The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is.
—WALLACE STEVENS
Snug underground in the civic worm burrowing
west, I was headed to class when a cadet
in full combat dress got on my train.
But for a pompom sprucing up the beret,
his age, the fact he was alone, and here,
this boy could’ve been boarding amphibious
landing craft. I checked for guns, grew pious
of this spinning orb’s hotter spots. He
was all camo, enactment-of-shrubbery, semblance
of flora in varying shades, hues, mottlements
of green. A helmet dangled on his back, a hillock
in spring, sprouting a version of verdant grasses
in plastic. I got past enjoying a civilian’s recoil
from things military, brutal, conformist, and took
a peek at what my soldier was so engrossed in—
Thoreau’s Walden—imagine him, rubbing oil
into a Sten gun’s springed bolts, working through
his chances at a life away from men: berries
plumping in among their thorns, night’s
curtain drawn across the window of the lake . . .
We must reconcile the contradictions as we
can, but their discord and their concord
introduce wild absurdities into our thinking
and speech. No sentence will hold the whole
truth, and the only way in which we can be just
is by giving ourselves the lie; speech is better
than silence; silence is better than speech;—
All things are in contact; every atom has
a sphere of repulsion;—Things are, and are
not, at the same time;—and the like. There are other
minds. Surfacing at St. George, I cupped my hands
and blew—bodies scattering among museums,
bank towers, campus rooms, and shops, each
to where they’re thinking of or not, seemed
to prove a law we’re locked into, demonstrable
with iron filings, magnets, and clean tabletop.
I can watch their faces go away. The singing’s not
to record experience, but to build one viable
armature of feeling sustainable over time.
The stadium’s lit, empty, and hash-marked
for measuring the forward push. On the surface
of the earth are us, who look in error, and only seem.
Evidence of a wolf pack’s passing marred the otherwise clean
snow basin of the park’s Barron Canyon: their in-line
one-two-one’s a juddering paragraph of morse—
They’ll run a deer down this whitened concourse,
surround and pin it to a cliff face,
or let its own weight send it through thin ice.
I, or the vodka, stood recalling Mr. Marysak explaining
in Geography, rock’s rust-red tint as proof of iron-rich
seams when the pinned-up cowl or hood of stars
didn’t collapse exactly but popped or blew a stitch;
a familiar seepage in weak-lit jades deepened, altered course
to crimson, and fell in successive tides from directly overhead
till that night entire became a darkroom developing
its notion of a thing outside the visible: pure in deed, and fed.
We were more than a little sullen on the descent—
ticked, really, at the dead-calm state of the air
at the summit of Topsail. Like a row of penitents,
we’d hiked the hard-scrabble straight up, lugging beer
and a designer kite. It was blue and red and meant
to funnel gusts through its windsock frame. Far
from catching a mean updraft, it spent
the afternoon nose down in the crowberries and fir.
What monarch butterfly in Sumatra was so spent,
so drugged or lifeless it couldn’t flap one ear-
shaped wing just once and cause a breeze, at least a dent
in the Wedgwood stillness we stood inside up there?
We coiled it and came down. And down on the crescent
of shale, four different kids tugged on the guide wire
of four different kites and hollered and bent
backwards at the strength of their flight. Composure
legged it back to the truck, we lit smokes and began to vent
into our chests. Colin moved first, sidling over near
a glib little pilot and flicking open a Leatherman blade. I went
with it, thumbing the grind-wheel of my Zippo under
the thin string nearest me. It left as if snipped. A parent
saw what his boy had lost and ran over full of hot air,
clutching tongs that pincer-gripped a heat-split wiener.
We shrugged and sniffed as the appendix of string burnt
to a cinder. We were up in the rarer atmosphere,
the social layer, where it often gets hard to breathe, and silent.
A new constellation just then visible over
Belle Isle, specks leaving, signs enacting what signs meant.
Happiness, happiness, happiness. Happiness. Sound of rabbits
freed from the hutch, ass-
upping their way toward the Interstate. Etymology of ‘blizzard’
unknown.
