[Please note that this piece was originally published in Poetry Quebec. - ed]

3625 Aylmer Street, Montreal

It is Thursday evening at The Yellow Door and you are hearing poets and prose writers reading from their work. They stand just a few feet away from you. It is as though you are in someone’s basement.

As founder, producer and host, I have been running The Yellow Door Poetry and Prose Reading Series since January 1999. I remember that our first reading was standing room only, and it has been great ever since. I enjoy networking and community-building with poets. I also host The Visual Arts Centre Reading Series at the McClure Gallery and co-host Lovers and Others, which will be held this year at Café Sarajevo.

The Yellow Door is home to folk stars, spoken word artists, and poets. Simplicity and hard work keep audiences coming back. Over the years, the coffee house has hosted the likes of Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen and Rufus Wainwright.

A typical Yellow Door season runs from August to May and consists of roughly 12 shows. The series receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts and The League of Canadian Poets. Twenty-five to 35 people attend our shows. A couple of times a year, we have a full house of about 50. Part performance, part acoustic experience, The Yellow Door always delivers the poetry. The authors’ enthusiasm for their work is matched by the appreciative audience.

The series has featured talented Montreal poets and prose writers including Governor General award winner Hugh Hazelton, Michael Mirolla, Catherine Kidd, Paul Serralheiro, Stephen Morrissey, Carolyn Zonailo, Endre Farkas, Carolyn Marie Souaid, and others. We have had musicians, as well as writers from out of town.

Sometimes publishers from Ottawa, Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver contact me to book one of their writers. Spoken word artist, Ian Ferrier, who has performed at numerous shows believes that The Yellow Door has been kind to the literary scene.

Poet Carolyn Zonailo, who has read at The Yellow Door many times over the past ten years observed that it has a “collective sort of soul feeling.”

Ilona Martonfi  Tel: 514-939-4173 ilona.martonfi@sympatico.ca

Blue Poppy, copyright Ilona Martonfi 2009, Coracle Press, 72 pages

In Ilona Martonfi’s new book of poetry, the title offers us a riddle that we have to figure out for ourselves. The poppy is not red, it is some unknown shade of blue, and it is standing alone, as in a still life. Martonfi’s approach here is at times painterly, at times cinematographic, at times like a quilter, stitching together patches of her life with fragments of familiar torn fabric. The images she conjures are of a woman who loves to have her hands in the soil, her back to the sun, her eyes turned skyward. Her passion for her roses awakens her at 4 in the morning, just to see how they look. Trees and flowers are her sustenance (and witness), as are the roots winding back through the almost silent ground that connects her to her mother, her grandmother and her native land of Hungary – and the prayers carrying her forward, flowing through her to her four children and her grandchild. This is a woman who comes from a tradition that is frugal with words… a long line of women who, like her grandmother, “didn’t ask for anything”. A woman who tries to do no harm.

Martonfi didn’t ask for the terror of a violent husband, and yet that was what she lived with for almost a quarter of a century. She spares us much of that terror. She mutes the sound, tempers the smells, slows down the action. She uses prose to pin the wild poetic spaces down. She grounds us in visual details, letting her unflinching gaze fall briefly on her husband’s actions before turning the focus elsewhere. She takes us into survival mode. It is as if her witness self steps back and detachedly records the scene.

Blue Poppy is written in triptych form. In the first part entitled Night Wedding, Martonfi lays down, stroke by stroke, stitch by stitch, the foundations of the marriage that would lead her to put down roots in a walled garden. The Apple Tree initiates us, baring her not yet husband’s fine teeth:

“The apple tree in my front yard,

I bought it from Jasmin Garden Centre.

Had it delivered by truck

with purple burlap over its roots.

I prepared a three-foot deep hole: poured in

a pail of cold water. Unwrapped the roots.

That night we made love

in front of our neighbours,

the squirrels and the tulips.

My billowing white dress hitched up

to reveal a blue garter belt.

