Promiscuity

rural house “across the field” (l. 15) that was uninhabited and whose presence was not acknowledged becomes the focus of attention. A couple of young lovers who have regular sexual encounters in the shade provided by the vegetation surrounding the house age when they are cast in the new light coming from the abandoned house: “The boy and girl who have never stopped / their lovemaking in the shelter of its trees / feel its light upon them and grow old” (ll. 20-22). The young lovers feel comfortable in the shelter that nature provides, which symbolises a locus amoenus of sorts, but the artificial light coming from the abandoned house breaks the spell. Years have passed, so the artificial light functions as a mirror⁴⁰ which awakens the lovers to age-related expectations which do not allow for teenage-like sexual encounters amid nature. In other words, the shining of artificial light on the young lovers becomes a rite of passage into adulthood. As a result, the young couple’s emplaced embodiment of sexuality is no longer free from cultural stereotypes.

lay as stark / as a body coffined / on the dining room table” (ll. 2-4). However, the poem does not clarify whether this is the case or not. The woman in the poem is described as having sexual encounters with a different man every night: “She wrinkled it [the bed] / with different men / who left before morning” (ll. 6-8). Nonetheless, it is not made explicit in the poem whether she simply enjoys the company of different lovers or whether she is a sex worker (as is the case of the poem that is subsequently analysed, namely “The Red Onion in Skagway, Alaska”). What Crozier emphasizes in the poem is the woman’s keeping of a memento from each of her lovers, out of which she sews a bed cover: “[…]

from each she stitched / a piece into her heavy quilt –” (ll. 9-10). Such a patchwork project suggests that the woman in the poem is fond of her lovers and does not wish to forget them. Indeed, the heat created during sexual intercourse will somehow remain with her in the warmth provided by the duvet. Thus, in a way, the quilt represents the woman’s willingness to anchor her temporary lovers to her bed, and by extension to herself. While the woman in the poem’s embodiment of sexuality is not made explicit, her emplacement of sexuality in her bed is reinforced by the memento she keeps from each of her lovers;

this suggests that the woman’s creative place-making stems from the sexual energy of her encounters. Hence, the woman’s undescribed embodiment of sexuality has a direct effect on her emplacement.

On the other hand, “The Red Onion in Skagway, Alaska” depicts the saloon, where prostitutes work and live, as a constraining space which fosters a disembodiment of sexuality on the part of the sex workers. The ungendered persona retells what she read in the exhibit of the Red Onion Saloon and provides a critique of the conditions its sex workers used to live in at the “turn-of-the-century” (l. 23). The poem criticizes the smallness of the rooms the prostitutes worked in, as implied by the following quotation:

In the Red Onion Saloon

I read what’s supposed to be

an amusing tale of the girls upstairs who worked in “cribs,” ten by ten cells, just enough room to lie

spread-legged. . . . (ll. 5-10)

The persona does not find such an instance of erotic history entertaining, as she makes explicit in lines 5 and 6. In addition, the persona also comments on a photograph of the sex workers in order to draw attention to their humanness. That is to say that the prostitutes from the photograph were no different from other local young women:

. . . Four small-town girls open-faced and plump look out at you

like someone in an ad for milk or someone you used to know,

that quiet girl who caught the bus to school from Olds or Antelope or Manyberries,

the one who ate her lunch outside alone. (ll. 24-31)

In spite of this, the poem both underscores their alienation from society, as the last line in the previous quotation suggests, and compares them to beasts of burden whose happiness is not taken into consideration: “I think of the ponies / who never got to leave the mines / . . . / pulling car after car / in numbing dark” (ll. 37-38, 41-42). Such an analogy is triggered by several similar characteristics, namely the already-mentioned limited working space, the system in which the prostitutes were asked to receive one client after another – “When one of the girls was occupied / the bartender flipped a doll / onto her back / and when he righted her / another miner climbed the stairs” (ll. 17-21) – and the

physical and emotional appearance of the girls in the photograph: “The photographer / has made the Red-Rock Ladies smile (I hope / his words were kind) / but they all look pale, / discomforted” (ll. 42-46). The sex workers’ pets, the persona guesses, were their only source of happiness: “two with their reluctant pets / tucked into the fleshy curve of their arms, / in the Red Onion / perhaps all they knew / of love” (ll. 47-51). The poem binds sexuality to a very specific place in this poem, one that is reminiscent of a prison and that involves routine rather than pleasure. From an ecofeminist perspective, both the women and the beasts of burden in the mine in which the prostitutes’ miner clients work suffer from the same kind of exploitation, namely one that prioritizes male desire over either female or animal needs and wishes. As ecofeminist Nöel Sturgeon claims,

“[e]cofeminism is a movement that . . . articulates the theory that the ideologies that authorize injustices based on gender, race and class are related to the ideologies that sanction the exploitation and degradation of the environment” (58). Thus, it makes sense that in their shared submission, the women find comfort and love only in their pets.