Imprint by Melissa Bull
After Gillian Sze
The poet Gillian Sze is a friend of mine. Gillian is from Winnipeg but has lived in Montreal a long time. We met in Montreal years ago when Ann Ward and Sasha Manoli ran a chapbook press called WithWords, and one spring, in 2008 or 2009, they published both of us.
Gillian’s incredibly prolific. I respect Gillian’s work for its own sake and I also very much admire her work ethic. I couldn’t pick a favourite book or poem of hers, but I was moved by “Benison,” a poem from her 2014 collection Peeling Rambutan. A prose poem, “Benison” is spare and nuanced. Clever, evocative, and loving. It’s about a grandmother, food, aphorisms, kitchens. An excerpt: “You come to me in mid-bite. A slice of peach at the tongue. In your hand is a red envelope stuffed with folded Malaysian banknotes. Beneath your silver gaze, you murmur lowercase blessings. On the stove, succulent lily bulbs are tossed into the simmer.”
For After You, I thought a lot about this poem. It reminded me of my own grandmother, my father’s mother, Hilda. I opened one of my grandmother’s cookbooks and thought I might do something with a recipe. But what came to me was the memory of an egg I found, once, when I was visiting her in Ontario. And I started to write about that. I didn’t know enough about my grandmother to know any sayings she might have spoken. Instead, I incorporated a few lines from a hymn my father always told me was her favourite—"All Things Bright and Beautiful.“
I’m not sure what I’ve made is even a poem. If it is, it sides more heavily on the prose of a prose poem than the poem of it.
But it’s nice to spend some time with these memories, and with Gillian’s poetry, and to be folded into this very tender project.
Imprint
I spied a single egg, still warm, in a haystack at Pioneer Village. My father slipped it into his jacket pocket. I worried it would break on the drive back but it didn’t. He handed the egg to my grandmother, who scrambled me a sandwich for early lunch. My grandmother might have said something about the rain holding off. The radio was on. Baseball. Cardinals. There were two stained-glass birds in the kitchen window. A bluebird. A cardinal.
I kept the bluebird a long time. Here and there its yellow beak and tiny wing broke off and the bluebird became a sliver; a cobalt chard. I left it glinting and twisting on its line when I emigrated. A moulted quill. An emptied nest. (Echo, echo, echo we shouted into the staircase.) My memory of my grandmother weathers tokens bright and beautiful. Even here. Hatched all these kitchens later. In this country of strange rooks and shrill chimneytop caws. My memory of her love brightens the low, bleached skies.