Short Histories of Light 9780773552883

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S h o rt H i s to r i e s o f Light

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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 Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe

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Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe

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

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©  Aidan Chafe 2018 ISBN 978-0-7735-5276-0 (paper) ISBN 978-0-7735-5288-3 (eP DF ) ISBN 978-0-7735-5289-0 (eP UB) Legal deposit first quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Chafe, Aidan, 1983–, author Short histories of light / Aidan Chafe. (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series) Poems. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5276-0 (softcover). – isbn 978-0-7735-5288-3 (eP DF ). – isbn 978-0-7735-5289-0 (eP UB) I. Title.  II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series PS8605.H327S56 2018

C 811'.6

C2017-905695-6 C2017-905696-4

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

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for Alfred, Margaret & Marjali

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Contents

BREATHING LESSONS Thetis 3 Disconnection 4 Father’s Hand  5 Night Owl  6 Breathing Lessons  7 Grandma’s Apartment  8 Rita 9 Diary of a Redhead  10

PSYCH WARD HYMNAL Major 15 Hell Has Nothing to Do with Fire  16 A Short History of Light  17 Mute Swan  21 Chief Broom  22 Ignoring Presence of Mind  24 Nature’s Ward  25 Psych Ward Hymnal  26

CALCULATIONS FOR CATHOLICS Why God Is a Father  39 Abraham 40 Gospel According to Uncle Peter  41 Our Father  42 Calculations for Catholics  43 vii

Genuflection 44 Mike 45 Lost Lambs  46 Jesus Lizard  48 Minding the Gap  49 On the Origin of Apples  50

UNSETTLEMENT Dependency Day  55 Vegastriction 57 Salmon Fishing  58 Unsettlement 59 Punjabi Schoolyard  60 Made in Indonesia  61 At the Corner of Howe and Hastings  62 Commute 63 Similkameen Dream  64

SHARPEST TOOTH Foxhole Diary  67 Hyannis 69 The Woods  70 Weather Hunter  71 Sharpest Tooth  72 Red, Having Rendered  76 Daughterly Advice  77 Traitorspotting 78 Incisions 86 Firestarters 87 Houseboat 91 Pas de Deux  92 Portrait of a Boy as Mist  93 viii

Anatomy of Chaos  95 Accident 97 Prologue to Absolute Certainty  98 Notes 99 Acknowledgments 101

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B R E A T H I N G L E S S ONS

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THETIS

My father, greatest swimmer, swam in the ocean of grandma’s womb for nine months before opening his eyes to the sun. Nurses ran water over him, a baptism, so he could teach grandpa to search for more than a bottle. Grandpa held my father, confirmed his genes inside his heavy hands while grandma hushed the animal inside him to sleep. Before the sky fell she held my father’s chest below water, bathed his body until the thought of Achilles drowned.

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DISCONNECTION

My father’s room is a field of wires. Lightbulbs flicker in and out of sleep. Pills populate the desk. Empties inhabit a hardwood floor. Through drywall I hear the sound of fingers flit along luminescent letters – his face glowing in the dark. I lounge in mother’s garden of stories, smelling flowers, gathering pages from her books. They are dense like the flood  of father’s imagination. Downstairs the basement is a forgotten lake. Backyard  a wilderness of vine. Here we converge at the mouth of a doorway, disquietude inhibits our thoughts, damming us within.

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FATHER’S HAND

My father’s right hand is a scarlet letter, is a soft blanket, is plantation purple. Was made in God’s tattoo parlour. Was dipped in Turkish rug. Is co-inventor of the freight train hug: it hits you hard. Father’s hand works at the factory of spare parts: piecing joints, glueing limbs, weaving open wounds. Father’s right hand is the first aid kit of a suture king, is operation-on-call. Works delivery room standby. Emergency room graveyard. Father’s hand is first touch at daylight, is last sight before nightfall. Is the one to pick up the phone, begin with the words I’m sorry to inform you…

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NIGHT OWL

Under the night’s shade when the family is turned off, he is wound up like a toy. Whiles away the oldest hours, dancing his fingers over the alphabet, dipping his eyes into the box’s bright glow. When string thins to handle, he collapses like a felled tree. Pulled up again by frightened keys, he startles to feet, creaking the stairs, retiring to bed. Trapped inside an oxygen machine, sleeping swiftly to catch up to his kind, he sings a sweet hurricane to his wife.

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B R E A T H I N G L E S S ONS

Grandma had the habit of driving me to her sister’s house. They lit cigarettes on the couch, while I played toy cars in the face of a warm fire. Underneath the smoke, I watched as everything born burned, glowing until the last ember died. After we left, grandma screeched away with me in her rusty station wagon, a choke of exhaust echoing the winter fog. I asked what smoking felt like. She said, Like breathing.

