None of this Belongs to Me

Before we had to move, I had heard of Ellie Sawatzky’s debut poetry collection None of This Belongs to Me (Nightwood Editions, 2021) and was intrigued by the title. 

I interpreted it like a confession, and I sensed sadness and loss.

When I visited Toronto in May right after the landlord put “our” house in Vancouver up for sale, that house was almost the only thing on my mind. Language is slippery. It was our house but it was also not ours. It took visiting Toronto to write a poem about what we were losing in Vancouver. The idea of ownership (what actually belongs to me? what can I call mine?) haunted me. Sawatzky’s title returned. None of this belongs to me.

When I heard she was giving a poetry reading at Massy Arts this past September, I was determined to go and finally buy the book from the author herself (provided I liked what I heard, and I did).

In her collection, I found coming-of-age poems, ex-boyfriend poems, Kenora (Ontario) poems where the author grew up, Vancouver poems where the author lives, vacation poems, and work poems.

My favourite section of the book (where the book’s title comes from) are these “work” poems that offer vignettes of the speaker’s role as a nanny looking after a three-year-old girl called “B.”

Take these lines from the poem “Nounou” that also relate to language:

I sit with B in her kitchen, discuss
a Safeway bouquet
of lilies. I say lis. B says

Maman accidentally. 

None of this belongs
to me.

That twinge of sadness and loss is amplified in “Forgive Us Our Trespasses” where Sawatzky writes: “The first girl just wants something to belong to her…”

While the book covers multiple subjects, the connecting thread of “playing a part” was most evident for me. Playing the part of mother, of adult, of being responsible. The joy in reading the book was discovering what “this” in the title refers to. The lines quoted above make it explicit—“B” doesn’t belong to the speaker, but there are many other examples of what doesn’t belong to her throughout the collection. 

Adulthood, with all its revelations, loneliness, and losses, is another one. 

B doesn’t know

she won’t always be a child,
the way I didn’t know I’d be

thrust into this thistle-stitched
ditch of adulthood.

-“Ouroboros”

I love the assonance of those short ‘i’s, echoing the narrowness of a ditch, as well as the spitty awkwardness of those “th” and “ch” consonants that suit the thorny journey to adulthood.

On a road trip at 24 with her parents, Sawatzky writes in “Recalculating”:

In the silence now
we’re all adults and no one knows

what’s best.

And in “What Blue”:

With Grandfather dead,
we are three single women, sisters, girls, absorbing

the mysteries of the world comparing blues.

These are poignant lines, but there is also humour and sass in Sawatzky’s writing, like in “Blessings Upon U and Ur Bullshit” that she dedicates to her neighbour “who threatened / to have my car towed / bc it was parked in front of / ur house…u’ll understand when ur / a mom u said / u’ll understand / when ur a homeowner / but I won’t / I will never be like u”.

Her house doesn’t belong to her either, and how many other renters can relate to the feeling conveyed in the line “i pay her / so she owns me”?

Sleep doesn’t belong to the speaker anymore when she’s at her father’s bedside in a hospital room in the opening poem. Rob Taylor beautifully analyzes “Overnights at the Hospital” in his Tyee article, “Be Brief and Tell Us Everything.”

A self-conscious voice emerges in some of Sawatzky’s poems. A surprising number are self-referential (I began counting how many have “poem” in the poem) and felt they could have been stronger without this (but I am of the school that doesn’t usually like the fourth wall broken). Sawatzky mentions in this interview with Rob Taylor that she likes playing with expectations of poetry and drawing attention to its process, but I found those poems detracted from her otherwise strong theme.

Sawatzky is at her best when the poem isn’t obvious, when it fades into the background and the reader is left with images and sounds that haunt, punch, linger, explode; when she’s working out what does and doesn’t belong to her and subverts readers’ expectations of girlhood and female desire. The reader might assume someone who wants kids or who does want them but can’t have them would pursue work as a nanny. But not so. In “Crystals,” Sawatzky declares, “I tell my mother I never want kids.”

By the end of the collection, I notice a movement from naming and/or lamenting what doesn’t belong to her towards claiming what does belong to her…even the unpleasant parts one doesn’t like to admit.