You lifted my skirt

to rip off the sash.

With your fine teeth,

you pulled off my virginity.

Later that night

around midnight we sat,

bleeding red tulips

fell from your jacket.

Today we are man and wife.

In the windows gleam

Fuchsia geraniums

with yellow dandelions.”

She might nonetheless have escaped her fate of marrying her first lover had she not become pregnant. I Promessi Sposi is a devastating account of her carrying their unborn child while her fiancé asks if $200 is enough for an abortion, a nurse suggests putting the baby up for adoption, and his sister calls her a Hungarian whore. She tries to conceal the pregnancy from her co-workers and describes her own bridal shower as if it is for someone else. Her loyalty to her unborn child is vivid against the warp of shame.

In these early poems we find a young woman who takes her wedding vows seriously, a woman of heart and substance whose life is now entwined with an inane man who, to me, is like a “white paper narcissus” with a brutal twist. Nonchalant in his cruelty.

In the poem Oleandro, set much later on a visit to her husband’s family in Sicily, we discover that his violence is not the only problem in the marriage. Under “dark grey-green leaves of date palms,” her brother-in-law asks her what’s the matter with her. “I don’t answer: my husband has a mistress. He batters me. I want a divorce.” By then, her life is so enmeshed with his that the walls of the garden have grown barbed-wire tendrils. 

The poems about their trips together are like macabre travel logs. Paris, Summer 1989 begins with:

 “I’ll throw you down the elevator shaft if you divorce me!”

I stared at the iron grill. I could see inside the shaft: cables

dangled three floors down. The day before we left Paris, we

went sightseeing. Our children visited the Musée d’Orsay.

Her husband goes on to threaten her casually in the Père Lachaise cemetery, standing before:

“[…] an old open grave with the marble slab removed…

The grave was empty.

“No one would be found here,” he remarked. “The place is

too big.” Ivy-covered stone wall. Paris traffic. August in Paris.

“Are you hungry? Let’s go to that restaurant across the street.”

We had spaghetti and meatballs with fresh basil. A glass of red wine […]

At home, he sweet-talked me. “I like your tan,” he teased.

 “Don’t believe him,” our children said. Every night after supper,

he left the house as before. I slept for five weeks on the putty-

coloured couch in the solarium. In October, I left.”

Her children were pivotal to her marriage, and pivotal to her escape.

Martonfi covers a lot of ground in this first part. Running into her husband with his girlfriend on Rue St-André. The birth of her first daughter, a blue baby. Her husband slapping her with a week-old baby in her arms, with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony playing on the radio. Slapping her three days before the birth of their fourth child. But she continues to wait for her husband to come home at night, continues to wait for something in the walled garden to give.

In the book’s second part, River Stones, the barbed wire tendrils can no longer keep her. In Take the Hand of a Child, Martonfi goes over what she has taught her children, willing it to be enough. She sends her kids to school “to normalize the abnormal.” In an article in National Geographic on wildlife reclaiming the abandoned land of Chernobyl, she takes hope. Pines are reclaiming the Red Forest, stunted and deformed, with unnaturally short or long needles. Her children protect her and help her leave. Their courage bolsters her resolve. It is her youngest, the boy, who musters his courage in the face of his father’s rage, and propels her to leave.

I, Myself, Fled into Exile

 “[…]

I went to sit on a bench in the walled garden.

I found our twelve year old son, who told me to leave.

I didn’t wash the supper dishes.

I didn’t water the fuchsia geraniums.

I didn’t call out: “Children, lock the door!”

It gets worse before it gets better. The chilling scenes in the shelter: a battered white-haired woman, a small girl whose pregnant mother goes out and never returns to the shelter. Martonfi’s children move their furniture out of their father’s house and their father calls the cops on them. He keeps trying to get Martonfi to come back, but can’t help using his old endearing tactics, like spitting rum in her face. Eventually, in Mount Royal Lookout, she achieves enough detachment to address him only as “You, the man across the river.”

