Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle
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About this ebook
Painters use the term fugitive pigments” to describe those colours most prone to fading after a brief exposure to light. In Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle, poet and visual artist Jessica Hiemstra uses the idea of fugitive colour to explore the grieving process; whether her subject is a lost grandparent, language, child, painting or cat, Hiemstra renders the fleetingness of life with fine, delicate strokes.
The poet listens, tastes and remembers, senses afloat, dipping into the past and then surfacing again, drawn by a perfect but fleeting moment.” Descant
Jessica Hiemstra is a visual artist and writer. Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle is her third volume.
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Self-Portrait Without a Bicycle - Jessica Hiemstra
Looking at the sky through dahlias
(remembering remembering my mother)
I’m not sure how to pronounce dahlia—how stiff
to make the a, but I say it how my mom says it,
the way I leave butter on the rim of a white plate,
take a bath to soothe anger, soak it out. I sing
the way she sang Graceland all my growing-up,
Saturday mornings, breaking eggs. This morning
I caught myself failing at an omelet the way she does,
humming but I have a reason to believe, remembering
the two of us on the ferry leaving Freetown
this summer, a music video of Paul Simon on a little TV,
boogying in Soweto, diesel fumes and children’s noses
pressed against glass. I sipped Fanta, the way I did
when I was small, looked at mom with more than love
because I was remembering my head in her lap, lamp-heat
on my cheek, the way she cleaned my ears humming
we both will be received as she curved the groove.
My vase of flowers on the table, dahlias
before mountains, makes me wish she was here.
She taught me to find the corridors—the curve
of mountain behind petal, how to curl my tongue
into the mixer for whip cream. She taught me
to save: not time or money, but pleasure—
how to find the world in a red dahlia, in Graceland.
Loveliness, one sip at a time, doesn’t run out
or overflow.
Well, the cat’s dead
i.
I wasn’t fond of her but one dandelion in a jar
is pretty. One cat, grey and shy and mine
is more than a cat—it’s a kind of love,
the way a dandelion yellow in glass is a kind of loyalty,
an admission of beauty. I remember her teats, kittens
pressing and milking. She hated the dog, silently
glared from the rafters. She’s the last of the animals
I grew up with—outlived them all from the beams
of the barn hissing and preening, regal even
with her tongue in the naked part of her belly,
hind leg in the air. Dying isn’t glorious
but she died in combat, fought a raccoon. Dad found her,
disembowelled. She expired purring in his lap
with a bowl of milk, intestines askew, swaddled tightly
in a blanket. My brother named her Grayling
after an English fish also called the lady
of the stream. The fish is nothing special,
just sleek and pretty, but I guess if I had one
in a jar on the table,
I’d owe it too, more.
ii.
So I got to thinking—Wikipedia says the grayling
has the most beautiful dorsal fin of any fish, but that could be
just a nostalgic fisher in England, slipping it in,
after too many drinks—loving an ordinary fish for love
of country and lager and because writing it down
makes it true. I don’t know
much about England or fish. I had a cat once—that’s all,
I thought she was nothing special
but it turns out that’s never the case
with anything.
Visiting the heavens in Toronto
When I was six we stayed in my aunt’s apartment
in the sky in Toronto, closer to heaven, jewels
of light tugged towards the horizon, headlights
like candy from her balcony. When I couldn’t unlock
what kept me from jumping I threw up. Fear
of heights is sane. We aren’t designed to fly. I was
unsure of this—having decided