Selah

By Nora Gould

A long poem that limns the incremental mourning of living with a person who has frontotemporal dementia.

Selah, from Psalms and Habakkuk -- to praise, to lift up, to weigh in the balances, to pause, or a purely musical notation. Biblical scholars debate the exact meaning. Selah, Nora Gould's second poetry collection, is a sequence of fragments written in dialogue with all of these meanings. Stitched together, these fragments form a poem that runs from the ranch land of Alberta into the heart of a shared house and a shared life.
Selah is about living with a husband recently diagnosed with dementia; it's about the looking back and the imagining forward, about saying what cannot be said -- the wayfaring bush and its shadow. It's about finding a way through all this: "The palette darker than I’d planned," yes, but also shot through with humour and care, crafted with both frankness and decorum.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781771314466

Nora Gould

Nora Gould writes from east central Alberta where she ranches with her family and volunteers in wildlife rehabilitation with the Medicine River Wildlife Centre. She graduated from the University of Guelph in 1984 with a degree in veterinary medicine.

Book preview

Charl

Beside the piano he wouldn’t play, his fingertips all slipped

into shallows between my ribs, drafted the longitude

of my midaxillary lines from the depths of my fossae

(yes, my armpits, where I sweat) down my torso.

He pressed as though to enter.

And this was a hug.

Breathe. There is air in the room.

In our bed, the window open

wide, night after night the hollow

tremolo of a snipe, winnowing.

Dusky blues, greens, shot with pearly light, yellows,

rosy pinks — twilight or dawn, nothing is decided. Goats,

grey, brindle, soft brown throats, underbellies flecked

with black. Unscissored beards, curved horns. An

undertow of semen.

The palette darker than I’d planned, all that

light to be sewn into nine-patches, a quilt

to layer with, or sleep under in another room.

Stitching the long seams across the breadth;

repeated kitty-corner, colour, slant-rhymed.

It is past time to question fabrics.

And that one goat, running — did I place both hands

on her head, turn her out into the wilderness?

What hadn’t, might not happen, was already my fault.

Too unsettled

to know that place he loved

to buy coffee, a sweet, was just a block north

on our way home, he didn’t talk

about our separate meetings, his new diagnosis —

frontotemporal dementia. We were both there

when the neurologist explained the medication,

how it should dampen the irritability, the drumming,

and his apathy. Six weeks until Bronwen’s plea

convinced him to try it. Another month and he sang,

not often, but occasionally — Splish splash I was taking a