God of LAST RESORT
If you had the eye for it, you’d see her footprints glowing like phosphorous on the rails of bridges and around a solitary tree with an angled branch that could hold a body on a rope. Then there are kitchen ovens, cars left running in garages, bathtubs, tenth-floor windows. If it’s someone’s second try, she might not bother. Notice, she says, when they upbraid her, last resort is singular.
She shows up for the ones who keep on going, though she’s weary of the notes they take so long to write and toss away. They call upon her from the daylight gloom of their sour beds. Sometimes there’s a child standing in the doorway, afraid to enter. He holds the tray his mother uses when he’s the one who’s sick. There’s an egg upon it and a slice of buttered bread.
Those who need her most can carry on for years. By the time she arrives, they’ve been whittled down or are so bloated with loss that when she touches them, the indents of her fingertips remain. She’s been called many things, often in anger, but that’s okay. The worst is the battlefields, the ruins of the cities. Soon she’ll have to ask for leave—she knows the signs: her left eye is twitching and she can’t lift her arms above her head.
Right now she is sitting on the blown ground of a farmyard, holding the head of a dead horse in her lap. To escape the soldiers, a boy has slit its belly and, with his little brother, crawled inside. Flies, usually leery of her scent of immortality, have lost their fear. They swarm from the horse’s torn flesh and settle in her hair. They bead her eyes and lower lip. If she calls out, who will hear her? Who will bend from the clouds and lift her from this place, her skin crazed with smoke and ash, the places on her face where she still shines washed with tears?
God of WIND
Lean, this god, and empty.
No one has seen it, as the poet says.
Even in the heavens, it can’t sit still, it remains invisible to the rest of the pantheon, yet it moves more gracefully and swiftly than the ones with wings. This creates much envy.
It doesn’t like to find itself inside walls, even those that form a circle.
It lords over the four directions and the fifth direction that controls the heart. When it blows through you, your life’s upended.
You think it comes from the mountains, the ocean? You think it comes from the west? Mistral, Papagayo, Santa Anna, Williwaw—the wind collapses anything you choose to call it.
Whither? is its favourite question. What it loves most on earth is an inky lung of starlings tossed into the sky. Of the human body, it loves hair.
God of CONTRARINESS
She spoons sand in the mouths of the emaciated, gives the weak of will five teenage daughters, the philosophers the answers they argue don’t exist. As well as a breviary or two and the periodic table. She entices the incurable babbler—it is her nature—to buy property, sight unseen, in the City of Silence. He won’t be able to flip it. She gives the child afraid of the dark a father who is only shadow. She makes the hunter of wild fowl deadly allergic to feathers. To the cynic she sends a baby in a basket, not necessarily a good baby, but a baby, nonetheless, when he expected a scorpion, a crock full of pebbles, a plastic shoe.
God of SLOW
The penitents ascend on their knees to the highest shrine, patellas worn thin as communion hosts. It takes more than a generation to reach the top. Children take over from their parents. What they search for is an answer. In their case, does slow mean dim, thick?
The dwarf trees on the peak conduct a sluggish wind. How do you slow down time? the seekers ask. Indiscernible to instruments of measure, toward the valley where people rush about, the mountain moves its granite thighs.
This, after all, is not the god of standing still.
God of HATEFUL THINGS
He has a hard time of it, as does his paraphernalia. Slugs, cockroaches, vats full of the muck that becomes wieners, bunions, and liver spots, the grimy carpet in the lobby of a cheap hotel. What did I do to deserve this? he asks, not expecting a reply. He himself is loved unconditionally by the others. They fill his pillow with lavender. They buy him freestone peaches. They lay out long, fat lines on Arborite and give him a crisp hundred-dollar bill. They let him shoot the farthest in the circle jerk. Meanwhile: tomato blight, the Out of Service sign on the last city bus, arch supports, blowflies, the dog slapping his tongue across your face after he’s eaten a pile of human shit, on the beach a pile of human shit—oh, hateful, hateful things!