I repeated that for weeks when conversations stalled, dried up,
exposed
the embarrassed cracks, or I’d stopped listening. But sure as shit
one among us would get it in her head
to thieve a cache of civic pride
that wasn’t ours, then stain the river with it, and we’d be up and
out, hailing
the Jumbotron we’d nailed our eyelids to . . . ah, Big Face.
Speak when spoken to. It glowed a gory orange at times, the river,
like the bands
of a milk snake, and just thinking of kibble made mid-sized dogs
recall that reek
of acetate. They thought of kibble a lot, back then, the dogs.
Crest and trough and the distance between crests over
a given time span.
Having just watched my dogs suffer their bordatella
winding, having just flashed back to my own spiking, as a girl,
against rubella,
I was serving him Nutella
on dinky bread, this guy, whose ex once serenaded—and
beautifully, apparently—a harbour seal with Ella
Fitzgerald songs from a kayak, proffering up strips of fat-striped
mortadella
and pitted cherries. And from within the darkened crescent my
patio umbrella
made, I wondered who and why this fella
might up and tell a
girl, a girl already suffering from, like, l’angoscia del hora della
posta due to debt racked up with Visa, the library, and a man who
resembles Danny Aiello,
a thing so intimate as to make her Cosa Bella
itch. And so soon! So soon after the portobello
mushrooms had come off the grill a
little darker, crispier than is my usual, ah,
preference. I bought some minutes by casting down my gaze,
intoning la illaha illa Allah,
till he noted no burka, and pressed on, pushing his Costello
frames up with a forefinger, a barrel, a
steamer trunk, a shipping container couldn’t hold what I have to tell you . . .
More sure of his own worth was this dude than even Cela,
he could, I decided, fork it in alone, hold forth alone, sit alone at
his own Valhalla
and spare me the blah and the blah,
so I gathered the dogs and waltzed off to work on my libretto. Tra-la.
Sometimes making is play, only that. I’ve not been
made yet, but will be, and when willed
into my bean-baggish zen loll
might wish for you nights of no nightmare,
layabouts with or without some other
when words are your mind’s lit
carousel, monkey bars, or gravel pit, not the spiral
jetty you like to make of it. We pretended
affection each for the other, then
wrecked the furniture, is what we’ll say when
they ask how we spent the duration. Single
man and his simian right hand, memento
origo, minister of the bemused stare. Lean me
against the neck of the reading lamp: sleep,
farts, fucks, illnesses, and idleness, I’m I
through and through, function removed from the feet
and become face with a grin and stillness,
form that gives if you hold it when there’s only you.
Lives like ours—patched, derided, thin—
meet more on their going out than on
their coming in. Great gales, maybe, churning
up the sea’s winey darkness, dressing
its swells in shreds of froth. Or a single,
very amusing man in waistcoat, doing
amusing things with rubber balls. Careless
tinkling on the chipped keys of a piano stood
upright. An officious-looking document
typed out on parched vellum, demanding
we behave athletically, mutter on
about percentages while the alders flash
their underthings through the overlong and
muggy nights of Arkansas. We were shown
the exposed flank of a chance-to-be-otherwise
back when, and when. One of us looked off, one
curled a lip, regarded himself with grave
import while men in weathered coveralls
removed the signs and rolled back the dripping
awnings. Everything closed, remember?
They showed and took away. A purplish resin
spread over evening and we demanded, if
demanding can be said to happen silently,
to know what had been done with our early
efforts all those skunked days in the church
basement. It looked to be worsening off to the west.
I have a photo, somewhere, of you in thinning
corduroy and cotton shirt that bore a number, you
were standing back-on to the smudged lens, your
legs obscured by umbrellas of rhubarb, that white,
dust-like matter afloat in the summer air so I thought
you might sneeze as was like you, we had done
something with the day that limped off behind where
you stood, and now the smells of proximity—I to you
and the reverse—were rent so as to allow in a stinging,
brutish, mind-on-forever sort of what?—
I’m writing by lamplight. I can hear the trolleys
biting the bones of the street. If you get this before
the onset of winter, think on it. We were very wrong.
