by Karen Solie
the most expensive in the history of film.
We can laugh about it now. This feels like work to me.
The generations’ attempts to interface explain
the music. Last time I saw you, you were wearing a hat!
Inattention wounds her. Hence, her bandage dress.
There are those you’d rather walk in on in the shower than see dance.
But there are good people everywhere, really lovely.
And each of us absolutely wasted, in our own way.
CONVERSION
First impression of a hasty once-over. Of universal
solvent and under-the-bed. An atmosphere both
apologetic and hostile, orphaned
amenities procured at clearance, curtains synthetic
and religious in their weight and ability
to absorb guilt. A thriving ecosystem’s residents
stared from fringes of the textiles, the debased
baseboards, and would grow bold. A doorknob
came off in my hand like a joke prosthetic.
Rooms like this have followed me around
for twenty years. It’s as though I married into a bad
family of many cousins. I was the only one
who loved them. That’s what I thought.
Even as a family steakhouse vented its cruel exhaust
across my threshold, even in the resurrected mystery
of how the moths get in—
by morning they’d hung themselves everywhere
like little coats by their own hooks—
I was at peace in the luxury of all that lack of care.
It was a skill, like tying knots. When all else
had gone, it would still be there. Blame
for the propane explosion that demolished
the Monte Vista Motel, rendering it only slightly
less habitable, though not registered
in the paperwork, remains, a secret
crouched in the rebuild. In cinder block and flat tarred
roof it rose again, innocent, under the same name, as if
what could accrue had yet to do so. Don’t
send me back out there again. That final night
in Salmon Arm, maybe Wainwright, Shaunavon, or
the Sault, wherever it was the last built-in fell out,
or the fold-out fell in, I thought of you then.
THE NATIONAL GALLERY II
Nor is the twentieth century accessible
in Edinburgh. As though, post-concept,
one needs only a velvet rope and a sign
stating it’s not here, whatever you came to see.
Move along. Here’s Jan Weenix
at the height of his decorative powers, this wall-sized Landscape
with a Huntsman and Dead Game
the largest of his allegories representing the senses.
A springer spaniel’s inflated proportions
might signify the breed’s extravagant stubbornness
as well as a commitment to symbolism.
Misfortune figures in its provenance:
Catholic nuns who acquired the home of an insolvent
sugar merchant sold all five to William Randolph Hearst
whom they entertained and instructed
until his bankruptcy, whereupon it was purchased
by RKO, then Paramount, resurrected as a backdrop
for Monsieur Beaucaire, a carefree
adaptation and Bob Hope vehicle
which delivered unto Hollywood an anxious period of decline.
Taste and Sight reside at the Carlyle.
Hearing among the eternal winds
of Ohio. The Sense of Touch is lost.
In a clearing, a seaside forest, a typical wooden setting,
the huntsman reclines, back to a tree, alert
to the proximity of his rifle.
Before him, the dead in surfeit are arranged in poses
of sacrifice, liberated even of the void
in their animal souls with which they were content.
They decorate a plinth on which sits a bust of Pan, leering,
externalized, a gaze the tired huntsman evades,
head turned over his right shoulder toward the focus
of the dog’s attention, so that all kingdoms
appear to detect the approach
of consequence, and the ugly infinities.
THE MIDLANDS
In an otherwise green field. A black stump
smouldering in a circle of burn. Land
near Doncaster flat enough to make visible a parallel
realm where that thing hasn’t happened. The science
of original laws excludes it. Purpose-built
is the mainline from which the long view hastens
counter to the middle distance, and purpose-
built the middle distance, its fences,
hedgerows, ancient oaks lending perspective,
foreground at high speed a series of precise
and irrecoverable losses. Warmbloods, spirits
of immediacy, graze margins of the River Don
heeding its true course through the realities.
They speak plainly. The lie must be inside you.
LORD OF FOG
It rises from the North Atlantic’s stacks
as radio silence, a generalized lack
of discursive tone or narrative movement distinguished
by its density. A mob of spirits enacts freedom of assembly
under a Carmelite aegis. Friendly, to a point; but no
rhythm. The fight goes out of us, highbeams
make it worse. Our dissent voiced frankly in the way
we’re put together, in claims to an ill-defined
sixth sense—clairvoyance, gaydar, sensitivity to the dead
and their unending list of grievances—
staring into the infinite regression of our inabilities.
Everything to the right resembles everything
to the left, GPS prompts ring hollow though we were so close
once. Unimaginable speed behaving like stillness.
