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FOR MY FRIENDS
ODE
Blue jay vocalizes a clash on the colour
wheel, tulip heads removed one by one
with a sand wedge. Something
in the frequency. Expectations are high.
There’s a reason it’s called the nervous
system. Someone in bed at 11 a.m.
impersonates an empty house. The sharpener’s
dragged his cart from the shed. His bell
rings out from the twelfth century
to a neighbourhood traumatizing
food with dull knives. A hammer claws
to the edge of a reno and peers over. Inching
up its pole, a tentative flag. And the source?
Oh spring, my heart is in my mouth.
THE CORNERS
Where the question are you alright usually finds one very much
not alright. Cellphone at the bus stop, cellophane, wind,
Hasty Mart in its collar of pigeon spikes. With smokes
in front of the sports bar, careerists mid-shift lit at dusk
by the inner light of cheap bottles
of domestic. Like payphones, cords have been cut
that tied them to the world. Let me off in the primary
neighbourhood, I’ll walk the traffic’s bank,
its decorative plantings and contradictory signage, the current,
I can’t brave it. Fortunes approach right-angled in their vehicles
of delivery, hearts beat quickly in anticipation
or dread inspired by the landmarks. How long have I resided
in these years of gentrification and not realized
they’re gone—the inconvenient, inadequate, or taken
for granted? The psychic welcomes no more walk-ins
in this life. Time is short. Though a timeless sublegal
entrepreneurial spirit flourishes over which laundromats preside
geologically, with deep sighs, belying
with the state of their drains their adjectives. No one
can be alone like they can. Pedestrians, obey your signals.
On the boulevard of a two-stage crossing he reads in her
an imminent change in direction. We were here once,
hand in hand at the intersection of the cardinal and ordinal,
blessed with purpose, and the Star of Poland still in business.
RENTAL CAR
It’s not a contract until the names are on it.
Though always there is one who signs off with less
than a whole heart. “Leading Today for Tomorrow,”
that’s Mississauga’s slogan. Or is it “leaving” …
eastbound, westbound, exodus via
the 400-series highways. Personal reasons
I will not get into. The 427 interchange
is a long note in space, flightpath of materials
the grace of which is a reason to live. Is not likewise
the possibility and mortal danger of shooting
its photograph from the roadbed? Is not digital
radio? Accelerate into the curve by the Ford plant,
its freshly birthed Fusions in the nursery lot
behind razorwire, their cradle the duplication
of goods and services. Oakville’s motto is “Go Forward.”
And, indeed, where is everyone? They are shopping
in the Dixie Mall because their cars are there.
They’re working in pharmaceutical company offices
because their cars are there. They’re eating
at the golf club. They’re lying in their beds. Burlington
is “The Home of Ribfest.” Upon the satellite campus
of the Lancaster Gentlemen’s Club,
sodium haloes cast an abiding light
whose influence fades along the paved
and shouldered avenues locals call country roads.
We are all locals now. A thing is what it is called.
Country has become the countryside.
It gets so you don’t want to talk about it,
though the air is thick with personal messaging.
A thought could walk on it as on stones to find you.
My good horse will bear me over the river
of that noise. As through a burning cloud
my good horse will carry me.
FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTION
Nose down in their day of rest. Bobcat, excavator, trackhoe
on legislated hiatus from the business of holes and
fill, of avoiding gaslines and the inadvertent manufacture
of larger holes, budget overrun, a public relations nightmare.
No rest, though, for he who must negotiate such obstacles,
rolling his cart and its empties toward refund, refill,
toward reinforcing the gaps in his memory. Who will attend
to whether his solitude is taken up in pleasure
or despair? He is a hole in the landscape. He is a black bird
at night. The security cameras of Queen Street have suffered
violent ends, and record the pit of their disconnection.
Images supplied by recollection inspire little confidence.
Lab techs riding herd on experimental krill and bright exotics
like high B-flats in the middle C of the faux environment
were stumped by consecutive disappearances
of these regulated populations. No evidence,
no earthly remainder. Should a single being vanish into
what is not, so all things may vanish, as is written.
