— July, 2005
Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat
an inanimate slur, wool gathering, hanging
like a bad suit. Suspended fine particulate
matter. And an eight-million-dollar ferry shoves off
for Rochester, no souls aboard. I see you,
you know, idling like a limousine through the old
neighbourhoods, your tinted windows. In what
they call “the mind’s eye.” Catch me here
in real time, if that’s the term for it. We work our
drinks under threat of a general brownout.
Phospholipase is activated by bitter stimuli.
Back home, we call this a beer parlour.
I washed my hair at 4 a.m., he says. The full moon,
it was wack. He can’t sleep. The woman
who says pardon my French, over and over,
can’t sleep. They are drunk as young corn. Sweet,
white, freestone peaches. A bit stepped-on.
You said we’d have fun. Do I look happy ?
Our fingers, our ankles, swell in unison. Word
spreads. “Toronto,” in Huron, means
“place of meetings.” Even now, you may be
darkening my door. On my bike, she says, I dress
all reflective. Even now, you’re troubling
my windbreak. The vertebrate heart muscle
does not fatigue and is under the regulation
of nerves. I’ll wait. First it’s unlike evening. Then
it’s unlike night. Thirty degrees in a false
high noon, no shade when all things lie
in shadow. The lake a larger mind with pressures
brought to bear, wet hot headache
in the hind brain. Above it, cloud racks up.
A mean idea it’s taking to, breathing
through its mouth. In this year of Our Lord
your approach shoulders in, the onset
of a chronic understanding. Rivers underfoot,
paved over. Humber, Taddle Creek,
just the way they sound. To be abyssal
is to inhabit water below 1,000 feet.
I need a good costume, he says, but don’t
know what that entails. Walk the districts.
Misery of heritage buildings. Superheated
rooms of the poor. Sorry, cooling station
closed. Lack of funding. I like my feet
covered up at night, doesn’t everyone.
Blinking, naked atop our sheets. Smoke
rises but won’t disperse. Air hairy as a fly.
In fly weather. Tight under the arms.
It also depletes your spinal fluid. In your spine.
Aesthetic injury level the degree of pest
abundance above which control measures
should be taken. God, what she’s wearing.
I’m tolerably certain you know the way. Red
tide of the sidewalks. Pass the dry cleaners
and Wigs, Wigs, Wigs! It used to be called
100% Human Hair. That’s right. “Ontario”
an Iroquois word meaning “sparkling waters.”
Like doleful seaweed, our predilections undulate.
Rats come out to sniff garbage blooms
in rat weather. Heavy cloud, colour of slag
and tailings, green light gathering
like an angry jelly. Pardon my French. The city
on rails, grinding toward a wreck the lake
cooks up. When you arrive, you may
be soaked to the skin. A tall drink of water. Darken
my door. All of my organs are fully involved.
He’s a little freshet breeze. We are as any microbes
inhabiting extreme environments, surviving
in free-living or parasitic modes. Chins above
the germ line. Is it true a rat can spring a latch.
Is it true all creatures love their children. Raccoons
and skunks smell society in decline. That sag
at the middle. Rat weather. Fly weather. A certain
absence of tenderness. Who will you believe.
Bear me away to a motel by the highway. I like
a nice motel by the highway, an in-ground pool.
It’s a take it or leave it type deal. Eutrophic:
of lakes and rivers. See now, she says,
that’s the whole reason you can’t sit up
on the railing, so you don’t fall over. Freon,
exhaust, iron motes of dry lightning. Getting
pushed, he says, is not falling. Jangling metal
in pockets, you walk balanced in your noise,
breath a beam. I harbour ill will. By this
shall you know me. Caducous:
not persistent. Of sepals, falling off
as a flower opens. Of stipules, falling off as leaves
unfold. Speak of the devil, the devil appears.
The Iberian head, roman-nosed. Black,
bay, chestnut, dun, some buckskins, palaminos,
roans, a few paints, stouthearted, with primitive
dorsal stripe, equus callabus returned
to the New World in the sixteenth century
as Spanish Andaluz mustangs, blessed with speed,
a good fear, their ears’ ten muscles. Only a dog’s
nose is keener. Escapees of expansion
from Mexico, their descendants, travelled north along
the Rockies, millions coast to the Great Plains
restored to the authority of the herd, its shelter,
its law, knowing from birth which rivers
they can cross, where sweet water lies,
and the saltgrass. In wolf scent, winter hunger,
deerflies, rear blindspot. Points of balance triangulate
from the skull, behind the shoulders. Jaws
can snap a coyote’s spine, hooves halve rattlers.
Before twentieth-century machinery they fell
ahead of ranchers and oilmen, cleared
from coalfields staked at Bighorn, the survey’s
immovable starting point in rocks above the falls.
From ridges travelled summer and winter,
they were driven into passes and corralled.