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GRANDMA’S APARTMENT

Sister and I avoided her dark questions by shoving jelly donuts in our mouths, staring into the voids between appliances. So good we had it, worthy of witnessing her own self-destruction. The way she cycled through emotions like loose change in a washing machine. Her hobbyhorse head rocking. Heart, a post office of unsent letters. Forgotten girl on a Ferris wheel of feelings.  Our mouths singing sugar in a room flowered with rosemary beads, a fistful of pills spread into a garden of colour on the bedside table. As gunfire ghosted through AM radio, dialled to the frequency of Iraq, we were captives in her bunker, listening to the white noise generator of her youth.

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RITA

A kitchen knife between cuts reveals grandma in mother’s blood – red herring among family servants of God: flirting with Jesus Saturday, dropping him onto her tongue like a lemon lozenge Sunday. Monday sorting him into a bouquet, ornamented in a single vase with all the men in her life, teaching us grandchildren to count using boyfriends buried in her backyard.

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DIARY OF A REDHEAD

Mother called me Aidan. Father called me son. Ireland called me Little Fire. In kindergarten they called me Freckle Face. Third grade, Carrot Top. Ninth grade, Fire Crotch. On the sporting fields, Fiery. At the oceanside summer camp, Lobster Boy. Around the neighbourhood parents knew me as hot-tempered. On the beach, blinding. In snow, camouflage. In mythology they called me Thor. After death they thought me vampire. In cinema, wild and tangled. After posting a fresh-haircut profile picture, a college friend said I reminded her of Tintin. On Robson Street they called me Daniel. On Granville they called me Henrik. In England they called me Rooney. In China, Red Devil. In Australia, Ginger.

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You, You call me Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful. Beautiful, the way you repeat it until the word extinguishes everything else.

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P S Y C H W A R D H Y M NAL

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MAJOR

utterly dispirited DEPRESS reduce level strength of activity DEPRESS push pull down lower DEPRESS causing feelings of no hope DEPRESSIVE severe despondency dejection hopelessness inadequacy DEPRESSION condition mental disturbance characterized DEPRESSION greater degree warranted by DEPRESSION external circumstances lack of energy DEPRESSION difficulty maintaining difficulty maintaining DEPRESSION concentration or interest in life DEPRESSION long severe recession economy Great DEPRESSION financial industrial slump of 1929 DEPRESSION act lowering pressing down DEPRESSION sunken place hollow surface DEPRESSION angular distance of object below horizon DEPRESSION region of lower atmospheric pressure DEPRESSION feeling miserable dejection damaging reduction DEPRESSION

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HE L L H A S N O T H I N G T O D O WITH F IRE

Windowless room to perform a stack Of tasks that never goes down Nail a clock to the wall Numbers that connect to nothing Imagining different high places to jump off Despite prayers and effort Dusts the desk with his cuff Thinks beach when he starts to get antsy With enough practice and concentration You could stop your heart at will The same way you hold your breath Impossibly slow the sound Of ripping paper again and again

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A S H O R T H I S T O R Y O F LIGHT

1. A student in my third grade gym class told me my birthday fell on the anniversary of his uncle’s suicide. Then he made a gun with his tiny fingers and turned it on himself. I wanted to tell him his ­uncle woke up that morning with a cloud in his head. That he blew a hole through his roof to return it to the sky. I wanted to tell him some ­people aren’t given enough light so they’ll try anything to let in more sun. That some days I wish I could open my wrists like windows. Instead I whispered, You don’t have to run laps for warm-up, and at recess the sun is yours.

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2. After the summer fireworks, his parents used to strap him into a jet pack and watch how high he could rocket into the atmosphere to determine if he would make it through the fall. When his legs didn’t snap upon landing, they’d toss plates across the dinner table as he curled into a cannonball listening to the war parties rage overhead. On wet spring afternoons he would come home from school carrying a storm in his gut, and notice the lights had gone out in his mother’s eyes. Realizing he didn’t have the power to fix her, he would sit beside her on the couch, stare into the wall of the family room, hold her hand and imagine veins behind the drywall, filaments in glass skulls buzzing.

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3. When father was young he caught a hurricane in his throat and steered it away from the lighthouse in his chest. He taught me how to tie a rope so when the storm came I could anchor my chest to shore. On my twelfth birthday I named each candle after a different girl I liked. Watched as they bent away from my lips, slipping into smoke. At the f­ uneral they boxed up grandma the way they found her: mouth fuming like a wood oven, pills pressed into palms, all the wine uncorked. Every morning I burn our kitchen with dying meat. Nail the living room walls with disappearing photographs. At night, I water my lightbulbs to sleep. Rinse my mouth with petals.

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When you ask why I flicker in the dark, I tell you I’m dreaming. That I don’t believe in ghosts. After the hurricane hit, they begged me to come out from the wreckage. I asked them if they knew anything about light.

