First Crack 9780773583894

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FIRST CRACK

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First

Crack

Craig Poile

HARBINGER POETRY SERIES an imprint of CARLETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

© Craig Poile and Carleton University Press Inc., 1998 Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Poile, Craig A. (Craig Alexander), 1967First crack (Harbinger poetry series ; 5) ISBN 0-88629-349-9 I. Title. II. Series. PS8581.0227F57 1998 PR9199.3.P557F57 1998

C81T.54

C98-901290-5

Cover: Bandaged Man, 1973 Paterson Ewen, Acrylic and cloth on gouged plywood, 243.8 x 121.9 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Design and interior: BCumming Designs A few of these poems appeared in earlier forms in the following publications: "Accommodations" in The Malahat Review, "Pacemaker," "Moondog," "Foyer," and "Utensils" in The New Quarterly, and "New Year's Letter (1994)" in Queen's Quarterly. Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.

Harbinger Poetry Series, Number 5

This book is dedicated to J.R. Morrison

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For advice and encouragement, I am indebted to Stephanie Bolster, Diana Brebner, Elaine Marchand, Missy Marston and James Merrill.

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CONTENTS

I. INVITATION New Year's Letter (1993) 2 Foyer 3 Tethered 4 Requiem 5 Hadrian's Vow 6 Arousal (Portrait of Anthony and Cleopatra) 7 Household Gods 8 Waiting 10 II. THE DISTANCE BETWEEN New Year's Letter (1994) 12 Lives of My Cell 13 Lather 14 Jellyfish 15 Pacemaker (Sestina) 16 Anima 18 Eighth Month 19 Heaven and Hell 20 Fragment 2 1 Thickening 22 Golem 23 III. MEDIA New Year's Letter (1995) 26 Untitled 28 Moondog 29 Autoerotic 30 To the Wall 32 Mise en Abyme 34 Summer Evening, 1995 35 On the Chateau Terrace 37

IV. THE DISTANCE FROM New Year's Letter (1996) 40 Old Flames 41 Moving In 42 Accommodations 43 Utensils 44 Invasion 45 "Bodyworks" 48 Empty 49 Some Late Afternoons 50

I INVITATION

NEW YEAR'S LETTER (1993) My friends, may I propose a masked ball? For how else to depict, defend, tell all As such occasions allow? New Year's here finds Bodies blackening the canal, our backsides Whitened by its froth. The crowd surges, set For speed on metal blades, doubt and regret Submerged in the exhilaration Of skating under bridges, flying where we Once drowned in steamy summer cataracts. Here's one more year to grind with stats and facts. From the frozen gutter, celebrants look up, Peer from under the mask's lip, to see Fire dashed from the sky's mortar, Where sheer intensity yields colour. To be human seems especially bare While facing thinnesses of flaming air. Must we find ourselves empty? For artifice, These feux d*artifice easily entice Us to dress down the unmasking. So we snatch another disguise, and ask, Just this year, to have the life of our making.

2

FOYER

Enter. Here we will clasp hands or kiss lightly, so I can enjoy the process, grasp the mild erotic flow of guests who've found this passive point of entry they've left their boots around. (One only has to try; A foot in the door and I'm taken in.) Throw off your coat, entrust that bottle to my hand. My smile greets your bare throat. Your costume, as always, fits. I whisper that your secret is safe with me. And yet, here, cloistered, one admits Desire, and that this departing arrival could form the basis of some longer interval. You hear the crowd and turn, making your second entrance. They stare in turn, locked in degree and kind like the parquet. Cool air lifts your cape like steam. My past gains a new ghoul. My future sheds a dream.

3

TETHERED

Thoughts of going it alone are rare as miracles this year. A bad fall on day one cracked your wrist, and left the knot of bones plastered up for weeks to come. You managed a bath, and strangers opened doors for you. But getting your tie on means two very different mornings, yours and mine, must meet. We stand still, embarrassed to be caught, again, acting out scenes of men and women charmed by the menial. My mother and father stood like this, eyes down, working their mouths and hands because someone was watching. Any child could see the exception proved their rule of undoing. From arm's length, I flip your collar, attach the clips and smooth things down with regimented care and, before it all passes without a word plant one on your cheek: The kind of loud kiss lovers exchange before they grab each other by the neck and fall together to the ground.