A few hundred remain on grizzly lands below
hanging glaciers, among Engelmann spruce, fir,
lodgepole pine, foothills of aspen and balsam poplar
in the Siffleur, White Goat and Peace Wilderness
where they’re shot for sport, caught for rodeo stock,
sold for dog food at four hundred a head. Sixteen
left to rot in the forest northwest of Jasper,
two foals dumped at a gas well site by the only
animal who kills from a distance, noise for a voice
and noise for a home, for whom all places are alike.
They stayed at home. They didn’t go far.
Trends do not move them.
From picture windows of family homes
they cast wide gazes of manifest pragmatism:
hopeful and competent, boundlessly integrated,
fearless, enviable, eternal.
Vegas, Florida, Mexico, Florida, Vegas.
With children they travel backroads
in first and last light to ball fields
and arenas of the Dominion.
We have no children. We don’t own,
but rent successively, relentlessly,
to no real end. The high-school reunion
was a disaster. Our husbands got wasted
and fought one another, then with an equanimity
we secretly despised, made up over
anthem rock, rye and water.
Our grudges are prehistoric and literal.
It seems they will survive us. The girls
share a table, each pitying the others their looks,
their men, their clothes, their lives.
We planned to camp in a remote valley
among the hills at the east end of X.
It satisfied all our prerequisites —
shade trees, a trout stream, some vague
narrative significance. Rumours
involving Sitting Bull feature
in the literature. Those days, in the city,
we squabbled like geese, cursing
squalls of compounded heat until,
steadily, you assumed an expression
that described a wide arc around
our situation, and I yearned
for the peaceful life that happens
in the country. Next,
we learned from my cousins of a disturbing
incident. That Y, a man from nearby Z,
a washed-up town with a bad
reputation, made a nuisance of himself
to people camping in our valley.
Cheap beer, threats, the usual.
That this, among other things, is what
he’s known for. The exact nature
of all of it remains unclear. Once again
we were visited with a grave doubt.
That night I dreamt I drove to Z.
Found Y beside a two-toned brown Sierra
Classic parked outside a plank bar.
I watched him as the hawk watches
the hare. Considered him, neighbour
to neighbour, the way one king
considers another. First I shot out his tires
and then I shot him. And that
was the end of that. I woke to everything
as I’d left it, but later, a morning lit
by the tail lights of summer
and the weekend edition face down
in the yard, swollen with dew,
general interest, product reviews
and more news of the wars.
Off-season brings rain and new life
to old habits. Whatever it is that we’re doing, we can’t help
wanting to. Roadside attractions of the great southwest
are nothing without us. The World’s Largest animals,
vegetables, minerals, fade and fall over as junk
beside our beloved minor highways, and the Four Aces
in Kingman, Arizona, having suffered the attentions
of the Board of Health, has closed its doors
for good. I’m telling you,
if you believe it’s worse never to have tried,
then you haven’t really tried.
Though the evidence confirms a deeply unimaginative
lack of decent judgement, it’s possible,
in the echoey solitude that is resolve’s aftermath,
to venture out into the hour of diminishing contrast,
under cautionary perfumes of the chocolate bar factory,
with the intent to do no harm. The honourable life
is like timing. One might not have the talent for it.
Take this guy up ahead who’s driven 45 minutes
with his turn signal on through this jurisdiction of few exits,
as if the hope of a left is all he’s got now
in his one chance on this earth.
The Redcoats brought their law
to the borderlands and lawlessness
with it. From the two, local economies
were born, these dead towns
that make the maps wrong now,
barely a ruin at a crossroads
to mark their passing, deserted
in the ageless prospect. To drive
the trail is to go unremarked on, a criminal
with a small window of opportunity
in the anonymous glory
of the itinerate moment. It’s terrible,
what a person can think up,
and want.
This is where
optical illusion was invented.
Light stands on the coteau like a herd
of antelope, and deer scare
from where no deer were.
Where all is visible, so all
may vanish.
Men lost during
the march west, when recovered,
spoke of God’s eyes on them
as the earth and its creatures
turned their faces away. In the distance,
death rattling, broad in the rims,
no weakness of luxury to it.
Must there always be something
for which we are prepared
to lose everything?
Regret has many
offices. But the motel
furniture is placidly ahistorical,
and on the bed, a fabric
of uncertain provenance. Here,
one might swear, as days wind down
around the campfire of the television,
that mistakes of the past
shall not be repeated. And as night
lays a hand on each numbered door
in turn, listen to constellations advance
on the foothills. To that first machine:
a wheel, and an axle, and a rope.
He looks out to the spring night composing its indifferent themes.
He looks out through his point of view. Looks through
the window to the darkness, which throws him back. He stares
at the night, his mirrored face, as into an unsolved
private sea. His pain elusive, dangerous, vastly intelligent.
Like the largest living giant squid his pain down there in his private sea.
He reflects on the playoffs, the anthem sung by a sellout crowd
at Scotiabank Place, dead soldiers’ faces scrolling through tv time-outs,
and starts to weep. Afterwards, he is simply starving.
The way a good cry can really make a person ravenous.