That about does it for boats :
The others are all the boats without any obvious
linking aspect, I therefore pass over those boats,
except to say they are lovely to be among
What’s more unnerving, that the chevrons
scored into the flesh on the brow
constitute confusion, or that they point
(as they seem to want to do) to a spot
in back of the frontal lobe—a mappable locale—
that’s truly, blackly stumped? Watch what
the hands do: while sketched on the scrim
between sleep and not, her thumbs as infant
bats snurl into the pack that clings
to the flesh of her rising breast. Her eyelids
want the field bisected, then want it magnified
or widened. We arrived one summer night
in the tobacco belt bearing bedrolls tied
with twine, bailer twine, and slept
in an anachronistic ditch. Morning
shaved haze off the immigrant labour
cattled on flatbeds that rumbled past
the quaintness of lettuce heads. In the barn
that was the principal clause our bunkhouse
sat appended to, bats in the thousands
hung, or scored the air in arcs, as
we lay in the loft in tarred pants not
wondering what it was like—We’d
irrigate the crop at night; I manned a valve
that had to be closed before a set of guns
were shifted west. He hammered on the feeder
pipe. He hammered on the feeder
pipe and I at the valve on the main
could not close the flow, nor could I signal
back. I couldn’t signal back, nor stop
what it was I was called to stop. She comes
in wearing a summer halter top, two dogs
huff, lift, and shamble over to the face
she wears I recognize as tenderness.
There’s nothing difficult in this. Intent forks
off from the main, we hit the sheets in sheets
of force that light the darkened rows. It was dark
where Roberto stood striking a wrench against
wet metal. He was from Oaxaca and wired
his wages home. The room’s a lambent
blue. No longer signalling he missed his wife,
he’d point and name a thing: relámpago ‘lightning’ relámpago . . .
From over the port side’s rail, our two faces
cameo’d, cast back, cross-haired in the lenses
of a wandering armada of jellyfish. The surface’s
slickness a zero on the State-of-Sea scale. No fog,
oil rigs mushrooming the northeast horizon,
spilling these rubbery spores, perhaps, that’ll clog
the Baltic if they spawn. And I’m told they
will; something about unbalanced fish stocks.
Full day and a night, approximately, aboard
the Prinsesse Ragnhild letting the earth’s curve
unspool under her hull. All that herring
and tritium encroaching on sea-level Lübeck,
we’re pointed at Oslo’s elevated ground.
Thirty-five-and-a-half thousand tonnes, a traffic
jam in her hold—I’ve never got my head around
how these gargantua float. Within her massive
warren is a micro-environment: ‘The smell
of ship seized you by the sinuses: the smell
of something pressurized and ferociously synthetic.’
Every threshold is a stepping over low walls
designed to trip, until habit lifts knees, marching,
under no orders, seeking air, or the casino. Both
luncheonette and pub offer brown cheese, salmon
on brown cheese, brown cheese under shrimp, or
just brown cheese. I think the Norse are funny,
and fine biathletes. In Rotterdam I asked one why
always the Finns and Swedes at International-level
hockey? ‘We don’t play well together. It’s amusing
to watch our neighbours do this. We like skis, and
the dark in the forest. Do you know more of us
are on the plains than in our own country?’
‘Norwegians like to fly?’ She looked
into her glass, then around at the assembled,
‘Minnesota, North Dakota, Saskatchewan,’ she said.
‘Prairies! Dust. Diaspora of the Norse.’ We lifted
glasses above our heads, masts in that windless
bar on the Maas where there was too much singing.
Down below multiple car decks, under the decks
for trucks lined like pachyderms in the pachyderm
part of the ark, our berth in the stern just above
the propeller. A strip of mirror, two narrow bunks,
a geologic dark when the cabin door swung shut.
Dark like that dark we fear thought arises from,
coated in its oil, and might descend back into but
for our propulsion to talk over the engine’s baleen
thrum and whine. Here was lightlessness,
an active black that eeled in the ear. Paired gifts,
we’d been given back to the world alive;
the incision of selfhood healed over, now adrift
in the wrong element, two mute, unshuttable eyes.