Commence to tremble. Then rig the lab cam. Witness
the octopus crawl out of his tank to feast, retreat before shift
the next day. They took him away. Why wouldn’t you
recognize the divine in him? It’s difficult to commit injustice
and elude detection, said Epicurus,
but to be confident of eluding detection is impossible.
He also said life is ruined by delay.
The animal dies when the soul withdraws. Dion Phaneuf
has been traded to the Maple Leafs. Neck deep in a Calgary
piano bar, the future of the franchise attempts “Piano Man,”
but can’t get past the first verse. Soon, he might as well have
been born there. Sings it again and again, infernal recurrence
without beginning or end, as the Acme Portable Hole
reaffirms its nomination as the best thing never invented.
Crowd studded with cameraphones like a ham with cloves.
Now always we look upon ourselves. Beauty and terror
in equal measure. Intrigue of a boarded-up building.
We want to get in there and find out what’s the matter with it.
A WESTERN
I
ts origins are to this hour undetermined.
The free-floating found
its transformative agent. A third term
arose. It was a thing, it existed.
Not a friend, though in all other things
it did kindle a renewed existence.
Storefronts said, defend yourself.
Under pavements, the timbers,
arms around one another, said
embrace your condition, said, we are lost.
Equipment is in a peculiar position.
It knows it belongs to the earth.
The machine, with its thousand parts,
is a thing, as is its smallest bearing.
A pail is a thing. So is
the water it carries. A painting
hangs like a hat on a nail.
Judgement, perception, death are things
in themselves; they’re not nothing,
though they don’t, as things, appear.
But what is the use of a feeling, however
certain, in defining that which itself
is only a feeling? No thing
can survive such boredom.
The situation prevails with its timeline.
A third term arose between us, it existed.
But a violence has been done
to its element it could not withstand.
It is not dead, unseen, or elsewhere.
Nothing real any longer corresponds to it.
Above the harbour a gull creates flight
as flight has created him. He arises
and results from his work.
He is the circle that violates logic.
That’s where his soul is.
WHEN ASKED WHY HE’D BEEN TALKING TO HIMSELF, PYRRHO REPLIED HE WAS PRACTICING TO BE A NICE FELLOW
Carrying my ladder to the next jobsite, I may get you one way
turning to identify your voice, and the other
as I resume my path. It isn’t personal,
merely aluminum and telescopic. The feet of my ladder
will be planted on the earth, its hands
in the branches of the stars.
History steadies it and will not be persuaded otherwise.
From its topmost I contemplate oilsands, acts of
war, abandoned dogs sobbing in confusion
and grief, the correlative of which is all the world’s joy.
A fear follows, if experience holds,
one’s inner badger stuck in one’s inner drain.
But that’s another life disowned, more surely absent now
than what has never come to pass: the great
accomplishments of my youth, say.
It only looks like I’m not working.
My atoms, like yours, like those of bamboo forests and Bakelite
are in constant motion, which should suffice for one day
to keep us from killing each other or falling in love
with our respective essential mysteries.
We can acknowledge the tulip’s beauty without eating
its poisonous bulb, admire the geometry
of the dodecahedron and not waste our lives
in a rec room at role-playing games.
It’s said when septic medicines, surgical and caustic procedures
were applied to Pyrrho’s wounds, he didn’t so much as
frown. Let us not agree carelessly about important matters.
The death of your cockatiel and the shearing
of an Antarctic glacier the size of Manhattan are events
differing only in kind. For those who pledge definitively
and confidently, a curse inevitably ensues. Sometimes
when I’ve thought I’ve hurt you,
you haven’t even noticed I’m around. I admire that.
It’s something one might work toward one’s whole life.
AFFIRMATIONS
Has the past not pursued me with its face
and haven’t I turned away?
Can a thing made once not be made again?
Hasn’t the rider returned to her horse,
the dog to his master? Isn’t this the lesson
of our popular literature?
And was the trash not collected
this morning, signalling no disruption
to the civic schedule?
Isn’t the gesture, the act, inarguable?
And don’t we live a parallel life in thought,
an attentiveness not unlike
a natural prayer of the mind and not-mind?
The shadow cast between them.
