Rules of the Kingdom 9780773549005

Citation preview

t h e r u l e s o f t h e k i n gdom

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t h e h ugh m ac len n an po etry s eries Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart t i t l e s i n the s eries Waterglass  Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit  Shawna Lemay  Chess Pieces  David Solway Giving My Body to Science  Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast  S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart  Tim Bowling What Really Matters  Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur  Aurian Haller Credo  Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes  Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees  Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words  S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church  Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage  David Solway The Ishtar Gate  Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself  Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant  Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood  Naomi Guttman Palilalia  Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus  Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells  Suzanne Hancock Blindfold  John Mikhail Asfour Particles  Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting  Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House  Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song  Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now  Gordon Johnston Some Dance  Ricardo Sternberg Outside, Inside  Michael Penny The Winter Count  Dilys Leman Tablature  Bruce Whiteman Trio  Sarah Tolmie hook  nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live  John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House  Margo Wheaton Small Fires  Kelly Norah Drukker Knots  Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom  Julie Paul

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The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  Julie Paul 2017 isbn 978-0-7735-4899-2 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-4900-5 (eP DF ) isb n 978-0-7735-4901-2 (eP UB) Legal deposit first quarter 2017 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Paul, Julie, 1969–, author The rules of the kingdom / Julie Paul. (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series) Poems. Issued in print and electronic formats. ISBN 978-0-7735-4899-2 (paperback). – ISBN 978-0-7735-4900-5 (eP DF ). – ISB N 978-0-7735-4901-2 (eP UB) I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series PS8631.A8498R85 2017

C811'.6

C 2016-906264-3 C 2016-906265-1

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 New Baskerville.

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For my family

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CONTENTS

S e t t lers ’ D es cen dan t Reclai m s t he Pa st Settlers’ Descendant Reclaims the Past  3 Variations of Home  5 Confessions of a Migratory Species  7 Highway 511, Lanark Village  9 Lanark County Love  15 Sentinel   17 Local Beliefs  18 The Rules of the Kingdom   20 Fire Loves  22 Paint by Numbers, Lanark Fire, 1959  23 I Should Have Married a Fireman  25 April, Ottawa Valley  26 W eig ht o f the W o rd Antecedents 29 Photo, Post-baptism, 1969  31 In Dreams, When Someone Calls My Name  32 Cat Got My Tongue   34 At Thirteen  35 Survival 37 Resurrection 39 Weight of the Word  40 Suffer No Fools  42 Sport 43 The F-word  45

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Blue Ghazal  47 Village Life  48 Via Dolorosa  50 Cleavag e Gazing across Venous Lake  53 New Mother’s Song, 5 a.m.  55 Waterslide 57 Parenting Strategy #4  60 Young Building, Dusk  61 Hormones Are Coming  62 Suede Wedge-Heeled Boots  63 Cleavage 65 Astrology Gets You Off the Hook  67 After the Paris Nightclub Attack  69 T h e W o rld ’ s S malles t Repub lic What We Thought about Sex at Fifteen  73 Flick You, Teenage Love  74 Coastal Romance  76 Earth Girl Tells All  77 Honda CB-750  78 Strangers We Are Not  79 The World’s Smallest Republic  80 Sunday Morning Praise  81 Leonid Love  84 Outskirts 86 Want(on) and On  88 Ne x t Time the W o rld W ill B ur n Revision 99 The Ten Suggestions   100 viii

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Other Versions of the Dream  103 Cheat 104 Advice 105 Memento 106 It’s Just a Bath  108 Liar, Lyre  110 Discovery Coffee Shop  111 God Decides to Start Again  113 Next Time the World Will Burn  116 Notes 117 Acknowledgments 119

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Settlers’ Descendant Reclaims the Past

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S e t t l e r s ’ D e s c e n dant R e c l a i m s t h e P ast This is not for fun-poking – no cow-tipping here – although it happens. Shit happens. This is holding the baby up, turning the shell over, opening the book to the middle where the pop-up village springs to life. This is life    and this life, I claim it, finally – birthrite by presence past: Lanark Village, middle of nowhere, Eastern Ontario pop. 800     The hands of my brethren     still clap in the vestiary     where fiddle tunes elaborate the heartsongs     of the Irish and Scots, transported    from hardship    to further hardship,

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   the only difference    familiarity –     bringing their God for company,    free passage.     Of course, He came.

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V a r i at i o n s o f H ome

Hidden in butterfly wing patterns and knee-jerk reactions to drunkenness, in the plantain and chicory edging the roads – this name, this simple word, this home, as in anybody in there? A neighbour borrows a shovel, the sink’s scoured with silver spirals, the leaves pile up and above the four-kid commotion all you can hear is the scratch of a deaf cat’s claws. Home, therefore, trapped rodents, flypaper, mosquito coils, the interrupted march of carpenter ants, six months of cold chased out of the house by eight cords of wood, tea towels flapping the smoke alarm. Also, home, still, in spite of, nonetheless – all the exceptions, in fact, the norm:

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flaws in the grain, the pain typical, the way anytime a scab lifts, the humanity stares back, pink and raw but healing, nearly always.

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Co n f e s s i o n s o f a M i g r atory S pecies

As with birdwatching, the most valued was the rare, the visiting: the social column boasted dinners with relatives in the village’s ten-page newspaper from beyond the county lines – and yet if anyone left town it was heresy. Pioneering long past, the fear still ran in our blood that people would leave us high and dry – no one to help bring in the cows, the laundry, the hay, the potatoes. I wanted out before I knew what out meant, not resentful of geography or people but driven by the ancient impulse in my immigrant cells: to leave. Before I had kept my appointment with the future, I felt the villagers’ unified, withering eye. Yet how could I fault them?

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Simply living out the patterns alive in their roots, puppets from another age, worried about crops, infections, babies turning cold in their cold mothers’ arms.

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Hi g h way 5 1 1 , L a n a r k Village

Every village has its monster,     every place its beast. For some it is the river, its song of movement calling the blood’s water back or the train tracks, the seduction of regular rhythm a better way to go or the madman, his dirty hands hungry, eyes burning like plastic.

For Lanark it was the road          Highway 511 renamed George Street for the five blocks it was ours. The road split the village down the middle

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    the only way in or out unless you walked through the graveyard and onto the trail behind the dump          or died trying.

On the road through the village the gravel trucks came and went more often than the guy who cruised it, elbow out the window, watching for legs tits ass before he turned at the wide mouth of the school’s driveway and headed back to turn at the chip wagon at the other end of George. The big rigs of Tomlinson Trucking carted chunks of calcite from a blasted hillside in Tatlock, a deep white hole in the earth so bright it hurt to see it, pure white calcitic marble on its way to becoming toothpaste then drove back, empty-bedded, to do it all again.

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I spent years listening to the low voices of 40-ton trucks chained to a routine I didn’t want any part of

    all villagers in the same boat –          driving to get anywhere     driving to get back     and heard myself promise    at eighteen       one day       not to turn around.

Into a green afternoon of that year, on the first hot day of May,     the dog – my dog – sprang from the open car window, ears flapping Casey, we called, sing-song             Casey, come my sisters, my Nana and I all yelled for the wild dog we loved             Casey! Come home!

