The towns where the bus stops are not organized towns at all.
—ALICE MUNRO
As Dragomoshenko, with arm upraised
Russianly, ordered us
‘Take it outside,’
my thoughts caught a bus
from the impending KO
to what must
have appeared to those watching as the backside
of that hill, cliff or bluff
that ascends off Fogo
heaving its mist
and gloom at Reykjavik,
more or less,
but was really nothing more
or less than the tanned hide
I saw stacked
once in a plant in Montreal.
Columns and colonnades
of skid upon skid,
encumbered—betowered?—with
kid or cow
the reek of which made us sick
enough to clang back through
that swing-door jobless,
our new fly-halos
honoured to be along for the ride
back to unemployment’s arcadia
and what calumny
might next be used
to cow us into quitting as kids,
and take up a place
in the burgeoning
town
of Burgeo, or Burlington,
or some other coven
of bourgeois ease,
where we might both ease
our gripes out to pasture
and await the imminent
blow to whatever
cranial region induces
the shiver that precedes
the blackness
that’s like the blackness
in a Greyhound’s
window. No sound, just
the dimensions of that pane
delivering a bust
of you to yourself. ‘Have made I myself plain?’
I ought not to have visited this scene of terror, I thought at the time. Today I think differently. It is a good thing I did. Times and methods do not change. This was yet another proof. —THOMAS BERNHARD
A childhood blow; they did thrust forth dragonly
their cleft heads. Bread morsels were money
and they were the greedy. One charred finger
poked from each throat. They chose to linger
in the lee of a cottonwood; scowling, truculent,
grounded accessory: mere landscape.
A punt
in some impressionist’s scene now glides by here,
constructed of light-dapple and smudge. The oar
on this side and this side’s oar’s double
form an arrow on water pointed at us. Stable,
though, as this picture sounds, the boy on our bank,
between us, remember? feels ill. Is ink.
Paid to safely disassemble a bridge in this park,
I do numbers, draft its replacement. It can’t work.
I was on a tractor in the rain
when it occurred to me, my paternal
grandfather was called ‘Henry James’
and cooked meals for men in a coastal
lumber camp in Bonavista Bay.
The brother of that other James
was William who wrote on matters spiritual
and hung with John Dewey. Henry
James Babstock’s brother’s name was Samuel.
So this grandfather, who went by ‘Pappy,’
died when I was two. He
was a huge man, gentle, happy,
and given to tossing infants in the air.
Concerning one’s self only
with the task at hand while temporarily
ignoring metaphysics has had more
recent support from the American
thinker Richard Rorty. His name
sounds like a tractor coughing, revving,
having sat idle in a field in the rain.
When I was two, and at the zenith
of one of Henry James’s loving pitches—
up near the ceiling of a white clapboard
house that has since been taken down, or
outdoors above the porch, or ‘ bridge’
as he and his wife Alma
would have called it—I was at the edge
of something. That descent, and all my
subsequent nothings and entanglements,
loves, riots, slippages, and cries,
could be felt to have happened inside a quiet
afterthought; a kind of dimming down
of who I was when I was him and contained.
Turn now to a book by William James
on states of religious experience.
I was pulling a trailer onto which
a friend was loading irrigation pipes.
He was powerful, and beautiful, yet
far from me, we finished early to a round
of applause from a bank of thundercloud
that had reared up over the cottonwoods.
There’s a kind of shroud I pull across my life.
Would Form, Colour, and Motion please report to Area 17
where you’ll be met by Memory and Recognition. An unbroken
field of light is uninformative. The cracks,
the jinks, what won’t cohere or blend but bends, fissures,
falls to the field
or becomes figure. A visual percept is degraded light.
We all like to sound important. I was convinced I’d actually loved
by a hot tinny pain spreading downward from the sternum. She
was gone, though,
by the time the evidence appeared, and I’d moll around the train ditch
of an evening, reading German dictionaries and pulling
loosened spikes
from the tie braces, designing industrial versions of croquet.
Home shot:
through the St. Louis Arch to the CN tower. Oil derricks and
wrecking balls.
I had no friends for a time. Whether
it happened or didn’t it felt as it did and affected the weather. I
was being fleeced, still I paid
for entertainment. It helped me feel worse, and worse was where
lovely numb wet its tongue. I sucked it like a strip of dripping lamb—
I moved like winter wheat.
I from dull wind came up and quiet.
I wanted and not large was there there to entreat.
I went myself to a parkbench to feed whatever would eat.
I inner-whistling the dumbnesses fanned hard green bread bits
low by feet.
I shifted, like carbon, like car horns, like cow’s jaw, on the slats
of the public seat.
I knowing how since long years counted then further and chewed
till it bled on a cheek.
I as sun’s going went thought dim of amphibious lurchings of
claws on smallthing by brown mule-slow creek.
I numbered while chilling wonders that weren’t that seemed that
sidled up as though to the moorings but hedged and
wouldn’t complete.
