September 14, 2015 | Occasus | Issue 5 | Fiction
on the difficulty of describing bill bissett (for Frank Beltrano)
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if i sed - 5’11”, 2-25, 75 years, 56
books uv poems - if i sed - the latest of which is titled ‘ths is erth, thees ar peopul’ that the painting on the cover was his - if i sed - 2 hours at 754 dundas st. - if i sed - shoulder length grey hair, twiggy, a cocked ball cap, green with yellow mesh, spectacles deep under the brim, the bulbous nose, black t-shirt and a paunch, blue jeans with their belt tight and shaggy loafers - if i sed - the kind of man you’d hate to see your daughter with, you thought, bad knees, back an overlap of knots, a lilting voice in speaking a baritone in song - if i sed - he sed “‘i was told the salmon talks have been moved to early next week.’ and i sed ‘at least the salmon are talking!’” - if i sed - he concluded his set with a single, short phrase which he repeated like a chant or an omen - if i sed - the phrase was “is it time to leave the hotel, yet?” - if i sed - to give you a sense that between two particular songs the audience or some of the people in it were talking about what he was and what he wasn’t and somebody had said, decisively, in that way that tightens the walls of a café, that he was a “performer” and that from the stage he said, “You think?” and chuckled - if i sed - as the front door of the café swiveled inches open, inches closed, in the brusque wind as the music with its exotic percussion instruments and piano and bill reading and singing, alternately, that the chime of the bell over the door seemed to want to join in or that maybe the wind and he were joined, then, somewhere over the door - if i sed - see the stage, dark floorboards, reds and yellows in a painting on the wall, the bright january blear in the window pane behind, the musicians huddled into their instruments of tapered steel or wood - if i sed - gnarled elegance - if i sed - he was holding two white sheets of printer paper stapled together and very white and he holding them, that shaggy big man who, if your adult daughter pointed him out down the aisle at the supermarket as hers when you ran into her incidentally might elicit from you, without having spoken with him, the phrase “i’m ordering chinese for dinner; come over tonight; it’ll be just us two; i feel like i haven’t seen you in ages.” he, reading a poem about a past lover, a poem about a past perhaps written with his knuckles and throat, holding them with one hand, the two sheets with the poems - if i sed - a bird sensing gentleness had settled there and he was reading from both of its wings until - like that - the music rolling home like a tide, that washy rolling sound, and the music-makers becoming musicians again and the poet becoming a man again and the wings of the bird, now flapping gently around the café, returned to the music stand and became pages stapled with words and stiff - if i sed - some know that we love and some love that we know and that he would identify with the former and love the latter, the same - we were there when we were there, then, and now we are when we were there or trying to be and this is memory - if i sed - to give you a sense it was an animal in motion without the vicious it was a sense of motion an animal with the giving and like any honest mortal performing it was full of the past tense already, even without the stopping it was long in the brevity and brief in the long a meaning motion, then, without the vicious, an animal in the brevity, in the long to give you a sense it was. |
KEVIN HESLOP is a student at Western University.
