The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out

by Karen Solie

  and highrises it’s God sticking a hose

  into the Devil’s hole to flood him out.

  And when the floodwaters rose,

  where was everyone?

  When fog risen from the lake assimilates varietals

  of exhaust, evolves through the financial district, renders toxic

  the neighbourhoods, swells over suburbs, the Devil

  has forsaken another project, saying sometimes

  I can’t fucking concentrate on anything.

  He says he does what he does sometimes because

  the Devil gets in like water through his weak places.

  When it rains like now the Devil yells at God

  I’ve told you not to call me that. When it rains like now.

  And every time God laughs at this

  roofs lift off along the Eastern Seaboard. The Eastern Seaboard

  will never understand.

  When we are broken, to whom are we opened?

  God’s taken all the fish home to live with him, honey.

  And when the earth shakes that’s God rearranging furniture

  not a bomb in the subway like we thought.

  If you feel the Devil with you, he is there.

  If you think God has abandoned you,

  you are abandoned, his attention

  on the World Series, more important than any one man,

  smiting the hell out of the Rangers’ big bats as the Giants

  lift fingers to the sky in praise and the ordnance

  deployed in his name, in making straight the way,

  would fill the oceans.

  And each foreclosure is a failure of belief,

  each immortal jellyfish a failure of belief.

  When those who will ruin us are elected,

  where is everyone?

  And when I return from the desert it’s with the Devil

  cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn’t really me

  who did those things before, that wasn’t me.

  LIFT UP YOUR EYES

  It’s dark by five. The time of year

  we cleave to lightboxes, their travel

  versions, and dawn simulators ordered online

  from the SADLight Super-Store. West, there is some

  daylight left, and later, by the north’s lantern, its plains

  read in black, white, grey, and lighter

  grey, a beauty acknowledged in the animal way

  with the whole mind, in a strategy. Distance

  lies heavily on that municipality, its roads,

  as will the snow, more so now the school has

  gone, and the store, closure of which inaugurated

  the season and its proprietors’ bankruptcy. Neighbours

  rallied to keep their electricity on, but when even this

  could no longer be done, they moved in

  with family in some other town. He’d been back to gather

  a few last things—people had seen him there—

  and in his daughter’s home died of heart attack

  that afternoon. I met him once or twice,

  it being years since I’ve lived in that place,

  which like all others is unlike any in the details

  of its luck and failures. We hate the one to whom we belong,

  and love the one to whom we don’t. Winter will say

  its long mass over him, over troubled ground upon which

  are written the liturgies, the ends of the earth. Anything

  going has far to go. As they wandered. I heard the news

  on the phone. They’d come from the east coast.

  ALL THAT IS CERTAIN IS NIGHT LASTS LONGER THAN THE DAY

  Look at your past, how it’s grown.

  You’ve known it since it was yea high. Still you,

  as you stand now, have never been there. Parts worn out,

  renewed, replaced. Though you may bear the same name.

  You’re like the joke about the axe.

  In time you’ve learned to behave badly isn’t

  necessarily to behave out of character. To thine own self

  be true. In script above the nation’s chalkboards,

  the nation’s talkshows. And not a great idea,

  depending. It’s too much for you, I know.

  One day your life will be a lake in the high country no one

  will ever see, and also the animals there, figures

  indistinguishable from ground.

  All of time will flow into it.

  Leave the child you were alone. The wish to comfort her

  is a desire to be comforted. Would you have

  her recognize herself buried alive

  in the memories of a stranger? Forgo the backroads,

  double-wides of friends, and friends of friends …

  Some of what you would warn against

  has not yet entered her vernacular.

  She travels unerringly toward you, as if you are the north.

  Between you, a valley has opened.

  In this valley a river,

  on this river an obscuring mist.

  A mist not unlike it walks the morning streets, comments on

  the distinction of Ottawa from Hull, Buda

  from Pest, what used to be Estuary from what used to be

  Empress, the ferry that once ran between them.

  KEEBLEVILLE

  Sausage makers, salt farmers, whose wives and daughters

  smoked menthols. Their bake sales baffling displays

  of unexplainable choices. They’d built themselves

  an indoor pool by 1979. We had none. Our curriculum

  embraced partnership for the sake of our physical

  education, so each swimming lesson was a lesson in defeat.

  Our cries rang off the Quonset hut’s corrugated steel.

