Dec 032012
 

Sharon McCartney doing CrossFit workout

Editor’s Note: Sharon McCartney’s poem “Deadlift” has been selected for Best Canadian Poetry 2013 by editors Molly Peacock and Sue Goyette.

Sharon McCartney‘s last contribution to Numéro Cinq was reprinted in Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 and now she looks for a repeat with a stunning poetic sequence that makes a metaphor out of weightlifting and love. I thought of a lot of puns I could use in this introduction: Sharon McCartney’s poems are muscular, explosive, sinewy, lean — but then I thought, Stop. These are beautiful touching poems replete with incisive perceptions about the relationship of love and pain, about the struggle of life. The Greeks called it agon. The Greeks saw no distinction between athleticism, art, philosophy, politics and love. They didn’t compartmentalize the way we do. Sharon tries here to reconnect art, emotion and the body.

I have only one small personal comment.  Would you LOOK at how much weight that girl is lifting! Go, Sharon!

dg

———-

Double Unders

As in love, it’s important to loosen the grip,
not to resist, to harden into clumsy condemnation.
If you think too much, you’ll stiffen and trip.
Flicking the silver cable faster, through two
revolutions rather than one. Forget the details.
Banish pedestrian mores. Embrace the higher
leap beyond petrification to delimitation, forgiving
the forgiveable, his petty flirtations. Outpace the
orderly, grasping mind. Allow the larger rhythms,
spontaneity, to flow. We’re liquid after all, flux,
especially now, this escalation roping a blue Nile
of salt-licked sweat from my candescent brow.

.

Deadlift

Lift that dead weight, my sister’s suffering,
the abominable pain of a teenager’s cancer,
how she longed to die, lobbing obsolete toys
at the obsidian-flowered bedroom walls, her
knobby fists on the chic white shag, and me,
ten years her junior, five or six, witnessing
the recurrent melees, squad cars in the driveway,
sedative syringes, a night ambulance strobing
the red windows. Our stone-faced mother so
calm under her beehive. An obligatory facade.
Lift my father sobbing beside the green Chevy,
not so much raising the plates as pushing the
floor away, slowly, patiently, shoulders slung
back, chest up. The pity, my mother’s burden,
a grief so poisonous it had to remain hidden.
How hard it is even now to forgive my sister.
Once called the “health lift,” hitting the glutes,
hamstrings, quads and core. Lock out tight
and straight at the top, loopy-eyed, vertiginous,
every cell in your body about to pop and
then drop the bar, a cold cadaver clattering.

 

.

Rest and Recovery

Fatigue disguises itself as need, saying work harder,
don’t give in. An intramuscular discontent, achiness,
disrupted slumber, eyes wide at 3 a.m., that brittle,
burnt, racing-pulse aftermath of excess adrenalin.

What is it in us that resists what we ultimately
require? The overtired infant startles awake,
wailing, after just two hours. My sad friend,
whose marriage implodes, is online instantly
pursuing another.

                               Reaching the furthest for what
we need the least. The closer I cleaved to him,
the lonelier I became. More squats and deeper,
more intervals and faster, until something
fractures, a scapula, a heart.

 

Skullcrusher

The bicep’s the starlet, pouty sex-pot, Bardot
or Loren lounging in limousines, but if colossal
arms are what you want, the tricep’s your man,
tuxedo-clad, blasé, smoking behind a pillar.
The larger of the two muscles, yet elusive,
easily over-looked, downstage, its horseshoe
cocked out of sight. To work it, think backwards.
Push, not pull. A subtle, focussed movement,
lacking the curl’s sideshow bombast. Or lie
on the bench, face up, a dumbbell socketed in
your palm, elbow raised, and lower the weight
to your brow, the tricep dragging. It’s your stay,
your guy wire, invisible block and tackle that
snags the heft, preserving your skull. Painful,
yes, and vaguely frightening, yet worthwhile,
like unveiling a shadow, the televangelist’s
sordid sex habits, the financier’s Ponzi scheme.
Behind the bicep’s facile he doesn’t love me
lurks the tricep’s harder truth: I don’t love him.

