Eva H.D., the natural hustle: poems

 

THE BOYS AT THE PIZZERIA

Drinking wine from a can from a glass. Wood
table, mittens. Moved in this way and in
that. The young pizza guys: doughty stand ins
looking like boys I might have loved. They could
have been, bouquet of zinfandel lips, good
hands, ranginess of youthlimb, easy grin:
the lush sweetness of it, getting things done, thin
skin at their collars blistering so you’d

want to soothe that itch with cool fingers, palms.
You’d have wanted that, once, and gotten—or
not: let the bombs go off all over your
body then snuffed the winedark flame of its song,
get lit again. turned back toward the heat, youth,
rising like dough in the oven’s hot mouth.

I’m only seeing this now, Toronto poet Eva H.D.’s the natural hustle: poems (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2023), a collection that follows her full-length debut, Rotten Perfect Mouth (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2015) [see my review of such here] and collaborative art/photography volume with photographer Kendall Townend, Light Wounds (2021). The poems that make up the natural hustle offer an assemblage of declarative scenes; a montage of moments wrapped around other moments, attending the immediate, it would suggest, of both the author’s urban landscape and memory. “Every summer,” she writes, as part of the poem “DONNA SUMMER,” “you entertain thoughts you’ve had before; through / a sweating glass, lacerated with heat, consider // whether there’ll ever be enough July, consider / the menu, the news from Aleppo, the breathing/ Chablis. You misapprehend, fail to think through / anything but your own righteous outrage, friends’ / afflictions, your partisan posture.” Through H.D., the past and the present interact, intermingle and even react, providing a suggestion that there are no singular moments, but those that connect in loose sequence. Everything holds, somehow, and everything connects. Composed as first-person narratives, these poems are rooted in landscape, even across great distances, meditative swirls and the backlash of recollection. “Back to the highway.” she writes, as part of the extended sequence “GOD AND THE PATH TRAIN,” “Ramones doing their / Cretin hop syncopations like a / bulimic mid-vomit like / this one song just has to leave my body, / a car cuts us off so close it’s / practically driving backwards. // Sunflower dust on everything.” Or, as the same poem offers, near the end:

I sit here in a clean cool blue
plastic seat not caring less
about Camus who never
as it turns out even
once mentions the PATH train—
whether god is at the end
or Hoboken—I dunno
what people see
in the guy.
He’s not a map.