by Alyda Faber
on Kurfürstenstrasse,
could have been a sign
on the cinema door.
viii.
The Tiergarten: rows of shirts with bold stripes
that yellow-cloaked birds dart between.
Grey column ribbed with gilded guns
raises a victory angel high above a traffic circle.
A philosopher seated on a colossal chair.
Pillar with busts of three composers,
topped with cupids dancing a laurel wreath,
and just below, swans with blackened wings
opened wide, their heads a lighter stone, cleft of war
damage visible on their outstretched necks.
ix.
Her face six stories high,
Queen L’Oréal looks down
x.
as her subjects leave and enter
the Potsdamer S-Bahn station,
a skitter of beetles.
xi.
Cranach’s Fountain of Youth
an ex-carnival of old she-floppies
delivered in barrows and wagons
or on the arms of the young to a swimming pool,
where the gods Cupid and Venus stand on a pedestal.
Trained as we are to read left to right
and to wish away what can be read from the other direction —
the women are lowered gingerly into the waters
burdened with their slings of flesh, hesitant
and harried in their grey undress,
while on the other side, maidens
sport pink melamine mounds.
Young men appear in the scene
to catch the pond’s young fish
once fully dressed for the table.
xii.
Such variable wants
as bodies jig puzzle sex
onscreen: post-hit-and-run,
initiation of a child soldier,
commercial trade, a nun’s
and a priest’s forgotten vows,
ripping-off-clothes-frenzy,
pulling-on-socks-sedate.
Try this piece, no that one,
a different angle,
no, yes, oh that’s it
ease in and press down.
xiii.
An intimate dark with strangers.
All those exposed necks looking up.
xiv.
The actors set free from celluloid freeze
of storied movements:
calls from under a camera carapace
want to pin them again — a little to the right,
right — this way — left — middle — click, click,
clicking of jointed legs, wings scuffle.
xv.
The movies are mixed together
fast and freely like liquor
at a high-school party.
The new metal garbage can
takes vodka, rum, gin, wine into punch red
and trips the crowd from soft-petalled
romance to disaster
and back again.
xvi.
The sniffing nose of the kiss — for fun other body parts try.
xvii.
Lives onscreen larger than our kitchen sink,
human scrubbing
and no bits of soggy food.
xviii.
The films massage your waiting body,
take you into a stupor of rest
or press fingers so deep that nerves
diagram red hot.
Their mouths talk uneven tempos,
barnyard sparrows only louder,
browner, more teenager.
View of a Spring Evening between Porch Posts
Light moves each pleated leaf
as if parting the lips
before a word forms. Rustling
twilight. Early leaves trim
as bird claws, muted sharp
of children’s voices at play.
She watches from the sofa.
His voice breaks in — you get
such intensity because
primary colours of light
interact: red-orange sun,
the tone between blue-green and
yellow-green, a blue-violet
sky. She looks into the room’s
dimness where a shadow
lingers on the forgotten
rug. The wild rabbit in her,
tall in a cut hayfield,
towering ears, tremulous
tail, lowers its bone frame,
folds into a round of brown
fur. She’s gone incognito,
all too readily her instinct.
What did you say? she asks.
Flesh-Ear
Listen to her
with your flushing blood
pheromone rain bands
vestigial tail
solar plexus
cruciferous bone
muscle fulcrum
face surface tension.
Hear what she’s not-saying.
Hear what’s in her, but not for telling.
Hear heat simmer over glitter-black shingles.
A scrim of mist on evening fields.
Goldfish
The shamelessness of goldfish
skimming the pond. Their fleshy Os
skirmish for flakes
dropped from a teaspoon;
among the reflected trees
flames flit in drowned wheels.
Was I once so round in expectation?
Mouth open for the nipple
breaking the surface of my own dark
without a glimmer of thinking.
Hoarfrost
i.
The hoarfrost shows
what you passed without seeing.
Here summer’s webs hang,
random slings
under the tunnel’s caged streetlights.
Trees clutch bone china
cups in the air
just for a morning.
Fog on the river;
God a guest
turning a doorknob.
ii.
The trees have fingers
and their touch
lays you
bare.
You a wick
to their flame.