A confused dream the land entertains. Lay down
your whatever-you’ve-got-there, don’t need to know what it is
to be sure we don’t like it. We’ve no idea
what we’ve just had a brush with. Unseen
beneath beaded grass tops, the meadow vole pokes
his nose out, scoots among stems of sedges, forbs.
A bad neighbour, his own kind crowd him. Justice
the predaceous gods of land and sky fail to exact in their satiety
or extinction he will carry out himself,
to keep what’s his. Full of ire, in rage, deaf as the sea,
he scuttles under cover to the sleeping places of his kin.
DARKLANDS
Reclaimed from brushwood,
from coarse rank grass interspersed
with stagnant bog water,
it’s a rich black mould
upon which ruminates
the Georgian country estate,
walled garden abandoned,
antipodal, wanting discipline,
private intentions never more
realized. The door was built
for shorter times. Loose stone
and trippy tufted hillocks spoke
harshly to me. Stinging nettles withheld
ameliorative properties,
broke bottles on my shins.
They supply their own remedy—
who wouldn’t like to say
the same? I collected a few
contused apples, impaled
my denim on the blackberry,
stumbled on a buzzard’s killsite
as if onto an ashtray in a pile
of paperwork, and that night
in bed imagined a factory
feral and largely silent,
concept and subject both,
; fabricating itself out of the initial
qualification from raw principles
of deficiency and excess.
Around it the mad, heavyhearted
wall, the heartbroken
schizophrenic wall argued all
positions. When we’re of no more use
we will invent one, a foundation
our own weight dismantles.
I couldn’t project my awareness
through the house, it was
too big. Did bootsteps
in the gravel skirting stop at doors
and windows? I was not alarmed,
as the property was highly so,
but would learn I was more alone then
than I thought. At 3 a.m.
I sat with mobile on the foyer stairs
just inside the door
he stood outside of
speaking into his phone
to a third party, who didn’t matter.
We were a single being split
into primary antagonists
likewise inhabited
by opposing pairs, and they
by theirs, so two infinite armies—
at odds but constitutionally identical—
occupied the field
of this decision.
My unknown presence
was my weapon. I waited for him
to initiate the next stage
of our lives.
A GOOD HOTEL IN ROTTERDAM
A baby is crying in a good hotel in Rotterdam.
From the hallway it’s impossible to determine
in which guest room the baby cries,
if it does so on the mezzanine,
in the lobby, unfrequented stairwell,
breakfast room, or business centre.
One moment its cries flare behind you, the next
precede you like a herald.
Tonight Oranje will lose to Germany in the Euro Cup
group stage and babies will cry
all over the Netherlands
as parents proclaim their own anguish in the streets
at the feet of the great pre-
and post-war architectures. It’s difficult
to sort where the trouble lies, in the public
or private spaces, as you lie in bed
in Rotterdam with the TV on, TripAdvisor
review form loaded on your iPad like a gun to the head
of the good hotel, one of the few
to survive 1940. To ask why looks for meaning
where there is none. Two blocks away
a Tom Cruise import plays
without subtitles in the Pathé
Schouwburgplein bordered by cranes
pulling the new city from the ground, and bars
that draw like water from the air
partiers kitted out in franchise colours.
TROUBLE LIGHT
Sun of breakdown, sun
in a cage, risen over
a concrete floor, gutting table,
beer bottles. Form
from function dislocated,
the hood is up
in an unsound hour.
Five-gallon pail, rag
and cord on the unshadowed
stage, which is
exclusive. Burning
in the shop in the middle
of the night.
Something isn’t right.
BITUMEN
One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky
east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia.
Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even
backlit by a devouring glare that whitened its edges,
bent the bars. Waters apart from society by choice, their living room
the aftermath of accident or crime. When the storm comes,
we will see into it, there will be no near and no far. In sixty-five-foot seas
for the Ocean Ranger, green turned to black then white as molecules
changed places in the Jeanne d’Arc Basin, the way wood passes into
flame, and communication errors into catastrophic failure
for the Piper Alpha offshore from Aberdeen.
It burned freely. If I don’t come home, is my house in order?
Big fear travels in the Sikorsky. Twelve-hour shifts travel with them,
the deluge system, aqueous foam. Machinery’s one note
hammering the heart, identity compressed with intentions, drenched,
the tired body performs delicately timed, brutal tasks no training
adequately represents and which consume the perceivable world.
In beds on the drilling platform in suspended disbelief,
identified by the unlovely sea’s aggression, no sleep aids,
should a directive come. Underwater welders deeply unconscious.