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MUTE SWAN

For years teachers pulled as if my tongue were frayed rope, wove an education until the last thread stitched me a straightjacket. Mother sang while they sewed me shut, sent home from school silent. Mind locked and sealed, the key to my caged song lay in the pocket of a white coat.

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CHIEF BROOM

i obfuscate dilemmas self-medicate trauma build egos burn them down rebuild burn repeat Prozac has never been an easy pill to swallow turns the attic into a carousel father says life is a general theory of relatives grandma shows me her latest paint-by-numbers asks if i can see Jesus in the plastic fruit who saved the best seat in the madhouse for me? chemicals release irregularly i can’t see anything clearly,

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especially a window veins are rivers in snow i think about sharp things on Saturdays mother always thought red looked good on me they make me wear long sleeve white sometimes i point out a lie to see if they’re listening Look, it’s raining Ritalin! i’m cured, they say i tell them i feel curated then i’m released: wingless    into that cold, complex night

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I G N O R I N G P R E S E N C E O F MIND

You are a constellation of undiscovered light. I am a protagonist pulling myself out from the plot. We are bathtubs of humour and anti-depressants, proud graduates of drowning school. Last night I woke the TV and he kept screaming at me. When cellphone chimed in, you were too scared to soothe her to sleep. Medication hushed us into comas. Friends keep laughing, only we can’t see why. When I edit these rough drafts of rough days I sand the words with your embrace. Today I’m attempting my own skin. My wrists keep knocking on my door. But I’ve been a good boy, trying so hard not to answer.

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NATURE’S WARD

The schizophrenic sky scatters with birds. Rivers seizure, foam at the mouth. Mountains suffer from an ongoing depression. Fields have seasonal mood disorders. Forests are post-traumatic. All the while beyond a window a white coat moon keeps busy, diagnosing in the dark.

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PSYCH WARD HYMNAL

1. The first night at St Paul’s you are manic. Make lewd references to William Fraser and Lady Katharine. Four nights before you were sitting in your car outside a man’s house. Synapses away from killing him. Now here you are making jokes, nurses’ best friend. You once said, Doctors make the worst patients. The moment shame reaches you

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I know what it means to hold a frightened child – like balancing an egg on a tiny spoon.

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2. Snowed by medication you angle a smile – cozy as a kitten, unaware of the world beetling around you. Dim room dulls a wave of curtain veils. Silence bugs your senses. A fog nestles in. My hands fasten. Your head is a balloon. Mouth, hot air – words for a lonely window.

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3. Trail mix clings to your beard. Lips. Tongue. When you smile, teeth shout taxi cab yellow. Your face, a journal of indigestion. You fight narcolepsy with stories. Five minutes mid-sentence and you are overcome. Head swings into a sling. I watch cashews parachute like sawdust to the floor.

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4. You ask us to visit. We catch you complaining to a nurse about the number of bars on your cage. She is tolerant. You mimic sweet as a songbird then sever like a scythe. She hides her tears, saves them for shift’s end. I stare paralytically at your fangs. How long will you remain caged? When will this monster inhabit me?

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5. Father, your mouth is a disease. Twisted by an uprooted mind, fear branches around your heart, swallowing your head. Through darkness that doesn’t quit. Reverted to child. Crying to sheets poor baby, white waves rippling through night. Ragged roamer. Restless roamer. No mother to rock you quiet. Only capsules to settle you, chemicals to put you down.

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6. Code White. You call her Nurse Ratched. You gave her lip. Again with your mouth. Four of them. Big guys. They grabbed me and threw me down. They hit me. It was terrible, son. You show me the bruises on your back. Your skin so clean and white, it shines.

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7. 57 days. 2 hospitals. 4 wards. 2 code whites. Bipolar. Acute psychosis. Cognitive delay. Sleep apnea. Your roaming narrative seeps into the corridors of my thoughts doing its best to explain isolation.

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8. Homeward on a day pass, you hemorrhage lies and conviction. Pride sweeps contradictions under the rug. At the dinner table stories circle, family lets the elephant run around the room. On the way to Kate’s, your head begins to hurt from wounds we debride with words. You open the car door, tires autograph pavement. Stretch the legs, inspect the neighbourhood, analyze wood sidings, vacant verandas: ideas for future unfinished projects. We see a man, husband, father – plump as a peach, carved to the pit. We’ve watched how the world has worn you; know you will never be the same.

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9. A few days out and you convince me to let you drive. Minutes later I ask you to pull over. You admit dizziness. Try hiding muscle soreness. Gut rot. We hold a family meeting, organize your life into a prescription of routine to barricade the devil from the woodshed. From the window I watch your mind take you up a ladder. What voice inspired this miracle? Clothing the roof with a tarp,      your sixty-year-old knees buckle as leaves flee the ledge. How many angels get deployed as mental health stewards? Where are those dancing on heads of pins? 35

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10. Three months ago you were a Fibonacci sequence spiralling out of control. An auger drilling through darkest earth. If demons bore into rock, you uncovered them. Held them to light, magnified. Today you visit the pool, wade through water like a Greek god. Water sinks history. Rinses misgivings. Reborn pure as limestone. Children splash around you. Mothers fly tiny airplanes of flesh, plunging them into the pool. Old men overlook, bobbing loose skin, bringing bodies to a boil. If the devil’s still inside you, he knows well the artistry of hiding in plain sight.