  As our school failed, theirs thrived, its sprung wood gym floor,

  ceiling domed and beamed, classrooms around a mezzanine,

  they wielded it like an unassailable proof, assaulted us

  with it. All in that ridiculous accent, the inexplicable

  outfits. Now our school is gone. Where once we fought them

  in the parking lots, the arenas, left our blood and teeth

  in the arenas, on the street in front of the bar, after band concerts

  and ball tournaments and grad, and sometimes during,

  now must we compel our children to be bused there,

  to disembark the Blue Bird like prisoners on work detail.

  Will our heirs go on to name their own after the wrong

  soap opera characters and country music stars? Thirteen miles

  down the road, and you’d think it another planet, a hostile

  one, or overly friendly, in any case backward and impossible

  to understand. No doubt, they’d say the same about us.

  Which only serves to confirm what I’ve been telling you.

  BIRTH OF THE RIFLE

  Gunpowder in the water or wine, the willow

  charcoal, potassium nitrite crystals emergent

  in manure, barrel in the ground and stock in the tree,

  and a new mechanism flowers along the Danube,

  along the Rhine. Power without accuracy

  is a triumph of unreason. He shot

  the passenger window out. Thought it was down

  and saw a skunk through it. An idea of the good life

  for a person must be based on the nature

  of that person. From the Pennsylvania colony

  through the Cumberland Gap, by the Rockcastle

  River and the Dix, Daniel Boone carried

  what was named in his honour. It leans on the seat

  of the half-ton where the girlfriend sits

  on weekends. It leans in a corner by the screen door,

  avoiding the federal registry. Pursuant to the protection

  of individual rights against the common purpose

  of our ene
mies. Your dinner does not willingly relinquish

  its spirit, whose shape remains, whose qualities

  are eliminated. Survival relies on the subordination

  of non-rational aspects. River Forth, Water

  of Leith from whence Patrick Ferguson brought

  his breech-loading flintlock and was shot through the elbow

  during the American Revolution. Eternal rest

  by the Catawba in the arms of the Carolinas.

  The totality of things will not change, there is nothing else

  for it to turn into, one’s essence a body made

  of elements distributed throughout the entire

  aggregate, an admixture of heat. By the harbour

  where empties the Mill and the West, Eli Whitney

  was credited with the interchangeability

  of parts. The beauty and the naming of parts. Revealed

  in feeling and abilities, ease of motion

  and the processes. It rides with us into the fields,

  among the seeds in the ground. It goes

  to pieces on the kitchen table in copper residue,

  solvent, and oil. At the summit of his thirtieth birthday party,

  he fired four rounds into the rental’s drywall

  to a purpose mysterious to him. If we are good,

  it’s because we have recognized goodness. If we are

  sharpshooters, it’s not because of Christian Sharps

  and his patent. Who moved to Connecticut

  to become a trout farmer. Ever looming,

  Plato’s “civil war in the soul.” Without extremes

  there are no limits. Sighting scope long

  as my forearm. Through it may be seen creatures

  single and continuous, presenting harmonious

  attributes. Once apprehended, they are real

  and may be taken. We followed the Henry Repeating

  Rifle into the west, and the Winchester

  1873. Emptied, the bottle has no reason to live.

  When we speak, the blow inside us

  produces a flow similar to breath. Prepare

  to kill what you eat and vice versa, he said. If not,

  what good are you. It was our better half. By the North

  and South Saskatchewan, by the Red Deer and the Bow.

  The soul resides in those constituents whose removal

  leads to our death. For Christ’s sake will you

  put that thing down. One day, he said,

  you’ll crawl out of your hiding place and thank me.

  THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME ROAD OUT

  The perspective is unfamiliar.

  We hadn’t looked back, driving in,

  and lingered too long

  at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life

  experience. Many things we know

  by their effects: void in the rock

  that the river may advance, void

  in the river that the fish may advance,

  helicopter in the canyon

  like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,

  a wandering cause. It grew dark,

  a shift change and a shift

  in protocol. To the surface of the road

  a trail rose, then a path to the surface

  of the trail. The desert

  sent its loose rock up to see.

  An inaudible catastrophic orchestra

  is tuning, we feel it in the air

  impelled before it, as a pressure

  on the brain. In the day

  separate rays fall so thickly

  from their source we cannot perceive

  the gaps between them, but night

  is absolute, uniform, and self-

  derived, the formerly irrelevant

  brought to bear, the progress

  of its native creatures unimpeded.

