the woods,

With a lake nearby to swim in, and the feeling of old blankets

(Though often with a rubber mat between mattress and sheets,

Put there by someone in contact with his mother, of course,

To prevent the mattress from becoming stained with piss)

On the beds, the sounds of 'critters' somewhere out the window,

And sometimes a great storm would come, once or twice a year,

And someone'd turn off the lights and they'd watch the light show.

 

The big wide world! (He didn't think that at the time,

Fifty years later, though, he imagined himself saying that;

All he's told me must be in the end imaginary;

There's nothing like a bad poet running over the past.)

 

And during the day there would be strangers to meet; they

Were, of course, from other cottages, and he got to know the kinds

Of ideas adults dealt with, because there was no way to get away.

One night, playing cards with his friend, his parents,

And two friends of his parents, the subject turned to education,

Namely, sex education: and the woman friend was describing hearing

Words from a classroom: she was an administrator or something:

"Boys and girls, this is a diaphragm," and because he understood

Nothing, thinking it was a rather inoffensive body part,

And because he couldn't rightly ask what the usage of the word was,

He stored it away in his mind, since it was obviously taboo

And was therefore an interesting word, to be explored later on.

 

Also, all these places were a little bit frightening.

There were bears out there in the woods, and they were hungry!

If you didn't watch out, your next trip to the outhouse

Could be your last! It was so dark, so outside of the suburb

Street-lamp-lit world that once a month you couldn't see a thing

In the night, just blackness everywhere, and no nightlights

Were ever available. The mornings were strangely cold, though

That was probably because everyone got out of bed earlier.

 

Strange people everywhere around, and sometimes he'd see them

In bathing suits even, with all their imperfections or perfections,

Some with giant birthmarks on their shoulders, some rolls of fat

Here there and everywhere, and it was a learning of humanity

In general, not only his little enclave of mostly chosen

Folks; it was, in general, a widening of the world to include

Not just two or three miles around, but rather two or three hundred,

Like world travellers (even though he later understood

That those places were almost exactly like the place he was from.

So it was both an expansion and a contraction, like much else.)

 

There was a lot to learn, and there was no structure to it:

Every day would arrive something new and (obviously) unforeseen,

Like a girl named Kim Wilson, a little girl, and they were both in

The first grade; of course they were never in love: rather,

It was a matter or her being terribly pretty (and though they

Knew one another for ten years more, they never once got

Involved: strange, that), and he was allowed to go to her house,

Which was down the street and over and in a dead-end court.

 

Just a couple children, seven years old and plus and minus one.

Kim had a funny-looking brother, a younger brother, who couldn't

Talk much even though he was only two years younger: he didn't

Understand that the kid had Down's Syndrome, he only understood

That he was pretty big and he couldn't play with them because....

He didn't know the because, and it was only later he understood.

 

One day, at Kim's house, he got blamed by Kim about turning

On the faucet in the basement, and flooding the basement,

And though he protested, saying he didn't even know where

The faucet was, the blame stuck, and it never washed off.

(Of course, we know who turned on the faucet, and why,

But I figure some families have to go through a bit of delusion.)

 

Which turns his mind to another memory, of about that same period,

At the cottage of his friend; he got accused by his friend

Of clogging the indoor toilet with toilet paper, which wasn't

True; he never figured out who'd done it, and the blame stuck,

But blame gets forgotten pretty quickly since there's only so

Many minutes to live and always there's other reasons to

Go through the routine of shouldering blame to get along to get along.

What he figured, as he conjectures today, was that sometimes

The truth cannot be admitted, and someone nearby has to take

Responsibility, someone for whom the cost is very much lesser.

It was the way things worked, and nothing would ever change that.

 

The whole family loaded into a brown station wagon one summer

And drove across North America, summer of '70, to California.

His mother's parents loaded the car with daily presents, like

An advent calendar, so in the back of the station wagon

He and his siblings tumbled around on the interstates playing

With plastics and games. Mother's mother had a sister there,

And thus mother had at least one cousin there, and when he got

Out of the car he went up to his great-aunt and declared:

"I'm five!" (He heard about this some years later, having had

The childhood amnesia because of all the sense perceptions

Flooding in from all sides.) They went to Disneyland, and the

Grand Canyon, and he swam along with everyone else in the ocean.

 

How many of these people not seen much of again are still here?

Whatever happened to the class of whatever time you want to say?

Statistically, some or many must be dead by now, but which ones?

And how do you think they died? How many finally killed themselves?

 

Mad Magazine. He read all the issues. Archie comics. He read those.

Their views of the world he found to be much like his own.