In “Self-Portrait as Ostrich,” the second-last poem, she sounds the most vulnerable and mature:

I do dream regularly
that I’m gathering eggs

And I thought it was because I used
to look after children

Or because I’ve rewatched
Fly Away Home

so many times and maybe that’s true
but maybe also

I’m finally taking responsibility for me
Anger has a shape too

Ditto shame ditto pride when it unfurls
when I rise

Up off my knees to become
the biggest bird alive

Here is a speaker who accepts she doesn’t have it figured out (“maybe that’s true”) and holds numerous possibilities out in her hand like seed for a bird, not sure which one will take. But the uncertainty doesn’t shrivel, paralyze, or keep her on her knees. Rather, it emboldens her to the extent that she stands up to become “the biggest bird alive.”

Coming out of (and soon approaching another) season of uncertainty, as is the way life ebbs and flows, None of this Belongs to Me felt like a gift at the right time. I am prone to anger too, prone to complaining about life not being fair (and yes, the old adage who said life was fair? always plays in my mind in response), and there is a sisterhood, so to speak, in Sawatzky’s words and in the kind message she wrote in my copy of her book:

Sending care as you settle into your new space. Hope you enjoy the familiar and strange in these poems.

I have been so focussed on our old house, our old city, what we lost and left behind (and there is a season for mourning) but I think it is now time for me to look ahead, not only for myself but for the sake of my child, who very much belongs to me even as she simultaneously does not belong to me. Oh language, oh the paradox of both/and.

The future is as it always was, a quivering
night lit occasionally by lightning. World
without end.

-“Matrilineal”

Running to Not Forget

When I run, I go to Mountain View Cemetery. I love seeing how it changes, how it stays the same when the world around me is so precarious.

When I returned home last Saturday, my toddler announced, “Mommy, when I get bigger and older, I want to run through a cemetery.” I laughed.

Little does she know she’s been here many times as a baby. I wrote a poem about the experience of walking through here with her two years ago as the world was on edge, COVID “sweeping the world / like my father in a game of Risk.”

That military image feels devastatingly apt right now as I run past gravestones and think of Ukraine. All the suffering they have endured and are still enduring. All the lives and homes lost. All the loss. The horrific war crimes the Russian army has committed in Ukraine, particularly against women and children, has shaken me. One of the questions I keep circling back to: “Where does all that hurt go? What does a country like Ukraine do with all that grief/rage/trauma?” I don’t have answers.

I recently read an interview with Ukraine’s First Lady, Olena Zelenska in Vogue. When asked what can ordinary citizens do to help Ukrainians, she says:

The main thing is not to get used to the war—not to turn it into statistics. Continue going to protests, continue to demand that your governments take action. 

I suppose running and praying through a cemetery is one way I don’t get used to the war. There is death all around me here, including death from war. I notice how young the men are in the numerous memorials throughout the cemetery, many of them younger than me.

But I also run through the cemetery because there are signs of life all around me too: from cherry blossom trees to blooming heather, from freshly cut flowers to surprising gravestone offerings like big, juicy oranges. I need these reminders lately.

Nostalgia for Moving Parts

This latest poetry book by Diane Tucker makes me glad I am old enough to remember using a payphone. The title poem recounts in detail the speaker’s process of making a phone call on this antiquated device, this relic of a bygone era where “cold square buttons resist pleasantly / my index finger’s pressure” and where the handset makes “a real click” when put back on its cradle, none of the “digital ping” today’s phones bring. Yes!

You can tell the speaker takes pleasure in revisiting old things—whether objects or memories. I am too young (or uncultured) to know many of the other references she makes such as The Lawrence Welk Show, Eva Gabor, Three Dog Night, Gerry Rafferty, Pablo Cruise, Brigadoon, to name a few—but that didn’t stop me from enjoying her poems. In “Beautiful grade four teacher,” one of the early ones, she lists what was in fashion in 1974 and this gave enough context to situate the speaker in the world she is conjuring.

