Irene Berchtenbreiter - 1914 - 2006

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Poetry about Irene  
by Gale Parchoma  

a novice painter, who has studied with Irene, and admires both Irene and her work greatly. Gale has two adult daughters, who both write and paint, and who also admire Irene. 

Gale has published poetry, artworks, and short stories in the Shoreline Chapbook Series, since the series began in 2000. In 2001, Gale’s poem, Interior Blizzard Talk, placed third in the Tidepool Prize for poetry competition, and in 2002, the same poem won the Milton Acorn Award for poetry in Canada, and was published in Mekler & Deahl’s After the Eclipse collection. In 2004 and 2005, Gale’s poetry and paintings, along with her daughter’s paintings in 2005, were included in the Her-icane Festival of Women’s Art in Saskatoon.

Currently, Gale works as an instructional designer and is a doctoral candidate at the University of Saskatchewan.

• Family Album, Unabridged

• Three Irenes

Introduction to Family Album, Unabridged by Gale Parchoma

On a Sunday afternoon in Irene’s home, she showed me what was left of a family album that her mother left to her when she died. Her mother had edited the album, tearing out the less easily explained parts of her life, as well as parts of Irene's siblings' lives, including leaving out the existence of one of Irene's three siblings. Irene's sister, Flora, had relayed memories of and stories surrounding the missing pictures.

Family Album, Unabridged

Against the frailty
of faded black Bristol board curled
inside cardboard covers dragging
long-ragged stitches
soft, knotted fingers trace
twisted foil wings that corner
Irene’s  mother’s final revisions—
clawed-away spaces—
erasing…  

Ø   the decade after my father when
she slept with the jockey
and bore their? marooned child
who was at middle-age
discovered forever
inside bowed
to twelve-station stone
shadows

“Somehow, Flora found her.
This note is all.”

Dear Flora and Irene,
Dear sisters, I send you
God’s blessings
and…
                 My regards.

“My lost sister had beautiful handwriting,
don’t you think?”

“Beautiful,” I say, thinking, “So—
the shimmering Madonna
whose down-cast eyes grace
your living room—has always puzzled me…
you, creating that.
No wonder,  “That’s not for sale.’”                        

Ø   Mother’s interim passage back
North to Vancouver
to acknowledge my sixth
—or perhaps, it was seventh—
birthday on the eve of my father’s second
marriage when I was first
hushed into the alley
then called back to hear
she didn’t approve
the way the aunts
cut my hair. 

“They thought she’d come to stop
the wedding but she didn’t
know or care. She
may have needed money.”  

Ø   subsequent fox-boa years
strolled along
a runway arm
in coined showers
with the man who ran
the San Diego Gold Club
banking
high-time fast-lane French champagne on
gamblers’ dreams

The photos that remain place her
at the track cheering
her thoroughbreds and sometimes
in the company of the two
who persisted being
siblings.  

“The first time I visited
these little half-ones in California
I read them a bedtime story…”

“About a Russian boy who shivered in the
 cold visage of winter-white teeth?”

Half-century
cross-border quiet piled
on high cotton candy skies
deep lows, high pressures
eventually breaking along the lines of,   

“Irene, we know you read… so
read aloud life as it might’ve been
fathomed by cast-away kids adrift
on midnight surf of big band
highballs satin dresses black suits
rich schemes and ordinary
lies surfacing
under the ice-
gaze of a once-so-beautiful woman
smiling between
us and the beam
you see…
            Our mother was the wolf.”  

Recurrent acrylic images—black
fur blurred in silver mist—
and bright little boots.

 Gale Parchoma © 2002  
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Introduction to Three Irenes - by Gale Parchoma

Three Irenes, describes three wonderful and diverse women, who happen to share a range of essential human qualities and one name. Obviously, Irene Berchtenbreiter, is the third, the artist.

         I:  Help-Line Irene

At close of her 50’s
a once-so-free, now-buried Irene
twirls her gold ring in a useless effort to dissolve
the barbs and quills that prick the point
where she lost her husband and the day after
when she decided to buy an impossibly bad
Marilyn Monroe wig.
This Irene works the help-line with
an ongoing apology for everything gone
wrong in the world
at the other end, “Of course, my dear,
you’re upset. Who wouldn’t be?” 
And after the shivering
rush of rush
hour traffic and
feeding, sponging
spilled tea from yesterday’s clean sheets… ‘til finally
sprawled on a lumpy couch free
from the impossibly bad Marilyn Monroe
she stares
into an image of The Lady
of Shallot and eats chocolate
chip cookies silently ignoring the ticks 
it takes Codeine to eat
the remains of her dear Mum’s aged pain.

       II: Poet Irene

Surfacing more than a few
decades past adventures at forty-two, there’s a second
sexy, silver Irene
tonight wearing jazzy tie-died tights and reading
wildly
sensual poetry in an off-street café
stirring up
punky young-hearted lovers and tired
‘60’s losers who’ve all
spilled sperm in the dark and freed
eggs in the afternoon.

From the stage 
of the semi-finals’ Van Slam, she reminds
her-once-Aphrodite-self who long ago lost
for a day
dignity in the cause of Warming Up the Pizza Guy 
that beauty is both
a nice butt 
and
synaptic fire. 


III:  Artist Irene

And then there’s the third…
approaching a millennium of surfaces
whose images whisper, “Believe…”
in melting glass heroes clutching
canvas crows, clay villains askew
in purple sunshine,
the Wicked Witch of the West and
a pot-bellied roller-blader together
skimming the Stanley Park Sea Wall sporting
cedar bark boots turning cedar knot wheels
on Sunday afternoon. From the damp
edges of crumbling walls of a wood shed
where she gathers imagined nymphs
dancing inside an axe-man’s shoddy
and rescues these splintered sprites to the rough
boards of her dining room table and in the dim-cast
light from a dust-webbed candelabra
brings their ephemeral grace
to acrylic light alongside
yesterday’s spoiled
goat cheese and olives.

Gale Parchoma © 2002  
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