There's nothing some positive reinforcement won't do!

In some ways he was in a very lonely world, and he wanted solitude,

Perhaps, reading books, solving puzzles out of Dell magazines,

Plastic models, plenty of those, though thrown together very

Sloppily. (He was emulating his older brother here, who had built

A magnificent Man-o'-war from a wooden kit, with stitched sails,

But he himself had almost no skill or patience.)

 

And sometimes when no-one was around he'd pull out a board game,

Land Grab, Risk, sometimes Monopoly, and he'd play all four sides

Of the stiff square board, all about chance the situation was,

But there was some kind of a pattern in the chaos of it all,

And likewise in a Hilroy notebook he once took down encyclopedia headings,

Following from reference to reference to see how it all connected.

Each concept lead to other concepts and around and around,

Like a web cast over everything, through perhaps only internally,

(He wasn't sure which it was at all,) as he'd strung string from

Tack to tack all around his room, making it impossible to cross.

There was definitely a pattern to be found in all he noticed,

And he was drawn for some reason to discover what they were.

 

Oh, this education business! There's no point to trying to sort

Out any chronological order anymore; each route moved at its own pace,

Intersecting in places as interesting as a string dangling

From another string. The school got a portable, and a girl died

One rainy night in Baker Park. She was bicycling down the slope

To the bridge and she missed the bridge and smashed up

In the stream, and there were still a few bloody marks on a rock.

He'd gone down to see it, along with a couple friends: it was true.

Blood on a rock, and a girl was dead, but none of his fellows

Knew who the girl was, because she was older and went to a

Different school.

 

They had a black mutt in the house, something of

A beagle, but not coloured like a beagle. The dog was named

Cookie. The dog had to be walked, or else in the back yard there

Would be turds all over the place. Yes, and they had a swimming

Pool: his father'd said: "It was either get a cottage or a

Swimming pool: We chose the latter." (Which had been rather a

Mistake, considering what cottage values were fifty years later.)

He could swim, he thought well at that, and it was only in a regatta

That he discovered he wasn't really that good after all.

 

On Boxing Day, they would visit his grandmother, his father's

Mother, who lived in a row house somewhere in Toronto. She had

Two young adults living with her, but he never quite figured out

Who they were, or if they were related to him at all.

I think one of us has covered this territory before, so I

Won't get into explaining who these two, or three, young people were.

Well, okay, I changed my mind. They were cousins of his, and they

Would have been acknowledged save for the fact that they were

The children of his father's sister, who had died some time

Between 1965 and 1970, in a car crash involving no other car,

If you can get the meaning I am hinting at; it was a forbidden

Subject, not to be talked about during the car rides from Oshawa

To Toronto: besides, he was just a kid, and some matters didn't

Matter to him very much or even at all. Still, he's got some cousins

Out there in the world, who knows who they are? What’s their names?

Where are they? Are they dead, are they living? The children of

Her aunt Joy, whom he'd never met, apparently, dead on some road

Probably not far from the DVP.

 

On boxing day, they would visit

His grandmother, who was a redhead, like he was, the cousin

Of Bessie Burdock, MP, from Liverpool, or maybe second or third cousin,

Who famously said to Winston Churchill he was drunk and he

Called her ugly, which she was, indeed, fat and Labour,

But we're getting way off topic here, he loved her, this

Bizarre British woman, his grandmother, with her poodle, Pierre,

That he walked in some place, when he was nine, somewhere

Not far from the DVP.

 

Naturally, and logically, we all went

Through what I'm talking about, here, in this phony poem.

You! You! You! Had a childhood, a time of mystery. A time during which

Language doesn’t describe it. There's no-one to tell you that

What you think is true is not true. Back to the track. 1970.

Kindergarten. Kim, John Waukaluk, James Deakin. He thinks:

Man, John Waukaluk should get a whole Canto to himself.

His father fled the Communist murderers and went to Detroit

(How did he manage that? [Oh, but how could a kid get

The geopolitics?]) So this very Ukrainian man escaped the Russians

And got to Detroit, Michigan, and married a very American girl,

Who was gruff, in the kitchen, insulting her husband,

 

And there's no way to communicate what it was like!

Fifty fucking years ago, a half a century, how can it be

True? He's sitting now listening to Emmylou Harris records:

How can he parse himself into existence? He has a tense.

The present tense. He is now.

 

 Kim Wilson, and she was pretty

Then and she's probably even more pretty now. He still

Loves her; if anyone knows her, let him know. I have his email.