4

REQUIEM

Rest, me for the moment, you for eternity. Camphor fumes grow familiar in the room of your last days. In this place that time's worn out I seek completion, to preserve the scene when you slip out of life as if through velvet drapes, robbing nothing from the moment, and leaving me a passage, a final phrase to carry into the next day's light, the carnival streets where I, too, make life recoil. The mere thought of that see-saw second can ease undying fears: the mirror unclouded at your nostril, hands resting on bedsheets blurred with mercurial shadows. Such sheafs, white instants, are brittle and thin. They melt briefly on the tongue, leave nothing but the taste of the moment when I stopped the clock, opened the curtains and said, "I have lived."

5

HADRIAN S VOW

Hopeless to survive the sun, this love of mine will drown you in the Nile to suit its own design. Let death be the price for choosing favourites. We've defined our Eden, still and bright, and each day the arrangement trips us up, like the small god who mistakes what's yours for mine. Nothing left but to flirt with the infernal, find fears in late-day silence and speak well of the casket that gift-wraps us for Heaven with skill and design. Gods marvel, no doubt, at mortal longings, puzzle over how we play at forever, saying that we dwell in something we've never even seen. But love's a wash with time, I know: those waters closed over our heads long ago.

6

AROUSAL (PORTRAIT OF ANTHONY AND CLEOPATRA) "You are not a statue," she tells him. "You are an obelisk that winks," he says. That's all they speak, hoping not to violate The possibilities that rise like summer sweat. He bends, in an arch, as if there were Something fast between them. Part of her is hidden by his forearm, A brace of polished wood, hollow if tapped, Which joins the aged bicep and scarred shoulder And holds him to the portrait she becomes. She sees herself stretch into the landscape, Sets her eyes on the shadow that colours her thighs. Her breasts rest like water, raised by Her spine to buoy him or carry him some distance. By dawn they have fallen, exhausted, To become each other's horizon. They touch At the extremities, where the day's kindling Light makes their skins a single surface.

7

HOUSEHOLD GODS

When Antonius sank in sight of Ramses' shore, his body was washed blank; his life etched out in ore. Hadrian, for love's survival, taxed the local idiom to stage his friend's revival, with sun and stone as medium. The favourite's name collected a cultish people's love and wreaths on his erected form, high and hewn. Above all, he's perfect: Maleness bare, delineated, an answer to men's distress, those who painted wives as Cleopatra, chiseled mothers crouching like the Sphinx. What extra poise he gained from touching Heaven. Monumental phallic object. Yes, but for me, it all boils down to his abject utility, as he lifts the mantle to his head. As twins with equal gifts he evens out the bed.

8

I'm tempted to employ your talents in this way: textures of man or boy designed to hold a tray or truss a bowl of ice. Winking at the armrest, your meet-your-maker face becomes a sculptor's test. But these require blueprints, not what's sketched in lines of blood and legend's tints. Only how we've lived defines the art we seem to see. The furniture of you still makes a seat for me when the ideal falls through.

9

WAITING

"We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest." — Nathaniel Hawthorne My home has a hundred pipes leading in, plus fissures, wires. Its borders thin in places to a single pane of glass. I'll take you in whatever shape you need to get inside, past the watching eyes that haunt the front door and the back. They expect you any day, on a white horse, in Hugo Boss duds, dripping with someone's blood. If you're seen, they'll make demands, draw up the papers for incorporation. They'll watch the ink dry and wait it out, fondling their disbelief. I will not measure you for memories, paint you on black velvet and admire your shiny, captive tears. That's their game. Let me clasp you, weightless, like the shape of a waltz. I will take you in sips and never, never tell. I will be struck dumb.

10

II THE DISTANCE BETWEEN

NEW YEAR'S LETTER (1994) Swerving to avoid this year's gust of pain, I stick to the well-weathered talk of the street. And who'd have thought winter would be so mild? As the season enters with a slow bow, I'm hunched, bending to look at stars resting in puddles — not their reflection, just a cold light where it's held. A few flakes fall like scraps. Soon a film covers the windows and moves in, transposed. At night the empty parks blaze orange-blue, green-red: a polar opposition and welcome oversight in a city spent from deficit reduction. "My own dog, gone commercial!" Charlie Brown lisps as I look on, the old accusation re-televised. In those years, the gaudy sight was plastic icicles linked over the wrought-iron bed. Their tips tapped lightly against the wall, echoing a slammed door or deepening curse. "Commercial," my sister would parrot and sneer. As chill memories come out of season, what seemed fixed disrobes — Good grief! — in the wash of light. It's all here again. Christmas was, after all, nothing more, or less, than a surge in the guts; a place where a child sits and rubs his hands in colours like spilled paint, abiding in the clash of lights.