There was the covert summer fling—
rail bridges, back lanes, blue dust of building
sites—with the NSCAD dropout (b.68, Khanesetake)
who worked at night with stencils and spray
paint, enlivening the poured forms of the capitol
with red and black silhouettes of ordinary people.
Meridians, bank walls, light poles, high rises.
I asked her to outline clearly her emotional boundaries
but at the front edge of fall we had words over colour;
a flare-up, really, over
who was seeing what when they saw what
they claimed. Tempers got hot.
Steady brown hand on a Stanley knife,
she cut me—expertly—out of her life; the life
I see now I’d been
filling in.
I catch glimpses of her anywhere the city is. Or is
that me, dead still, spread thin?
To eat the pistil and stamen both, of a flower rarer
than kermode bear paw, doesn’t travel well at all,
and must be leached of liquid, near Iqaluit, by clean air.
Nice wheels, a sweet ride; a snorting Valiant, Impala,
or Duster. Short of that, a Trabant. A spiritual guide,
like Gibran, but smart; well-packaged, pithy stuff
I already know, for pre-sleep, irony by Ikea-light, to get my
breathing slowed. To appear a little off on Off
The Record—Poet and silky striker in rec-league soccer—spouting off,
letting fly, making it clear to Landsberg why we never qualify.
Every distal and proximal cause in full-colour diagram.
A scale model of that bridge in Rotterdam
that spans the Maas. The odd Lorazepam.
To be reunited with that Zippo Jeff had engraved with a K.
A thank-you from the kid found crumpled in a stall
in the Queen Mother who’d been shooting K. A stand-in
Father. To be tutored on the TOE’s finer points by Michael Green.
Elbow grease. New joints. The information retention and retrieval
of, like, DFW. There’s space yet on the form, but the form is our trouble.
What’s on offer is finite. What would you say to a stroll
and a bite? Who’s up for pad Thai?
These boardwalk slats intermittently
visible where the sand, like an hourglass’s
pinch, seeps between chinks, free-
handing straight lines that stop without fuss—
then fill again, as the wind wills it.
The beach path cuts through undulate
dune land where wild rose, marram grass
cover the scene like a pelt
of shifting greens, or rippled sea of bent
and tapered stalks. To step off
the path’s to severely threaten
what a modest plaque declares ‘this fragile balance.’ If
my affection’s bending toward you seems
or feels ever just a blind, predetermined
consequence of random winds,
think of here: our land’s end, streams
of ocean mist weighed down your curls,
spritzed your cheeks and lids, made both
our jeans sag and stick. The shore birds’
reasons blow through us too, but underneath
or way above our range of
understanding . . . even caring. I’ll
pass this sight of you—soggy, in love
with me, bent to inspect and feel
the petals of something tiny, wild, nestled
among the roots and moss—over
the projector of my fluctuating self if ever
life’s thin, rigid narrowness
requests my heart be small. You taught
and teach me things. Most alive when grit
makes seeing hard, scrapes the lens
through which what’s fixed is seen to weaken.
A patrimony all our own: the hours when we have done nothing ... It is they that form us, that individualize us, that make us dissimilar. —E. M. CIORAN
Christmas alone, by choice, with a tin
of sardines and bonnie ‘prince’ billy
sharpening the blade of the cold on
the whetstone of his voice. A melee
on the morning of the first of the year
over who should pay what to who
for the nothing we got the night before.
There’d been lots of it, but it amounted to
loss, I guess is what I mean, given the pain
and embarrassing, hours-long absences
of someone with someone else whose name
should stay out of this. Fences
went up around friendships. The exacto blade
in the thermometer kept snapping
off segments till there was nothing save numbered
hash-marks seen through a static
of frost. I went for a walk in a parka I bought.
Zipped up; the city as a fuzzy-edged
dream sequence afloat to indicate thought
in the head of a smiling protagonist. Cadge
a light from a passerby and now your head’s
the lantern from the 28th Canto
shedding light on hell. ‘Oh me!’ you’d said,
and no laughter, canned or
otherwise, leavened a life that felt filmic.