 

Yes, maybe I was a kid a lot like this John guy. He had

A bully yelling: "Kiss her! Kiss her!" because, because,

There's no way to explain the cruelty little kids have;

Is it the way they're raised? Did they all have rotten parents?

There were indeed more than a few rotten parents around in that

Industry town. Maybe there's something about industry towns that

Attracts rotten people, maybe with get-rich-quick schemes

All of them, a brutal place altogether, and he had to live in it.

 

Another girl he met later, perhaps two or three years later, in

The fifth or sixth grade, who was a very sporty girl, and once

They'd come to a kind of maturity, in a house that was being built,

She fluttered a note down to him from a second floor.

He missed seeing noticing its fall, and she had to prompt him

To pick it up. The note read: "Wanna make out?" It was obviously

Prepared beforehand, it was so neatly written. So, they gave it

A shot, even though it was very cold. They didn't know what

They were doing, but they were learning. Education doesn't stop

When you leave school-age, but it certainly slows down in

Intensity. They played mommy and daddy, and she was very curious.

It got to the point, a couple years later, they stuck hands down

Pants to find out what was different down there, and the difference

They found. That was another cold day. In retrospect, winter

Was the time for them to play together like that. Maybe she went

Away during the summer: fifty years later, he can't quite recall.

 

The whole thing broke off unexpectedly, by proxy, at that.

He had done something, and she didn't want to talk to him again.

He didn't even wonder why. He didn't know what he'd done.

He couldn't find any reason to pursue her. Yes, he was cruel,

He learned then, and through his life it always surprised him,

A little. So he wasn't that nice after all, which was true.

 

A little learning goes a long way, about oneself mainly,

The surprising discovery of the shapes of humanity

That don't go along with whatever you're taught in books:

How different it was from anything else, not even Shakespeare's.

 

One summer day, his grandmother, his father's mother, called

The house on Arden Drive, wondering if he was all right, for she'd

Dreamed about him the night before: "He dived into the pool,

And he didn't come up. So, I want to know he's all right."

Well, as a matter of fact, he wasn't all right: The previous day,

With John Garry in John Garry's backyard, he'd been standing

In the wrong place when John Garry had swung his father's golfclub

Behind himself, which was where he was standing. The club hit him

Full in the face, knocked him down, then he heard himself screaming.

All sorts of blood vessels in his cheek burst, he tasted blood,

And his ears were ringing. His face was all puffed out on one side

For the rest of the summer, and he still has an scar on the inside

Of his left cheek. The idea was that if the club had hit him

A couple inches higher up, he would have died. His grandmother

Seemed to have had something of a communication through beyond,

But he never quite believed it, but still the tale is there,

And maybe someone remembers it aside from himself. It proved,

In any case, that Hamlet was right in what he said to Horatio.

 

He came across a class picture recently, and it was funny,

Because, judged objectively, it looked composed of circus freaks,

Like something Francis Bacon might have come up with if he'd been

A class portraitist: Everyone looked stunned, and himself no less so,

For he was cringing in something like fear of photography.

The individual portrait of himself is no less ghastly,

For there he sat, his eyes pitched open and no smile on his face,

Some things can't be helped, and he must have been going through

Troubles at home (which he recalls having been ever-present),

And he was probably a cause of the troubles, being as he was

Such a complete doofus, with terrible habits, and they had no hope

For him.

 

       He'd watch tv bingo, to watch the board as the numbers

Lit up: he'd be looking for patterns in how they connected into

Islands that joined and he'd try to find something mathematical

In how they started alone, then joined together with other numbers.

How did the board work? What was the process of joining together?

He wanted to know, he always wanted to know, it was like a sickness,

Wanting to know. (A widespread sickness, bred in the genes, but

Sometimes these blasted genes go a bit too far, don't you think?)

 

Other matters have been forgotten, but there are things remembered.

The smell of sheets, how the clothesdryer would hop around,

The rumble of the furnace way back in the basement, the basement's

Flimsy fake walls, the shag carpet down there in David's room,

The ice grinder attached to the staircase, his father's ice cream

Bucket, where the brooms hung, where the windows were,

The dining room with people around it, the little porch beyond,

The swimming pool, the bookcase with the radio on it,

The chairs with their wicker seats and off to one side,

The den, in which he'd once come across a science article about

Topology, in which the basics were laid out: a doughnut is

A torus, and since a torus can be deformed in any way

And still retain its torus-nature, and since the human body

Is a torus, in that the alimentary canal is the hole in the torus,

It can be said that we are no different from doughnuts. And

For two days he told everyone he ran into: "We're doughnuts!

We're no different from doughnuts, and they're no different from us!"