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CA L C U L A T I O N S F O R C A T HOLICS

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W H Y G O D I S A F A T H ER

You tell her one day a tadpole  will swim in her lake. That she will  have invited it. Opened her legs  and swallowed it whole. That her body  will blush, balloon until birthday season.  Her blood will river from a spring inside.  That her pain will have purpose.  Scars will be a token appreciation for a son screaming into the emptiness of a fatherless room. Blinking twice  in the darkness before her eyes float  to the surface of yours, she materializes, this is unnatural. Only a man can cause  so much pain for a woman and call it a gift. Only a man can take away so much light and provide none in return.

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ABRAHAM

Half a man searches, scrapes, makes a life to fill his emptiness. A whole man becomes bloated by circumstance. The house grows old with his guilt. Barn swallowed up by its wood. Chapel rotted from faulty foundation. Crows oversee the coffin. The dog runs off. God moves on. The tractor keeps running. His wife swarms the hive with her pollen. Willows hang and wallow. Daughters survive handme-down dresses. Sons wipe hands clean of grease and shit. While the world exhales, dozens doze off or die. The wind whips like Herod; the sun still rises each day to taunt the fallen.

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G O S P E L A C C O R D I N G T O U N CLE PETER

If God gave my father anything it was a whipping and a smile. The latter he shoulders through life like a cross.

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OUR FATHER

The morning congregation sits silently waiting for scripture. My father stands, leans on a pillar. Mother has given me the task of elbows. I hand them out whenever narcolepsy carries him to sleep. He never complains about the bruises. Sister chimes in They match the port wine stain God spilt on his arm. It may be guilt but we agree our father is the best at church. During homily a man collapses in the back pew. Our father, medical instincts tingling, runs to the rescue, offers to ride away in the ambulance to the hospital. I remember the piercing wail of the man’s wife. The altar boy letting go of the wine. The priest at the pulpit not once breaking from sermon.

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CA L C U L A T I O N S F O R C A T HOLICS

Confessional equations: Punch = Our Father; Kick = Hail Mary. Swearing = Mother boxes your ear. Schoolyard scuffle = Old man straps you down. With a collection you start piecing together the Rosary. One is complicated. Two gets more complicated than one. Three becomes a problem to a couple of fifteen-year-olds. In math class Mr Finnegan forewarned us, Never divide by zero. You’ll make thunderbolts and black holes. Every day the sky was a condescension of clouds. I added up the pimples occupying my face. Subtracted girlfriends by a whole number. Multiplied the lies that enabled me to breathe.

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GENUFLECTION

The man inside led me up from my knees, told me not to drop before a greater force. Luckily I was still plastic before the mind’s putty hardened, when I stepped out from Plato’s cave, for the first and last time, as God fell into the flames of almighty reason.

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MIKE

When I turned sixteen my parents said I didn’t have to believe in their god anymore, but there was still someone out there greater than me. In high school, Mike was the greatest. I told my parents I worshipped Mike. I told them I prayed to Mike every day.

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LOST LAMBS

You grew out of this town as though apparition. Like you, I feel taken from this place. Washed away by the mundane, the many metaphors by which we measure a man. On the streets shepherds merge us into fold: at traffic lights, in the principal’s office, along the pew, leaning onto shovels, leaning away from girls. Was it you who used to belong in our house, or someone else hiding with me in the attic as we prayed to the gods of moving pictures?

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Remember Clayton, his parents grew him in a Mennonite field. He blossomed into a simple life. Not us Catholics, we used to study the contradiction of contrition. Translate the language of clouds in the churchyard. Write stories of how the sun cuts the sky like a knife. Confirmation came the Sunday we never returned.

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JESUS LIZARD

Attempting to catch me before I fall to sleep, you query, “Did you know the basilisk lizard can run on water like Jesus?” Flickering consciousness, I sink the conversation with silence before it sets sail in this sea of bedsheets, wondering whether Jesus would have even bothered if he knew God was to divine a lizard in his image – suspension of science to illustrate miracle: a cold-blooded bug-eyed sacrilege sprinting slime-tailed over streams, rivers and lakes, routinely defying gravity with every splashy step.

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M I N D I N G T H E G AP

On the crowded SkyTrain   a woman sitting across from me    is wearing a baseball cap    with the acronym G AP. (God. Answers. Prayers.)   I explore the imaginary theatre    of this scenario, hoping to have    mine answered – summoning his spiritual highness   like a drive-thru genie,    wishing that hat would disappear.     Instead, I’m sent a man wearing spandex who interjects, his front bike tire   treading my bare knee.   I mutter Fuck! mid-prayer.     God misinterprets the message. The bike man exits the train car.   The hat sits scoffingly on her head.    I stare dejectedly another five stops     before the woman selects her divine moment to leave.