12

LIVES OF MY CELL

"One drop of that stuff and bang!" he said, his hands circling like birds or bees, for effect. In another drive-thru sermon, my father was supplying the fuel to further distance my life from his. I detect one message as we race apart: Fm ahead. "She was pregnant, wasn't, then again ..." More talk from friends revolves around this recurring idea, or act. New life. A topic that troubles as I turn a new leaf, and start to think of children, around the age my mother swore off labour pain for life. Desire has led me to men, doubled my distance from fatherhood. Why squander hopes on pregnant thought, IVF, or mutations of the nuclear home? Enough to nourish the cells I have. It should be clear that only life's pulse is new. Time and again, just one drop, just one slap, and I find the courage to attempt mitosis. As my miraculous replication, selves born in the lives of my friends, has shown, I do not survive singly, each kiss hatching a brood, closing the gap.

13

LATHER

This is a trick of my father's, That I must, once again, teach myself, Folded in the sharp hiss of steam. First, my fingers trace Cheek and chin melting in the shower's Flowing glaze, sight unseen. Then the blade comes into play, Inching blindly along a path it completes In a few heartbeats with a mirror's help. I feel my way into the anxious Thrill of cutting it close, Remaking myself, beardless ... sexless ? My fingers stroke the throat's Gibraltar, Its message adamant: to the touch My imaginings are off the map. Back at the flattering mirror, In the curtains' sifted light, I find the job's half-finished But easily completed. The razor moves, Scraping. I meet my eye only briefly, afraid To see what's washed away.

14

JELLYFISH

The sea brought us smack together. Inevitable, though neither chose the course that brought us head to head. Limbs or tentacles do little more than serve their purpose: propel, paralyse, give pain. In my face, it trails poison strands, a pumping lung of phlegm or brackish lymph. I freeze in the ache of fight or flight, the fear of a soft-bodied, mindless menace, gripped by the urge to hurt, to hide, to deny. I escape the water scarred with stings: mother sea's reminder of when we dumped her and rose upright to the land. From above, I see them pumping still, assiduous, sucking up a sea-deep nightmare set in a smudge of raw egg and the red of blood on stone. Years ago I watched small, bored children use rocks to crush them from a distance and explode into giggles and cries: "Jellyfish' Man-o'-war!" Now grown, Fm still tender to such terrors, and wait for the tide to strand them in the sun. I put a freckled finger to the puddle body held in a cup of tangled weeds. Like a nosy guest, I bend close, to identify what's beyond recognition, eager to touch, to see, and know.

15

PACEMAKER (SESTINA)

Tapping fingers keep time. Looking to the clock (Hunkered down between the ferns) on the up beat, I come face to face with the moment's emotion, (Asking for my status: starting early... running late?) The brief despair of seeing unwound time: Hours sit, unfractioned, around its steady hands. It's a gift from a relative, no emotion (The music curves out of mind, like a question mark) Attached, just filling a need known to beat In every heart and home. And the clock, Neglected and run down, twice each day hands Me an urgency, a marker, the veritable time. Inanimate, it marks life with a timeless beat, Lends it breadth, like a primary emotion Colouring a minute's tone. Fear or love, for a time, Bring relief, take blame off our hands, (What, deep down, is the problem, after all?) As immutable gears catch in the heart's clock. So these days I've learned to spare my hands The job of winding it with pendulous time. (Is killing time so simple, found in an act so small?) I don't ask it to keep pace. Instead emotion Fuels the gaze, sets the time for heart or clock Tracking the need of the ever-changing beat. (Always to be stubborn, not for a moment free?) It doesn't even jitter as my fumbling hands Pull books, or water the plants by rote, clockWise. Still that perfect face, marked for, not by, time, Flickers in the stereo blast, blooms in the beat, Its glass humming as if with emotion.

16

"I've heard," it mimes to me, "of emotion, And of souls that race against the clock To wash their minutes like they were hands. I've got my numbers, and never miss a beat. So pick a feeling. You'll come to need it, in time." (Whose is the voice that chimes inside mine?) What's this emotion? Clever as a clock, my hands resume the beat, in time to an absent tick.