God of ACCEPTANCE
The landscape painter at the artist colony in the country noted for its messianic light, its sparse, hard-to-capture beauty, complains she’s come all this way to paint alfresco but the mosquitoes have driven her inside, no matter the netting on her hat, her cuffed sleeves and pants, a heavy dose of Deet. They bite through everything. And when she tries to snap a picture, a breathy handkerchief of mosquitoes flutters over the lens. What can I do? she moans, trapped in a dull and narrow room, thinking of booking a ticket back to her studio in Vancouver. Paint the mosquitoes, god replies.
BOOK II
“Has All—
a codicil?”
EMILY DICKINSON
“Was God a metaphor, and if so, of what?”
STEPHEN DUNN
HER WORDS
(After Mahmoud Darwish)
When her words were sap
she was bone;
when her words were water
she was wren;
when her words were gravel
she was sweat;
when her words were ashes
she was heart—
see, the moon is rusty,
the dust, weary—
when her words were mist
she was the hands of lovers
that can’t stop touching
though they lie
in different pockets in the earth.
God of SHADOWS
Has a soft spot for twins. For blue hours of snow, for cumulus that drag their doubles across the ripening wheat, for Goths who wear nothing but black. Though he’s without substance this god carries a lot of weight. Stretching out his arms across the sky, he can spread a shadow big enough to canopy a mid-size town, a city ghetto. To distract us from his less-than-sunny disposition, his partnership with death, he switches the setting from the darkened valley of Psalm 23 to a flat and treeless field where shade is cast only by the giant wheel of a tractor. Late August in that cool limbate circle, a man and woman unwrap sandwiches from a dish towel, open a tall red thermos, and eat and drink, a collie-cross who will be born again (same breed, same sex, same name) panting at their feet.
God of RENAMING
Her main job is to fix things up so you won’t be nasty, to rechristen the creatures you work to wipe out. Slugs she yclepts lawn dolphins; gophers become earth otters; rats turn into small-footed wayfarers of the dark. The rats reject that: it could be almost anyone. Possums, raccoons, feral cats. She tries again, Night’s—no; Fear’s—no; Fate’s postal workers: on an assembly line that sorts the mail, she can see rodent families decked out in standard blue-grey jackets. They’d stamp “Return” on any missives of doom Fate sends your way. To doubly ensure you’d never get the letters, others down the line eat the stamps and piss on the envelopes till the ink runs. Though she’s pleased with this scenario, it’s overly elaborate, too complex. Will it convince you of the rats’ crucial role in your future happiness? Will it stop you from setting out the poison, the traps? The rats don’t think so. And though they’d like the taste of glue, the nepotism, they hang on to rat with fierce rodent teeth.
God of QUIRKS: ITS MORE FAMOUS DEVOTEES
Emily Dickinson went in fear that strangers might see her handwriting. Her sister, therefore, addressed the envelopes of the letters Emily wrote. Miss Dickinson wore only white; so did Mark Twain, and his shirts, tailor-made, buttoned down the back.
A puzzled doctor noted that Malcolm Lowry’s knuckles were callused like a chimpanzee’s, who walks and runs on all fours. In Malcolm’s case the
hardened skin was caused by standing in front of a desk and leaning on his knuckles as he dictated his novels to his wife. If she wasn’t with him while he was dressing for the day, he put on his shoes, then his socks.
On the promenades in the Jardin du Palais-Royal, Gérard de Nerval walked a lobster on a leash of blue ribbon. “Lobsters make the perfect pets,” he said, “because they don’t bark and know the secrets of the sea.”
At the age of sixty-nine, to improve his sexual and creative vigour, William Butler Yeats travelled to Switzerland, where a doctor implanted monkey glands into his scrotum. One of his contemporaries on the board of the Abbey Theatre opined, “It’s like putting the engine of a Cadillac into an old Ford.”
Terrified of being buried alive, Hans Christian Andersen, with no attempt at humour, posted a sign by his bed: “I am not already dead.”
