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  PENGUIN CANADA

  BEYOND THIS DARK HOUSE

  GUY GAVRIEL KAY is the internationally bestselling author of ten novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in Toronto. For more information, visit his website at www.brightweavings.com.

  Also by Guy Gavriel Kay

  The Fionavar Tapestry:

  The Summer Tree

  The Wandering Fire

  The Darkest Road

  Tigana

  A Song for Arbonne

  The Lions of Al-Rassan

  The Sarantine Mosaic:

  Sailing to Sarantium

  Lord of Emperors

  Last Light of the Sun

  Ysabel

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published in a Penguin Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2003

  Published in this edition, 2008

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Guy Gavriel Kay, 2003

  Foreword copyright © Don Coles, 2008

  Author representation: Westwood Creative Artists

  94 Harbord Street, Toronto, Ontario M5S 1G6

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLLICATION

  Kay, Guy Gavriel

  Beyond this dark house / Guy Gavriel Kay.

  Poems.

  Originally published: 2003.

  ISBN 978-0-14-316864-5

  I. Title.

  PS8571.A935B49 2008 C811’.54 C2008-900338-1

  * * *

  ISBN-13: 978-0-14-318735-6

  ISBN-10: 0-14-316864-9

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  for ANDY PATTON

  Volarono anni corti come giorni . . .

  FOREWORD

  After the lines

  If you were here with me tonight

  the sea’s sound might shape itself

  into your name …

  Guy Gavriel Kay adds,

  … I have

  a mild facility that lets me turn

  such phrases

  and I’d like to look at that addition, and that facility, for a minute. The facility is nothing to be uneasy about: it’s the acquired, hard-earned access, on the part of a writer, to those great fields of tact and nuance (based, as they must be, on a wide and still wider experience of literature), which, once entered, need never be left. The thing you don’t want to do with it (i.e., with the facility for, in this poet’s case, coming up with the sound of a sea shaping itself into a beloved’s name: a wholly original, I think, moment in one of the best poems in this collection) is to beach it among near-similar moments where its soft-edged glow will be hard to single out amid all the competing sparkle. And that’s just what too many poets, even the ones who are capable of such moments, never manage to figure out—they just blunder on among the pyrotechnics, and before they know it, they’re doing this all by themselves, since everybody else has gone home rubbing his eyes. Or hers. In this regard, what do we find here? Well, in a poem called “A Northern Man,” which shifts from Greece (“renderings of blue [never before seen]”) to London (“sunshine [that] / … is a pale, soft, small gift”), comes “There was / no stinting, where I have been.” It’s that word stinting that I’m holding up for you to appraise, to know the worth of. The poem was crying out for just such a hard-scrabble, tight-bitten sound there, the “renderings of blue” needed it as much as the “pale, soft, small gift” needed it—and right on its cue, of course, there it was. How nice it would be if, among the profusion of melting constellations that keep on, year after year, coming at us from their publishers, a few other poets would learn how to respond to this kind of cry, this need.

  It’s what I’ve been admiring for years in Kay’s novels, where time and again he sets his characters up for what’s surely, we at first think, going to be a rerun of some welltravelled mythic tale of olden tyme—and then, by virtue of, let’s say, his facility, the writer lifts them into an astonishing newness, bringing off scenes that I, an ungenerous, blade-between-his-teeth critic if there ever was one, am lifted up by as I recognize that this scene that I had glimpsed coming and was already regretting the glimpse, is, bon Dieu, against all my tired certainties, convincing, substantial, very often beautiful, moving, mind-halting. There’s a passage in The Last Light of the Sun (it’s the one where a just-slain prince is glimpsed riding his horse across a stream in the company of a fairy queen and her retinue—i.e., everything that you might think would spell disaster for the twenty-first-century writer foolhardy enough to attempt it) that I defy you to read without getting into the face-dampening thing we critics try hard to steer clear of. I don’t know another writer in this country who could have managed those three or four pages. Beyond This Dark House lives off poems that come from the same unique sensibility.