  We have a plan between us, and then we

  each have our own. Land of the four

  corners, the silent partner, $500

  down, no questions, the rental car

  stops at the highway intersection, a filthy

  violent storm under the hood. It yields

  to traffic from both directions.

  It appears it could go either way.

  FORTY

  It was a black-and-white episode,

  our stroll along the shore road at

  Tobermory. Sodium lamps did the best

  they could for us in their limited spectrum

  and reach, walked us out to the end of the dock,

  made a short-armed gesture to the total dark.

  You posed on a cache of traps. Seamlessly,

  we integrated with the background.

  It had been quiz night in the Mishnish Pub,

  the river bordering Zambia on the tip of our tongues,

  rugby, as ever, an unknown quantity, like the Latin name

  for onion. We couldn’t pick Lily Cole out of a lineup

  if she’d robbed us at knifepoint, and now couldn’t see

  through to the limits of our sight. A constellation

  of pale boats emerged floating on the air, the horizon

  had closed its eyes and disappeared. In this,

  our own were not deceived, it’s the mind that makes

  inferences. When lying in a small room in the dark,

  you often survey distances in a kind of daylight,

  don’t you. You left me sleeping

  and went back out to the seawall, the drifting

  boats, each a new month awaiting your captaincy.

  In the cell water, eye water, the water thought

  floats on, rigging clanking softly in the breeze

  and afterbreeze, you were anchored

  by unseen lines to the harbour.

  LIFE IS A CARNIVAL

  Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit

  of disclosure, we trail Google Earth’s invisible pervert

  through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly

  contemporized, denuded of childhood’s native flora,

  stuccoed or in some other way hostile

  to the historical reenactments we expect of our former

  settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal

  basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart

  sprouting in the demographic, in Street View’s perpetual noon.

  With pale

  and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise

  to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete.

  We sense

  a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence

  of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them

  change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage

  from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest

  of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold,

  though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old

  house. Look what they’ve done to it. Who thought this would be fun?

  A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before

  YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store,

  cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful

  they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher

  registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity?

  Encore, applause, encore; it’s almost like being there.

  ROOF REPAIR AND SQUIRREL REMOVAL

  Natural squirrel men, those two,

  ladder up the side of the rental, into the attic

  before you could say “humane spring-loaded exclusion

  device,” footsteps confident, efficient,

  though they didn’t speak, presumably

  communicating in the unspoken language

  of those born to a trade. We’d never heard a peep

 
up there. Daily, nightly, the main-floor tenants

  pushed their ambient electronica

  through the vents, but we hadn’t a clue

  a halo of chewed wiring threatened us, that the inferno,

  as the landlord said, was nigh. Getting used to things

  is something even distracted people can do. They thought

  they owned the place, but once they leave now,

  there’s no returning. It’s time we were moving on,

  ourselves. On the walk, ruins

  of what an extended family of nuisance animals

  had made its nest from. Shreds of paper,

  insulation, twigs from the smoke bush, and the bitter

  broken wood of the invasive tree of heaven.

  SAULT STE. MARIE

  A storey of blue flame, the “Bay View Candle,”

  from the coke stack at Essar Steel Algoma

  marks the southwest corner of the Italian

  neighbourhood. Flare from blast furnace pipe #7

  in the foreground as tractor trailers and students of cheap gasoline

  cross the bridge into Michigan as though everything

  were normal. Each day a new frontier

  to break upon. The fires mean for now there’s

  work. The drugstore clerk plans to stop in to the casino

  for a couple hours after shift and what so-and-so

  goddamn doesn’t know won’t hurt him. She’s not talking to me

  so I’m inclined to believe her. How difficult could it be

  to stay here? Anonymous and thereby absolved.

  Everyone’s dogs look crossed with wolves.

  A hotel guest is an awful thing, repeating I’m not from here into the night

  while the money lasts. Perhaps it’s not contentment

  animating patrons of the food court, the sanguine tenor

  of my waitress, and the men pray for the burners

  to go down, the three days off required to heat them back to temperature.

  The time it takes iron ore pellets to ship by water

  from Cleveland Cliffs, for an epic run at the VLTs,

  for mercenaries to shoot 233 protestors in Tripoli

  according to the flatscreen above the lobby bar.

  WRAP PARTY

  The party planner has transformed the space.

  Subtract trousers and voilà, an outfit goes from day to night.

  And the bartender’s eye elusive as inner peace.

  It’s your trickle-down economics in action, the crane shot,