This window gives onto a windowless
brick wall where house sparrows, winged
mice, home in on holes
in the ochre exterior —
dappled tan blurs flitting,
fretting, howevering
over sad, stagnant hydrangeas exhaling
gnat-clouds into October’s bluster.
Gangs of groundleaf riot,
relax.
The earth’s skin crawls,
so it hugs itself —
our sandals reappear healed over, suddenly boots, and
soldierly stand their position
on the collage of newsprint, having gone nowhere in days.
The storm pane casts
back our room, unpeopled, from the pre-dinner dark and
we turn from the prospect
of living in there, reach for stray things (oddments, clutter,
rind, string), grow hungry-
bored, and gnaw through the burlap rice sack, the electrical wiring.
Or I put the mournful, harpy lyric away and look outside, where
what I thought was a scrap
of tar paper or blown shingle poking up from the mat of wet
leaves turns out an abandoned black docker’s cap — picture a toque
but rolled up like a condom — and
it lies there, in the downpour, sucking the weather into itself with all
the finality of a full-stop ending autumn’s rambling run-on sentence.
It’s telling the story of a city
employee who’d been cleaning the drainage grates of the season’s leaf-
slop, the now-sopping scurf bound and glued to blowdown sticks, when
he gave in to the urge he’d thought
locked away in that sheet-metal barn alongside his lunch, to leap before
looking, just as he’d done as a kid, on his own, a few times even off
the roof of the dog run. Why he’s
in it now, though, up to his eyes, I shy from explaining, not being near
as adept at the ending of stories as I am at the lifting of lids off gloomy
scenarios just long enough to get
a whiff of the runoff, the runnels of subsurface flow. More the stand-
offish, dissociative type; our protagonist’s boy-self, say, come upon
the crown of his own head in that
leaf mound like olives he’d picked out of salads and — bent kneed,
stooped, curled-out-over alone with his moment’s unease — has turned
the dark end of the world’s prose
into a — look — a question mark.
Strung over the crosswalk, three
yellow boxes marked X: a lantern
festival in a red-light district.
They’re reminders; though it never
appears so, the neighbourhood’s pornographic.
A brownstone with lights
burning on the second floor.
The west window lowers its blind.
I wink back. Je t’adore.
A low-flying merlin, straying out of High Park,
eclipses a 747 descending into Pearson from Newark.
You, coming and going, hair snaked
down your back and tied with a ribbon.
I’m seeing the F hole in the cheap Gretsch
I owned in grade eleven; my thrashings, posings —
and point of pride, never once
attempting “Stairway to Heaven.”
The same bird, about to depart for O’Hare,
gets word from air traffic control: Stay here.