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There is home and there is this home,     my father’s baby, built from scratch: a sparkly ceiling, a handbuilt fireplace       and a picture window on the land where he used to harvest his mother’s potatoes picture this! in curving ’70s squares a view of young maples a newly paved road that led to two other houses a sawmill a small barn that held one old cow a dead-end.

Whose dog was he? We each called Casey our own yet whose life was it but his when he was off his chain?

Every village has its monster,       every place its beast.

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At our edge of Lanark, just past the school zone sign, you could smell their dust and fumes, the exhausted trucks tired of having to slow their heavy load down every trip they made from quarry to processing plant in Perth our village    a speed bump our village    a nuisance somewhere to get through.

I never saw the body my father and our neighbour buried after taking turns with the shovel out behind the shed, beneath the bursting lilacs, but I tried to assign the blame:     it was my fault,    the truck driver’s     the scent of hepatica    and skunk cabbage     desire in the dog’s veins     to roll in the woods behind the school

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   or spring itself     forcing that car window down.

What got him, though,       was that highway and whatever freedom it offered seconds of being more alive than not

it’s only sacrifice if you don’t want to go this I told myself, tell it still.

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L a n a r k C o u n t y L ove

We came from the rough and tumble, settlers intent on surviving this rocky section of Upper Canada, committed to making every scrap count. A hundred and fifty years later, not wanting to waste energy, we barely touched each other at all. Instead, we got our intimacy on the road: hugging each curve, hands on the wheel, familiarity daring us to let just two fingers rest. We nodded as we passed each other, teased with the horn, knew, like a memorized song, what was coming next – each house farm bridge pond field accident site every sideroad leading deeper into the land our blood had come to when there were no roads at all little here to love then but the villagers who survived the voyage

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the lakes like eyes always open; more trees than hope. We drove, we had to – and even when we didn’t, we did: Sundays first leaves of spring last leaves of autumn new houses new bridges new heartbreak watched wheels passing – every parade down the main street full of antique cars and trucks descendants of the successful dead waving from the windows, throwing candy kisses at our feet.

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Sentinel

Hearing a siren, my grandmother stands at her front window to see what vehicle it’s coming from and where it’s heading. What she has lost comes back to her each time the silence is replaced by wailing, and then is taken from her again. Even if her family and friends are spared this time, chances are she knows who’s hurting. She sends a prayer along with the siren, a plea to make the suffering short, to ease any kind of trouble. Once the air goes calm she sits down to her soaps and the magical place, Genoa City, where that old charmer Victor – who reminds her of the son she lost to the road at twenty-two – keeps coming back from the dead.

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Local Beliefs

We believed in the miracle of sap to syrup, vatfuls of maple water boiled down to amber potfuls, and we poured it on everything and it was good. And our God was good and He wanted only that we shop at Church bazaars and eat at bean suppers and try every type of pie known to mankind – and to be kind, and learn a few hymns, and offer up a couple of bucks in the collection plate. We believed in the power of Balderson’s Mammoth Cheese; our pride swelled at the sight of the crumbling replica on the edge of town, by the tracks – the wonder of that huge wheel of cheddar so big it broke the platform it was meant for at the World’s Fair, 1893, Chicago. And we bought the discount bags of trimmings at the cheese factory, extra-old and Colby with caraway and marble, and they were good. We believed in the glory of Perth’s Last Fatal Duel, the fight over a woman, pistols cracking in the thunderous afternoon, one man down, dead in the rain.

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We believed in the label of Ontario’s Prettiest Town, repeated it to strangers when telling them of home, because it sounded good. And it was good, and we knew it, and in our Sunday best, after Mass, we passed the roast beef, Amen. We believed, and each night, kneeled to pray, not only for our souls but for silence, wanting no more voices to rise from the land beneath us like its cursed stones, still surfacing, no ghosts of pioneers running, wailing, in their ridiculous, laced attire, into the woods for shelter – shelter they would only find by making it.

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Th e R u l e s o f t h e K i n g dom

In the earliest days of the province almost every settler took in travellers overnight, but as immigration increased, many, almost in self-defence, took out inn licenses so as to be able to charge their guests. 1970s Upper Canada Village Guidebook, Morrisburg, O N

If you rub nothing and nothing together, what do you get? Everything. Each thing, every day, is made from scratch. Imagine leisure time as sleeping, dare to dream of cakes and beds made, candles dipped, barns raised, wild turkeys plucked. Memories present the problems. Fine chairs, tables and linens packed in the brain, horses instead of borrowed oxen, thoughts that were given free passage from a land where castles exist to a country where no palace has ever stood. Your log house is a room in the forest made from forest itself. What shelters and warms you is also what you hate a little more each day.

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The rocks keep rising to the surface. The trees rub against each other, thickening while you weep. When you hear a knock at your door, you cannot ignore it, even if you want only to heap sweaters on your head. Under your own roof, no boots lacking holes but if you put yourself in the traveller’s shoes you must invite the stranger in. Your light has comforted the weary before, your rosehip tea has warmed many cheeks. Give them freely. You are a long way from any kind of comfort, therefore you are the comfort. Make this your diversion. Make this your solace. Your heart, forced open by the new creeds of desolation, pounds out a welcome. You hold a candle up to a face that radiates equal measures of hope and disbelief. Come in, your mouth says. Rest by our fire.

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F i r e L ov e s

the sawmill the tree-lined main street  the houses  the hotels the window sashes on the town hall  the library books  the way the mouth loves the way a mother says I could eat you up       but actually does it   the way a lover – the way the village God does not discriminate among Christians       all God’s creatures equally blessed  or cursed oh yes the Lord God Fire  loves all

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P ai n t b y N u m b e r s : L a n a r k F ire, 1959

The fire was pretty well out when we reached town, but it no longer looked like the old Lanark, which had been pretty much a model for Upper Canada Village. Betty (Drysdale) Somerville, “The Lanark Fire,” The Lanark Era

x # of lunches – called dinners – untouched on the tables x # of suppers not made x # of sandwiches handed out to the horrified x # of kitchens going, going, gone x # of stories untold, baths not taken, medicine forgotten, pets gone missing x # of loads of wash not brought in from the line x # of bed sheets marked with a body’s ashy fingerprint after a few hours of nightmared sleep x # of lads and lasses on the bucket brigade, wetting their old houses’ sides to slow down the attack

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x # of trees to feed the army of flames marching down George Street x # of homeless, jobless, hopeless, once the smoke cleared x # of dogs on the loose x # of phobias born, babies not made, spirits broken. These numbers were not officially tallied. But the # of spectators over the weekend come to witness the carnage in this small village, cars bumper-to-bumper for ten miles on the Perth Road? Twenty thousand. Twenty thousand witnesses to a spark gone wild in swirling wind. Entertainment. And what then? Tales of the wreckage taken home, fire safety wisdom imparted from the front seat while kids rolled their eyes at the back of parents’ heads, yeah, yeah, yeah, driving back to their cozy houses, their tree-lined streets, eyes burning from cigarette smoke alone.

