Weyman Chan, Witness Back at Me

 

Tired yet strong, you tell me to read the White Paper. Nothing
knows its place. Sunday you help me dig daikon, radishes like ice
stab the red earth of Heng Ha. Rain to atmospheric mist.

River mist, you aren’t lichen or reparation, don’t mouth off or
look back. Water is the first drum, though places forget.
Rats of the bang, wrong human, Paxil. We face the land we forget –

North west thaw, Devonian chinquapin. Tokuhon
plasters collide me with the daikon of my dad. Limbs drunk on
camphor, he loved Stampede Wrestling. Kroffat vs. Kamata
raised thee rat x²: Dad’s rage, 1923 vintage exclusion. Rat, times
July 1 pharma-grade plunge, equals Dad spiked with alcohol. (“SITTING WITH SHARRON”)

Composed as a collage-elegy is Calgary poet Weyman Chan’s sixth full-length collection, Witness Back at Me (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2023). Subtitled “mis-mothering & transmigration,” Witness Back at Me is a book-length elegy of witness composed through a lyric of stunning complexity around language, loss, grief and connection. As the back cover offers: “Suffused with a collage-like immersion of stream-of-conscious voices, Witness Back at Me parallels Chan’s childhood loss of his mother to breast cancer with the loss of his Two-Spirit Métis friend and mentor, writer Sharron Proulx-Turner.” The book is structured in five parts—“Did Nietzsche Have a Navel,” “My Surname Is Dust,” “The Hole to Heaven You Dug,” “That Old Vast Emptiness” and “Inscrutably Mis-Mothered”—and the collection is a wealth of sound, jumble and narrative layering, weaving in and through lines on and by Proulx-Turner, offering a through-line of the heart. The poems examine her work and his relationship to her, and to her work, providing an image of his mentor and her work that looks back at him, as well. “I too / am split from monster.” he writes, as part of the poem “DEFUNDING MY FEELY MAP.” The poem writes, further along: “if sorrow is / a stomach in a pond / or a clavicle neither beside nor / behind, if sorrow is / an op-ed that helped me not die // will you witness back at me? / that crow-wing blanket that helped you fly / above your own terror // Sharron, if I get lost // if parchment was ever innocent of its writ / to not have at least five tricks played on you [.]” The poems are masterful, richly evocative with a density of syntax, texture and sound. “how do I witness / when I am the land that I forget?” he writes, to close the opening sequence, “SITTING WITH SHARRON,” “I did not / plan                 to live outside the dead // or just by thinking this / haven’t I already changed the outcome [.]” As part of his “Afterword,” Chan offers:

Decades before her passing, Sharron braided me a rope of sweetgrass. It hangs on my car mirror as a talisman. I couldn’t have been loved & mentored by a more thoroughly in-tune soul & spirit. My book of witnessing is a tribute to truth-telling &, by sheer luck of the draw, of finding my way to a safer place to land, on settler land that my father sailed to by means of a dead child’s identity, bought on paper. My shaky narrative of soul wandering & reintegration is a tribute to all of my get-togethers with Sharron & her children. The amazing French onion soup with globs of cheese, her description of blues & greens hallowing the eye on a summer’s day.