Several residents of Walden Pond allege that Henry David Thoreau could swallow his nose.
De Nerval, who named his lobster Thibault, hanged himself when he was forty-six from a tall window grate in a Parisian alley, leaving only a brief note for his aunt: “Don’t wait up for me this evening…” There’s no formal record of what happened to Thibault, though a neighbour claims Gérard’s aunt, ashamed to be seen on the streets with such a creature, kept it in shape by encouraging it to climb up and down the curtains. This she accomplished by placing its favourite snack, a pickled herring, on top of the wooden rod.
Yogi Berra voiced the wisdom of this, his favourite, god: “You can observe a lot just by watching.”
God of GRIM
She’s the loveliest. Long white hair and the body of a retired prima ballerina, some severe Madam (fill in a name that sounds Russian) who teaches for meagre wages in the school where shoes bubble with blood. Her two renowned disciples, the dour brothers, went beyond her expectations: dozens of princes who starve to death in thickets, a fox with its head and feet chopped off, a dog deliberately crushed by a surly carter’s wheels. It was not the Dog of History who, with his huge gloomy head and strings of drool, is her keen companion. He’d be less dangerous if he weren’t so ugly and good-tempered. If he didn’t grin when he sees you coming from the past. Oh, the horror, the horror, you can’t help but say out loud. It’s her favourite way for a bedtime story to end.
God of INSECTS
With a billion billion in his care, there’s so much to consider that he gets help from the others (see the gods of noses, of sex, of astonishment, of bites).
There are insects he endowed with so much clout he may have gone too far: a tiny beetle can eat a pine forest, grasshoppers devour continents of wheat, termites chew until a town turns ghost. Some accuse him of gross egotism, of power-mongering. He defends himself by pointing out the delicacy of monarchs and mayflies, the ballet solo of the praying mantis, the song of field crickets, the dancing cartography of bees.
There’s no shape he hasn’t used—the thorn bug is a triangle, the kudzu bug’s a square, and there’s a treehopper that looks like a helicopter. He’s dropped off members of this class on every inch of earth, inside the flesh and out, in palaces and hovels, in every climate. There are insects so cold-adapted, they’ll die from the heat of your hand.
Most doctors of divinity agree he, of all the gods, has been around the longest and will outlast.
God of WATER
Her signs are willow wands and pitchers moulded from mud in the shape of shorebirds. She calleth forth water and she maketh it disappear. She knows the fountain of youth; she knows the dried well where the old ones gather and toss into its depths the dull coins of their given names. She bloodies the River Styx and gilds the mouth of the stream that flows through the gates of heaven. Mostly she’s this colour: Aegean blue, Danube blue, Nile blue, South Saskatchewan blue, Pacific and Atlantic blue. None of them blue. That crow sent out to find dry land? It saw no end to water. It landed on her wrist as if it were Bedouin-trained, then went off again. Praise to her ears is the beat of its wings. And the thou, thou, thou hitting shingles and the tautness of tents, all around her the rivers running. That was the best of times, the undamned rivers running.
God of THINGS WITHOUT MERIT
There aren’t many such things. Even bad TV might free a person from loneliness, the kind that maims. A red thingamajig with no purpose might, in the hands of a child, become a treasured toy. Can you accept one shoe for this category? Objects that have lost their other half? In the old days, one nylon stocking was used to replace a fan belt or tie a peony stem to a bamboo stake. One mitten carried a kitten to a vet. There’s throwaway plastic, but it’s too dangerous to drop off at the dump. This god is the ruler of junk stores: he transforms and mends, he miracles the worthless into objects of desire, that is, things that sell. Really he’s doing himself out of a job. It’s okay. He has hobbies. And in every country there will always be those who believe their whole lives fall with a clunk into this category: without merit. Even if they take care, without complaint, of an agèd parent, even if they own a chestnut mare who waits every morning for the barn door to open so she can look upon a beloved human face.