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I S h o u l d H av e M a r r i e d a F ireman

Instead I got a man who burned his own house down with his brother when they were six years old    an accident –    twin trouble. Now my teenaged daughter breathes fire: all it takes is a mouthful of cornstarch, a breath, a lighter –     Of all the ways to heal,    exposure the easiest?

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A p r i l , O t tawa V a l l e y

Spring came as if it dropped from space – a package to shut us up or save us. The snow seemed to vanish like a bad magician’s silk – only glimmers in the shadows. The air smelled of dog shit and dandelions, and once the daffodils popped, a bright tang that seemed to come from sunshine itself. Beneath the bridge our giddy river carried trees like they were dolls, the park lost its picnic tables and the monkey bars were in up to their knees. We didn’t care. Winter had been a war and now, to us haggard survivors, the sun promised a ceasefire. The ground beneath us thawed and softened, finally ready to welcome our seeds and our vaulted dead.

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Weight of the Word

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Antecedents

My grandmothers, their youth marked by both wars, the tables they loaded with food, the hands that rocked ten cradles my grandfathers, not for killing but for flying & textiles, their war efforts shown in less lethal ways my great-grandfather the farmer, his broken legs that brought his son home from crossing the Atlantic with bombs to bring in the harvest instead and further back the snowstorm that made my young great-grandparents elope out of moral necessity to ride out the storm overnight in Almonte’s last hotel room on their way home for Christmas; the country – this country – that let their families in, encouraging them to tame stolen corners of it, back and back the ocean, that liquid highway of a thousand possible deaths that didn’t kill them all

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the old countries that drove them out, however they did it, the Spanish Armada, the Vikings, the Germanic tribes for visiting, the Celts and Bronze and Iron Age tribes who hosted and whatever moors and peat bogs and seas sustained them so that I might one day be born of two teenagers in love the same summer a man walked upon the virgin moon and claimed it.

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P h o to , P o s t - ba p t i s m, 1969

My father stands straight as a post in his narrow suit beside my mini-skirted mother, who’s perched on the edge of an armchair. They are married. They are family. They are teenagers. Behind them, two sets of parents smile, now God’s been involved while I sleep in my great-grandfather’s lap, his stroke-damaged face blank, useless as the young fist curled tight against my father’s thigh. I have been given over to God, purified of the sin that brought me here, and this Sunday afternoon, among these good people I am celebrated as blessing, straight from the womb of Mary, untouched by any earthly love.

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I n D r e a m s , W h e n S o m e one Calls My Name It’s a calm voice, a lapping of waves, the way my mother must have spoken to wake me at midnight, just enough awake to take my medication, those early years, in applesauce or ice cream. She, a mother so young, seventeen, had no idea how to do it and yet she did it. Motherhood came to her as if she’d fallen into the ground, not a pit but a hole the shape of her, not a grave but a place from which to rise. She rose three more times, baby after baby, body not her own, a decade’s stretch.

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In her exhaustion – a renewable resource – she taught me that voice and I used it – lapping, dulcet – against my sisters’ downy heads, whispered into my brother’s tiny ancient ears:                 hush, hush. Mostly I sang to the tune of “America the Beautiful”: for God’s sake, little baby, please, just go to sleep.

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C at G o t M y T o n g u e

The tire swing rubs circles into a small wind. My mother is pregnant with her fourth child. The male grosbeak calls until dark for the female the cat has killed. Sadness is not mine or anyone’s to own. Instead it skulks from heart to heart. I have become silent, the ten-year-old who will not talk, while the bird sings the same song he sings in joy not knowing any other.

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A t T h i rt e e n

Later, you won’t remember the rage. You’re the big girl, the one in charge, the one with the answers when the answerers are gone. Until they’re finally asleep your three siblings laugh, giddy and free, reach wet hands into the sugar jar, lick them clean, chase each other around and around the house, shrieking, deking easily around you when you try to block their way. You won’t remember the ratio of slaps to threats that ultimately gets them to stop but one kid always ends up in tears and Band-Aids from a run-in with a coffee table or the walls themselves. You tell them I told you so. Then you tell them it’ll be okay.

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Even though it’s not their style, you worry your parents will come home plastered like your aunt at Christmas, whose blood stained the icy walkway after she slipped and split her head, ambulance lights pawing your bedspread, because if they can’t parent these little terrors, it’ll fall on you. Later, you’ll only remember the fear that fuels your bargains with God: please don’t make me hurt them.

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S u rv i va l

It took me four tries to earn my Survival badge in swimming – to convince my body to somersault from dock to darkness, from edge to depths     Fail, fail, fail. Pass! and yet the glory of finally tipping over, letting myself go like a thrown penny, its solitary wish attached, did not make up for all the failures I carried them in my thighs, my belly, pushing my bathing suit’s stripes off-course, in my breasts that came in like toy volcanoes, too soon. All those waiting kids behind me got it right on the first go, moved onto the next level, said    god, it’s as easy as breathing. But hey, I was good at other things – changing diapers, picking wildflowers, pretending I was the Queen.

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I got the badge; I made it; I passed the test. Why still the sting? Because scars tingle, because humans hold on, because I doubt I could do it now, that damned somersault, knowing what I know, carrying what I carry.

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Resurrection

The sky was always there for us when we had nowhere else to go: we had nowhere. The nation’s capital, an hour’s drive away, might as well have been the moon. In fact the moon seemed closer beyond my clip-on window sashes, somewhere I took my problems, a round white Jesus, the host’s model dying a new death each month, coming back whole. If nothing else those Catholic years gave me metaphors, another way out of the village: leper colonies, floods, famines, burning bushes. How good our wide, empty streets after Mass, and after the hymns, how sweet the red-winged blackbird, heart on its wing.

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Weight of the Word

In the woodlot, my father asked me to lift a maple log, then a piece of ironwood, just to watch my face. When he was twenty-two his own father died; the oldest child, like me, my father picked up the pieces and grew up.    The meaning of father for him:    provider, protector, chopper and piler of wood. His favourite food: the tip at the end of wild honeysuckle – columbine – the honey-sweet blossom a delicacy from meadowed clearings. Could we live on it? was never a question. When my father showed me how to eat flowers, I was already living on it.    I lived on that rare    tenderness for days.

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All he asked was that I love him, handing me those logs to weigh, to see what he could offer, to feel their heft and know that he would keep his word.

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Suffer No Fools

The village had no time for airs, suffered no fools or flouncers, could not stomach lace, flash, furs or joy beyond what was necessary, say, at Christmas, or on an old aunt, gone dotty. It had no patience for made-up, put-on, contrived or gaudy, except on stage at the Spring Fling and in the marshmallow salad. In the garden: geraniums, petunias, marigolds, phlox. In the fruit bowl: apple, orange, banana. And yet year after year, I gave my mother rhinestone wonders from the five and dime, blue-dyed carnations, mica and fool’s gold, rocks shot through with sparkle to distract her from diapers and casseroles to jazz up our nest to dazzle her into seeing me in a brighter light.