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ON T H E O R I G I N O F A P PLES

Before Jobs, and his version of 1984, there was McIntosh, and it was sweet. Crab came first, hanging from a Dzungarian branch, bitter for it knew nothing of nurture. Fast forward to the first pupil. A gift for teacher, chalk-palmed and hungry. Then Johnny’s crusade: Apples Across America – a one-man pilgrimage of seed. Once, one fell from the sky and spoke to Isaac. Remember the garden and the snake. So much

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nectar inside woman, thus man, and somewhere God searching for skin.

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UNSETTLEMENT

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DEPENDENCY DAY

It’s Tuesday and November somewhere in the suburbs. The Starbucks line spills through the doors and out onto the sidewalk. A distracted mother strollers into a man with a tattoo outbreak on his arm, waiting for the latest legal drug at the local dispensary clinic. Whole worlds collide in the cold. Shoppers keep busy indoors swinging samurai credit cards with rubberneck will. Food court victims, wounded by grease, stare into a commercialized hole. Arcade gamers wiggle worn-out thumbs. Bottled and syringed squawking like seagulls, tending to sidewalk soapboxes. Netflixers plug in their electrical eye sockets. Hoarders housed in clutter. What if, instead of the revered sloth, we woke up to communication? Whole tribes honouring vice, sharing in a potluck of dependency, a punchbowl of denial, exclusion and unsettling sense of belonging.

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Imagine one day a year, resistance toward this collective urge, this deepening desire drumming in the brain: to rush home, unplug the feel and plunge into the vastness of the great alone.

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VEGASTRICTION

In this dustbowl where America comes to sit and flush away its money, a man stands on The Strip, face an erosion of time and sun quietly unmasking the layers off his skin. Burns a cigarette out on his tongue, smirks noticing you reading his cardboard slogan, I may be homeless, but I don’t mind telling you I just need a drink. You feel saddened and strangely claustrophobic, the Nevada mugginess whispering in your lungs, eyes rolling back into their lids as your arm stretches out like a flamingo’s neck, drop a crumpled dollar into his plastic peanut butter jar, his prickly smile stinging as you waddle towards the next casino in thick blind heat – this city so enamoured with artificial light.

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SALMON FISHING

Sockeyes cycle above roundabouts, spawning streams of circulating vehicles reaching out toward estuaries onto suburban shores – driveways, parking lots, etc. Downtown fisticuff fishbowls flow outside of bars, college kids drive drunk to basement apartment after-parties avoiding police nets for catch-and-release. A Stó:l man spears invisible whales to an audience on the curb. A girl lures loose change for alcohol on liquor store sidewalk. Steve is spotted swimming in a 24-case at the park, drowning thoughts of morning’s trenches. Fishing words out of bagged wine won’t finish that slurred rendition of “Bad Moon Rising” for you. The chalice of darkness seeds many things. Hand over the hook and take in my arm, I’ll absorb your pain in my chest. This town, it has many anglers and a long history of eating its young.

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UNSETTLEMENT

Imagine you are a town. Imagine you are a town searching for meaning. Some towns didn’t have their mouth shut. Some towns had their head cut off. Cocaine field. Diamond trench. Sugarcane knife. Corporate vulture. Crop circle. Church pew. Drug den. Corruption of police. Confederation of flags. Bout of overdoses. Scarcity of water. Cheating spouse. Psychopathic neighbour. Restless street in blindfolds. Too many lights turned off by the dark. Imagine you are a town. Imagine you are a town struggling to survive.

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PUNJABI SCHOOLYARD

She walks across the court wearing a magenta sari from the old country, passes a blur of boys and a reckless basketball to collect her granddaughter from kindergarten. She walks as if she is a ghost, oblivious as a toddler, as though the world is waiting to move out of her way; the boys brushing past, the world slowing down, and she remaining unscathed like Kartikeya through the killing fields.

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M A D E I N I N D O N E SIA

if i listen closely    i hear those children their voices woven in the cotton

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AT THE C O R N E R O F H O W E A N D HASTINGS

She stands a glossy cover – the loneliest book in the library What she wants is her mother to pick her up and start from the beginning

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COMMUTE after Raoul Fernandes Passengers suppress contortions during shaking stops. Tilt-a-whirl window frames a salmon-belly skyline. Tankers bob under a calamity of clouds. Iron tentacles hang onto bridges. Crows crowd on a slumped observatory of wires, suspended shoes like laundry. Crickets busk between concrete. Wild grass pickets a retired railroad. Blackberry bushes extend thorny fingers through metal prisons. Chainsaws chew through chattering trees. Engines narrate streets, succumb to occasional impact. One knocks the wind out of a bus, causing internal bleeding. Another breathes life back with its electric tongue. A couple folds into human origami. She runs her fingers through his autumn fields; he plants a kiss along the waterbed of her wrist. A man plays connect-the-street lamps with his bicycle as a plane lifts its wings carrying a neighbourhood through the sky.