Where an unlight burns.
Won’t nighttime reawaken and won’t it be familiar?
Unequivocal through Carolinian forests
which have not wholly disappeared,
and equally among rows
of wrecked cars in the junkyards,
hoods open like a choir?
MUSEUM OF THE THING
Sad storm of objects becoming things,
the objective correlative, tired of me
as I am of it. I embody everything it hates
about itself. People don’t stand in for each other
the way things do. Someone
for whom Wednesday means groceries
might animate Wednesday with, among other
realities, the inability to possess it,
as one might a derelict potato chip factory
co-opted to ventriloquize one’s state
of mind. It’s impossible to know, entirely,
what a trip to the Real Canadian Superstore
suggests to someone else. Even animals,
notoriously difficult to work with,
whose very mention in this context invites
derision, illuminate a failure of perception
no less uninformative for being true.
It does not satisfy. Dear being, how might I
responsibly interpret your incomprehensible
behaviour? Where am I in it?
The imagination, whole yet incomplete,
feels its edges. Gestures from its windows
as if into a city whose language no one speaks.
A dilemma unresolvable, but mutual.
THE WORLD
When I learned I could own a piece of The World
I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those
who live in the present. My wife’s bright eye affirmed it.
As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary
decor of our professionally designed apartments,
private verandahs before which the globe, endlessly
and effortlessly circumnavigated, slips by, allowing residents
no end of exotic ports, a new destination every few days
to explore with a depth we hadn’t thought possible.
It’s not how things are on The World that is mystical,
not the market and deli, proximity of masseuse
and sommelier, not the gym, our favourite restaurant,
our other favourite restaurant, the yacht club, the library,
the golf pro, the pool, but that it exists at all, a limited
whole, a logic and a feeling. What looks like freedom
is, in fact, the perfection of a plan, and property
a stocktaking laid against us in a measure. The difference
between a thing thought, and done. One can ignore neither
the practical applications nor the philosophical significance
of our onboard jewelry emporium, its $12 million inventory,
natural yellow diamonds from South Africa no one needs,
thus satisfying the criteria for beauty. Without which
there is no life of the mind. What we share, though, transcends
ownership, our self-improvement guaranteed
by the itineraries, licensed experts who prepare us
for each new harbour and beyond, deliver us into the hands
of native
companions on The World’s perpetual course.
The visual field has no limits. And the eye—
the eye devours. Polar bears, musk oxen, rare thick-billed
murre. We golfed on the tundra and from The World
were airlifted to pristine snowfields, clifftops where we dined
alfresco above frozen seas. The World is the entirety.
The largest ship ever to traverse the Northwest Passage.
How the silent energy coursed between us. Fundamental rules
had changed. Except, with time, it seems a sort of accident—
natural objects combined in states of affairs, their internal
properties. Accusatory randomness and proliferation
of types, brutal quantity literally brought to our doors.
Or past them, as if on the OLED high-def screen
of our circumstances, which hides more than it reveals.
For what we see could be other than it is.
Whatever we’re able to describe at all could be other
than it is. Such assaults on our finer feelings require an appeal
to order, to the exercise of discipline a private Jacuzzi represents,
from which one might peacefully enjoy the singular euphoria
of the Panama Canal or long-awaited departure
from fetid Venice. There is some truth in solipsism, but I fear
I’m doing it wrong, standing at the rail for ceremonial cast-offs
thunderously accessorized with Vangelis or “Non, je ne regrette rien,”
made irritable by appreciative comments about the light.
In Reykjavík or Cape Town, it’s the same. Familiarity
without intimacy is the cost of privacy, security
of a thread count so extravagant its extent can no longer
be detected. Even at capacity, The World is eerily empty:
its crew of highly trained specialists in housekeeping,
maintenance, beauty, and cuisine—the heart and soul
of the endeavour—are largely unseen and likely where the fun is.
We sit at the captain’s table but don’t know him. He’s Italian.
I think on my Clarksville boyhood long before EPS, ROE—
retractable clothesline sunk in concrete, modest backyard
a staging ground for potential we felt infinite to the degree
our parents knew it wasn’t. The unknown is where we played.