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S p o rt

In the field behind Maple Grove School, the killdeers must fake broken wings to save their young. They are not baseball fans, and I think of them as kin while my brother runs the bases, slides into home, brushes dirt from his knees. I don’t often come to cheer him on – I am a teenaged girl with a kid brother, the last-ditch successful try after three girls. I love him, though, with a pride that chokes: my chest hurts from stopped tears as I watch him in his dusty blue uniform, pitching to the other seven-year-olds, striking them out. In two years I will call him an asshole when he sprays me with water, poolside, in Myrtle Beach. I will watch as his face caves in, his bright smile collapsing and my heart with it.

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Years later, he’ll say he doesn’t remember, insists I’m making a big deal over nothing which only means I did my job: Killdeer! Killdeer! Killdeer!

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T h e F - wo r d

Some women jump at the F-word as if hit on the shoulder with a Frisbee but F is not for Frisbee, or fist, or figure of speech. Fudge is one substitute, like carob for chocolate: no effing way. Frig, another stand-in, is more malleable than others, and friggin’ right it is, the best way for the mouths of rural babes to practice the power of the F. And yet, none of them really do the job. For years I jumped, too, because it wasn’t in the Girl Guide laws or the readings at Mass, not in Trixie Belden or on cereal boxes, not in the history textbook or on the Fonz’s album cover     (although it was implied)          (Ehhhhhhhhhhhh…                Sit on it!)

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I had no training for the world beyond pop. 800, was kept in the dark like Mom’s bean sprouts growing into pale straws under the kitchen sink: once I felt compelled to go to an unscheduled confession because I said Bitch.     But one summer I read it, daily, a blue Fuck    spray-painted on the stone wall across from the liquor store     where the village creep sat, saying Soon, soon     as I walked past in my first bra – until the day he scrubbed the paint off, when he smiled at me like a saved sinner and I smiled back, my young mouth stained Popsicle pink.

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Blue Ghazal

We learned to swim in the river, diving until we turned blue. Perth’s water tower used to be baby blue and rust decorated its edges and seams and rivets like cinnamon frosting against It’s-A-Boy blue. Mrs Kolarik, the woman around the corner, made cakes; twenty thin coconut layers so heavy we turned blue just to carry them into the house, singing. I have a photo: a cake, my great-grandfather’s blue pyjamas, his last birthday – 98th – in hospital. My brain, feeble tool, is going blue to keep his pipe, his Scotch mints, his love of animals and kids alive, but I’m stuck on the bluesilver bedrails, Grampa Patrick’s mouth, open not for cake or to say goodbye, Julie; only a wordless, final, one-bar blues.

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Village Life

1.  1969–1988, Eastern Ontario Each holiday meal, the ham, robed in pineapple-ruffled cherries, glistened its radiant benediction on Centennial Roses. You scooped more Jell-O salad instead, watched your mashed potatoes turn pink while your grandmother asked the Lord for his attendance. The olive-green appliances talked, at night, of the gardens that had grown before they arrived, beneath the new basement, where your grandparents once grew a year’s worth of potatoes every summer; if you were the only one awake, searching for alum powder for a canker sore, iodine for a cut, you could hear their ghosts sending faint satellite pings of longing up through the brick and stone flooring, all faked, but truly, so easy to clean, wax-free! Beside your Sears canopy bed, with its spray-painted rings of faux-pyrite, you knelt on blue shag and prayed to Jesus and Holly Hobbie, then later, Luke Duke, Bono, Bowie and Sting, woke up soaking wet, pulsing, sure your desire would stencil itself on your face in a pattern of whorls and dots, visible over the porridge. Downstairs on Sunday mornings, your lapsed Protestant father watched Star Trek while you fixed your waist-length hair in the small bathroom, where you and your Mary-blue eyes went on forever in the stick-on mirrored tiles, all versions a sinner, holding shame like a storm cloud until you could confess after Mass to the handsome young priest.

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2.  1995, Todos Santos, Baja California In a fishing village in Mexico, you rented a lime tree and a ham-pink house where you wanted for little, hungered for much. With no appliances but a borrowed hot plate, you practised each word before buying groceries, let a wolf spider live in your shower so you could feed him cockroaches. At night you watched satellites cross against the traffic of tropical constellations, became distracted by night-blooming jasmine, faked love for orgasms with pyrite-skinned surfer boys. You ran until you were soaking wet in the desert, at noon, let the sun stencil a pattern through holes in your shirt, stopped at the dead horse to pay respect, renewed your lapsed attention to God in the pastel cemetery, beneath the avocado trees, at Punto Lobos, where the wild sea calmed enough to let you in. And yet, after six months as a regular at the palapa bar, the tortilleria, the tiny tienda next door, you still did not belong. Instead you found yourself mirrored – not in the orange sellers or the butcher or the red-lipped girls in white jeans – but in the clouds, gathered along the horizon, promising, yet never, ever, bringing rain.

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Via Dolorosa

You had fourteen times to ponder and suffer along with Christ’s muted, ragged body framed in faded gold fourteen chances to thank Him for doing it all for you but the one tableau that made you most love Jesus was the one where – nearly dead – He accepted a drink in a sponge held aloft with a stick, a sponge filled not with water but vinegar a bloated wad of acid to drink: you were thirsty and had gotten up too late to eat.

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Cleavage

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G a z i n g ac r o s s V e n o u s Lake

The first glimpse of my daughter showed nothing I’d been dreading –     a carrot-thin, three-toed, faceless thing – but instead confirmed my luck, my baby’s every bit intact,    perfectly formed. In that first ultrasound, along the uterine wall – a shadow a pool of blood a site where past and future had fought, a whole evolutionary struggle: a venous lake, possible site of a twin now gone, now history. I didn’t mourn anyone that day but kept looking across that lake again  again  again

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studied the grainy xerox, the cheekbones the curl of her fist searched for traces of damage found none her first loss so deep in her bones I’d never see it the separation already begun.

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N e w M o t h e r ’ s S o n g , 5 a.m.

The acrobats have begun to stir. Soon they will spread their mats,       uncoil their ropes and fly hand    to wrist,          hand             to wrist    through the morning air. A crowd will assemble,     the smell of popcorn and elephants with it, and another circus day will begin. The ringmaster will welcome the animals, and the bicycling clown will circle, standing on his hands. All of this is coming: I have seen it all before. But it’s too early for a show –     the night has two hours more to wear itself out against the horizon.

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Instead, let me smooth your forehead back into softness,     let me hold your restless limbs,       be     the net beneath you    as you settle back to sleep.

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W at e r s l i d e

From under the waterslide, I watch your body floating like a branch in a creek, riding the momentum, the gravity, the rush of the pushing stream, and I can just make out enough of your small muscled body and your hot pink one-piece to know it is you. But once you come flying out the end and fall into the frenzy of bubbles it is all you; your courage, your abandon, your surrender into it, your grin – and then I see nothing. Nothing. For a few seconds you are lost to me,

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I have lost my only child, my daughter, my baby who loves water more than anything, my six-year-old whistler, my brave brown bean of a girl with a better French accent than I will ever have, my heart in a size-seven swimsuit, my curly-haired imp. The hardest question surfaces first: what will I do without you? The shrieks of wild, oblivious children echo back to me from the walls like sirens. Then, then, finally I see that head of yours, popping back up, wet curls plastered over your eyes,

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no foam of blood around you, no purple face like at birth – this is nothing like that – and you pull the hair away from your eyes and our eyes meet – they lock – and you’re smiling, and telling me you loved it and you want to do it again – and I let you. I have to. We live through our children but we also die: with every kick away from me you alone are getting stronger.