Tricked out in phantom gear, I imagined myself
perfected, at least made better to the extent
that I wanted nothing more, and could hurt no one—
which is when the world disappeared. Or
the world’s model displayed under glass with figurines
passing through parks and purchasing things
and boarding trains at dawn then transpiring, shattered
or melted, receding back into the far hills
of the false. The story of Stories Connected, and I
among them, constructed of them, a notch in the wood
of what’s happened, wound down to a farce, just
a face extemporizing the facts and making a meal
of what it had felt like to be. What had it felt like?
I remember a latch on a low gate; a kiosk on a platform
that smelled of diesel and grease; a rowboat blown
into reeds and the oars in the oarlocks; remember
my flesh on the flesh of another but limbs needed
moving and the air needed stitching with words, or
just murmurs, it all demanded doing and seeing,
removing the black box of immediacy to its place
on a shelf near a pot of dahlias gathering dust and
dying. Alone now, in the glow of an Imperial mind,
I curl to the chilled sense of being other; am bench, bolt-
hole, view of the Baltic coast, brother, or crayon set,
want to be implemented, bent to, used inside
the watched life lived—
1.
We stuck sticks in the lawn’s hollows,
slept at sun-up, for an hour. Oilskin
and Mick jokes over Jameson on
the ferry out of Farewell, a sideways
rain slicking nubbled deck boards.
Lenses stared into the car trunk’s
dark down in car bay four. Whale
flukes northwest, once, like greens
spooned from stew. Rainbows
out near Reykjavik leaned into
over the bow rail, and white
wake below, a volatile doily
torn at by sea that wants to be oil.
Frank held up the gig being
high over in Tilting, talking
the girls into photo-ops knee-deep
in bladder wrack. Switchblades
from popsicle sticks and clothespins,
we’d have tied our own flies and
hooked the vein hiking over
the second knuckle. Edge of the flat
earth. Fuego, Fogo, somewhere way
west of who fucking knows?
It wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t bad.
We slid round the corner on goat’s
feet to the Dep manned by the ginger-
haired man who resembled your father,
for Belle Gueule or Boreal, green tea
to go with the coke, and chips in tins
we can’t get on this side--this side of
the bridge you were terrified of, its groans
and see-through pedestrian grates. Ice
down the pike keeping tour boats lashed
to shore under the shadow of the parliament
library no one can use. It’s not as bad
as we thought. Our patterned nights filled
with what comes next comes next. And it did:
rancour in the tilted kitchen, kisses while
you bathed, bullying silence as the grounds
got banged into the can. Give me the chemicals,
we’re not leaving for days.
Paint cans with gummed lids,
buckled, and shut like bad clams.
Stir-sticks half-naked in moted
light. Particleboard and exposed
studs. The skelf of a nail bent
back, hammered down in the grain.
Washers stare like squid from a silted
jam jar. Skis lick down through
the rafters. Knot-hole the size
and swirl of an ear. A push mower
cowers under the workbench,
sniffing oil stains. A plinth
of chipped bricks near intestines
of hose that moult on a door-hook.
A dog changes gears in a hedge.
One pane rattles. He turns six.
Pig in painted numbers, nosing
the low slats where straw rags,
resined brown, stroke the fairground’s
polished concrete. In a papered
metal pen that keeps her fat
from crushing seven. Seven on
spikes staccato in the show
booth, snoring at their siblings’
nose-holes. Galway blacks
could jump a five-rail gate
any horse and rider’d balk at.
In transit, a school of teeth like prawn
the driver wades into wearing
chain mail. Vietnamese potbellies
petted and picked up and flung
back at the goat. Fistfuls of spilling
pellet. They move like moles.
The ribbons are satin and blue.
Run-off exits a pipe all day and
a dump truck takes it off.
When he got sick, worms were
pinching the blossom petals and
pulling them underground. Moonlight
made the little flags glow, blink
out, so the night lawn shimmered
galactic. We didn’t know
what was happening. The doctors
aren’t given to telling; they’d dose
him and send him home to float.
A city in Japan makes a festival
of this, all brush stroke, seafood
and a divine quiet. He set about
digging his shallow moat.
FOR DON COLES
Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Estonian.
A spectral mist had curtained the port and spread,
silken, dewy, over the crowded park grounds.
