‘The hour is an enormous eye.
Inside it, we come and go like reflections.’
Welcome to Toronto, on whose craggy beaches
the Argonauts land, and lose, and repeat.
Sweat in a brow of Astroturf, Astroturf a cold cloth
pressed to the forehead of a fevered hour.
Are we sometimes frigid with envy? Exactly, actually.
I’m here. Ahem. I’m ready. Last night a friend was married
in the echo of a rental hall in Scarborough and I celebrated
by cultivating a slow headache. On the dance floor I swayed
in the great electric light of four-four time. In an earlier hour,
there were three of me: me with the untied tie,
me in the mirror, left-handed, wielding the tie like a cudgel,
and me in the eye of the hour trying to figure out the tie’s
secret handshake. Toronto the Half-dressed, the Business Casual.
I’m not the first to say this but an hour isn’t enough.
And then the hour coming to a close,
always closing like a salesman, by the bucketload,
by the pailful. Our skylights, our hatchet-like bylaws.
The timber of our ambition. This morning the QEW
is a meadow of cars in which I lay my headache down,
traffic limping like a waitress working a double in a cast.
Which isn’t to say there’s not money in pockets,
obviously by Bay, and in the hills and parks and echoing
like the subway cars shuttling folks from hour to hour,
the underground life, crumpled transfer in a pocket.
I’m here. I’m ready for my costume, my ridiculous prop,
the walk-on scene by the fountain. I’m in relief
like the conclusion of a pregnancy scare.
Oh, what could have been, in an hour made
and unmade, bloodless as an insurance claim.
City of equivocation, Great Equivocator by the Lake,
Toronto the Retailer, the Beast from the East, Middle Finger
to Western Sensibilities. Toronto: whole hog, gassed up
and living better by living in a condo. This little hour
antiqued on Queen St., this little hour drank O’Keefe’s.
And this little city from block to block, from hour to hour.
It’s not that I don’t like the slump and drag of Sherbourne and Dundas,
the slow exodus to Forest Hill, Richmond Hill, Vaughan Mills.
When grandparents die we bury their bones and leave.
It’s not that I don’t like the concrete tomb where the Blue Jays play,
the days’ earlier hours when I pilot towards lunch
or the afternoon’s flashy bits of circumstance that steer me home.
As if in the naming we could make a thing: Rosebank Dr., Progress Ave.,
ash in the mouth. The hour a cadaver on which we practice
and practice again. It’s the Hour of Being Hauled to Attention
at the Corner of Bloor and Wherever; someone’s just been hit
by a car, and for the feeling of his feet aloft, above him
in the hour’s air, he thanks the driver by introducing a fist
to the car’s windshield. In these ways do we bridge the gaps
between us. Hour with a worm in its molar, with mud on the mudflap.
At our feet the evening gathers like litter,
a hot little mess spied in the hour’s mirrored eye.
And around each corner another wildfire of strangers,
insistent as a commercial break: we’re here,
we’re burning up, come find us.