Apparition Poem #555

I never really got out of Mary Evelyn Harju why it was that, in 2003, she expressed a desire to spend some time in Montreal, Quebec. There were museums she wanted to see— the city was famous for its elegance, like Paris— but I always felt she was pulling punches, and something else surreptitious was going on beneath the surface. We went there and back by train that summer. Our digs, during our stay, were modest— a small room on the top floor of an inconspicuous building on Saint Catharine Street. The way I thought it would go, we'd bum around cafes, meet other artists. Mary didn't see it that way—without me noticing, she'd learned Montreal's transit system thoroughly, and when we got there, showed every intention of taking the city by storm. As was not usually our convention, I let her lead me around.

As Apparition Poem #555 demonstrates, all was not well with Mary H. during our Montreal adventure. The now-famous portrait of Mary on Saint Catharine Street is a ravishing one. Yet, it doesn't allow viewers to see how modest our room was. The night in question, Mary couldn't handle that we'd been on the Plateau, and not found a suitable place, club or bar, for her to dance in. By the time we saw the fight transpire in a pub right across from where we were staying, Mary was overcharged and had a minor fit of catatonia (I shuffled the order of the night's events for the poem's sake). I did a Golden Dawn cleansing ritual and it seemed to work, but being alone with her in a foreign country scared the Be-Jesus out of me. She remained intermittently on edge for the rest of the time we spent in Montreal.

The original draft of #555 I called Dancing in Montreal. I debuted it at NEC in the mid-Aughts, in a workshop with Paula McLain. The last line, as I had it, ran "dozed & woke ready for more dancing—" Paula suggested that I drop "dancing" and conclude the poem "dozed & woke ready for more—" I took her suggestion. #555 is front-loaded the right way on PennSound, and is included in the original 2010 edition of Apparition Poems. In the end, I take as a cathartic attempt to deal with the unstable side of Mary H. That instability was where and how she got her art— no doubt— but those who lived with and loved her had crosses to bear. The Montreal portrait is chiaroscuro; so was she.