Survival suits profane in lockers. By dreams of marine flares
and inflatables, buoyant smoke, percolating fret,
one is weakened. Violence enters the imagination.
Clouds previously unrecorded. Unlocked, the gates of light
and technology of capture in bitumen oozing from fractures
in the earth or afloat like other fatty bodies, condensed
by sun and internal salts, harassing snakes with its fumes.
Light-sensitive bitumen of Judea upon which Joseph-Nicéphore Niepce
recorded the view from his bedroom. It looked nice. A new kind
of evidence developed from the camera obscura of experience
and memory, love-object to dote on and ignore. Collectible
photochrome postcards. Storm surge as weather segment,
tornados on YouTube relieve us of our boredom. In the rain,
drizzle, intermittent showers, unseasonable hurricane threatening
our flight plans, against a sea heaving photogenically,
straining at its chains like a monster in the flashbulbs, on wet stones
astonishingly slick, we take selfies, post them, and can’t undo it.
Meaning takes place in time. By elevated circumstance
of Burtynsky’s drone helicopters, revolutionary lenses
pester Alberta’s tar sands, sulphur ponds’ rhapsodic upturned faces,
photographs that happen in our name and in the name
of composition. Foreground entered at distance, the eye surveils
the McMurray Formation’s freestanding ruin mid-aspect
to an infinity of abstraction. A physical symptom assails
our vocabulary and things acquire a literal feeling from which
one does not recover. Mineral dissolution, complete. Accommodation space,
low. Confinement, relatively broad, extremely complex stratigraphy,
reservoirs stacked and composite. An area roughly the size
of England stripped of boreal forest and muskeg, unburdened
by hydraulic rope shovels of its overburden. Humiliated,
blinded, walking in circles. Cycle of soak and dry and residue.
The will creates effects no will can overturn, and that seem,
with the passage of time, necessary, as the past assumes
a pattern. Thought approaches the future and the future,
like a heavy unconventional oil, advances. Hello infrastructure,
Dodge Ram 1500, no one else wants to get killed on Highway 63,
the all-weather road by the Wandering River where earthmovers remain
unmoved by our schedules. White crosses in the ditches,
white crosses in the glove box. The west stands for relocation, the east
for lost causes. Would you conspire to serve tourists in a fish restaurant
the rest of your life? I thought not. Drinks are on us bushpigs now,
though this camp is no place for a tradesman. Devon’s Jackfish is five-star,
an obvious exception. But McKenzie, Voyageur, Millennium, Borealis—
has WiFi, but will track usage. Guard towers and turnstiles at Wapasu—
we’re guests, after all, not prisoners, right?
Efficiently squalid, briskly producing raw sewage, black mould,
botulism, fleas, remorse, madness, lethargy, mud, it’s not
a spiritual home, this bleach taste in the waterglass, layered garments,
fried food, bitter complaint in plywood drop-ceiling bedrooms strung out
on whatever and general offence and why doesn’t anyone smoke
anymore. Dealers and prostitutes cultivate their terms
organically, as demand matures. The Athabasca River’s colour isn’t good.
Should we not encourage a healthy dread of the wild places?
Consider the operator crushed by a slab of ice, our electrician mauled
by a bear at the frontlines of project expansion
into the inhumane forest. Fear not, we are worth more than many sparrows.
They pay for insignificance with their lives. It’s the structure.
Jackpine Mine photographs beautifully on the shoulders of the day,
in the minutes before sunset it’s still legal to hunt. One might,
like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer, at a certain remove
from principal events, cut a sensitive figure in the presence
of the sublime. Except you can smell it down here. Corrosive
vapours unexpectedly distributed, caustic particulate infiltrates
your mood. As does the tar sands beetle whose bite scars, from whom
grown men run. Attracted by the same sorrowful chemical compound
emitted by damaged trees on which it feeds, its aural signature
approximates the rasp of causatum rubbing its parts together.
The only other living thing in situ, in the open pit where swims
the bitumen, extra brilliant, dense, massive, in the Greek asphaltos,
“to make stable,” “to secure.” Pharmacist’s earth that resists decay,
resolves and attenuates, cleanses wounds. Once used to burn
the houses of our enemies, upgraded now to refinery-ready feedstock,
raw crude flowing through channels of production and distribution.
Combustion is our style. It steers all things from the black grave
of Athabasca Wabiskaw. Cold Lake. Rail lines of
Lac-Mégantic. The optics are bad. We’re all downstream now.
Action resembles waiting for a decision made
on our behalf, then despair after the fact. Despair which,