The third part of the book, Acacia and Bones, fleshes out her family quilt, stitching in some of the unfinished patches of her life before and after her husband. She takes a more poetic, less prosaic approach here. Already the poems breathe easier, letting in more space.  In Visiting the Ridge, she describes her knew vantage point, choosing not to fence in her sentences with capitals or periods:

            “from this view I see it better

            from this perpetual angle of scarred trees

[…]

in a soft, white crinoline skirt

I don’t know how to write the truth

the green fly on my hand

this is where home is”

In this final part, she shares the quiet intimacies of her family life. Her mother Magda “[…] used to wear a flowered dress in summer.

She used to laugh with father at night in bed.

Breastfeed my baby brother.

Go with us to the big circus.

[…]

She used to laugh with me:

laugh out loud in her cobalt coat.

Make a lot of noise with her wooden spoons.

My mama used to love me:

she used to give me a bath on Saturdays,

in an old tin tub, in the middle of the kitchen.

She used to comb my long black hair,

part it in the middle,

braid it with red polka dot ribbons. 

My mother, Magda, was a love child.

 […]”

Her tenderness toward her mother is poignantly vivid in the poems about trying to fend off her mother’s breast cancer and death. “I have a rucksack full of miracles.” “Mother is the blue sky… mother is the water washing her daughter’s hair… mother is the empty room…” “She was hidden, my mother, in my sock.” 

Martonfi waits until the end of the book to reveal the most hidden pieces of the family quilt: the secret woundings that thread their way through the family lineage, passed down from mother to daughter, barely spoken, only now committed to paper. We see Martonfi’s fourth grade teacher fondling her pigtails, his body pressed against her blue flowered cotton dress in the last row while the class watches a movie. We learn about her mother’s suicide attempt after the war. About her father’s mistress before they came to Canada (“Why did mother slap me?”). But perhaps most painful of all, we get an inkling of her mother’s own brutal initiation into a shameful world of male violence when she was just a girl, in the poem Mariska’s Daughter. We see how the wounding gets handed down and preserved in silence and shame.

“Tightly drawn curtains in the windows of the house

made with brown ochre stone. Potted red geraniums.

The dirt roads are empty, strangely quiet. Magda’s

room is closed.

Her mother’s hand-embroidered muslin dress.

Eyelet petticoat, the colour purple. Sepia-hued

Photographs on a shelf. Cross-stitch tablecloth

Mariska sewed.

A love child.

I stand at the gate of Mother’s childhood house in

Arad, Romania. The year is 1928. A photo of Magda

posing in a studio: dressed in black leather school

shoes. Pleated dark blue skirt. White long-sleeved

blouse. White leggings.

Bees in the kitchen garden. Peach trees and pear

trees. Fleshy red berries of shrubs. Thistle and

nettle. Thorny acacia with yellow flowers. Laundry

fluttering from a wash line. Mariska works as a cook.

After school, Magda is alone in the house.

Stepfather says: I’ll kill you, if you tell anyone!”

Puppetry is her favourite childhood pastime:

everything secret.

On a Sunday in early September,

there in the cold grey yard

entwined with wildflowers.

Meadow grass. River stones.”

Now we understand why Martonfi had to face her own nightmare of male toxicity incarnate with such thoroughness. To break the legacy of shame suffered by her grandmother and mother and untold foremothers, she had to find the words and courage to sever those long-buried barb-wire roots, not knowing whether the tree would survive, much less flourish.

Hats off to Martonfi. Blue Poppy is an admirable body of work.

With nails that curved over toes. Her limbs, limp, her eyes vacant. She took her acoustic guitar to music lessons. She attended art courses at the Douglas Hospital for the mentally disabled. She had lived in shelters and foster homes. She visited emergency rooms at different hospitals.