Can we say spectral mist, or even mist, wasn’t
it more a greased, Baltic fog? We can say
the masts appeared broken, occluded at times;
the water that slapped the low stone rampart
could be heard clearly but relied on inference
to be known to be there, or, looking back, at the very
least, the edges of things went grainy, lost
substance, and shivered; mothers with kids
in their care sampled baked sweets or nudged hand
crafts on display tables then sank away into
enveloping dampness from which cries of
where are you carried through a muffled din—
No, this would have reached us as
Wo bist du and could we really have
isolated a phrase like that, being new to a tongue?—
An area roped off for children held rough-
hewn, log play-structures, the bark left on so they
looked ribbed and reptilian; metal boxes strapped
to lamp poles spat out cigarette packs if you
thumbed in the coins. We might have thumbed
in the coins. The masts, when they split
the slate-coloured veils, leaned and rattled, or
knocked against parts of their rigging, and small
triangular flags hung limp from the upper reaches
where the masts narrowed. Gulls landed—or terns
landed—on the crosspieces where the sails were
furled and tied like camping gear. It might have
rained, as our feet were soaked through, and we wanted
not to be where we were, but felt also an internal
pressure, like a note left for oneself in a home one
has yet to move into, to look, to take in the thick
beams of each building, the docks buried in fog,
the cider smell and steam from steel vats, the layer
of beaded wetness on things and the people who
handled those things: cups, wallets, paper containers
of food, rucksacks, umbrellas, the odd camera or
brass-handled cane. The ships lumbered away, sniffing
each other’s sterns; someone’s future warmed into
high resolution as love’s rags clapped in a weird wind.
Wait. Hold. I was happy just then; a breeze entered in, garlanded
with creosote, cut grass, and a sharper tang that chilled it by degrees
and told me autumn’s coming on—
Back then I was a kicking colt with an arrogant mane, everything
wrong with the world, I wasn’t understood,
a town with more churches than sense, a defensive streak
that flared whenever it could; I felt no fealty but the potential for it
when the valley’s trees pulled their embarrassing sports coats on
and a wind traipsed east through the funnel the Laurentians formed,
whipping the river to soft swabs of white where it’d lazed all summer.
I could smell C. where she lingered on my face;
part wine, part almond, and I want to say metallurgic, tinny,
or minerals of the earth. One wants to be in love
but moreover, one wants to be one, narratively speaking; Towers
of Tofino. Saccade. What did we miss?
Saccade. Blisterpack. Wind rose. Fill us in later.
Slate-grey iris of Olympic Stadium collapses into its pupil.
Meadowlark that banged on morning’s window just one
in a percussive trend.
Where in the world to go, to go?
O where in this world to go?
This big old wagon’s slow, it’s slow.
My beautiful wagon’s
slow.
It shines a silver sheen, though,
its silver sheen a-glow.
This silvery ovoid’s sturdy, ho!
metallic armadil-
lo.
Born in nineteen six-and-oh, and Oh,
she’s factory clean.
Awesome to behold but slow, but slow;
she’s sort of like a
brain.
She’s sort of like a model brain, no?
Just sits there unless towed.
And a constant need to unload, to forego,
what we couldn’t take or
know.
A post, only just deserving the name,
grew up or appeared in the worn earth
of the quad’s footpath—
it asks what top-down planning’s worth.
Someone cuts out a coupon for Thanks, another
for Many Thanks. Another cuts out a coupon
for Thanks, another for Many
Thanks. Another cuts
out Many Thanks, pockets Thanks, then Many Thanks,
then stands in the room as it darkens
according to the light outside
we call Natural. It’s been programmed to behave.
Because the vast warehouse space in which their days
are spent—the poured cement, the cement
floor, the door
for lunch and the barred window casement—
now seems to move under the moving
grass of sales-lot tinsel,
or instead the tinsel’s
a lung’s cilia through which the currents of air
normally all but absent are visible,
or the qualities are visible, or the content
of air from ducts in motion become what we’re meant
to see here—
Am I Here?
I didn’t build the shelter but sat in it and looked,
looked out onto the passing phantasm of exchange.
Then I built a shelter but didn’t look, as
there were more discarded bottles than could easily be counted.
The bottles formed an ice floe. They formed a reservoir
and became the lake we
can no longer drink from.
Rain became steel; became little pellets of perfectly
round, Newtonian weather precipitating
giggles and a species of quiet
anguish. Was that too much?
They find their level.
Does anyone connect looking
anymore with beauty? While the tall ships moored in slots
transmit morse to the positioned storm-
lights, a friend leaves his squat
and happens onto, or falls into—
while picking bottles—a web. A workbook. No, a web.
