Dirt Under the Nail // Chris Bailey
Memory lane is overgrown with too-long grass and trees in need of limbing. I am OK with this. Old photographs of me are for others to look at. There is no guilt or regret associated with the past, but a finality. The past is a statement, the future a question. Tonight is nothing if not possibility. On September 8th two things happened. The first was that my debut collection of poetry, What Your Hands Have Done, came out with Nightwood Editions. The book concerns family, relationships, work, and life on Prince Edward Island, where I live and work with my family, and Toronto and Hamilton, where I lived when attending the University of Guelph’s MFA Creative Writing Program. The second thing was my father’s birthday. When asked how old he was, he’d say: Working on the 65. The book is dedicated to my family and so I got asked, and get asked, if the release date was intentional. My answer: That is how the calendar worked out. The book was once dedicated to someone else. It now reads: For my family, sometimes it’s about doing what you can, and fuck the rest. This is not untrue. Richard Lemm is a writer and professor from PEI. He was the one who suggested I apply to MFA programs and he worked to arrange two launches for What Your Hands Have Done, one in Charlottetown and one in Halifax. At both launches I read alongside Steve McOrmond and Annick MacAskill. The Charlottetown launch was in the Carriage House beside Beaconsfield in downtown, on a corner of Kent Street near the edge of Victoria Park. On Canada Day, you can sit along the water’s edge nearby and watch the fireworks. There were no fireworks that night. The room was fairly full. It was hot for September.In the audience were friends who’d put up with me and my writing over all the years I’ve been at it. A handful of family: my parents, a sister and her two kids, another sister and her husband. Their first time seeing me read. Before this, I told them, over the phone and in person, and in my parents’ kitchen where the white top half of the walls has yellowed, and flyers and dishes and bread bags sometimes clutter the counters and the table, that they didn’t need to come if they didn’t want to. I didn’t want anyone feeling they had to be there. No sense of obligation. They want to come, great. If not, fine. They came. The reading went well. Afterwards there were books bought and people coming up to me and telling me about the things they write, that they like my work, and asking me questions like I knew something. This would happen at other launches, other readings: people paying compliments and discussing their writing, and people with the ability to discuss my writing more intelligently than I ever could. There was a time when this could’ve been all I ever wanted. When I worked with Dionne Brand during my MFA, she told me to read poetry if I wanted to make a character’s perspective in my thesis novel better. Poetry is the seat of experience, she said. A big part of writing is the desire to be understood and loved for what makes you who you are. To be seen in some way. I hoped the poetry book might explain myself to family and friends, the people I lived with and worked with and write about, and to people who have no real idea what things are like back home. This is an odd thing for me to do. My father, when speaking of someone, said, He’s out west now. I don’t know if he’s doing the books for some company or if he’s actually working. We were driving east from the airport. It was April and snow melted in ditches in the dark. I was home to fish lobster with him and my older brother. Snow would fall off-and-on till April 21st. Surprise snow in June when on the water.I named names in What Your Hands Have Done. Some of what happened, happened as depicted. Some did not. The poetic I, like the nonfiction I, is dangerously close to the author. Some people feel I mischaracterized them or others. Sometimes this is true. Speaking with me at the kitchen table, my father said, None of them went around with halos before. I don’t know why the fuck they want to pretend they do now. Sometimes you hear what you want to hear.Perhaps the book forced a visit with the past. Pasts that people remember differently, and so when presented with something else there is discomfort, pain. This is how I could’ve been then. A fear of being seen as who they were in a time they’d rather forget. The lack of choice in determining a fondness or flattering light.When my past visits it is uninvited and unexpected. An unwelcomed remembrance. The smell of a woman I loved returning for no discernable reason. How she folded towels just so. The Doritos vomit I cleaned from the shower after a time I spent away when she could not follow. The feel of her brushing my cheek in passing. Her voice complaining about my body heat. You’re a furnace. Get. Ontario streaming by during drives, or outside train windows. Her voice singing along to a song I do not know. The book was not always dedicated to family. When it snows, there she is. Bukowski said love is a dog from hell, a fog that burns up come the first light of day. He was wrong. Love is late winter snow. You never know when it’s truly done, and it lingers far longer than it should. And the grass will grow back eventually and be green again. On cool days in my Hamilton apartment when the sky out my south-facing windows is grey and the trees climbing the escarpment are full of wind, the dim yellow lighting of the place returns me to my family’s kitchen. Mid-winter morning. The feeling of home. Woodsmoke from the furnace in the basement. None of these things I can touch or ask to touch. They’re there, in flashes, in moments where my mind is tired and wanders aimlessly down halls, opening doors, seeing what’s inside. Folgers coffee brewing in Ontario and years ago, on PEI, sitting with my little brother on the front doorstep of the house. Our eyes pointed south across potato fields in August. I tend to make strong coffee for I am always tired. My brother’s voice from then: This is good coffee. He put milk and sugar in his. I drank mine black. Clean autumn air. Tires on pavement. Bad Company on the radio and the world opening up. A car is freedom. My father told me this when I was 16 and I would think of it when the life I had wasn’t anything I wanted any part of, and I wondered what it would be like to get in the car and just drive. Beyond the chalk horizon on the water that surrounds the Island, possibility. These memories are perfect for a while. Then reality. How things ended with her. What was done and said. My little brother and I talk less and less every year. Home isn’t always quite home. The freedom of whatever car I drove was imagined. Work always needed doing. Responsibilities to fulfill. There are few things in the past I yearn for. I’d rather not speak or think of them directly. Story is a lens. So is poetry. Some stories are best kept in a drawer to stumble upon later and blush at the foolishness they contain. These visitations are your hands part way through the day. You shower in the morning, wash your hands as the day calls for. They’re clean. Then you reach out. You go to grab a glass from the cabinet, to brush hair out of your face or the face of someone close to you, and there is dirt under the nail of your thumb. Your hands aren’t as clean as you recall. They never were.
Chris Bailey is a fisherman from North Lake, Prince Edward Island. He has a MFA Creative Writing from the University of Guelph, and is a past recipient of the Milton Acorn Poetry Award. You can find his work in Grain, Brick, FreeFall, and on CBC Radio, and his debut poetry collection, What Your Hands Have Done (Nightwood Editions), can be found in bookstores in real life and online. Chris splits his time unevenly between PEI and Hamilton.
