Wedlock
Flesh binds us, makes us one
And yet in each alone
I hear the battle of the bone:
A thousand ancestors have won.
And we, so joined in flesh
Are prisoned yet
As soul alone must thresh
In body’s net;
And our two souls so left
Achieve no unity:
We are each one bereft and weeping inwardly.
Widow
No longer any man needs me
nor is the dark night of love
coupled
But the body is relentless, knows
its need
must satisfy itself without the seed
must shake in dreams, fly up the stairs
backwards.
In the open box in the attic
a head lies, set sideways.
This head for this body is severed.
The Unquiet Bed
The woman I am
is not what you see
I’m not just bones
and crockery
the woman I am
knew love and hate
hating the chains
that parents make
longing that love
might set men free
yet hold them fast
in loyalty
the woman I am
is not what you see
move over love
make room for me
Dorothy Livesay was attending a seminar in London in early 1959 when her husband Duncan died at their home in Vancouver, Canada. In her memoir, Journey with My Selves, she recalled how she learned of his death:
In the narrow hallway of the club was a rack for letters and a bulletin board. I barely glanced there when I noticed a thin blue envelope with my name on it. Tearing it open, I read, “Father passed away last night, February 12. Love, Peter.”
I stood in the hall, shaking. Instead of going upstairs to my room, I went outside again, stumbling along into the twilight street. The only words that would come to me were, “I’m free … I’m free …”
[After the funeral] … In one week’s time we sold the house on Grand Boulevard. I flew back, into the arms of London. There, at the end of 1959, I was heading for my fiftieth birthday. What lay ahead was a new life in Paris, with UNESCO. Then Lusaka.
I had had four hoods: childhood, girlhood, womanhood and motherhood. Now there were two more waiting: widowhood and selfhood.
“Wedlock” was written before Duncan’s death, “Widow” and “The Unquiet Bed” after.
Dorothy Livesay’s Collected Poems: the Two Seasons is available on the Open Library: Link.
Livesay wrote a lot of poems and not all were as effective as these. But read through the collected poems and you’ll keep hitting ones that just explode on the page like a landmine.
So impressed by “The Unquiet Death,” I could not stop exclaiming over its power, just “Wow, wow, wow, how great it is,” after finishing it. Reading it over and over again. I had never heard of this woman, and now I have to read more of her life and her poetry. She is strong.