17

ANIMA

Her pace is slow, but I fall behind to illustrate My distance from what she's come to mean. The glimmer of streetlight rises half an inch From where her skates touch down on scourged ice. Her round cap is the first sphere of a trio that ends in A black skirt hanging from her fat behind. Moving through the unmeasured, shifting night, A loafer in each hand, she carries broken bread, Sacred books or green boughs. The image of her Waited for the cold's kiss to wake Its likeness in my head. A few breaths end its captivity In memory, tear it from the electric net that tows pictures To our homes and litters our waking lives the way A restless shut-in leaves used kleenex in a trail. I draw closer, bear down like angels wound in coloured Sheets, their arms around a whipping post forming in The dim cross-hatch of light. We round a crystalline moment Hard to touch, embodied in the multitudes that have passed This way and edged its surface with artful cuts and glances. I pass silently at this border; accent and language are Their own prohibition. She has picked the telling image up And, for me at least, will bear it from now on.

18

EIGHTH MONTH

Though it's all about excess (full to bursting she is) her legs look starved below the life-flooded abdomen. She would not welcome the child right now, unless it was shaped like a footstool. She could not bend to pick it up or feed it: the food she sees she takes to fill the unsevered hunger the unborn dreams for her. A presence, not diminutive but double, sits behind her slanting eyes as she swallows the last spoonful.

19

HEAVEN AND HELL

Renovation rolls into the new year and they're still living in two rooms, lives and objects strung together in a tight-knit cradle of a home. The child runs back and forth, trailing a toy and defective words. They know it's no great distance from one room to another. On grounds of either/or and "yes, but" the domestic scene can change. To hold it together, you sit on the stove instead of a couch. For love, you watch the sink like it's TV, and pass the milk like a prayer.

20

FRAGMENT The tablecloth pink As this raw moment Beside the canal at dusk. The waitress asks: "You want that toasted?" I say no, knowing that I've already burned enough. Spun outside my insulation, I keep looking at blooms Arranged in mouthfuls and Algae-covered moorings, Because heaven's every feature Has a twin in hell And with this ripple past The two will, like me, recollect And claim they are one.

21

THICKENING

Like shadows clearing, the demons rush out when I think of what I'll build today. They are dinosaurs rising with shifting jaws, long madonnas trailing golden yarn, things with wings and thin, knotted fingers. I act fast on sketchy plans, with the urgency of the childless man, who tries 30 on for size and feels a pinch. Somewhere a scale holding body and sense wavers, then tips. At the hardware store, I join a long line of men, some fathers, who have come to weigh down their arms and load up the family van. In the aisles, they measure and compare, think by touch, long to taste life with cold metal teeth. I once thought they were bored: as the housewife hits the bottle, so the husband grabs a hammer. But we all get our share of pieces, something ill-formed, edges raw, that fail the trick of time and error. It calls for craft. That's why the tape, gloves, and glue are waiting here. And the roll of chicken wire I'll bend into a torso frame, teasing out the constellation hiding in the stars of wire. In my prickly net, one more demon comes to light, possessed by the thought of a body.

22

GOLEM

Still sticky from her lips, the stitched description of what she'll wear that night got up and walked away. The story has taken on a life a step away from hers. Strapless, beltless, hanging. At the bosom, a monstrous bow, freed from the label of accessory. The hide is velvet, a dusty texture altered by gestures into refractions by Vermeer. (Stripped and dripping, the last bath towel used to wipe the coffee cup saved from the abandoned kitchen, Monty jettisons the rod and, in the ruin of a good set of drapes, enters the living room in velour cinched at the nipples, Craven A in hand.) When she tells the story again, it will sound the same, although it already hasn't happened. Now the dress is folded into time. But I have seen her that night: head above the bared clavicle, the close-cropped hair looking wet (traces of the sculptor's hands), her smile surmounting a wry tooth with a bite of laughter.

*3

And she keeps on spinning tales in the midday nosh and chat. Among stabs at ex's and everyday reversals, lie plans for a masquerade, decidedly out of season. She licks her lips at what will come off when the veils go on, the costume that comes cheap as talk. Just last week she wore tuxedo tails to work and swept them up, her buttocks rolling, for anyone to see, challenging the settled faces, our final, fatal masks.

