CARA LOSIER CHANOINE - POEMS

Cara Losier Chanoine is the author of the poetry collections "How a Bullet Behaves" and "Bowetry: Found Poems from David Bowie Lyrics." She teaches English at a college in New England.

​Elegy for Dead Architecture

the stale air 
in the summer stairwells

the classroom chairs
in which I sat
for aching hours

the clatter of wooden doors
shrunken too small
to quite fit their jambs

the urgency of ordinary ambition
in the voices spilling out
into the otherwise quiet hallways

it is, 
all of it,
gone now

Leonard Hall has fallen down,
one more London Bridge

I didn’t expect there to still be rubble,
but there was,
a landfill of bricks and steel and glass,
contained by a chain-linked perimeter:
ersatz walls for a phantom building

in places, the mortar still held,
larger pieces of exterior walls
resisting their own disintegration

at the rear corner
of this once-was building, 
a lone doorway still stood,
intact and hemmed by a border of foundation,
in refusal of its own irrelevance

behind the library, the new humanities building
turns its grey face to the sun,
its banks of windows like 
the hundred eyes of a wonderful monster

the lobby is vast
the ceilings are high
the elevators our quiet

it is everything
we always said
we deserved

and yet, I am drawn to the rubble,
for reasons 
that I cannot yet name

and yet, I am compelled 
to reach for the handles
of the orphaned doors,
to cross the threshold
of this building’s deathrattle.


​

​Cartography

​I am standing in the middle
of a stone walkway 
on a college campus
for what may be the last time,
and imagining all the threads of myself
that have caught in the teeth
of the places that have been my homes.
I am thinking what a wonder
it is that I have not yet unraveled
into nothing.

These threads are the lines
between cities and states
the borders of oceans and countries.
When I picture my blood vessels beneath my skin,
I think of maps
superimposed over other maps.
When I close my eyes,
I exist in so many different places
at once.

I am a deconstructed artifact,
and my far-flung parts
comprise the most compelling evidence
that I have been alive. 
I close my eyes and
I am learning to dance barefoot
on the toes of my father’s wingtips,
and watching a cloud of bats
rise out from beneath a Texas bridge,
and falling asleep in the air-conditioned chill
of a Pennsylvania library,
and learning how to be born
on a stage in a bar.

I am standing in a walkway 
on a college campus,
and the grit of the bricks is catching
on my loose threads,
and I am falling 
to pieces 
again,
and this is how I become 
more complete.

Feast
​

​On the night of my grandmother’s funeral,
I sat with my family 
in the kitchen of the apartment
she had lived in since I was young.
The drop-leaf table was covered
by an array of casseroles,
each in its own Pyrex casket.
Foil-capped plasticware
lined the chipped formica countertops.
These were the eulogies
the church could not contain,
the prayers that transcended religion.

After we held the wake,
and placed the pall,
and lowered the casket 
into the cold ground,
we crowded into my grandmother’s kitchen
like shipwreck survivors
stumbling into the shallows
at the lip of a kind island.
We sought to sate 
our hollow hunger
because it was a place to start.
It was an act of resilience,
of remembrance.
It was a kind of ceremony. 

The Naming
​

Call me Ahab.
It’s not my name,
but it suits as well 
as any other.
Call me tyrant
or madman.
Call me the seventh king
of Israel.
Call me old thunder
on the deck of a ship 
bound for hell,
or somewhere like it.

When people are afraid of you,
they never tell you what they really think,
but you find out, anyway.
To be feared and omniscient
is a bit like playing God.
I will never be loved
like God is loved.
It is a special thing
to be both loved and feared,
a graceful balance that my
asymmetry will never achieve.
This is maybe 
something I used to care about,
but I can’t remember 
anymore
what used to shape my life before
this here,
this now,
and now
I am only a purpose,
a pinpoint of latitude and longitude
on a vast map,
a slender harpoon
fit for a single quarry.

My legend
has eclipsed my humanity.
I am less a person
than a collection of ideas
viewed through a kaleidoscope lens.
My reality will never live up to my symbolism.
It is a standing suit of armor,
a shell,
a mask.
My real face is my most easily-kept secret.
I could be anyone.
I could be you.

My name
it is everything
they say about me when
when they think that I can’t hear them.
It is spelled out by my uneven gait,
by the slope of my shoulders against the deck,
by the calligraphy of scars on my body.
Call me reckless
call me hunter
call me something against which
to measure your own sanity.
Some of us fight windmills
and some of us
fight whales. 
Call me crazy
if you want.
I am not everything I have been called.

​

The Creed
​

Some people believe
it is an act of faith
to take to sea,
to trust that you will ever
return to land
when there is nothing but water
at the lip of every horizon.

To be a sea captain 
is to read cartography
like a Bible,
to intuit your heading
from the taste of the wind.
It is to know that humankind
will never conquer the world beneath
the skin of the brine.

The ocean exists in constant agitation,
resisting roots and foundations.
It is skilled in deception
and double-dealing.
It is remorseless.
The church of the open water
is not built upon the rock of any faith
that decent people know of.
To worship at its altar
is to relinquish the idea
that being good
will keep you safe.

We are a congregation
of the faithless.
We never bank on round trips
because we know that
death is a rope
in the rigging of this ship
and our survival depends
on a precise balance
of skill and luck. 
We survive by trusting 
nothing.
When the white whale
rises in a halo of spume,
looking like the face of god,
we are not deceived.

​