Cognitive disorder associated to epilepsy, chronic. Contribution of sarcoidosis to mental state is unknown. Mental retardation and psychotic episodes greatly impair insight and judgment. She has basic ALD. Adult learning disability and anxiety disorders. Although she was on welfare, she received a settlement from the sale of her former family house. Less than a year later, she was penniless.

The kitten ran and hid under the bed when it saw me. The Persian cat with a broad round head, long silky hair, and a thick tail. Within a few weeks, it looked as sickly as my daughter did. Bony and undernourished, its hair unkempt and tangled.

The last Thursday of April, Susan, her nurse, called me from St. Mary’s Center Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic: “Can you stay with your daughter until I come to pick her up in the morning? I have a tryout appointment at a foster home in LaSalle. I don’t want Marisa to check herself into emergency. We will not be able to find her.”

“I’ll stay with her,” I promised.

Lemon-yellow apartment block. Alley view of walled gardens. Fragrant with new blooms of red tulip, daffodil, purple crocus. Hum of traffic on Decarie Boulevard. Notre-Dame-de-Grâce.

I arrived unannounced. Knocked on Marisa’s door. “I can take care of myself. Go home!” Her eyes blazed with anger.

Behind closed doors, acrid, pungent smell of cat litter. Here in these three overheated rooms of my daughter. Hardwood floors. Canvases. An easel. Metal rack of CD’s, black guitar, rickety table. Stale pizza crusts littered the refrigerator. “Did you eat yet?” I opened a can of chicken soup. Popped a toast.

White T-shirt, blue jeans, and running shoes. After supper, she lay down on her crumpled bed. Unhung paintings leaned against a walnut dresser. A landscape of turquoise, pink, and orange. Vibrantly embroidered floral motifs. Her rent check returned with insufficient funds.

I watched her stroke the cat’s knotted hair. Moon-pale, my first-born daughter. At times, I wished I could hug her as she hugged her kitten. I looked at Marisa and the cat. They didn’t accept pets at the foster home. New and unfamiliar world.

She lost all things that she dealt with daily. Everything in her house and kitchen garden. Red ochre stucco with long windows and narrow green shutters. Five years ago, she had a home. Interim divorce court. Her husband obtained custody of their two daughters ages five, and three. Five-month-old son.

The woman in those pictures is skinny, tense looking, and young. Her brown hair is short. That final summer, before her bout with chronic depression. Before Youth Protection Court declared her an unfit mother. Before I supervised her children’s visits.

Today, I bedded down on the living room floor, fully dressed. All night, Marisa tried to leave the apartment. In the dark, I yelled: “Don’t even try it!” Dozing, I awoke to see the door ajar. Down one flight of stairs. Cold cement steps under my stockinged feet. I caught up with her in the lobby. Hugged her close. Felt her gaunt, rigid body: “Come back upstairs.”

“I’ll hit you! I’ll hit you!” Her face, ashen, her eyes wild with rage. “Don’t do it. Don’t hit your mother!” I clamped her face with one hand. My fingers pressing her cheekbones. I held her there. “Don’t even think about it!” The sky, a curtain of indigo. Candles to light a room. Four in the morning. I hadn’t slept. Neither had she.

1.

At Checkpoint Charlie

customs huts

The death strip – scraped earth

:wildflowers.

Sepia postcard of the Brandenburg Gate.

Organized bus tour. A one-day visit.

2.

Windows are bricks instead of glass.

3.

A summer day, lapis-blue sky.

My husband buys a rucksack.

“These East Berliners look unhappy,” he says.

I remember, his leaving bruises.

The Mauer, the Wall, cuts through houses.

Ripped-up cobblestone.

4.

People are forbidden to wave

to family and friends.

5.

White crosses under an old elm.

A Strasse becomes a cul-de-sac:

from a steel viewing tower

one sees the street life.

Blank faces of passers-by.

6.

People break the Wall with hammers,

take home souvenirs. 1989.

7.

We are a family, divorced.

8.

A piece of Mauer still stands along the river,

one kilometre long. Dandelions, graffiti art.

Centre of the city under construction.