No, a workbook of white, and what white is there isn’t Blank
but put there as white, as work, as what
we do with hours
and ask to be paid.
He clipped out Thanks, pocketed Many Thanks. He picked
up photos, on a corner of the dragging phantasm, of no one
and returned them to no one by land mail, as record
of having been: I was Here—
You weren’t. It was a record of having been,
or of anguish. I no longer speak to him.
Water levels fell,
an obliterative cloud of Doings loomed. I mean, there was a threat,
but I’d attached, just beneath me, and for the duration, a name.
I’d attached my name
to a plate then attached the plate to me, where I
sat in the shelter, or lit kiosk, looking out.
It was a web; a white web spanning the cement struts
that prop up the overpass.
He slept there.
We were talking about the movement of air: billowing
white air, smoke translated from the thrashing
key strokes; a turnstile spins according
to the force of wind; smoke from the friction
of wooden dowels knitting
the unused threads together:
A patchwork version of future—
A blankness that isn’t vision—
After burying myself in boreal dirt, then digging that self out,
I carried a stone around wherever I went, though
a stone the size of my head, I found, wasn’t
my head. No loose threads showed. Or loose threads
showed we chose to ignore faced
with the heat of winter. What’s
here, now, for a time
was something else entirely.
Sort of crescent-shaped, grey granite, canted
at an angle, like the metal bed
a trailer hitches
into just behind its cab
but plopped at the perihelion of a crescent
beach where driftwood timber
changes its
arrangement with each tide.
Sand-flea’d kelp wigs blacken; braided
and crisp. A weir at the mouth
of the bay being
figured out by seals whose whiskered
sneers submarinely ignore warning shots
from a propane cannon. They close
their ears. It was here,
on this rock, in eighteen-ninety-something
villagers found a man starfished, famished,
rolling his eyeballs at the sky.
Parched to a papery
cut-out. Both legs had been surgically
removed. Above the knee. Arteries cinched
tight or clamped or cauterized so
a sub-promethean amount
of blood hardened in the sand to French
dessert. They took him in—the locals did—
staunched whatever leaked, bandaged,
balmed, and watered
this ‘Jerome’ the Fundy waters didn’t want.
They weren’t not funny back then either;
‘Who’s buoy is this?’ ‘How’d Jerome
here on those?’
and a winter’s worth of ‘Bob’
jokes. He lived out his days here, a fixture
first in Sandy Cove, then further
down the shore
among Acadians, not once revealing origins,
family name, or what happened to his limbs.
When I’ve fanned out
the glossy colour
prints of that place, the rock’s not there.
Shots from the rock looking east toward
the weir, that part of the beach;
shots of her
on the sand to the west where
a fishhouse on a wharf exposes bleached
flanks, that’s all there. But
history sits
about where my own wrinkled stare
looks out at gill-netters, heat haze, the horizon
spitting at the spot where I want
a whale to appear,
or would want if I were still there.
Awareness was intermittent. It sputtered.
And some of the time you were seen
asleep. So trying to appear whole
you asked of the morning: Is he free
who is not free from pain? It started to rain
a particulate alloy of flecked grey; the dogs
wanted out into their atlas of smells; to pee
where before they had peed, and might
well pee again—though it isn’t
a certainty. What is? In the set,
called Phi, of all possible physical worlds
resembling this one, in which, at time t,
was written ‘ Is he free who is not free—’
and comes the cramp. Do you want
to be singular, onstage, praised,
or blamed? I watched a field of sun-
flowers dial their ruddy faces toward
what they needed and was good. At noon
they were chalices upturned, gilt-edged,
and I lived in that same light but felt
alone. I chose to phone my brother,
over whom I worried, and say so.
He whispered, lacked affect. He’d lost
my record collection to looming debt. I
forgave him—through weak connections,
through buzz and oceanic crackle—
immediately, without choosing to,
because it was him I hadn’t lost; and
later cried myself to sleep. In that village
near Dijon, called Valley of Peace,
a pond reflected its dragonflies
over a black surface at night, and
the nuclear reactor’s far-off halo
of green light changed the night sky
to the west. A pony brayed, stamping
a hoof on inlaid stone. The river’s reeds
lovely, but unswimmable. World death
on the event horizon; vigils with candles
in cups. I’ve mostly replaced my records,
and acted in ways I can’t account for.
Cannot account for what you’re about
to do. We should be held and forgiven.