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P a r e n t i n g S t r at e g y # 4

Sometimes words get in the way and a lock on the bathroom door is the only equipment necessary. You’re a bad apple, I whisper. You’re a bad girl, he whispers back. Outside the door things are piling up: our daughter likes to lean objects against it, so that when it opens, everything crashes in. The drying rack, the broom, the mop all greet us when we’re done, and we shriek and moan – all the sounds we don’t make while showering together – just showering, saving water, soaping each other’s back.

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Y o u n g B u i l d i n g , Dus k

Down the long hallway, my tween daughter’s hand on my shoulder, we walk nearly ear to ear. She’s never done this before, put her hand exactly there, like a comrade.

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H o r m o n e s A r e C o m i ng

In the city of my recurring dream there are long hills with difficult intersections, curvas peligrosas, transit mix-ups, surly bus drivers, unhelpful strangers. No matter who I’m with, we always get off the bus in the wrong part of town and spend hours of dreamtime trying to get back home. This morning, my daughter dashed away from me towards a gigantic hole, a basement of mud. Between us, only emptiness, cracked pavement, the odd car driving between the hole and the sidewalk where I stood shouting into the wind, Come back, come back! She looked so happy; she was nearly at a pizzeria, holding a cute boy’s hand, but all I could see was danger. She’s lost her mind, I thought, then realized she thought the same of me.

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Su e d e W e d g e - H e e l e d Boots

Oh boys, my daughter says you underwhelm her, my daughter who towers over you and your cowlicks, your spiked hair, your swagger. But today, oh boys, she’s got her new heels on and a short, curve-hugging skirt. She says none of you are interested, that I shouldn’t worry, not even a bit. I wish I could believe her, wish the worry would thin to the thinness of her black tights – oh boys, hapless with hormones kicking you into other kinds of trouble. I can’t even think about her long walk home. All I can hope for is sore feet, those high heels off and tucked into her bag beside Science 8, well-worn moccasins

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slipped on instead to carry her back to me, the crazy woman who bought her those very boots.

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C l e ava g e

inf.: A parting of the ways.

You might want to watch your cleavage, I say, as my daughter gets out of the car. She leans back in to grab her bag and declares, My cleavage says hello. And so it goes, and so she goes, my girl taking her body, her body taking her, to school. Who’s the one being schooled this morning? Me, the mother, trying to keep her under wraps. Is this my job now, to serve and protect, to resist the future even as it’s happening? I plant pink petunias now, for God’s sake. I like the taste of rutabaga. My mother used to eat breadsticks, stick them in butter and twirl. My grandmother told me about boys in track pants, how it’s easy to see the trouble, best not to tease the poor things. That was the meat of my sex education, other than one basic command: don’t do it.

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I kept my cleavage to myself, at least in the photographs, until that night at the drive-in when I was fifteen, another necking pair beside us in the back seat, two girlfriends in the front trying to watch the movie. And just like the scripts were telling us, it was suddenly all about being stacked, a decent rack, love by the handfuls right there on my ribs. I didn’t care if he cared about my deepest dreams or my ability to play the clarinet: they felt amazing, that first set of hands on me. And so it went, and so it will go, me buttering Melba Toast, drinking tea, eating root vegetables, learning to welcome my daughter’s cleavage, remembering the first time I held her to my own.

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As tr o l o g y G e t s Y o u O f f the Hook

The fate of your relationship with both yourself and all other earthly pilgrims rests in the hands of the stars getting jiggy or wiggly up there. Yes, verily, they are doing Ice-Capade-style choreo above your very lucky head – in other words, not your fault (despite the YA novel to this effect) * What most children lack is a murky aura. What most children lack is concern for opinion. What most children lack is a way to prevent these future likelihoods from rising out of them like sebum, like onion sweat, like the posture of an empty boot. * This afternoon my daughter hugged me like she hasn’t in months – years, maybe – an extended mix of a hug, half-sideways, minutes long.

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Teenagehood, pre-boyfriend, with parents who are in love: crushingly lonely. We won’t stop, but I wish I could take her loneliness down a notch. Wish a boyfriend? She’s too smart for it right now, the same way I was, until my brain lost its cellophane when that trombone player kissed me in Manitoba. * Wish the dumbness of love? Yes, even though hurt will come of it. Wish balance to the impending chaos, too, some way out of the depths with access, all the while, to the corresponding heights. * The stars, etc.

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Af ter t h e P a r i s N i g h t c l ub Attack

In the beginning I was lazy, perhaps, or too in love; rebellious, or too attuned to her breath, in and out, her tiny nose wider, flatter than mine above her full lips, still milky below her hidden, knowing eyes, below her hair, curling at the temples. I could not bear to part from this girl, newly out of me, just arrived. It went on, eighteen squirmy, sleep-short months, baby beside me, comfort close and fast; then, until five, from her own bed she cried every night, needing solace. Yesterday, in Le Bataclan, daughters and sons became targets, bodies, numbers. Last night, here in Canada, my girl, sixteen, in three-inch brocade heels, sang “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’” to a sold-out crowd, encouraged them to “Rock Steady,” got everyone dancing to “Shake Your Body Down to the Ground.” When she asked to sleep in my bed, half-vacant, her father gone for the night, I remembered the sliver of mattress I once clung to, the way her limbs liked to thrash, said no, we’d sleep better, longer, in our own beds. But once in mine, I changed my mind, and from downstairs, texted her a yes. This morning, I woke early, watched dawn greet my daughter’s face, heard the music of her breathing, felt the warmth from her feet against mine.

And first light comes, no matter how dark it has been: what now? What now?

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The World’s Smallest Republic

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W h at W e T h o u g h t a b out sex at F i f t e e n we thought it began with the Bible we thought Shakespeare invented it we thought it was a unicorn, right there in our woods we thought it was basically like a peaceful sit-in    a gemstone       a bacteria          a rogue wave          a swan          a fever we thought it was better than Chicken Divan we thought it was like the sun, actually good for us we thought we were animals in all aspects but this:     we could forget about it        a fresh slate was all we wanted we thought nothing of it    nothing could compare we thought good and hard we thought ourselves sick       like girls in a telenovela we thought we could do it again we thought we could never do it again: we thought wrong.

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F l i c k Y o u , T e e n a g e L ove

It was a substitute for love, that tap of the finger against the middle deltoid       tap, a euphemism the pain just sharp enough to bring out a cry of surprise. There was an instant of withdrawal just as it is even at the yes, the time of death, little or otherwise – union a union but the feeling all your own –       love, a euphemism until you recovered,     came back to your senses. It didn’t hurt, you said.     It just startled me. Oh, beauty of the unguarded moment! Awake to wonder or just a little attention       finger, a euphemism 74

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– at least he noticed you, girl.     At least your shoulder was the chosen one.