God of CATS
Like birds (neither appreciates the comparison) they don’t need a god. They bring the light of their grace to the darkest of alleys, the darkest of times. They take to the air, to the trees, to the tallest highboy in the house, and look down at you with the gaze of a terrible deity. Unlike dogs they don’t try to help out, that is, with the little things, with repeated tasks. They don’t get upset at sirens. They can see the soul as it sloughs off the body, and if you’re not ready, they bring it back or leave enough of it by your bed—a feather, a skinny tail, a transparent wing—to regenerate then slip inside the cage of your ribs.
God of BALCONIES
He can’t help but think how expansive a balcony makes the meanest apartment! Like a substantial chin on an indifferent face, it juts and imposes a new personality. There’s room for a bicycle, an old mattress, a hibachi, a potato plant, a fake tree with decorations, an aquarium, a surfboard, a hummingbird feeder, a red canoe. Only the railing draws a line. And the space it defines is the site of crucial happenings: the tryst that begins the affair while the spouses of the nascent lovers chat insipidly behind them in the well-lit room, a disgraced banker’s leap to the cars below, the birth of five mice in a tumble of rags, the sliding of a paring knife across the smoothness of an arm. Moonlight comes to rest on the blade when the moon’s had enough of rising.
God of THE DISREGARDED
There’s a shine on the boy’s belly where the mouth of this god kissed him. No one has kissed him there before. Only the wind fingers the old woman’s hair (how she longs to be touched), opens her unbuttoned jacket. Because people in the city have stopped noticing the seasons, snow stops falling. Birds rattle the bushes so they’ll be seen. A grey jay calls. On the way to the party the stench in the subway was so bad the couple held scarves over their mouths and nostrils until their stop at Bathurst. On the way home eight hours later—it was New Year’s Eve, there was a crowd—they got in the same car. The heap of clothes that was a man still lay on the floor. God of the disregarded made the revellers, vigorously drunk and void of pity, step over, step over, in and out.
God of PUTTING-BACK-TOGETHER
When the man spackled the wall with his brains, did he think of his daughter, who had to clean it up, his wife, who had to force herself to eat from that day on? Yes, the gods are livid. They put him back together with duct tape, they used horn buttons for eyes, they gave him dandruff instead of hair, and a bad back. They put him under a bridge in a dying city where his wife and daughter would never see him. They tied his tongue, gave him a phobia for pigeons and the reek of sewers. Then they made him immortal. The gods of pity were too timid to interfere and besides, they’d been assigned another task, to comfort each snowflake in its long fall and its immaculate, gradual melt. They’d get to him when they had time.
God of ANONYMITY
When she decided to appear on eart
h, all the names and the need for names vanished. Given that, it’s difficult to talk about what happened next. What was called man, woman, gravel, grass coexisted without distinction. Stem, barbed wire, snail, oboe. Energy flowed into the spaces that the nomenclature of type, class, and vocation used to occupy. The air was uncertain. She came down and walked you into the open. Blurring all distinctions, a breeze blew on everything at once. There was a nameless longing. What else? A bewilderment, a baffling consolation. It was as if the unsigned messages she sent had been written on the walls of some mother’s womb, warmed by it, salted. In that state before mouth and mind shaped meaning, eye and ear (of fish, of canine, of aspen leaf?) were slowly opening; a vague heartbeat thrummed.
God of PUDDING
You knew there had to be one, didn’t you? There are fewer kinds of pudding than species of beetle, but still enough flavours and textures that a divine fondness has to be behind it. What came first, the pudding or the spoon? That’s this god’s favourite ontological question. His buddies in the upper realms get a little tired of it, but there are more empyrean weaknesses than taste buds and this shortcoming is less annoying than most. Think of a pudding’s special nature: you can eat this sweet before you have teeth and after you lose them. You can make a different variety every lunch and supper hour at a campfire or in a fancy kitchen in Dubai. And what could be more sacramental: one of the most delicious on the menu calls for day-old daily bread.
God of Shadows Page 2