24

Ill MEDIA

NEW YEAR'S LETTER (1995) Stroke by stroke, the world takes on the pattern of our inconstant motion as we paint a friend's new home. The rooms turn shining wet and white, like eggs flung inside out to hold the days to come. Oozing from the bucket's spout, the white on white effect spreads far beyond our provocation: we brush against it, it falls on us in pearls. It takes hold like everything you live with does, even what you've left behind. I heard about the split today, what's come between who's here and who's not. At least a few of us have made up our minds to stay, though which few changes every day. He's gone from wife back to mother to the one who holds him here, where he'll now live, mimicking the chaste hug that marked the last goodbye, before the paint's had time to dry. My job's to cover the comic scene, graffiti left by nomadic folks who fixed their choice of idols to this month's wall: boxy skyline, green dragons, a wiry Spiderman. My first coat lies like tissue, held with a breath of hope, the hero pale but present.

26

His recent change of heart and home gives off raw heat. Tonight I burn to see through who I was, step out as who I am. Through white my eyes recall old flames, misplaced trust, the elements that make the truth up as we go along. "Shellac!" This solution (far from final) seals in the icons as I leave, turning from the traces of hands going dull on the wall, the tactile moment where a life takes shape.

^7

UNTITLED

After the work by Anish Kapoor Three half-spheres, set mouth to mouth As if I (agape) complete the set And find my likeness in these domes (Each more than my height, Skinned with moon surface, A lacquer of proscenium drape). Their sheen is pure pigment. Set free of base mix, the insoluble blue Gives the vividness of scenes That are seen as something new then Shift back, again unseen. You have sculpted the mind's Doghouse, an opening to no dimension, A blackness that first looked solid To the indifferent eye soon drawn in. Next time, flashlight in hand, Pll add a bright chancre Of ease into each maw. Aiming the light for a glimpse of form, I fall in, only to emerge In the blue serge suit of the untitled, My hands cloister-white and limp (The zero of my face assumes the illusion, Describing a circle dark as pond ice, A brittle solution).

28

MOONDOG

Please, take one more look. Lunacy, indeed. No glow, just pitted and left to shine Like the bloodless flush of half-life, still Buckling under the human wish list, Matter that yields to mortal fissions. I looked my fill one night, drunk as a trout, Mouth open to the tasteless water of The northern lake. My constant embraces Kept me afloat and ready to sink for good, Cupped by the devil's waters: scotch, summer and night. Resting under the deflated day, I listen To Vickers' voice, open, open, open, no end To breath, assuring his comrade or his woman. I ingest heaven as it's said the Virgin did — Through the ear. My throat opens in mute response. What I lose in these moments leaves me with Poise. Come, my love, embrace the man in the moon.

29

AUTOEROTIC

Hired hands did in the scandal, excised with yellowed veils the bits that breed and nurse us into what Michelangelo called God's image. As if we'd never guess the parts from the imperfect whole. Below his Judgement sat holy men, scalded white and thin, who put on scarlet robes and Latin phrases to masquerade as monuments and hide the eager, mortal hand. But for the chosen, time was threatening. The brimming, interminable mass dragged on like the world's last days. Their eyes looked up, beyond the censure of the horny finger and its ring, and turned, full throttle, to the naked limbs above. There's no less risk in our time, when perfect flesh, its ripeness and sheen, take shape in the murderous clang of the barbell returning to the stack, or the penitent crack and buzz edging through the surgeon's inner room. Hooked by a curve to worship, the eyes carve a shape for the mind to turn, while the body suffers the reinvention of Catherine's wheel and arrows Sebastian drew in like breaths.

30

But captive glimpses of perfection, worked out on flesh in solitude, will fail the test of time. Uncovered, they're denuded, drained of colour. Memory holds only exhibits of desire. Don't talk of love eternal to the drudge who stooped at Catherine's haunch to cover up the master's art. Lacking the timeless touch each swathe he painted differed, its vigour weathered by a day. His odd job coloured in the passion in hopes of steering the flock's devotion. But when heaven employs my hand to tame the lustred flames, I see skin that's sainted, and draw in life's deep, green breath.

3^

TO THE WALL

Judgement, the scene that hangs my head. Neither "the last" nor lasting, the vision has suffered 100,000 considerations and now a good wash as well. Sponged free of dirt and sepia complacencies, it moves out of the world, rippling fictively. The eye can't hold it. Canonical weight breaks into relics of the glorious whole on the faded, ground-up blue of edenic skies or millennial wash-out. In the search for authenticity, every layer shields offence, the tense space where someone's laboured to skew perspective or twist limbs 'til they agreed. Skilled use of colour. Lessons in the morgue. Human arts of dim origin betray the heavenly, cast shadows on the past when

3^

a moment thundered, and heaven and hell fell fresh and wet and heaving on the walls. But tales and times get tarnished. They live on in puzzled skins, browning hides that dissolve in modern solutions until nothing's left but here and now. The judgement's past. A face left red and burnished finds a frame in the cool colours of the master's hand.