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C oa s ta l R o m a n c e

Wild, they were wild strawberries, and we picked them on a tiny island we could only reach when the tide was out. He smelled like lichen and his hair was matted from the wind. He christened me with a private name, a growl in his throat. On the day he phoned me, saying he was sick, and could I make him feel better, I found long earrings on his windowsill. This was before he lived in a Majestic Vale tree, before he came to my window at three a.m., climbed in, trailing burrs. I didn’t notice the earrings until I’d given what he wanted, until – he shrugged when I asked him, turned and fell asleep. Still, these twenty years later, I dream of him, wake up hungry and bewildered, inhaling the scent of my husband’s clean hair. At low tide, I search for wild strawberries: Fragaria chiloensis, fraisier sauvage, and idziaze – Chipewyan for little heart.

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E a rt h G i r l T e l l s All

If you were an astronaut, and you are, I’d crochet a silver vest for you I’d send you a basket of freeze-dried fruit I’d buy your lottery tickets    file your taxes    clean your contacts    eat your leftovers I’d have your pets neutered     dust your Elvis busts I’d rake your leaves and spread your compost    bend over backwards and make you come like a gun gone wild a firecracker a shaken-up Pepsi a man who needs only one woman to round out his life     like a tight butt     like a pizza pie     like the big eyes of a frog squeezed in the middle. And if you still weren’t sure I’d sing every Queen song I know and dance on your chest ’til you remembered what makes me hum:     passion at every turn and a hand on each breast     to pull me through the night. And you think I only think of sex and the devil when all I think of is you.     Am I far off? Far out? Oh, you’re too cool for words, baby, so when you stop orbiting Venus come back to my little launch pad and I’ll shuttle you off to any planet you want. 77

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H o n da C B - 7 5 0

At the crossroads of the crotch begins the vulval buzz: ten thousand bees, lips on a trumpet. Together we ride the road that tempts the sea to rise; leather to leather we lean through every curve together – your shoulder dips and machinery follows. Behind you, I sit, breathe lilacs red currant mock orange half my cells spring-lullabied, the others all a-shimmy, alert only to the growl of little explosions between our legs.

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S t r a n g e r s W e A r e Not

But we shift from role to role a dozen times each day, so that when I yell at you in my morning dream after making love a few hours before, it breaks my heart when I wake up to feel your back against my breasts, its generosity of warmth, that contrast like the edge cold air could kill you with but doesn’t, an exquisite pain I rest in until the alarm sounds and roles change, and we breakfast like a long-married couple, but not long enough that there are no surprises left, so that when you say I make better coffee than you do and moan at your first sip, it makes the love all fresh again, and then, and yet, on the tennis court, we turn to battle, hammering that ball like nothing would please us more than to drive it deeply into each other’s bones.

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The W o r l d ’ s S m a l l e s t R epublic

The Most Serene Nation of San Marino is the world’s oldest republic and one of its smallest nations. Its motto is liberty, penned in lightly, as it is, by Italy and the Adriatic Sea. But it is not the smallest. Nor is the coral reef of Tuvalu, which won’t last long when the oceans rise, or Nauru in the West Pacific, made of guano, gone to shit now that all the phosphate has been sold. It isn’t Monaco either, with more policemen per capita than any other country; no, it’s not even Vatican City, where the ATM s are in Latin and the euros have the pope’s head. It’s in me, darling, this tiny nation. It’s my Girlian Republic, Womanysia, Vaginica, Loveland, Nunugolia, the richest piece of real estate south of the equator. In case you have forgotten: the weather is subtropical, perfect most days of the month; it has its own currency and the exchange is decent. It is true that the borders have been closed in recent history, but restrictions are being removed at a steady rate, and I am confident you will have no trouble getting in.

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S u n day M o r n i n g P rais e

In Ixcatepec, Mexico, the whole Sunday Mass is broadcast via loudspeaker from the crumbling church to lure its niños and compadres away from the taco stand or the electronics shop and back to the old heart of this mountain village. The sleepy priest’s voice, the guilt, the bells come in through every crack like the ants and scorpions, but my worship begins when I peel breakfast oranges beneath the trees they fell from, looking up as I give my thanks. Back home on Vancouver Island, the organ rouses me on Sunday mornings from the church at the end of the street, and if my husband is still in bed, it’s our soundtrack to love – our Oh Gods apropos in the beatific blue sheets –

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while upstairs our daughter – born on a Sunday at 9 a.m., exactly – sleeps on and on, her only religion a dream state unburdened by Scripture’s judgement, her mistakes all her own. And yet, despite the scarring, the shaming, the litany of infinite sins, after twenty-five sermon-free years, I still miss the music: the open hymnal in an open hand, the lift and fall of mismatched voices – those songs still fresh enough in my memory to get me singing “All That I Am” getting offered now to you, to help me practise the supplication, the surrender as it is in heaven and bed 82

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Oh, God, yes please take and sanctify these gifts Allelujah, Allelujah How can I not give thanks to the risen Lord?

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L e o n i d L ov e

The Leonid meteor shower on the night of Nov. 12–13, 1833, was so spectacular that it helped lead to the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. David Olson, “1833 Meteor Shower’s Effects Are Seen to This Day in Religion,” The Press-Enterprise

What we saw that November was an earthgrazer – a burning hunk of extraterrestrial debris skimming the horizon like a neon bluebird before dying as orange embers above the frozen fields. Turns out it was only dust, left in space from the Tempel-Tuttle comet, waiting for something more powerful to come by and set it on fire: Earth stepped up and became the spark. Meanwhile, back on the planet, we sat in a cold car eating pretzels to stay awake, watching for more falling stars. An owl flew over, hunting, as we were, for movement. During the meteor storm of 1833, a thousand showers filled the sky with light. People thought it was the end of the world: the final sign before the return of Jesus, stars falling from heaven. When we made love in the early morning,

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my head full of birds, stained glass and apocalypse, I said, to the body beneath me, Look skyward! God is coming! And so we rode the horizontal plane leaving trails of glimmer and glow until it all faded to black.

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O u t s k i rt s

At the edge of my left eye, twelve roses blasted wide open by the kitchen’s hot afternoons – a thank you / love you gift. At my toes, a morning breeze, a tease, cool puppy tongues. At my elbow, six red plums beg for attention. I put them in the fridge for the sake of the poem. From across the lane, the toddler’s insistent Daddy sails on the mounting breeze. From behind me, the fridge hums in G major. The breeze becomes wind the laundry tree spins the place to begin is here, in the centre, as the woman, weary from waking every hour, the woman, up to make the coffee at six, the woman, alone with the roses – a thank you / love you gift from the husband who nearly died two nights ago, before sugar brought him back.

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This is marriage: bouquet paid for from the joint account and that’s okay it’s calm at the centre a methodical feeding one spoonful of honey at a time to bring the balance back to pull the focus in to centre to offer roses / to accept them, to admire them as they bloom their beautiful heads right off.

