on the picket line, National Gallery of Canada, May 2001

red shoes leading us forward, the porcelain-smooth leather dyed and the red not
dying, the efflorescence of sunset flushed through storm clouds glazed overhead

withholding the evaporated red rain of Belarus the wind blew west from Chernobyl
refugees for centuries walking westward in red shoes that looked black in the news

reels our parents watched after the whitest of nightly air raids during the darkest
of days brought to mind by red shoes lined up in single file down a public sidewalk

the shed shoes of Auschwitz or those removed before dance class, pairs of bound
feet called up to the bar, faces turned forward and looking en pointe into the blood

shot depths of the eye, red shoes leading past insomnia or hallucination to stare
down forethought and aftermath, power meant to be balanced and binary, hand

linked with hand rather than toe stepping on toe, the shoes we slip back into
forced to walk in circles in the public square outside the closed museum

where the shoes insist we belong, blood coursing in our interlocking veins, red
shoes leading us forward, umbrellas opening as one against the corrosive rain

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poem from reading by Brenda NISKALA:


ABSENCE

for Anne Szumiglaski (1922-1999)

We need this negative
: white on black
the thundserstorm sudden and gone
the full moon round and hazy
the glowing electric aura
the concave curve at her neck
the place men love to
stroke just above those beloved breasts
where negative space conceives language
breathes poems
births abstract notions of time     space

the release of negative ions
in the shower, in rain, cleanses me
I breathe it in, eager
So why is it not relief I feel
on this balmy night
The ions build and release, the continuous Dance
of life and sex and birth and death and
how they're all related
I must release - mustn't I
negative ions out here, water falling,
not a cloud in the sky
She is the first to embrace
the inevitable, the first to show
what I already know
: negative space doesn't stay, cannot
It will be filled
Even fully positive space
beach balls, tea cozies, and round lush
women all someday fall back
into the curve the spade makes
as the soil is broken

Negative ions dwell too
in the rot of the earth
the very rot that relaxes us
in our postcard gardens

In the sway of hip, of arm
the nodding head and swinging hair of the Dancer
there are nebulas of negatives
Sexy     We follow her in the circle
which naturally disperses     embraces
the freedom     the discipline

So she will understand when I tell her
I will follow you, Dancer
the rest of my life
I will not
And if we need negative space
may it always be a curve
not an absence
A release
not a cause for mourning
An interwoven circle so large
we can only see one side
How it quivers and waves against the horizon
before it disappears

(from Emma's Horizon by Brenda Niskala, pp 6-7)

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