I tethered there unoptioned stayed to no coming no visit no
gloried knowing to sing of carried on backward at darkening
like the thing sightlessness wants of its own
and claims unlawfully settling a coming despite—
The long dream of Union ceased,
and his world uncrinkled.
Horizon a pressed seam from the Space Needle
to the mean
maximum berg limit out in the toiling
east. It made
him squint. Glaucoma newly
scraped. He’d been
stood in place; stood here to be looked at;
peered
at; inspected by it. Modelling it-ness
for Horizon:
I
Was it a Greek who said begin with
the good? Does this feel good?
II
The kids are waving cutlasses and singing of apocalypse,
or watching TV.
III
Walk with me to the liquor store, under
the effluent, the badger-face cloud.
IV
In the park near the pump under empires of oak,
winter sits folding its linen.
An ice cream party and Mozart hymns; to live without
hope, or a table saw.
VI
I saw and was relieved. I saw my relief and left. I left
without seeing what I’d done.
Like I said, important.
Calm your amygdala! Keep up with the furtherance
of what’s known as best it can be for now. This spruce
is dripping new growth, little lime-coloured nubbins
in the uncorked sun of a Monday. They now can listen in
on the harmony
of seizures, all the differing bandwidths holding hands
and hooraying, hell, they can trigger them at will, and will.
And when last you gripped a garter snake by its tail, whipping
it in circles above you,
offering it a Benthamic view of the bean fields and windbreaks,
you went home
with the feel of its scales—a muscled dryness you could taste—
and humped
your bicameral mind to bed to stop the senses mingling.
Most were written at home,
some done away,
a few in a bar,
one inside his head.
Many had a tendency to roam,
some felt grey,
a few went too far,
that last refused to be read.
That’s not what we liked. It wasn’t for us.
It was pinned to a stream. Ear-marked.
The arriviste mashed up with the avant-garde.
We didn’t go for that. That wasn’t us.
It wasn’t quite right. Lacked focus.
Might have tickled the kids, the simple,
Or those others on that other coast,
but not us. It wasn’t what we liked.
It was riding a riptide of research
from Pittsburgh. Big deal. Where
was the spit, the spark, the goatish
smell of the real? Who could tell air
from gas, music from dirge, dinghy
from ark amid all that saleable merch?
I’m saying we didn’t like it.
And we didn’t. How much? Not much.
We couldn’t get in. There were no
knobs on its doors. Goes to show
some prefer building walls and floors
to keep us here, outside, looking in.
That’s not what we liked and we disliked
when we did with some vigour. Active.
Off the couch and out with the X. Heave
to with No, No, No, and especially Not.
If there were a key here I’d make that ‘No’
bigger. Is it clear what wasn’t on for us?
It’s about cutting out rot. About rigour. About
the men in acumen and the small made
smaller. We didn’t like it from the get go.
It was under the sheets as boys, now
it’s everywhere and not. Not liking’s like
affirming we’re here while stretching here
to include whatever isn’t. And we’re right.
Show me something we didn’t like and I’ll
show you airtight. Excruciatingly tight.
It wasn’t for us and won’t be. Ever. Trust me.
are without exception irresponsible. Which
sounds alarming and is, admittedly, an aberration
(perhaps not funny) of a more valid, thinkable notion,
that dolphins, wolves, chimps, etc., flip a switch
in us, casting klieg light on the frightening solitude
engendered by the very Fifties idea—I know—
that we alone are responsible for our own
consciousness. A friend, who’d taken work as tutor
to a high-school student, leaned over the back wall
of a booth in a pub and told me: of all the thumbnail
sketches he’d done for her, from Plato to Pascal
and beyond, this Sartrean concept of taking ownership over all
that you know, feel, and do, had proved the most opaque,
the singularly most inconceivable stupidity
ever designed to befall a girl, driving her to kick some shitty
desk chair in frustrated disbelief. Now, Reader, make
a face that’s meant to express some woeful sense
of pity and surprise, while feeling a cold sickness underneath.
That was my face. I was mumbling things so far from the truth
of what I felt, I could have been a clergy entering the manse,
touching tops of heads, asking how days went, seeking food,
while wishing one or the other end of this circus dead.
The sight of a pint glass didn’t cause me to vomit. I didn’t
reel, sweating and murderous, out into the street; but my mood
stiffened, grew intractable, opaque; I felt blue flashes inside
that were flares of all the moments I’d sought causality,
a why for each failing of character, somewhere outside
of myself, amounting to a web of reflexive sophistry
that reached back into the years of my life like illness
discovered late, or how rot sets into wood compromising
the strength of a structure by softening its centre. Rising
from my seat, I went and faced a woman whose caress
had eased my passage through some months I couldn’t pass
through on my own, she’d been more than kind, I’d
found I couldn’t love her at the time, and fled.
So I faced her, and apologized as best I could, given the mass
of people in the pub. ‘This is a poem,’ she said, ‘and that’s not
good enough. Around here, we don’t let art, no matter
how acutely felt, stand in for what’s necessary, true, and right.
Next time you face me, maybe leave you here. End quote.’