.

Poet Sharon McCartney

.

Hard Ass

150 Smith machine squats over an hour, sets of 10,
alternating with biceps and triceps, not too much
weight, but as low as possible on the declension,
and, on the upthrust, envisioning Atlas, Pythagoras,
even that pea pod in grade 8 science, how it shoved
the crust of loam aside as it unfurled. Stiff-legged
deadlifts. Walking lunges with 15 lb. dumbbells,
spine erect, each bruised knee smacking the floor.
Hamstring curls, the glute machine’s equine kick-
back, finishing it off with the lying bridge, a 30 lb.
plate on my hips, lifted and held to a count of 20,
10 times, 2 sets, the goal being overload, quaking,
tearing and scarring, and, in the end (pardon me),
an ass like rock, monolithic, enduring as hatred,
that unseen core of silence that remains unswayed,
undeceived, beyond hypocrisy or triviality. The
unshaken ground beneath me, the darkness that I
fall back on, the depth that elevates, propels me
through the salt-dappled double doors of the 24/7
gym into the light and strength of each damned day.

.

Poet Sharon McCartney

— Sharon McCartney

———————

Sharon McCartney is the author of For and Against (2010, Goose Lane Editions), The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007, Nightwood Editions), Karenin Sings the Blues (2003, Goose Lane Editions) and Under the Abdominal Wall (1999, Anvil Press). In 2008, she received the Acorn/Plantos People’s Prize for poetry for The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her poem, “Katahdin,” which appeared in Numéro Cinq in July 2011 was selected to appear in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope Books). These poems are from a new book to be published in the Spring of 2013 by Palimpsest Press.

The pictures are all courtesy of the good people at Crossfit Fredericton.

Jul 132012
 

Numéro Cinq is delighted to announce that Sharon McCartney’s poem “Katahdin,” published in NC last July, has been selected for the 2012 edition of the annual The Best of Canadian Poetry in English. The guest editor for this edition is Carmine Starnino. The continuing advisory editor for the whole series is Molly Peacock.

Congratulations all around but especially to Sharon. NC readers are advised that this is one of those occasions when it is appropriate to raise a glass of Talisker or two or three.

dg

Jul 192011
 

Editor’s Note: Sharon McCartney’s poem “Katahdin” (below) has been selected by Carmine Starnino for inclusion in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. The series advisory editor is Molly Peacock.

Sharon McCartney is an old friend, one of the Fredericton, New Brunswick (the centre of the universe—let’s be clear), literati, also a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop, also a prolific, prize-winning poet. These are poems about the body and transcendence, about the contradictions of love, about flying yet being buckled down—the normative tensions we all feel, in spades. Sharon is the author of For and Against (2010, Goose Lane Editions), The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder (2007, Nightwood Editions), Karenin Sings the Blues (2003, Goose Lane Editions) and Under the Abdominal Wall (1999, Anvil Press). In 2008, she received the Acorn/Plantos People’s Prize for poetry for The Love Song of Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s lovely to have her poems grace these pages. (Author Photo by Gabriel Jarman)

dg

Antiques Road Show, Kathadin & Other Poems By Sharon McCartney.

Antiques Roadshow, Katahdin & Other Poem

By Sharon McCartney

.

Giardia

The dog’s crushed mien, ears underslung, brow
low, as if he anticipates a cuffing, so mortified
by his unbidden inner turmoil, intestines bubbling.
He refuses his meat, corkscrews his torso, nose to ass,
as if to ask, Why? What does this mean? Or simply
to snap away the itching chigger of ignition. But
the root’s too deep, the inbound cysts redoubling
in subdermal subterfuge, his bowel’s womb warmth.
Poor sad thing. Empathy won’t cheer him, but I do
know how it feels, pain without meaning. Nowhere
to look but within. Whatever the cause, the impurity’s
source, he took it in, bad river water, morsel of carrion,
just as we all ingest delusion, denial, self-deceit,
the insalubrities that corrupt our gut and send us lurching,
chest-clutched, to the nausea of defeat, unmasked,
that demon in the mirror who points a digit and laughs.