33

MISE EN ABYME

You fall silent, your response a captive of the deafened room. Into the vacuum goes your prayer, speaking the crime I'll answer for on Judgement Day. I rest on the edge of my insistence and the threadbare sofa that becomes your cradle in blind afternoon sleep. Good Catholic boy, they pressed you down with all the baggage, the ancient scripts that have us in different corners: Poor in Spirit (that's you) despairs in hard squints below the shifting blinds, tongue held in trust of doomsday gold, as Worldly Desire (that's me) brandishes the hope that something less than death can whittle down our souls to fit the Blessed Book. The night ahead will swallow every hard word and look and still sit open, until the stares held over the startled, empty air, turn to the morning's page, where we're torn to shreds or lifted on wings to ourselves. I take pains and make a volume, spare and lucid as Michelangelo's angel, who hears the trumpet and holds blank pages open for the waking dead to read.

34

SUMMER EVENING, 1995

Smoked out of the city, the antidote to the day's admixture of heat and fatigue was cool nature, a drive with friends to the world at the water's edge that would clear our heads before we're drafted into sleep. The people we meet on the way down have tossed off more than us, though we'd never thought to escape something as simple as clothes. They weave in and out of sight, finally settling on the rocks in poses, their eyes masked in the serenity that comes when the final veil falls. Upwind from their esprit de corps, my eyes rummage the ground for something large enough to shatter the stare I've locked on the man opposite. He stands like metal set out to cool, fine hair rising off a new skin he dimly scratches. I flag my modesty with a suit and towel before my introduction to the waters. Dip the feet, then wet the neck on each side — nothing left to impulse as I show how art and nature meet. Finish with a splash, and push off from the smouldering shore.

35

From the hollow of the lake, our laughter travels out, innocent of the joke, then breaks off as we save breath in our small place between abundant air and sucking water. We return with the sun off our backs, rise up dripping chill, as the last light shifts over water and land in a losing balance with the dark. Over and above, an old man sits, flirting with the water behind the fanned-out pages of a book. His limbs bear up the globe of his belly, the bright, ideal planet nestled inside him. Holding my towel like a tent, I drop a pair of soggy shorts. The awkward birth leaves them laughing, and gives me heart, the poor apprentice who apes the shaman on the lake's dark shore. Then we move into the shadows of the tumble-down terrace that leads to home, the city built from small flashes of lives mirrored a hundred times over. As we reach the road I shiver, shake off the backward tow of recent events, and join the slow rotation into tomorrow, while the shore below goes up in flames.

36

ON THE CHATEAU TERRACE

River and rapids flow on And it's beyond me, to capture Each leaf in words or paint. From above, I can imagine A place in the locks, afloat, Living life buoyed up By lowering horizons, Feeling the hidden current's Push towards the sky. How much has passed over these Flagstone spaces unimpeded, Tossed down as if by thought Into the water bordered by Soil furrowed and black, Grass levelled to mown thickness? Take your moment on this concrete Tongue, which cares enough to stress Only intention, its proffered view.

37

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IV THE DISTANCE FROM

NEW YEAR'S LETTER (1996) For once, no words. Just conversation, tossed around like a clear stone. The days have shaken off their measurements into the open boxes at the end of this so-called year. Someone has hushed up the stores, forgot to clear the sidewalk on the Laurier Bridge. And in the newspapers, the annual attempt to clean the smudge off has come up clean. Some people were counted, among the countless dead. It was out with the old, in with the neo. Each evening people are appearing on TV with light instead of skin, their bones uncertain. There was something I had to do, this year. It filled the hour or two I waited for you in the weightless night. I swept up now instead of later. I bought time. But this year is just a number; the rest is unnamed. Forget the days, the year is not over. Not until you say for sure, not until I give the word.

40

OLD FLAMES

"It was only for the sex," he says as we wait for the light to turn. Or else it was to have a story to tell, one we've all heard before. Like the tale of the lover who ate oat bran every meal, only showered after sex, became famous, or beat me black and blue with words. We mark them "ex," then pluck them out to illustrate when the subject is the inner lining of the stomach and what makes it throb with a hidden, unseen ache. Lost in the telling are bits too delicious to share, that ever since that lover there or there, you smile at the stranger who hands you a cup of coffee you love with both hands for its heat and taste of bitter and cream. We thought we loved like angels, crying at the outline of a soul. But after them, all of them, we know the romance of objects, things. As lovers past we become worthy. Just a mouthful of flesh and bone, a few words spoken while crossing the street.