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SIMILKAMEEN DREAM

You of wide antlers and narrow sky. You of cloud current, ­rattle-tongued in wild grass. Of white bark brocade. Windborne and dangle-branched. Breathless under chokecherry chandeliers, night sky Edisons. Nostrum secrets of salt and copper. You breathe Ponderosa. Carve moon’s circumference into skin of cutting horse. Are you of harvest or clearcut? Pine from pine-sawed pines, from wolf traps and wounded wolverine, from seething forest? Burning tree, swan dive into gleaming water, into pellucid blue. Submerge into river mouth. Rebirth as canoe.

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SHARPEST TOOTH

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FOXHOLE DIARY

Crimson coat. Autumn thistle. Burrow ghost. Chaser of rabbit in rain. Sheep eater. Stealer of farmer’s keep. Yawner in morning’s mouth. Braggart of snow-belly to muzzled moon. He of folklore fodder: trickster among trees. Paw printer. Mile runner through sapling spring. Mighty cedar calling him by name. Familiar he with dark eye of rifle. Metal clutch: jaw clench, jigsaw teeth. Headlight prophet, he. Cadaver of curb. Ascender of asphalt. Red-tailed and wanted, he. Skinned ancestors living in dreams, they. Watcher of gleaming knives. Of blood hunters. Listener of laughter howls emptying him red, drowning him dry. He of here still: staring

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through quiet trees, hallowed in fogging forest. See his fang, how pure a pickaxe. Look at the moon, how it hungers for the hunt.

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HYANNIS

“Maybe he thought I was a deer.” – Jon Way, after having been shot by a hunter in the woods. w h d h News, 8 December 2014

What happens in the woods stays in the woods, or so says the man hunting with a rifle to the man running between trees. What happened in the woods escaped from the woods and leaked to mainstream media. Here is what we’re told: lead lodged in the runner’s neck. Was he jogging with antlers? Sporting a fur coat? Perhaps woodpeckers were involved, chiseling beak to bark? When asked by investigators the hunter recalled losing his rifle, and the story bleeds from there. Little by little spreading over comment sections, unfurling into headlines. To retrieve the rifle from the ravine turn to page 2. To blur the lines, turn to page 3. To capture the truth, feel the rifle’s pulse, interview the trees, place a microphone in the dark.

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THE WOODS

Watch the rifle disappear in his hands. Watch the rifle put back in the shed. Watch when he takes your hands, when he places them inside his, watch them disappear. See how your mouth hides his tongue. See your dress. Watch it slip away behind the woods, disappear. Feel balloons rise in your lungs. See them escape from your mouth as you float between trees.

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WEATHER HUNTER

Shiver. Swift whip of wind. Fangs of the low front stinging fierce as forest fires. Frost thickening the stoop. Exhaust from our mouths rising into ruptured sky: pillowcase aftermath of cold feathers on the ground. Chattered teeth. Cracked hands, cutoff circulation. Bodies huddled under bus stops amidst industrial frontier. Winter: the weather hunter. Perpetrator of our beloved comfort. Seizing summer’s wealth. Heaving it over his hardened back. Trudging the embers of dusk through a dead still wood.

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SHARPEST TOOTH

“Now, as then, ’tis simple truth – Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth!” – Charles Perrault, Little Red Riding Hood

1. Boy listened to feathers unfold above a nearby thicket while father’s hungry hands fed bullets to a tired rifle. His own hands fled into a fist of nerves until the confusion of forest stopped, cleared for a flock within a meadow. Father uncocked the rifle, whispered in his ear, See those beautiful birds in flight? Boy nodded, looking toward the sky with all the focus in the world. One of them was your mother.

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2. Family felled. Wife – dislodged, splintered. Husband – vein-spidered forearms, blood-embraced axe blade. Siblings – tall, firm, fingers entwined like roots. Son’s trade grew from father’s hands; daughter’s future in a fallen tree.

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3. She whistles thrush song skirt long through wild grass. Leaps into arms of wood. Lurk of trees, lanterned by leaves, floored with flowers. Uncovers her velvet hood. Slender shawl. Unravels the braids of wood-toned hair. Gathers aches from the curse in her womb. Disappears inside a river of body. Blood-dressed brocade. Eyeful for the howl. Harrowing hunger brooding deepest of dark, sharpest of tooth.