While Tucker highlights “golden-hour” memories like playing badminton in her East Van backyard with her brother in “As we leapt”; riding a merry-go-round in “The horse is a cathedral”; falling in love with theatre and its stars in “Brigadoon, 1979″ and “The star”; or listening to a mesmerizing busker in “Blue melodica,” she doesn’t just see the past with rose-coloured glasses. In “Dream of Old Vancouver,” the (day)dream comes to an end with the sobering realization:

This was how a woman earned her safety:
the workman noticed you and bought you drinks.
You played the well-liked woman; you went along.
You threw the dice of yourself and hoped you’d win.

Nostalgia, like memory, is complicated. “Love the sad men” is a beautiful yet bittersweet tribute to her father who showed his love in “scroll-sawed shelves to hold phalanxes of dolls” but just before, in “Tiny Dresses,” the speaker admits:

I saw the calendar ladies on the garage
wall not covered enough with pickle jars
of nails. Dad would give me long wood
shavings, curls as golden as Eva Gabor’s
hair. I guess I put two and two together.
This is what beautiful ladies are like.
This is what men like ladies to be like.”

The collection is divided into 4 sections: “The Child Is Still Kin,” “Tidal Volume,” “Keep Walking,” and “Though I am Tattered.” The first half delves more into the speaker’s memories of childhood and memories of her own children while the second half predominantly draws from nature and seasons in Vancouver to reflect on what lies ahead: life without her parents, her own aging body, mortality.

A recurring image throughout the book is that of a tree. In “World wall,” the speaker remarks:

A tree
seems able to stay rooted and yet rise.
How lovely it becomes, torso ridged

with strength. Crown full of mosaic light,
branches all airy elbows. All it receives
it wraps in rings around itself. Am I patient
enough to somebody be a tree? I want to try.

This wish, expressed in the last poem of the second section, surprised me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have. After all the glam and fascination with moving things in the first part of the book, the speaker aspires to be something that stands still, solid, rooted and steady. She’s moved from the 1970s into present-day Vancouver. “Imagine being planted long enough / that your roots grow up through the earth” she begins in “VanDusen Garden in October” and later muses, “I ache to be the maple / outside my father’s hospital room window. / Just standing there, she ministers healing / and need never worry about where to be / or what to do with her slender dark arms.” (“The day before my father died”)

When I read back through the poems, I noticed this tree image appears in the very first poem, too. Tucker describes her aging body holding a yoga position called “Child’s Pose” (the poem’s title) with her “small spine / a path from darkness to darkness” / arms twin tree roots cradled in earth.” The very last poem, “I’ll take the answer,” complements and contrasts this imagery with the speaker invoking the lullaby-prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep” where in the darkness of night and even in unanswered prayer, the Fingerprint of a Creator burns, “making my body a light that cannot be hidden.”

The poems in Nostalgia for Moving Parts speak to a poet who’s in love with the created world and who describes it so poignantly and concisely. One of Tucker’s favourite methods to quickly set a scene or mood is a compound adjective, especially when it comes to colour: “rust-orange carpet,” “blue-black air,” “blue-boxed breath,” cartoon-red beefsteaks,” and by far, the winner for this reader: “”February skies hang rodent-grey.”

There is so much colour in these poems, so many news ways of looking at old things (for example, “slow ducks ink themselves in”), and so much courage from her aging, gaping heart she calls a “begging bowl” that is still open, ready, and waiting to be filled even when venturing from the known past to an unknown future.

Love in the Rain

On our first night in Paris, my husband and I took an open-top boat ride along the Seine. It wasn’t long before the sky dumped sheets of rain on us and the wind gusted so strongly it flipped our MEC umbrella inside out, rendering it useless the rest of the trip. We were soggy, jet-lagged Shreddies arriving home to our Airbnb. Welcome to Paris.

Before the rain…(I don’t have an “after” photo).

One of the many bridges we cruised under was Le Pont des Arts, more commonly known as the “love lock bridge.” Many cities have their version of a love lock bridge, but Paris is perhaps the most famous. With close to a million locks hanging from the grilles, the City of Paris decided to remove them in 2015 after part of the railing collapsed under the weight (about 45 tonnes). They replaced the grilles with transparent panels.