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Want(on) and On

I do and I don’t want the birds to come into the house watching them I feel lonely lazy    luxuriously so able to pause, unworried about who’ll want this stump-perch, who’ll take all the sunflower seeds    their flit-and-freeze     gets my nerves up    but also my sympathy   my utmost respect * Liza Doolittle’s marvellous refrain: “How kind of you to let me come.” * If we knew exactly what was going on in our bodacious bodies, if we were aware of every process – 88

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    I don’t mean textbooks or Wikipedia I mean tuned in inside   turned on, man our attention able to    freeze each   activity all at once a simultaneous adoration   and aha!   as the deep eye   saw   everything – I saw it, I did – dendritic love paused in the reaching alveolar o’s of oxygen strong-armed macrophages stilled, punching nipples and thoughts caught, mid-bud hormonic highways at a standstill – whore / moan / ick –          but ooh, baby, yeah –

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– what then could we possibly do but weep at the body’s wonder? * out, in, out the focus travels eyes blur windows fog Soup’s on! Chicken carcass          soft, hard, soft again bones boiling Sunday’s lunch out of last night’s modest feast * “How kind of you to let me come.” * birds at the threshold patio door sliced open a couple bird-body widths I may or may not have dropped seeds intentionally just beyond the glass 90

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intent is what their beaks speak       no bird relaxed,             ever * Our cells locomote, not emote it is forbidden for them to cry Sabbath * “I’m a good girl, I am!” * Seven of eight children died in Brooklyn, a family following the Orthodox Jews’ tradition of letting the hot plate burn what faith in electrical perfection          (Surely someone gets to heaven?) *

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“How kind of you to let me come.” * Those flames burned in perfect allocution the children’s agnostic   arms    legs   torsos more bodies bearing more wonder * St Francis was kind enough to let the living live although he preached at bird and beast alike to praise God, repent * The chicken continues to soften    marrow please     it’s what my cells want isn’t it? * it’s supposed to mean a death if a bird comes in

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but I have never bought this unless it’s a death to distraction a bird in the house and nothing else matters alive as live wires on high – wings burning with one desire:             to flee * once, we rescued a wren from cat’s play held it hospital-captive in a bowl of leaves and moss in a box beneath a cake-cooling rack in the kitchen then went to sleep. We woke to commotion, husband sprung from bed crying, it’s gone! before he ran back to me and the bird, perched on the mirror’s frame

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before it flew to living room and under the couch. We opened the front door, as we would for any visitor, suggested direction       in seconds             free. All day we felt aloft proud successful

as if we’d turned a flower-seller into a lady       “I’m a good girl – ” as if we’d saved a family of children just wanting to be good in the eyes of an old God * no want(on)ness       no   prescriptions *

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just wanting burning to live

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Next Time the World Will Burn

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Revision

I went back to research the past, to betray my blood or exalt it, to look with an eye I do not possess – that of the stranger, that of the fly. Did you see anyone you knew? came the question each time I walked in the door, my grandmother waiting for news from the street, stuck as she was in her aging bones, old house. What I saw: porcupine, beaver, loon, skunk, mothers with sticky kids and cigarettes, boys I’d ignored as a girl turned to tired men, the ghosts of my village life, waving, sighing. Now, back on the coast, the desire to dig up the past has just up and left me – a weariness in its place and a sense that no matter what I say I’ll hurt or build walls against acceptance, me of the village, the village of me. I’ve returned with what I took the first time – myself, a severely watered-down pioneer, a notion of home to keep revising as I go along.

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The Ten Suggestions

1 When not burning       for your survival, toast,          or soup, what have you, let the appliances rest. 2 A lapsed religion still emits faint signals; God, in his satellite dish,    groans       moving on. 3 Your ideas about Sex in a Pan are probably bang      on, but remember what Lennon said: I am she    as you are we… 4 If every window bears stencil-made Christmas     snow scenes, how might       you see the real stuff, sparkling down?

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5 In the beginning, before “Hair Tips for    Natural Curls” on YouTube,    people relaxed more. 6 What if, as in dreams,    the mirrored closet doors slide open to reveal nothing but shoes? You can still     only wear two at a time. 7 Should your daughter never grow    wide-eyed at finding Fool’s Gold in ’dem hills, suggest she study internal medicine     to save both money and herself. 8 Everyone’s faked    something. Sure, somebody’s likely onto you,       but it’s unlikely they’re a bona fide spy. 9 When you emerge from the river,    soaking wet but birth-taint-free, your birthday suit will still be the first to dry –       and only with minimal shrinkage. 101

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10 You might feel a bit of burning near the temples as you read these.     Don’t sweat it. It might be shame, but it could be an angel,       her fevered hand on your brow.

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O t h e r V e r s i o n s o f t h e Dream

There were no forts in these dreams, no peepholes where we could spy on the British, no one was eating chocolate-covered jujubes, the plants were not intent on strangling babies, frozen men were not being sold by the slice, pillows did not turn to living creatures who wanted to take us into their Mormon-like universe, my grandmother was not making a cake filled with cream and sawdust, no one yelled in Old German or limped, dogs did not behave like world leaders, hair did not grow on bananas, nothing shook the whole Southern hemisphere or changed the earth’s axis, no one peeled human skin off another because it was the wrong color, nothing delicious was forbidden, god was only a tube, a cloud, a feeling, unconcerned.

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C h e at

It’s the old choice: preserve the face or the ass, plump enough to keep things pleasant for the fingers, tight enough for dimes to bounce. In my dream I was lifting a school bus up a small footbridge and then down again. It was work but I could do it, although I kept thinking, there must be a better way. Time claws at our skin like a frightened bat searching for a foothold. If you can jail-break a phone, then what about this madness of ageing? Look up the cheats online. Sure thing, they all say. Get started today! No time to waste. As easy as one-two-lift the bus-three. All you need to do is sleep forever, the setting adjusted to in your dreams.

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A dv i c e

Make the daughter slap the mother. Make the plates break. Make the tablecloths fly and the crumbs turn back into cake. Make the love turn into something solid and entirely impermanent, like ice. Make that day on the island in Lake Ontario, when she crossed the frozen water along a path marked by Christmas trees, central to your predicament. Make someone look into the jade depth as if it were an oracle. Make all the hair in the world fall out. Make everyone obsolete. Make French fries healthy and Swiss chard not. Make all the holes whole and the halves holes. Make a story true by not including aliens, real by alienating everyone. Make shit up. Make it and make them take it. Open their mouths: make them sing.

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M e m e n to

There is innocence in skeletons, virtue in mummies: goodness once the brain no longer knows a thing. I want to catalogue each young plant in this too-early spring, the first blade-leaves bearing birth scars, hints of their eventual demise. On our cottage’s bathroom door, a penned record, sixty years of snowstorms or reverse – strange, brown-grey winters, miles of lake to skate. Some Chinese children have never seen stars. The sun rises on a billboard. Arctic ice, Sumatran tiger, cloud forest – soon to be legends alone. Let’s time capsule everything, transform what we ignore into treasure, far beyond the 8-track, compact, honey bear, dollar bill. Memory’s mutability frightens and relieves; will my sharp tongue soften?