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4. To those who search with claws forgetting weapons of the mouth perform clumsily, palms one curls cowardly into fists, conservative Fair is not playing by the rules, it’s the cunning required to sever a balance More appropriate if the wolf had said, I only have teeth for you So Red would know blindness was salvation as she plucked his eyes, like ripe red apples, from the spoiled hands of a rotten tree

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R E D , H A V I N G R E N D E R ED

In another dream I marry the wolf and then as his rosewood trees burst and burned, as vulnerable as ribbon – I thought the wolf was a wounded bird. The wolf, convulsed with indignation deep, and bite and bite his shoulder bloody. Your scar upon the mind, Dear Wolf – there are marks up and down my body.

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D A U G H T E R L Y A D V ICE

Mother told you women can build homes out of men. You said houses maybe, not homes. You told her father was a bad example of something you could build from. You said homes are made from materials born to last. You told her women make the best homes. You told her men are only good for building houses.

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TRAITORSPOTTING

I. if our messenger arrives, and your camp rode off through the woods in another direction

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II. if they capture you, and the first thing you tell them is the truth

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III. if you outrun the wolf, but your heart overcomes you

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IV. if your legend eludes you, eclipsed by the embers reflected in your lens

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V. if you feel a terror reverberate in your howl

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VI. if you hear a match light in your conscience

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VII. if at dawn, you lead the ambush, thrust the blade, witness the blood in the bowl of my unarmed hand

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VIII. if tonight your dreams are haunted by the six feet between us

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INCISIONS

The scalpel or the kitchen knife. The switchblade, or the wood saw. The metal lathe. The meathook. The guillotine and the bayonet. The needle and the arrow’s head. A shiv, or a shank or a shard. The whip’s lash. The pitchfork. A pin prick. Or a rusty nail. The rock, the paper and the scissor. The bear claw or the bee sting. Or the bull’s horn. The wolf’s fang. The stinging nettle. The rose thorn. The devil’s club. The mean glance or the long stare. The razor wit, or the traitor’s tongue.

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FIRESTARTERS

I.  Petroleum Birds disturbance of water unidentified dot on a map tillage pond thick as blood stain in the universe smudge in the narrative flock of ducks – wing-spattered, sludge-tethered flickering like they were born aflame

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II.  House Fire Lungs negotiate carcinogens from mother’s cigarettes. Bruises appearing inconspicuously like dust settled over years. Broken hands, a manuscript for your future, transcribed onto skin, translated into cutting. You have ghosts waiting to be born.

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Skeletons hanging in the rearview. The past pulsates like electroshock therapy. Somewhere on Hastings a bottle watches your father sleep. Veins crawl his clenched forearms. This man who started a family, then set it on fire. You remember him closing the door through the flames. The only lesson he ever taught you – don’t look back.

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III.  Justifying Ashes On the subject of flesh in the case of marrow consider the flume: valley of oil drums, and the Phoenix: trumpeting ashes, effervescent wings beckoning a victimized sky to cast its offering, trembling smoulder, pleading tongue of the match upon lighting – knowing what’s lost by seething shadows will not be remade. Rebirth: the myth we tell ourselves in the aftermath.

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HOUSEBOAT

You lost your home  in the throes of passion.  Drowned by the lake of a man who used to love. You are a carnival of desires swimming in shallow skin,  floating along scars; comfortable with treading, conscious of exits, naked from what’s disappeared. You of sailors and bedsheets. Of living tied down, taut as cable. Cautious of the sound of sinking. Wary of the whims of water.

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PAS DE DEUX

Girl knows her worth weighs more than her weight, knows the worth of her weight is more than a boy, is beyond what a boy thinks about her weight and whether she’s too weighty or not weighty enough according to boy. Girl wonders whether boy is worth the wait or the weight that boy wants is worth her weighing, is worth wanting, and weighing that want is even worth having a boy who weighs his want in weight. Boy bulked, balks at other boys: boys unlike other boys, boys who like other boys. Bulked boy blossoms blindly into bullying, barking at boys black or otherwise. Shouts bruises to boys otherwise. Otherwise shouts to have his barking heard. Hard to hear voices of other boys bruised: boys unlike other boys, boys who like other boys, and boys black or otherwise.

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P O R T R A I T O F A B O Y A S MIS T

A boy awoke to watch the wind blow his parents’ weathervane relationship, leaving him in a fog. I changed channels to see a duplex drown in the middle of a city. I once caught father catching rage, fists becoming thunder. He flooded home for weeks. Mother felt storms grow in her wrists whenever grandma came over. Felt her mercury rising, barometer break as grandma’s tornado swept the kitchen. To hide from grey skies, I used to drink lighting from bottles. Inhaled the occasional snow. They told me a man does not become a hurricane overnight, so I watched the weather network, waited for the incoming forecast of my life. I’ve seen when a home sinks an entire neighbourhood slips into high pressure, slowly washing away as children echo the quietness of clouds.

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Others stare through backseat windows wait for solitude in blue while parents drive in different cars to different towns.