Above you can see the transparent panels, but you can also see people’s determinism to continue the love lock tradition, which started in Paris around 2008. (This photo was taken in 2017.) Although you would think Paris would be the origin of this tradition given its moniker as the City of Love, it actually began at Most Ljubavi (“Bridge of Love”) in Serbia during WWI. You can read the story here, which is actually more tragic than romantic. Now locals and tourists alike attach padlocks to bridges around the world and throw the key into the water—a contemporary urban ritual for couples to declare their love and its permanence.

(FYI, it is illegal to put a lock on a bridge in Paris, though how strictly this is enforced is debatable given the picture I took above. For the record, we did not add one.)

A year after the grilles on Le Pont des Arts came down, a love lock sculpture in Vancouver went up. Couples had been affixing padlocks to Burrard Street Bridge, and for the same structural reasons as the City of Paris gave, the City of Vancouver also said no, this can’t go on. They did; however, provide an alternative: a public art sculpture that could hold the weight of thousands of padlocks.

You can see Love In the Rain (2016) by Bruce Voyce if you visit Queen Elizabeth Park, the highest point in Vancouver at 125 metres above sea level. The public chose this location from a number of recommended sites and it seems symbolic of love at its peak. (I’m sure this has been the setting of countless proposals—the first lock attached began with one).

Best view of Vancouver from Queen Elizabeth Park

Incidentally, my parents took their wedding photos in this park.

Four sets of couples embrace under umbrellas—their stainless steel frames the hooks on which the locks hang. A receptacle is located on site for people to throw their keys into (very Vancouver), with the purpose that the metal will either be recycled or melted down to use as part of another public artwork.

The human forms are meant to be ageless and genderless. The work “celebrates the shelter that love brings and the union that it forms,” according to a Park Board press release. On the artist’s website, Voyce writes that his sculpture “embodies love in the temperate rainforest.”

The umbrellas make the piece, in my opinion. Not only do they add height and visual interest, but they contextualize the artwork, answering the question, why this public artwork here? If Paris is the City of Love, Vancouver is the City of Rain.

I cannot help but think of a line in my own wedding vows: “to shower love and forgiveness like Vancouver rain.”

Now I am wondering for how many other couples is love linked to rain, fitting together like lock and key?

Do you have a “love in the rain” story?

A Tale of Two Trees

I live near Mountain View Cemetery in Vancouver. When my daughter was young enough that she was taking her naps on me, I often walked its paths, reading the odd gravestone, admiring the beautiful trees, composing poems in my head. Now my daughter takes all her naps in a crib and I leave her with my husband to run those paths, admire the beautiful trees (especially this season), and compose poems in my head.

While there recently, I ran by some art installations that compelled me to stop. Two trees: one dressed in red, the other in white.

The first tree is called REDress and brings attention to the 1200+ missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. It’s a response/continuation of artist Jaime Black’s REDress project, in which she hangs red dresses in various public settings. She writes on her website:

The project has been installed in public spaces throughout Canada and the United States as a visual reminder of the staggering number of women who are no longer with us. Through the installation I hope to draw attention to the gendered and racialized nature of violent crimes against Aboriginal women and to evoke a presence through the marking of absence.

It is not an accident the dresses are red. Red is for blood. Red is for love. Red is for anger. Red is for warning. Red is for stop, look, pay attention.

The other tree’s branches hung with white baby carriages, fabric stitched taut over stick frames, weightless and rocking in the wind. The installation was next to the infant’s cemetery, where each stone in the river commemorates a baby lost. There are many stones in the river. The oldest one I saw was inscribed with the date 1902.

It is not an accident the carriages are white. White is for innocence. White is for milk. White is for purity. White is for a fadeout screen in a film. White is for ghosts. White is for baby shoes. White is for a blank page, an empty photo album.

Two trees dressed in grief. People have remarked that running through a cemetery is creepy. I have never experienced that feeling until the day I saw those red and white trees in broad daylight. They were haunting.

