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Things That Keep and Do Not Change
In Things that Keep and Do Not Change, Musgrave dances on the threshold of ecstasy, madness, rage, and desolation, and goes further, to life beyond the moment of extremity. Yet even as we are caught in the undertow of betrayal and loss, we are buoyed up by a terrible sanity that reveals humour and beauty in the shoals of loneliness and pain. By turns dark, playful, and edgy, these poems are informed by a mature intelligence. This is vintage Musgrave.
104 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 1999
23 people want to read
About the author
Susan Musgrave
78 books44 followersSusan Musgrave is a Canadian poet and children's writer. She was born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents, and currently lives in British Columbia, dividing her time between Sidney and Haida Gwaii.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
Musgrave was married to Stephen Reid, a writer, convicted bank robber and former member of the infamous band of thieves known as the Stopwatch Gang. Their relationship was chronicled in 1999 in the CBC series Life and Times.
She currently teaches creative writing in the University of British Columbia's Optional Residency Master of Fine Arts Program.
Recognizing a life in writing, the Writers' Trust presented Susan Musgrave with the 2014 Matt Cohen Award for her lifetime of work.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 22, 2022
The legless man in the motel room next to me
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman's love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you'd seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn't know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be
next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You'd been
on the phone and I'd turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable - move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail - acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we'd made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body
had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cried. You drove
deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew
at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of the stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad Bag, then tote her to the park.
They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I'd want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!
She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting her privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.
* * *
It's as if you'd gone out
to bury a seed and that seed
had come back to you, promising
more than it once was. Only I bury you
for colder reasons, none
of them having to do with death.
You wished for madness
but your wounds were never deep.
You need to take your grief
backwards into the depths, let it
drink of that element from which
so much life has sprung.
* * *
The man whose wife is afraid
I have fallen in love with him
asks, why do I always lie
whenever I've placed everyone in danger?
He lies naked on their unmade bed
and I place my wedding ring
on the tip of his half-erect penis
before slipping it back
onto the tip of my tongue. I do not care
why he lies. This spring I have become
obsessed with danger, my children
in the wild garden flapping
like birds his wife has attracted
to the feeder. I ask him if he will
remember this day bu I know already
he has forgotten, ear cocked to something
beyond, beating back the growth.
* * *
They had gathered in a field, the wild
woman they called witch strapped to a fence-post,
stripped but for her snow boots of rabbit
and a lemon-coloured scarf. They lit a fire
and watched her burn as their children
poked the meat off her body with sticks.
The men called to me, to warm myself
at her fire; one placed his ox-hide
overcoat on my shoulders, his gloves
of heavy sealskin on my hands. My mother's
eyes told me to be graceful, I had youth,
I had it all. She must have believed I even had
her man, who slipped his hands inside the overcoat
and caressed me as if he had been aroused
by her pain, and the fire nourished him.
Years later I could see my mother's eyes every time
I took a wedge of lemon between my teeth and sucked
the bitterness dry. I felt her scarf tugging at me
as her voice carried high into the star-pitched sky.
The old man who had once been her young lover
said he'd always believed a warm woman was god
as he'd entered me that night. Even where I burned
he still felt the desire to praise her.
* * *
You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money all around you
on the ground, remembering how it felt
when he put it in your hands.
listens to country and western music
all night, an endless song
about going down on his knees
for some faithless woman's love.
I turn in my bed, thinking of you the day
we thought our daughter had gone
missing. The moment
before she disappeared you'd seen a stranger
on the block, the kind who wore
a stained suit from the Sally Ann, the kind
who couldn't know innocence
existed. Our daughter was supposed to be
next door, playing in the fenced yard
with two neighbour boys. You'd been
on the phone and I'd turned my back
on the moment to do something
predictable - move the garden sprinkler,
open the morning mail - acts
that would never again seem so ordinary
once we'd made up our minds
between burial or cremation. Your body
had never felt so alive as you took off
in the car, driving down
every back lane, listening for her
glove-muffled cried. You drove
deeper and deeper into the kind of hell
we reserve for ourselves and never want
our children to have to know. You knew
at this moment she could only be suffering
in the hands of the stranger who would afterwards
stuff her trusting body into a single forest
green Glad Bag, then tote her to the park.
They would find her legs first, dangling
from the swing, shoes on the wrong feet
as usual, arms hanging from the jungle
gym. I'd want to touch, to straighten
her turned-in toes: how clumsily
we lived on this earth!
She was lost only for a moment, locked
in a spare bedroom with the two boys
next door, not wanting her privacy interrupted,
but in that moment when she was gone
forever, death in all his beautiful variety
sang to us, off-key and aching
inside our cheated hearts.
- The Moment, pg. 3-4
* * *
It's as if you'd gone out
to bury a seed and that seed
had come back to you, promising
more than it once was. Only I bury you
for colder reasons, none
of them having to do with death.
You wished for madness
but your wounds were never deep.
You need to take your grief
backwards into the depths, let it
drink of that element from which
so much life has sprung.
- Burying a Friend, pg. 27
* * *
The man whose wife is afraid
I have fallen in love with him
asks, why do I always lie
whenever I've placed everyone in danger?
He lies naked on their unmade bed
and I place my wedding ring
on the tip of his half-erect penis
before slipping it back
onto the tip of my tongue. I do not care
why he lies. This spring I have become
obsessed with danger, my children
in the wild garden flapping
like birds his wife has attracted
to the feeder. I ask him if he will
remember this day bu I know already
he has forgotten, ear cocked to something
beyond, beating back the growth.
- This Day, pg. 53
* * *
They had gathered in a field, the wild
woman they called witch strapped to a fence-post,
stripped but for her snow boots of rabbit
and a lemon-coloured scarf. They lit a fire
and watched her burn as their children
poked the meat off her body with sticks.
The men called to me, to warm myself
at her fire; one placed his ox-hide
overcoat on my shoulders, his gloves
of heavy sealskin on my hands. My mother's
eyes told me to be graceful, I had youth,
I had it all. She must have believed I even had
her man, who slipped his hands inside the overcoat
and caressed me as if he had been aroused
by her pain, and the fire nourished him.
Years later I could see my mother's eyes every time
I took a wedge of lemon between my teeth and sucked
the bitterness dry. I felt her scarf tugging at me
as her voice carried high into the star-pitched sky.
The old man who had once been her young lover
said he'd always believed a warm woman was god
as he'd entered me that night. Even where I burned
he still felt the desire to praise her.
- Praise, pg. 70
* * *
You walk into the white field, squat
between rows of frozen cabbages, almost happy
he is gone. You spread the money all around you
on the ground, remembering how it felt
when he put it in your hands.
- The Sex of Money, pg. 71
October 14, 2023
A considerable roller coaster of lyricism. The first 10 or so poems are about scenarios of the first voice narrator loosing their children in beyond tragic ways. Then we go into the comical (mercifully) after Burring a Friend into Sex After Sixty: for Peter Gzowski and Do Not Make Loon Soup, then into losing a lover who sends letters describing sexual conquests back to the "comical" situation of a bomb threat on a plane out of Ireland, lol... YIKES! Who said poetry needed to be dusty and boring?
March 12, 2023
Musgrave's book plays on the verge between good and bad poetic prose. While I'm still a bit skeptical of it being on the good side, I'm no less impressed about her talent and the collection of epigraphs of all those Stephens.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews