Zigzagzip
Cat o’nine tails whip
The tender night
To splintering applause.
I never see a stone
I never see a stone
Without an inward groan
And feel again the impact of my race.
For should I chance to peer beneath
Its smooth and granite face
I see no other
Than a brother
Come crawling out with looping squirm,
Wet, white and eyeless, fellow worm.
Confession
I know so well what I want to say,
I even know some of the words
And the rhymes that wait to translate it.
And then I begin–and begin–and prevaricate–
I hedge my course with blinded byways
I tunnel under lighted highways
I cannot say “this is how it is
On the flood lit road”
And thrust my pen ping into a reality;
I buck or shy left, I suggest
A graveyard fixed in night
Rather than look an honest hour
In the face, by broad daylight.
If you should die
If you should die
I’d give my flesh
For purpose of worms
And ivory grow my bones
And moss my hair
Until I grew desirable
To death
And you moved over
And we shared the earth
I am so tired
I am so tired I do not think
Sleep in death can rest me
So line my two eternal yards
With softest moss
Then lengths of bone won’t splinter
As they toss
Or pierce their wooden box
To winter
Do not let the children
Pass my way alone
Lest these shaking bones
Rattle out their fright
At waking in the night
Anne Wilkinson was a Canadian poet whose first book first book wasn’t published until she was forty and only published one more before she died in 1961 at the age of fifty. Raised in a somewhat unconventional family and educated by her mother and in several Montessori-influenced schools, she struggled throughout her life between the pull of poetry and the demands of her life as a wife and mother. If a woman “acquires an interest,” she once wrote, “cultivates a talent outside husband, children and house, she automatically is subject to the qualms of divided loyalties.”
As Ingrid Ruthig writes in The Essential Anne Wilkinson, the only easily available collection of her work, Wilkinson’s poetry is “direct in approach, incisive, and unflinching,” something well illustrated in the above poems. Her lines are almost always short: “She did not dress/Except to wear/A word across her groin”, for example, is the opening to “La belle dame sans dormi.” Most of her poems are a page or so long; none is more than four to five.
And they were usually slow in gestation, as is suggested in “Confession” above. She wrote in one diary entry, “The pattern is irritatingly familiar. The first heaven flowing rush–this is it! A week later the desolation of knowing that this not only is not ‘it,’ but is atrocious, has no relation, except for the odd line, to poetry.” Yet she seems to have always had a clear idea of what she wanted to achieve in her poems–which was to avoid what she saw as the two flaws in much of the modern poetry she read. “Those who attempt the simple are thin to the vanishing point,” while most of the other “… are obscure, tortuous, and torturing.”
Heresies: The Complete Poems of Anne Wilkinson (2004), edited by Dean Irvine, is out of stock on Amazon but still seems to be available from the publisher, Véhicule Press, in Montreal. A good selection, if not complete, can be found in The Collected Poems of Anne Wilkinson (1968), edited by A. J. M. Smith, which includes “Four Corners of My World,” a memoir of her childhood that was published shortly after her death in Tamarack Review, a literary journal she helped found. It’s also available in electronic format on the Open Library (link).