.

Leg Press

Nearly prone, heels pushing ceilingward,
then ceding to gravity, to fear, knees descending
to sternum, a worthwhile grind in the hamstring.
The new pain is all self-inflicted, like gouging
a wound, a willingness to suffer and in that
extremity, transcendence, freeing oneself from
triviality. The bodybuilder says, pain is weakness
leaving the body. Each day a different muscle group,
yet always seeking symmetry, balance. He knows
it’s not what you lift, how many pounds, but how
you lift it, that the range of movement is what
quickens the muscle to consciousness. The bulge
of the quadricep surfacing like that awful awareness:
my love did not have to die, but I had to kill it.
.

Reverse Fly

Gravity’s the man beneath me, anchoring
me to the up-tilted bench, seductive, sweat-
beaded embrace that engages the rhomboid,
the rear delt. Not the weight, itself, but the force
that bestows weightiness, disheveled hombre
whose romantic fantasy feeds me, who would
drag me down if I did not resist, 17.5 lbs. in
each fist, straining back and away. Gravity’s
that urgency, the abyss of desire, divine madness
somewhere within that makes me not only gasp
for his illicit kiss in the dark, husk to husk, back
to wall, but also to beat him off, to disever.
Not the struggle, but the strength unearthed,
molten matter of nickel and iron inwardly spinning,
adamant and unrelenting, endless and unfathomable.
.

Katahdin

Why couldn’t I love him? He was all good morning
beautiful and you deserve to be spoiled, bringing me coffee
in bed, balancing the cups in that prissy way. Why couldn’t
I ignore that? His air of resignation, slumped behind the wheel,
always just under the speed limit, docile yes officer at the border.
Nothing on him to give those in authority what they want.
To my, this isn’t going anywhere, he said, well, I like what I see.
His respect for social order, corporations, the business section.
Not rights, but responsibilities. His regret for the years I spent
smoking dope. A whiz with engines, quadratics, but not overly
analytical. Something about beer, pizza and women, he said.
And mountains, escorting me to the top of Katahdin, a mile
high, on a lucent autumn day, a small Gore-Texed crowd
dazzled at the summit, taking in Chimney Pond, the knife
edge. But all I wanted to do was get back down.
.

First Flight in Five Years

No need for fear, nor hope, flight’s
timelessness coursing through me,
humming with the engine’s overture,
acceleration fueling euphoria as I dare
myself to look down, all of the paralytic
restrictions of the past, my anxiety of
incompleteness, grasping, as far away
now as the frost-heaved tarmac below,
wings tilting, banking, that wonky view
imparting a new perspective. Free of the
binary logic of groundedness, the be or
not be, pull and release. Yes, I’m buckled
in, book on my lap, as caged as the flock
of finches stowed, oddly, in the cramped
aft of this commuter aircraft, but I’m also
out there, aloft in the thin air, the updraft
of ambiguity, delimitation, giving in and
giving up and the transcendence of that,
birdsong, enginesong, dermis and hull,
indivisible as we ascend and turn.
.

Antiques Roadshow

But for his pearl buttons, he’s a dead-ringer
for my long-gone father, silver mop swept back,
comfortable paunch, blue hint of bemusement
in the iris. Arrives with an old Indian blanket
he’s slung over the back of a rocker forever.
Says it belonged to Kit Carson once. Dignified
in his discomposure, shifting on his toes.
He’s pleased to tell the story, his link to immortals,
but too proud to grasp. The appraiser’s apoplectic,
choking, his voice cracking, “Did you see my face?”
It’s a Ute “first phase” chief’s wearing blanket,
the purest form of Navajo weaving. Priceless
in its simplicity, yet the bidding would start
at half a million. More if the Carson link’s proven.
It’s like glimpsing my father crying in the garage
so many years ago to see this man’s unconcealed
confoundment. Overwhelmed, he confesses,
“There’s never been any wealth in the family.”
Now there is and all he can do is weep.
.

—Sharon McCartney