They have become more haunting after reading theologian James Cone’s 2011 book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Cone connects the cross Jesus died on with the trees that thousands of Black people died on in the United States because of white supremacy. Cone writes:

The conspicuous absence of the lynching tree in American theological discourse and preaching is profoundly revealing, especially since the crucifixion was clearly a first-century lynching. In the “lynching era” between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus.

While not ignoring the historical and theological differences between the cross and the lynching tree, Cone concludes:

The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice.

These are powerful, haunting words. Reading Cone’s short and accessible book (for non-theologians like me) was illuminating, horrifying, and necessary. Just like the red dresses and white carriages render presence through absence in Mountain View cemetery, Cone writes for America (particularly Christian America) to remember what it has all too easily forgot, ignored, or even justified.

He reminds us of the strange fruit hanging from trees that Billie Holiday inscribed on the ears of anyone who listened to her sing this indictment.

Listening to the song and looking at the cemetery tree photos, I wonder what the late Cone would say about Canada’s collective violence towards our Indigenous peoples, people we have sought to kill, assimilate, dehumanize. We have our own strange fruit, our river of stones, our Highway of Tears to reckon with.

Places to Play

Kids don’t need an invitation to play. I have two nieces and a nephew who take any opportunity to transform their beds into trampolines, couches into jungle gyms, boxes into forts, living rooms into dance floors. 

Adults, on the other hand, need to be told to play. In a world where speed and efficiency are rewarded, play is underrated but oh so necessary. 

Westlake Park, Seattle

This temporary art installation by Downtown Seattle Association invites people to do just that: take a break from the hustle and bustle of everyday life and play. Their website says they “offer a variety of daily games and activations – from ping pong to foosball.” When I was there the other weekend, I noticed a play area for kids, as well as portable library with books for kids and adults to enjoy.

In their other location, Occidental Square, they had a life-sized chess game. This square was really empty on a Monday morning at 9am, but I wonder how much traffic it gets other times. Do people respond to these efforts at interaction and creativity? Do you?

You can see the “PLAY” blocks in the far left corner of Occidental Square, Seattle

Seattle isn’t the only city encouraging its residents to play. I’ve encountered similar efforts in New York City and Amsterdam through public art, life-sized chess games, public pianos, and letters to climb.

Perhaps this sign is more popular with tourists (guilty), but fun nonetheless

Where there are life-sized letters, there are people wanting to climb them. Heck, there are people wanting to climb almost anything. These jellybeans that were in Vancouver’s Charleson Park are a prime example. I think some of the most effective public artworks are ones that can be touched. Humans are so hungry for contact. 

Love Your Bean by Cosimo Cavallaro in Charleston Park, Vancouver. This public artwork was a Vancouver Biennale project and has since been removed, sadly.

When I think of the word play, I think of a piano. Its presence in my various apartments over the years is akin to a good friend’s quiet constancy. For me, a piano is not just an instrument, but a physical space to unravel myself. I much prefer playing to my ears alone, but I appreciate the public pianos cropping up in virtually every city (or in Victoria’s case, along the beach where I played only to wave, wind, and husband). 

My favourite public piano so far, Victoria

Friends in Okotoks, AB

The above images all strike me as examples of placemaking, a word popular in urban planning spheres for the last few decades.

Project for Public Spaces, based in New York, has a concise article summarizing this hands-on approach to making neighbourhoods and cities more enjoyable places to live, work, and play.

With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being.

I’ll share one last example from Seattle that literally appeared like a hole in the wall. I don’t know if it was a community-driven initiative, but it felt like it fulfills the last part of the above quote. I was walking to King’s Street Station from Occidental Square to catch the bus back to Vancouver when a sign on a gate reminiscent of a high-security prison stopped me. 

Say what? How could something beautiful hide behind such ugly doors? But when I stepped inside, I kind of liked this incongruity between outside and inside, catching me unawares. 

Just as adults need places to play, we also need places to rest like this Waterfall Garden Park. An oasis of quiet and calm. I sat on one of these chairs and listened to the music of the waterfall, feeling like I had found a diamond in the rough.

Do you have any stories like this of surprise urban retreats? What’s one of your favourite places to play or rest that you’ve encountered in a city? I’d love to hear!