Sometime in March, the plaster over
the tub got pregnant, or Anish Kapoor was snuck
in to redecorate. Its water burst near
April Fool’s and spring arrived stillborn, I was
reading something that hasn’t stayed
with me, when the soldiers arrived with shovels.
It was Mendelssohn screaming at Stoppard,
I think, or Stoppard screaming back, in the letters
section of the NYRB, about Housman,
was it? As penned by Stoppard?—whatever,
I remember an exchange of epithets and now’s
a little after the fact seeing as the play itself
never came. One night in May, a barkeep thought
I looked tired and slipped me a pill: I got soft
in the neck, large in the thumbs, and a spot
of crimson light sang Agnus Dei from the foreground
of my vision’s left field. Wall calendars
were argyle socks; all those X’s in rows wrapped around
June under colour shots of designer blenders.
It was like a training regimen to ensure I’d place last
in the race to accomplish, accrue, attain,
or think straight for a day and a half. I didn’t dust.
Meeting resistance—a door opens onto more rain—
I’d fall back and regroup, reuse the same ringed tea cup
and liberate a pack of Dunhill from the long ice age
of the freezer. Watched others watch their Weimaraner pups
grow to full glamour in the park. Massaged
the kinks of appointments from the hurt muscle of months,
dredged each nightbottom for spare hours
to stare at. Just a therapist and me and a lot of not much
to work through, more like locating doors
I might walk through if I’d get up and walk. Hypodermic,
or fifty candies, or warm bath and a pine box:
repeated it all to myself, but self laughed, knew it was weak
and would linger. Self trips self then mocks
the starfish of limbs washed up in the gravel, another X-
brace to hold square a day. I read a novel wherein
many were worse off, so read it again, while flecks
of grey ash mixed with eczematous snow in
the deep gorge between each page. To open it now’s
like opening a text from the Middle Ages, but
you can’t, it’s glued shut with dead skin cells and sweat. Sows
at the Ex in August nonplussed with the crowds at
the gate. Too much lost, in ten minutes, at Crown and Anchor,
and my house keys freed from a pocket while
upside down in those ergonomic gibbets hung from the Zipper.
So head down for the night on the deep pile
carpet of clipped-lawn embankment that skirts the expressway.
Stuff fell in the fall. No one took pictures.
Or painted the scene on wood panel in oil, of the day
none of my friends and I decided not to go halves
on a driving trip through some of Vermont. I read Frost
and stayed where I was. Thanksgiving
I thanked someone for the chance to play generous host
to myself as guest at the bar where, having
been dosed earlier that year, we went back for more.
By November I was an art installation
begging the question are empty days at the core
of the question of begging the question.
Borrowed money so’s not to be anywhere near Christmas,
while the snow whitened what no longer
wanted to be looked at. I know now I was missed.
Then was a different story. I think we’re all stronger.
Then the belt of penury tightened further
and whether from hunger
or a need to lash back,
we started dreaming of weeks of slack;
a hammock of days
nailed between trees
rooted in the old loam of obligation.
The names of God all sounded like ‘vacation.’
And the trips we summoned shimmered
with a nimbus of the definitively unreal: moored
on the Seine in a houseboat
the best feature of which was the wrought
iron collapsing front gate on the lift
descending to a fully equipped
laundry room.
Earning our rent on a loom,
at our leisure, for a cave
with a/c dug into a cliff at the edge of the Mojave.
A month of Sundays of naps
in New York, NY. The chance to collapse
into ourselves or blow apart during monsoon
season any place monsoons
happen. It was just as she was uttering
‘Saturn’ that I felt my compass returning
to that cabin capped in thick green felt
I’d seen outside Oslo—
not felt, really, a meadow
doing its placid best as a living quilt.
The earth on the roof. Voles over shingles.
Seven kinds of moss softening the gables.
And inside, each step a ride
on the backs of sea birds to a bed on a floor all sky.