You the vibrations
of their song.
ARoS Museum, Aarhus
Dante’s rings of hell
form white stairwell rings
that leave you
at glass floor-to-ceiling doors.
Video of the cutting
up of a horse in an open field,
here in 112 jars
miniature landscapes inside glass,
archaeologies of red fur,
its windpipe, flesh, tubes, fat.
A crashed piano clings to tangled wires
dangling from cracked soundboard.
A man flees the apocalyptic music,
one leg frayed at the knee, an arm
in ribbons at the elbow,
capstans, whippens,
tuning pins
sunk in epoxy flesh.
Down into the innermost ring, a tall room;
if you step onto a grille, clasp the rails,
beside, over, under
are mirrored surfaces.
You free-fall into so many yous
and spin up into more.
Yes, I know this place.
Accept Loss
Greg Staats, triptych, black and white photographs (1995)
Excruciations
— twigs score
the heart, cut roots drip like taps.
Gone the plunder that built the sconce
yet a wedge of darkness lingers
in the people while ancestor
trees pinprick passing clouds, map
trails in dirt and lance festering
malignancies.
Muteness
Spirits straggle in compressed snow.
Domesticated mountain range
shifts under the fingered shadow
pouring over the horizon.
Above the reaching dark, silent threads
pray the sky empty, then scene change
for remote blankness over head
beyond ordering.
Mordant
A mouth that hides an inner roar —
Ontario gothic farmhouse.
Listen to windows and doors
for sleety keening without
beginnings and endings that bless.
Visible in unsettled foreground:
plowed field or grave, excavation mess
or memory mound?
Eucharist
After the snack-box children go inside,
leaving mullion tracks in snow,
see what ratcheters swooping from trees
uncover with their sooty beaks
hidden in each wrapper,
without giving thanks,
without kyrie eleison.
What is left to the almost empty page?
These discarded packets
that once held flakes of wafer.
And what more can I want or know
than this flying off after scavenging?
Saying Poems
On Looking Up into a Tree
Her leaves, upside-down
kitchen drawers.
Forks, knives, and spoons
hang bat-like,
all blue-tinged shine
and scant tinkle.
That’s where
my love-hunger,
a ragged contagion
knotted into ropes,
coils among her root-hills
and looks up.
Her trunk’s wary door
hides a stairwell
to a dizzy room.
When I’m there
walls sing me
happy absolution.
Death at Five Years
Nuzzling into her scant time on the ledger —
bright blocks, drawings large and bloomy,
page-cut and square bangs, eagerness
to grasp the tall broom and sweep. Pointed
and round red As, green Bs, yellow Cs
cross a corrugated blue wall
to a pair of pink Zs. Twelve train cars
rode five birthdays door to window —
for each, a different animal cake.
Stale cookies, apple-dented peanut
butter sandwiches, masking tape
names curled over coat hooks.
Carpet-level row of boxes
holds indoor shoes and treasures safe
for the 3:30 bell. Under a peeling
MARY ANN two rubber-soled navy
canvas shoes untouched from hand-me-down
snowsuits to spring squelchy boots.
Children wobble cups of red,
last-day-of-school treats, in a forest
of bare adult legs, skirts, flower-topped
sandals walking on nap-time rugs. Meshed
voices rise and fall, laughter darts between
gaps of talk. A woman in a green
shirtwaist dress clasps tight her buzzy
daughter’s hand. Mary Ann’s mother leans
toward them: “Can I look at your daughter?”
In the green mother’s fluid fatalism,
a fear-pendulum starts up,
a bright echo at her side.
Trespassing
We went everywhere, easy
about crossing property lines
with our horses. We liked the look
of a neighbour’s back field — asked permission
but he refused: Haven’t you got enough
land of your own to ride on? We took down
part of the split-rail fence, rode Queenie
and Duchess over, circled the field,
closed the fence behind us, a door.
Periwinkle overgrown graves
near a Methodist Church, a rarely used
cottage now. Rooms like suitcases almost full
for tomorrow’s travel. Or that house
being built near the lake. It was open
and we wandered through, imagined
furniture for the wide rooms, sat smoking
by the window cut-outs,
sun telegraphing water into flickering signals
in the tree leaves. We kept placing ourselves in larger
possibilities than we already knew.