4i

MOVING IN

Where was I but in the kitchen (elbow deep In what needs be done before I sleep) While you set out our socks, side by side? You relayed the simple fact at my side With a kiss, holding out your delight, Which caught us like the sun's receding light That still brings a glow, however small. It appears our common stock, unmentionables et al. Has gone up, like a new moon. Tried, true and tired. Too much "real life"? But old tongues have shown that Puns preserve as surely as amber sap. Our settings are indispensable, Raising hardened truths until they cast off light Like imposture. And so I say: Held to my eye, you are adorned, Compelling to adore, a lover the colour of This moment, the shade of the light we stand in.

4*

ACCOMMODATIONS

I'm stuck with the tour. Giving it, that is. As a host, it's the perfect way to manage the fear — rushing in afresh with each arrival — that I live too differently or, worse, much the same. I skew the directions, herd them on past the bedroom walls, still the sorry pink we found them, and the boxes that look dispossessed even though they're labelled by name and room. (We just arrived ... is it five months now?) But I'm guide, not guard, and one gets through to the kitchen, a flirtatious pinch of a room, and just as unsettling as a prelude to dinner. A guest's turn to point: "Now that's a real sink!" Yes, a fully functional archive, a great hulk and fitting heir to the name Titanic. It is, as he says, "What they were all like in the 20s and 30s." And where's the real in that? He's found meaning around the peeling edges, but the trace of authenticity just leads back to his conversant eye and Newfie grin. Rooted on the spot, a hand on each side of the well, he's found his home, not mine. That mystery will live and die with him. All I've found in this spot is that agility counts in cramped quarters and the wit to say that our sink is the perfect size to bathe a child (What is more agile than irony?), if only the one my love and I dream into each other's eyes.

43

UTENSILS

Scuttled to the kitchen you find something set out to thaw. Beans have been soaking. A few still float as you plunge fingers in to the knuckle. Stir. Round and cool, dark skins thin enough to hatch. You've found here both a child's mind thinking pebbles from a stream and waters close behind where senses rest in dream and memories are held like prisms of thought to your retreating eye. So like sauce that's prepared before to add flavour to the brunch, the past can be seasoning for a tame, hungover bunch: Sinking down, beyond reasoning, to where metaphor's meat and spice of meaning.

44

INVASION Weekl Ants in the bathroom. With B-movie blather, I say how much I care: "The Encroachment of the Ants?" Maybe. The slow insinuation smacks of a James novel. Still there they are, strung out like seeds or chatter on the page. Week 2 A room tiled with habits, ornament of interlock and fissure. In our home shutting the door is a tendency, but at times deliberate. And now we close ourselves in with their slow progress. They will leave. What's here but a meal of suds or toothpaste mint? All the good shit's whisked away.

45

Week 3 Now they're acrobats bent on pyramid-building. They stack up each excursion, make a ladder of tried-and-true and clamber to the kitchen. These tiny twists of muscle share our table, test our food. I buy poison. It's cheap as a candy bar and packed in plastic stop-sign shapes. Week 4 I try to be fascinated. A gentle tap 1 sends them scattering. I crush a few, find them hard. Who's unimpressed? Just a segment of the larger, untouchable entity. Like the few cells I once scraped off my inner cheek for biology class. Or losing an arm or a leg. Week 6 It's beyond irritation. I stop the cracks with chewing gum, leaving a pinkish thing on which they suckle. C. sweetens the traps with sugar and the corps clots the path to reach it: our rehearsal for Triumph of the Will.

46

Week/ There can be no peace. The super spares us the shame. Same thing happened two floors up, but she can't seem to understand how we could have ants. I want to meet these neighbours. Week 11 In bed I remember: there were ants. It's dark, but I get up to hunt one down, just to say that it's the last.