  —Don Coles

  BEYOND THIS

  DARK HOUSE

  Night Drive: Elegy

  Driving through Winnipeg this autumn

  twilight, a sensation has lodged

  somewhere behind my breastbone

  (impossible to be more precise).

  It is at once a lightness and a weight,

  press of memory and a feeling

  as if tonight has insufficient

  gravity to keep me from

  drifting back, so many

  long years after leaving here.

  Quiet streets, the slowly darkening

  sky (it can take a while). I turn

  on Waterloo and stop outside the house

  where we first lived. No curtains drawn

  on the living room windows. I can see

  into the past, almost. The w
illow in front

  is very tall now. My parents planted it.

  We played football on this lawn

  (and the next one down, and next,

  as we grew older, needed room to run).

  Used the willow sapling when cutting

  pass patterns, slicing in front of it

  to shake a defender. I hear

  my mother from the porch, ‘Don’t

  break the tree!’ A car approaches,

  slows, someone looks at me

  in the gathering night, moves on.

  So do I, gliding a little further

  to Mathers Bay, where we’d race

  our bikes, the finish line

  right at the intersection,

  so we’d be flying flat-out

  and sometimes have to brake

  in a squeal and sideways skid

  (black tire marks on the road)

  if a car was coming east.

  I wouldn’t let my sons do that today.

  The houses along the bay,

  down to the curve and back

  up the other side, were homes of friends

  or girls I longed for, and their

  parents—men and women mostly

  dead now. Each address marks

  a grave. Ghosts water the night

  lawns, rake leaves under stars,

  look up as I coast by

  and then turn away, as if politely,

  not to seem to stare as this rented car

  stops again, this time outside

  our second home, the one

  my parents built when I was nine.

  I am heavy and light tonight,

  entangled and drifting, both

  at once. The city

  is so full of my father.

  I used to ride with him to Saturday

  morning rounds at the hospital.

  Proud, anxious not to show it (Why

  was that? Did he know?) as we’d step

  off the elevator and onto a post-op ward.

  I’d read a book by the nursing station

  then cross the street to the

  Salibury House (long gone now)

  and order two sandwiches, a milkshake

  and a coffee, but only at the exact

  minute he’d told me to. And he’d

  arrive from his last patient just

  as the waitress set the food in front of me.

  I’m guessing he’d watch from the window

  or door, to time it so exactly, for his son.

  East on Mathers now, imagining kids

  on bikes careening into my path forty

  years ago. Waverley, and south. I’d

  hitchhike this route to campus, winter

  mornings, dreaming of away, anywhere

  away. My parents had their first

  date at a nightclub out here on

  Pembina Highway. My father just back

  from overseas. She thought he was

  phony-British, using words like ‘chap’

  and ‘bloody,’ all night long. Still, (she’d

  later tell her sons), that night she

  went home to Enniskillen Avenue and woke

  her mother. Sat on the edge of the bed and said

  she thought she’d met a man she could love.

  We never tired of that story.

  Our pretty mother, barely into her twenties,

  her immediate certainty, the dashing

  image of our father, home from away,

  winning a woman for himself.

  The city’s quiet on a Thursday night.

  The forecast was rain but the sky’s been clear,

  the air cooling down; football

  games and burning leaves. Back north now,

  on what seems to have become

  a night drive entirely unplanned. I steer

  with one hand at twelve o’clock and

  an elbow out the open window.

  The downtown ‘Y’ has been demolished.

  My Uncle Jack would take me there

  on Sunday mornings for a steam and

  a swim. Such a sweet man. White hair

  my father always joked of envying, ruefully

  shaking his head in admiration. Dad’s

  was a duller, white-grey, nondescript. Except,

  it seems, the morning of the day he was

  killed in Florida, my mother said to

  him over breakfast, ‘Sam, look at your

  hair! It’s white as Jack’s!’ Salt water,

  winter sun, had bleached it bright.

