Can

Took a stab at writing a piece after I read this poem by my favourite poet. I'm more a fction reader than a poetry fan but I have an enormous stalker-ish obsession with her and couldn't help myself.

Can

by Juanita Brunk

 

Losing you is a tin can

clinking against a barbed wire fence

in the middle of the night.

A farmer with piss on his pants

tied it there and laid it open with his shotgun

late one Saturday, drunk and with nothing inside

to talk to but the linoleum floor.

Now someone in a neighbouring house can't sleep

and is lying awake listening

to it clatter, not constantly,

but whenever the wind knocks it around.

After awhile it will be morning,

and I can get up, and light will come in,

not the kind that makes the world look large

and possible, but the kind a camera uses

to turn an event into chemicals

and paper, reduced,

so you can file it in a drawer

or frame it: small tin can,

small fence, small farmer.

 

 

 

 

Can

 

   She wakes to the morning sun at its whitest, illuminating her bedroom like the flash of a photograph being taken and she is the subject. It highlights every pore on her skin, every furrow and blemish of her sixty eight years. It sweeps through the windows every day like a predator. It is tangible, thick and moist like the words of an old friend she has grown to accept, the kind of friend one can love and hate in equal measures. The familiar sound of the tin can awakens her to another day. A new day she tells herself but she has lived this same morning a thousand times before and it sweeps her into its arms with an ease she has grown dependent on. Time constantly, dutifully, moves her forward to that same moment again and again.

 

 

   She passes the empty milk bottles stacked up for recycling, dirty dishes piled in the sink, a shopping list so full that another page has been taped to the bottom of it to accommodate its growing abandonment. She turns on the television but cannot stand its artificial light this early in the morning. Images flash at her like warnings. A war in another country, a devastating earthquake, men on her own doorstep being dismembered and thrown in rivers. Sometimes she needs a cup of coffee before she can brave the world through a television screen.

 

 

   Today she feels wearier than usual. That age old aching in the bones some say, an aching in her soul she places it with a half smile; a joke to those who laugh, an understanding to those who nod solemnly in acknowledgement. She goes out onto the back porch overlooking the fields behind the house. Birds glide above her, singing to one another, oblivious to this woman and the dying she is enveloped in. A white cat sits on the fence mesmerised by the blue smoke that curls from the cigarette in her fingertips. She stands there for a long time, long enough to follow the sweeping light of morning as it reveals the garden inch by inch.

 

 

   The morning isn’t quite still, there is a soft breeze blowing from the east but it is warm on her bare shoulders. It has been blowing against the tin can caught on the barbed wire fence around the neighbouring farm. She cannot see the can, there are trees surrounding the farmer’s wall, but she hears it often. Like a tin can in the occasional wind his presence is always there, when she can’t hear the can she forgets it and only when it begins its familiar dance does she remember to appreciate the silence when it stops. Only she never does remember. Sometimes she forgets that he is dead. And like a dream, she cannot fully appreciate what it feels like once it is over. That damned tin can brings her back every time.

 

 

   Aside from the can, the only sound is from the pond at the bottom of the garden, the pond he built all those years ago. One of the many favours a son does for a mother through the guilt of leaving her. He had put a toy shark in it to make her laugh, for when he was a small child he was so fascinated by them he would beg her for a pond in the yard so he could have one as a pet. The trickle of the water always reminds her of his obsession, the hours he would spend reading library books on them, spouting facts again and again until she lost her temper. He was enthralled by their inability to stop moving. If a shark stops it dies, he said to her once, can you imagine the only time when you get to rest is when you begin to die? She has come to realise this is not only true of sharks.

 

 

   Her skin is flecked with grey. She remembers her son when he was a child on that same porch. In her memory he is wearing his favourite blue shorts and has a football tucked under his arm shouting for his father to follow him into the garden to play. But she realises his father left before she bought him those shorts for his eleventh birthday. She wonders what other memories she can’t trust anymore. Is this a curse of becoming old or is it a curse of time? Sometimes, out here in her escape, she forgets what it feels like to be growing old because out here there is no time. Out here, she can freeze it at whatever moment she chooses.

 

 

   It was on this porch that same boy opened his letter of acceptance to university only days after he turned eighteen. She had cried without shame, she was the proudest of all parents. She stayed at home while he changed, grew into a man she did not recognise. She stayed at home, frozen in time. Shortly after he graduated he asked if she would be proud to see him join the army. She nodded and smiled, what else could she do? When on leave after a tour of duty, war weary and old beyond time itself, he asked her if she believed in the war. She had nodded and smiled. “Of course,” she had whispered but this time he knew she was lying.

 

 

   He wrote often. In her favourite letter he wrote about the other boys who would shoot at the endless rats that flooded their camp. They would hang the dead animals on the wall of their barracks like trophies. He wrote of his friends, who mocked him for not wanting to participate. He always felt slightly queasy when someone managed to catch one alive, knowing it would be the subject of torture and entertainment. Instead, he would go outside and shoot at tin cans lined up on the top of a wall that used to be someone’s fence. She had joked that he formed the habit from listening to the farmer shoot cans as a child. She was proud he wasn’t like the rest of them, that he was still the little boy who would bring her injured birds or strays and beg to keep them. The little boy who wanted to keep a pet shark in the back yard.

 

 

   He told her of the boredom they endured; the days of waiting and nights of solitude, wondering if they had been left alone in the dessert. Wondering if time had stopped still and they were trapped in an unmoving land for eternity. Most of the boys he fought with came back in one piece, others with broken bodies but they still came back. Over time she noticed several names he had mentioned in the newspapers as dead or wounded but they were only names to her. Out on the porch she thinks of the numerous, faceless boys out there somewhere watching the same methodical march of the sun light and praying they would see another day.

 

 

   She goes into the kitchen to pour another cup of coffee. It is early afternoon and she is hungry, though not enough to go to the effort of finding something edible in the cupboards. Through the window she can see the farmer who lives by her walking along the dirt path that separates their properties and waves to him through the kitchen window. It was he who would line up tin cans along his wall and shoot at them some nights, a sound she would never get used to. Her husband had fought with him on occasion when he was around, the unseen presence of a shotgun when their son arrived was a constant worry. Everyone knows the farmer is a drunk. Harmless, but a drunk nonetheless.

 

 

  But so was her husband. The farmer soon learnt not to take out his gun on a weekend, not after her husband had confronted him with a stomach full of whiskey. She’d been forced to call the police after he had driven his fists into the famer’s gut one Saturday night. In the years after her husband had left her she had reconciled with the farmer. Maybe out of guilt, maybe out of loneliness, she wasn’t sure. They kept their distance, only a hello here or a good evening there but it was comforting to see him out on the farm from her window at dawn every morning. Somehow he had become the only reliable person in her life.

 

   By now it is almost evening. The sun is moving dutifully towards the west and she is losing light. Tomorrow, when it is in the east again she will follow it out onto the porch and remember her life. In the machinery of night she will continue her dying. There is a knock on the door, Mary, her home care assistant who helps her lose the little independence and dignity she wished to hold on to. At least Mary makes her eat. She stands up and turns her back on the porch, on the fading sun that once resembled life itself. It is now a substitute, like the kind a camera uses. Bright white, illuminating. Blinding.