An abandoned house, exposed
on a hill crest, alone on a stretch of road.
Above the doorknob, a padlock,
smashed with a rock until it released.
Inside our shoes made divots in the dust
in rooms left bare: a dead sparrow lay
on the floor in an upper room.
A girl’s future could hold less
than the present moment:
windows open to sun and moon
would be boarded up, the interior dark
day and night. I couldn’t see that then.
Redress
How natural an unhappiness
to be outfitted
with mismatched parents.
How much
dressing and undressing
in the brain drawers
before each parent
could appear
unadorned human.
My Mother, Far and Near
i.
My mother’s rage engine
walks out the door:
heat enough to take her
to the moon,
past the gateposts
where yesterday she held me
up to see a funnel spider.
Brothers rattle behind me.
Skin stings as the eldest grabs
my shoulders, pulls me
away from watching
her go.
ii.
Sun leans out of a waterless sky
as we pass the gateposts,
walk under the shushing pines.
Rivulets percolate under our feet
between bands of green.
Her anchoring arm guides my unsteady legs —
together we are joy —
riding winter’s undoing.
iii.
Brought to her wordless deathbed,
staying in the night. Words that failed
us seventy times seven
have no betrayals left to renew —
old ones canker.
My cot, eye level
with her bed’s machinery.
Spectral illumination from the hall —
elastic air
gathers us in.
This Love for Mother
Impossibly melted
twine in green glass,
a finger-ring suspends the toy’s
clackers. Their tussive
coming together
fractures hunger.
Impossibly tangled
garter snakes in weave
of wintered grass and new spring.
One wraps a wrist, tongue
flashes a silent red, compressed
intestines unfed.
Impossibly late
snow falls in clumps, lighted ferries
foundering on dark pavement.
Breathed into strangers’
noses, riding on shoulders,
slow, damp, cold.
Impossibly thick
coffee, its bitter pleasure
now an emergency in
the churlish flesh engine.
A final swallow, grounds
between the teeth.
Suture
1. Surgery. joining the edges of a wound or incision by stitching; a seam or stitch made during this procedure; the material used to make surgical stitches
Those early morning calls, mother, you
ever sewn into my ligaments
insinuating as the living and more fleet.
Tease an oar through this lucid medium,
draw my sail, taut for absolution.
Throw out to sea all your flesh hooks,
ease the clamps on sinning selves.
Allow me to take a chance
with happiness, that depth charge.
2. the junction of two bones forming an immovable articulation, especially each of the serrated borders between the bones of the skull
What the fields proffer
in their season
I still gather for you —
this pleasure I permit myself.
On grass-bare earth a singsong of daisies.
Our long-gone house edged
by starred lilacs,
a green-wheeled spectre.
Hawthorn seedlings harbour
new forests under their spines.
Silence hollowed us.
Without the cartilage of speech
we lived marrow and bone.
Could I have lured you
out from your hatched pencil lines
and become unsheltered too?
3. Bot. & Zool. the junction, or line of junction, of contiguous parts, such as the line between adjacent whorls, chambers or valves of a shell, the seam where the carpels of a pericarp join
I regret
my unwillingness
for offspring.
Your bittersweet
motherhood
occluded
this desire. Certain
I could save you
from your life, I became
a maple ghosted
in your field,
roots exposed —
all those small
wind-trussed gestures
left undone.
4. Geol. the line of junction formed by the collision of two lithospheric plates
what drift is possible from you
so much adhesion under the skin
wanting your laughter to press my spinal ridges
a fiery igneous belt
kidney melding to spleen
our sometimes cloudless fusion
a bee forages a bristled globe thistle
your small frame lists to the left
5. film. techniques used to obscure awareness that we are looking with and through the camera at a story joined together from various selected takes
There is no release
from everyday graceless cuts
yet love spools them along
seamless across the lake.
Without upright features to offer resistance,
a heavier wind and looser
scrolls white caps,
spins near-shore rows of wind turbines.
Meditations on Desire
This desire glides
into winter harbour,
irreconcilable song