  I imagine my father surprised

  and pleased, and thinking of his brother

  when he took that last walk

  with the dog along the coastal highway

  in too much twilight.

  There seems to be no crossing of streets

  tonight where I can avoid

  hitting my father or myself. Wellington

  Crescent now, west towards the park

  where I first kissed some girls, broke up

  with others, dreamed of going away. My father

  took a troopship to England in the

  last year of the war, stayed over there

  in Scotland for five years, came back,

  married, had three sons.

  He taught each of us to catch a football, lost

  deliberately (to each of us) in table tennis,

  grimacing elaborately at a drive mis-hit

  into the net, not fooling anyone. He’d look

  shocked, shocked when we accused him

  of letting us win, as if the idea

  couldn’t have even crossed his mind.

  He quizzed me before high school tests,

  tsking with dismay at wrong answers

  that were clear evidence of insufficient

  application. He worked so hard.

  I think we knew that, even very young,

  but still assumed he’d have infinite time

  and room for us. I wince, tonight, remembering

  the absolute sureness of that. How did he

  elicit so much certainty? I wonder

  if he ever looked for and found

  clear signs of his own nature in

  three very different sons,

  or if that kind of thinking

  required too much vanity.

  I liked coming home from a downtown

  appointment with him. Walking to

  the Mall Medical Building, waiting

  in the doctors’ lounge, listening to the

  talk of football and politics, grabbing

  myself a Coke from the little fridge, and then

  the feel of the room altering as he came in,

  loosening his tie, hanging up the white coat,

  raising an eyebrow at my soft drink

  before dinner. The drive back home,

  just the two of us, end of a work day. He’d steer

  with one hand at twelve o’clock and

  an elbow out the open window. No one

  ever born had hands I’d ever rather feel

  enclosing mine. Then. Now. The day

  the son we named for him was born.

  If it was summer, turning west on Grant,

  the sunlight would be on us. We’d put

  the visors down. (I was too short for that

  to help, but copied him.) Or it might have been

  darker, cooler, under a prairie sky

  in a twilight like the one that started

  and compels these images,

  if it was autumn then, as it is now,

  above this ground of memories.

  Heaviness, and that so-strange

  sense of weightlessness. I thought,

  before, I couldn’t locate these feelings

  precisely within myself. Not so,

  in the end. They reside, together,

  anywhere my father was in this city

  and in me, which is pretty much

&nbs
p; everywhere, and he’s been

  dead too many years now already,

  with more years and more years

  and more long years of being gone

  still to come.

  PART

  ONE

  Crystals

  Diamonds overhead.

  We walk on crystals

  sharp as longing.

  When you touched me

  I thought my heart

  would crash through

  my breastbone to lie,

  pulsing and impossible,

  on your bed. A screen

  door banged across

  the lane instead.

  We heard a late car

  on the street. Summer,

  that was. I wanted

  the sea, an island, more.

  You wanted tenderness.

  I felt the bone and

  cartilage that held

  my heart. Dreamed

  of crystals,

  sharper, even.

  No Strings

  He will not let himself

  need her. He has too far to go

  he says, no strings.

  Her hair that first afternoon

  was afire with sunlight.

  I thought it would melt the snow.

  Walked home in winter twilight,

  her name beginning in my head.

  In dreams he moves along

  distant beaches in fierce solitude.

  He thrills to the tight hum

  of the right words coming.

  She writes, ‘Convent education doesn’t

  make a hedonist. I must make this person

  over in my own image.’ I wish

  she were with me tonight.

  She called, very late, just to

  whisper a good night that ran

  along the humming wires

  stretched from pole to pole

  over the silver-white snow

  and under the early spring stars

  to us. No strings. Her hair.

  Other Women, And You

  I’ve written good bye songs

  for other women.

  Told how my resolve

  was loosened with their hair.

  Not for you. No poem

  about your blue eyes

  luring me from the blue

  seas of Greece.

  Too deep the knife

  you have become.