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Or will I be remembered for laundering and lemon loaf instead? A list is a way to remember. Remembering, a way to hold – a means to carry the past with us, cradled in our aching arms. So. Delphinium, crocosmia, bleeding heart, spearmint, and those fragrant white-belled flowers whose name I always forget.

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I t ’ s J u s t a B at h

I am afraid of fire, and death by it. In So Cal, where the drought’s still going strong, the schools are closed again because of smoke, while I float in my bath eating oranges and the backyard floods beyond the thin old walls. Smaller than normal, these navels cried out their fury at the store’s discount price, but I mistook the sound as a plea for attention and brought the sweet things home. I have made this mistake before, heard interest and its holy cousin, curiosity, in the voices of young men, when it was only desire for rocks-off, alcohol-enriched diversion. My God, I don’t need to repent as often as I feel I should, but the Catholic triad is lodged deep inside, like a blessed IU D . I should float here and think of better things, my husband’s head beneath the covers last night, my quick and effusive response, then his;

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like teenagers, I said, but in a good way, and he laughed, but in a good way. My husband loves fire, and oranges, and today, instead of making everything into a baptism, all I need to do is this and call it bliss, and name it life.

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Liar, Lyre

The lyre bird of Australia can make sounds like a camera shutter, a chainsaw, a car alarm. We watch it on YouTube and swear it’s doctored. Fake. It can’t be real. We’re the ones supposed to mimic nature, to walk like cats and strut like birds of paradise, decked out in the colours of sex. When a bird gives us back a car alarm, it feels like a slap. How dare you? Cheeky, disobedient, punishable creature. All we can do is console ourselves with fate, our favourite medicine: it won’t be long before it goes extinct – and doesn’t it deserve it? Chuckling like a power tool in death’s face, sounding its own last rites.

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D i s c ov e ry C o f f e e Shop

Chaos does not become me although I become chaos when chaos becomes the norm, and then, as in now, writing becomes the thing, the country of my salvation, even as the kids in superhero pyjamas rock their stools and shout, even as the tall woman leans into the tall man’s shoulder and whispers, kill me now, even as the dozen cyclists all order their complicated drinks for here and the grinder buzzes on and the plates fall against one another and the wild kids sneeze and the hipster, here long before I sat down beside him, rubs his temples while he searches Craigslist for a job.

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And then, the Belfast/Manchester couple, just married in San Francisco, proclaim this the best coffee in the world and the woman’s bleach-dried hair, backlit by the rare December sun, turns to raffia, which gives me more hope than I’ve felt all season, because, although it looks dead, pale, never once alive, I know that raffia comes from palm trees in Madagascar where nearly all of the wildlife – bamboo lemur, fossa, seven types of baobab – does not exist anywhere else on this planet, and the smallest known chameleon, the Brookesia micra, can stand, calmly, on the head of a wooden match.

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G o d D e c i d e s to S ta rt Again

Move the walls

the shrubbery

         the impeccable lawn job, its criss-cross pattern    more precise than a panty line     move the sidewalks holes

the potholes

the man-

         move             the woman walking        the unleashed miniature bulldog the view from the end of the block,                move mountains. Move the sun hitting the church wall,       move Jesus hanging out          invisibly on his visible cross       move bad architecture from the ’70s

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move the decrepit vans and ugly cars          named after beautiful places       move the Saturns heck, move Jupiter   its moons   hanging out   like fruit flies       move whatever you can get your hands    or eyes    or mind on.       Wait.       You can’t move things with your thoughts?       Huh.        I thought that might’ve passed down. Move along, then.        It’s time to start fresh. Move your God-given limbs             and skedaddle.          Move

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it, pilgrim, I mean it.    Show’s over.

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N e x t T i m e t h e W o r l d W i ll Burn

Fire takes the place of sanity, pepper where salt should be. Destruction eats permanence, illusions go up in smoke. My husband and his twin burned their house down at six, double-handedly dismantling Christmas, the transient peace. Is it possible to love what we fight? A mesmerized firefighter is no good to anyone. A dieting baker is in jeopardy before she takes one bite. Is it possible to fight what we love? The elements cannot be cajoled into behaving. Masters of being true to oneself, they use the most direct means to undo the obvious, the static. Change is their raison d’être. Light this poem.

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Notes

Some of these poems appeared previously in Baldhip Magazine, Bywords, Canadian Literature, Grain Magazine, Literary Mama, Prism International, Queen’s Quarterly, Qwerty, The Malahat Review, Third Point Press, and Wordworks. I am grateful to the editors. The first line of “At Thirteen” is from Evelyn Lau’s poem “Blue Dresses,” in Vallum 11.2, and is used with permission from the magazine. “Village Life” was originally written for c v 2’s annual contest in 2015, and was longlisted for Prism International’s 2016 poetry competition. Quotations in “Want(on) and On” are from G.B. Shaw’s Pygmalion. The poem “Revision” has been turned into a song by my daughter, Avery Jane. Lanark Village, O N , established in 1820, began as a supply depot on the Clyde River for settlers, mostly Irish and Scottish, intent on populating the surrounding townships. It grew into a bustling village with lumber and textiles as its mainstays, sources of income that continued into the early 1900s. On a very windy day, 15 June 1959, a massive fire destroyed much of the centre of Lanark Village, begun from a spark at the Campbell Sash and Door Company.

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Perth, pop. 6,000, is the closest town to Lanark, and had its start as a military settlement in 1816 on the Tay River. It is a thriving town, and the main centre of commerce in the area.

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Acknowledgments

This book was written with the generous support of the British Columbia Arts Council. Many thanks to everyone at McGill-Queen’s University Press for publishing this book, especially Allan Hepburn for his superlative editing skills and Carolyn Smart for championing it in its early days. This book would not exist without the unfailing support of my family, especially my husband Ryan Rock and my daughter Avery Jane, whose music and love sustain the rhythms of ­poems and life itself. Thank you to my parents, who gave me a solid, strong foundation in that little village on the edge of the Canadian Shield, and my siblings, always a supportive team. A special helping of thanks to my grandmother, Dorothy Paul, for leading by example and living a life of deep loving kindness despite a surplus of losses – and for sharing her stories and memories. I am grateful for my two writing groups in Victoria, the  Fiction Bitches (Patricia Young, Arleen Paré, Barbara Henderson, Cynthia Woodman Kerkham, Yvonne Blomer, Jill Margo, and Christine Walde) and the WWC (Kari Jones, Laurie Elmquist, and Alisa Gordaneer), for their years of editorial, creative, and moral support. Also, for my intrepid writamin partners, Traci Skuce and Jenny Vester, who provided the seed words for many of these poems. Marilyn Dumont and Phil Hall provided editing suggestions on a few of these

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poems, as did the editors of the magazines listed in “Notes,” for which I am very appreciative. Thanks to Mary-Lee and Bill Munro, for the use of their sea shanty for my annual writing retreat, for the land on which I write and live in Victoria, BC (unceded Coast Salish territory), and for my heart-home, Lanark Highlands, ON (unceded Algonquin Territory).

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