47

BODYWORKS

"Now touch with the toe!" At first I prod, The way you'd check a corpse for signs of life. But My foot catches the beat. The touch Goes short and sharp, for seven more, six more ... This afternoon, IVe kept my appointment with health, As marked on the schedule I've pinned up. I step in and out of squares we're asked to imagine, And we're cutting up the floor, for six more, five more ... Legs and elbows tick-tock across the room, arms reaching, To get air into that clutching vacuum of a muscle. I trip by myself in the mirror, odd and robotic, Dressed in black to mourn my dignity, for five more, four more ... We take time for the breath, the Body, the middle child Left standing in the frayed clothes cast off by older Feeling, Spectator to the darling lisps of Thought That dog my every misstep, through four more, three more ... Here the demographic bulge shows, the sweat behind The gay man's burden, where colour is worn like skin, and Sagging chests go high and proud. Name the source of strength: Lower fibres, hip flexor, the foursquare quads, for five more, four more A loose parade of faces and fists above, step and kick below, Surging like the crowded square, the mob chant At a soccer match, the People exhaling like a shout beyond The speeches of the new Right, for three more, two more ... "Remember this energy, take it when you need it. Remember how hard you worked." We're down, body long On the clinging mat, the ceiling tiles riddled with holes. The countdown starts again, the heart cries out for more. More.

48

EMPTY

We set a date to take possession, behind the windows someone papered up to hide the empty life inside: a burlap backdrop never meant to face the world alone, a few raw bricks reduced to the job some dumb rock could do, a line of mismatched nails, dusty logs. Enough to make the emptiness complete. For months the store repelled each applicant with its vacant stare. Even as we sign, there is no outward hint of acceptance, or disgust, in its Little Orphan Annie eyes. And when it all comes down, what of us goes on display? We've planned a carnival of books, to wink out "Come buy, come buy." But there's more to fill, and space enough for ambitions we've kept quiet, like a lover on the side. We need bodies, the public person, quaintly dumb, the right stuff to crowd a room or catch the passions of a passerby. And if they don't come, I'll make them from papier mache, a forgiving, childish clay, that (unlike pastry) has always worked for me before. C. hears my plan, suggests a dinosaur. That's what I get for asking: massive needs you thought had died off long ago, roaring hopes that wither at the first sign of chill. We barely contain patterns spun from tooth and claw, the glinting kernel of cold-blooded intent. Our homemade monsters have found a perch in glass houses each side of the door. Less terrible than the nothing where we started, better than forgetting, it's our last chance to think big.

49

SOME LATE AFTERNOONS

Lying in the room the sun Cracks open, we wish It could always be so bright, In the places where we eat and sleep. Last week you whitened this shell, Brushed over its creases, "cut in" the windows, Turned the pipes into their shadows. Your white moves over me, sinks in. The sloppy job has trailed a pile Of speckled clothes. On your skin The mottle of mole and hair Turns white as I close my eyes. When you are not here and light Floods in, moving closer to leaving, I remember and ache, floating Like a black X off the page.

jo

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The HARBINGER POETRY SERIES, an imprint of Carleton University Press, is dedicated to the publication of first volumes of poetry by Canadian poets. Initially, Harbinger's mandate is to publish two volumes per year; if funding permits, however, it is to publish no fewer than four volumes per year. As the title of the series implies, our mission is to herald poets in whom we have discovered not just the potential for good verse, but an already clear and confident voice. SERIES EDITOR

EDITORIAL BOARD

Christopher Levenson

Stephanie Bolster Elaine Marchand Armand Ruffo Darien Watson

ALSO AVAILABLE IN THIS SERIES

Holly Kritsch, Something Pm Supposed to Remember "Holly Kritsch is an immediately attractive poet, gifted with the stern voice of raw confession. Telling of harrowing blasphemies against childhood, telling of violation and irrepressible love, her poetry matters/' — George Elliott Clarke Ronna Bloom, Fear of the Ride "Few poets write of grief and love with such a simple elegance and an impressive depth. Ronna Bloom writes clear and hard about what hurts, and gives us hope." — Susan Musgrave Anne Le Dressay, Sleep is a Country "Have you heard rocks keening? Anne Le Dressay helps us recognize the sound. Austere as ancient standing stones, her poems are perfectly shaped, perfectly positioned to reflect the wordless light." — Mary A. Wright Mark Sinnett, The Landing 1998 winner of the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry published in the previous year. "These poems [are] blessedly unphoney and clearvoiced ... quite often piercingly unexpected, moving, right." — Don Coles Michelle Desbarats, Last Child to Come Inside "This is poetry full of quick and acutely angled insight, moving with great sureness to glimpse the raven's wing inside the ordinary." — Don McKay