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ANATOMY OF CHAOS

A boy bleeds out from a man loaded with fear and the second amendment. A girl runs until she hurts more from calluses on her feet than the memory of her father’s hands. Families swell into airplanes as home spends Ramadan in shrapnel showers, mortar gnawing its bones. Some men just want to watch the world burn. I catch an escalator on the news chewing a woman whole in front of her children. Waves of aquatic assassins cascade into villages, sirens of flames wipe out arboreal compounds. In high school I read about a Little Boy from New Mexico descending the heavens like a dark angel, tattooing a city’s flesh into concrete. Madness is like gravity all it needs is a little push.

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Hour’s drive from my town God’s disciples whipped children of the forest in front of crowds of crying cedars. I want to know what secrets the cotton fields whispered to the winds of Mississippi. Rain tries to interrupt Armageddon. Horrors even nightmares won’t reflect back to us. These civilized people? They’ll eat each other. Do scientists determine growth when earth produces cultures of unrecorded shame? Best kept covered in the ground. Stay the mind’s blinds, be sure not to awaken the heart. Wounded can’t keep sutures shut, the world unravels well: factories at a time – Destined to do this forever.

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ACCIDENT

“The force of the collision was so great that a pair of white sunglasses thought to have been ejected from one of the vehicles was embedded in the street post.” – c b c News, 28 April 2013

After the cymbals. The hum. Smoke. The traffic lights’ quiet screams. After the window’s missing teeth. Flashlights inside the mouth of the scene. The last drop of oil and blood. Tire fumes. After sirens stopped. Metal cleared. Strewn glass cleaned. After a severed black Toyota, sheared in half, brought in for autopsy. The signpost spoke, offered more evidence. Its aluminum flesh exposing a protruding arrow, like Achilles flexing his calves reflecting the sun’s light.

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P RO L O G U E T O A B S O L U T E C E RTAINTY

Because death kindly waits sometimes God throws a tantrum. Sometimes he tosses airplanes to the ground. Sometimes the ocean swallows ships. Because death kindly waits rage frequently finds the rifle. Knives nuzzle nicely into backs. Diminutive armies unleash the deadliest warriors: samurai of invisible science. Because death kindly waits the highway is addicted to wreckage. The forest hides bodies. The man in the newspaper follows the headline of a girl until they both disappear. Because death kindly waits my lungs invited the water to dive inside my mouth as I fell into that lake drunk in the dark.

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Notes

The opening line in “Rita” is rephrased from a line in “Shaving” by Zubair Ahmed. “Major” is a found poem sampled and rearranged from definitions in The New Oxford American Dictionary. “Hell Has Nothing to Do with Fire” is a cento, created using lines from the short story “Wiggle Room” by David Foster Wallace. “A Short History of Light” borrows a metaphor from Jeffrey McDaniel’s poem “The Foxhole Manifesto.” In “Punjabi Schoolyard” the word Kartikeya refers to the Hindu god of war. “Commute” was inspired by the poem “Suspension” by Raoul Fernandes. “Red, Having Rendered” is a cento and contains lines from the following poets: John E. Buri, Tina Chang, Melissa Fite Johnson, Grace Fallow Norton, Meg Pokrass, Melvin B. Tolson, Pepper Trail, and Cindy Watkins. “Pas de Deux” translates to “step of two” and is a poetic form created by Rachel Rose. “Anatomy of Chaos” is an unrhymed glosa that samples dialogue from the movie The Dark Knight. “Prologue to Absolute Certainty” was inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem “Because I could not stop for Death.”

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Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the following journals and anthology in which versions of these poems originally appeared: Canadian Ginger Anthology (Oolichan Books): “Diary of a Redhead” Contemporary Verse 2: “Father’s Hand” Cordite Poetry Review: “Our Father” Eastlit: “Punjabi Schoolyard” Femmeuary: “Daughterly Advice” and “Why God Is a Father” The Paragon Journal: “Breathing Lessons” Right Hand Pointing: “Gospel According to Uncle Peter” and “Made in Indonesia” The Sacred Cow: “Minding the Gap” Sewer Lid: “Jesus Lizard” Sulphur: Part four of the “Psych Ward Hymnal” suite Unlost Journal: “Hell Has Nothing to Do with Fire” Also to Caryl Peters and Jim Johnstone for publishing many of these poems in the chapbooks Right Hand Hymns (Frog Hollow Press) and Sharpest Tooth (Anstruther Press). Many thanks to Shane Neilson and Blair Trewartha, who mined these poems for gold. To Mark Abley for scouting me and to Carolyn Smart for giving me the green light on this manuscript. Love and appreciation goes out to lifelong friends living in Vancouver, Toronto, and elsewhere. To my brother Connor, my sister Kate, and my uncle Peter. Most importantly to my parents Alfred and Margaret, and my beautiful, insightful and loving partner Marjali, without whom this book would not have appeared in front of you.

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