A video loop. A video
loop of a Rhode Island wind inspiriting the natural-colour tresses
of one Bernardine Dorn
as she adjusts the sit of her shades, while the boom
finds its level, then recounts her decades-
long exploits in
the Weathermen.
An etched plate. A plate
depicting a troop of shades infilling each other’s footprints that pass
behind one Bertran de Born
who’s clutching his severed melon by its medieval
tresses while bemoaning, well, plans best-laid.
Something explodes.
Connect them.
Originary cling, muck compress
on the senses.
Antennaless ant, little miner mole in a cave-in; what
is consciousness at night?
Irruption, flickering blather, drip-damp
in the ass cleft,
warbling lullabye as the outline of the hair erases
a form of hair to begin its
lick at the scalp. Isotherms tauten and snap.
I know I’m not no-
where: grease came off the cook pans
with sand and a little soap, arenas
are where the unlived live out their tenure
and flower as bruise, Mons,
mons pubis, I owe the government money, Planck
Length, V-dub under green water in
the quarry. It needs an outline; I owe the future
some questions.
I’d come in from a wind, a wind in a storm with snow
like atomized iron, part chandelier part bomb, it hurt
to inhale. An engorged winter snow that ignored each cardinal
point on the compass, and Newton, and foreground, and
it ignored depth. Snow with layers of enamelled white
degrading through grey to black, black snow that shivered
white again in the acid of stung, underlid vision. Knifed
onto the canvas snow as the canvas creases, then tears.
The tips of two fingers rolled loose in the purse of a glove,
and a dollar-size patch of dead flesh collected crystals
under one eye. Gliding on the stump-end of each femur,
I reeled, gill-snagged by the collusion of wires above
and banged into the barn wood door before the door had gained
outline and was more than the snow shift and ground static.
It gave, and leaked a column that glowed. Air in that lung
was unalive, warm, moted, smoky, how I had imagined air
in my own, before I’d left the great enclosure months hence,
to come here, though at the point of my leaving ‘here’ was no option.
Then I was sitting, a snow-pack on one hand stalling the thaw,
and chewing hard on my face with weak teeth. Iron pry-bars
and outsized wrenches hung like strips of smoked meat from
spikes in the studs. The studs crowned outward, and cracked
like the whip’s end the wind held the handle of, out past
the weakening hydro towers. There were wood chips, a stool,
and a curling portrait of Curtis Strange in his backswing; two
palm leaves browning through the frame of his high arm. Seeing
was shearing browns from the not-there’s of black, except where
the heat source bled orange onto the meltwater and ice still
clinging to seams in my gear.
It was here I began hoping the angel
of quiet might visit, gripping the past in its talon; a past devoid
of plastics and canker, shame, stale grievance, Vancouver, debt,
shortfall, and waste—
‘ You stain what sections of now I’ve allowed
You,’ I said, addressing the past as a pain-fire in the flesh of my feet
took root, ‘your slavish insistence on sticking around, on bearing
down on the hours as they enter and be, siphons the glow off your
stardom. You and your retinue reek. I’ve a chance here to gaze at this
oil can on into tomorrows. Equilibriate. Blot the weather and settle.’
Outside was tearing its fingernails out, eating the elderly in drifts-
become-tombs. The notion of water froze in the mind of outside
and all vertical entities had relinquished pretensions.
‘You had
a chance. Then you opened your mouth.’ Its voice came from nowhere,
as the past needs nowhere to be, and deadened the details of the things
I could see. ‘ Your good eye hangs the way it does due to me. Padlocks
in your lower back, and the list of cities that rented you space. The love
defiled by disallowing the ground it grew into. Remember, bored child,
as a flea on the flesh of disquiet, you’d have given fingers to have
things mean, prior to seeing, disturbing, and reading them.’ The sun,
a governing body, had entered a phase of secrecy it couldn’t discuss.
Or there wasn’t a sun.
—ANDRÉ ALEXIS
Thankfully, he arrived
long after
it was de rigueur
to sew insignias
onto sleeves,
or wrap a band
around. For a time
he thought much
of mirrors, doubleness,
Paris, and the Author;
but when he met
one, and shook her hand,
it was warm, she
smelled of lilacs,
exhaled smoke,
and scratched where a bug
had bit her arm.
Was convinced for years
the sign had turned
its face away
from God. It had.
So God switched seats
the better to read,
and now words still mean,
what his COD
says that they mean.
He took a photo
in Berlin of Hegel
on a pedestal;
it was evening, and bluish,
and his face
developed wrong. The flash
made the streaks and stains
of time glow white
and his eyes appeared
as pits. He visited
the very spot
in the North Atlantic
that marked the shift
when Auden went
from there to here.
It was cold, and deep.
He stood and smoked
with an older, wiser
man at the battle-
ments at Cape Spear,
and looked east,
or out past the seam,
or just out, and thought . . .
nothing, really,
that hadn’t already
been, so they talked
about love for a while.
I recieved a card
from him; he’s in
Saskatchewan,
learning to farm,
alone, one leg is gone.