Our own harpings, hootings, hawkings
announce the dawn.
The spanked bottom of the horizon.
How badly we treat our brothers, make
them wear dresses, ride bicycles,
taunt them with an alphabet. Chimps
cradle jaws and roll their eyes to heaven.
ii Closed Circuit
Mike and Con and his girl Andrea
bumble around in their own little world,
still ruled by Santy, some say Santa,
some see Nicholas in his red and white.
Con comes on like a pro, tells Mike.
Tells how, how not to pull a teen —
Stay out of sight of the guy with the lip,
the short-legged limp.
They speed around on in-line skates,
fuelled by cider and amphetamines,
in the roller rink beside the track,
beside the roundabout that feeds the motorway,
that feeds the whole five ring circus,
throbbing like really massive bass.
iii Mighty Whites
A man ( is it me? ) in the laundromat
shakes out his teal blue sheets
and curses, God damn you to hell, Dante,
for leaving a tissue up your sleeve.
Moses came down with the mist, you see,
full of whispers, wheezes, and rheum,
gurgling like a cheap coffee machine
in which his followers heard thunder.
Oh, for a mist without aroma,
the companionship of silence,
the gentle foothills of a notion
where we can graze
in the inconclusiveness of togetherness,
where never a clarity can intervene.
Evidence: there will be no evidence
A white film. Some tract turns
to KY-jelly in a can. Overnight,
while you slept, the cat prowled.
Haw, haw says the Michelin man
when the widow cannot pay
her rent. Mt. Fuji quakes;
the straw huts tremble.
The widow’s soul is a frail origami,
a parasol that pops open
whenever it rains. Homemade
chips dumped in a deep fat
fryer. The widow nibbles
on an ear of corn while
Mt. Fuji pushes one finger
through the tympanic
taut white seal and into
peanut butter. Evidence:
there will be no evidence.
Except the sides of the bath.
Glistening skin.
Four-leaf clovers on the counter.
Sumotori.
A letter of intent.
Tea stains on the carpet.
A lightweight fedora.
Brittle cocktail decorations.
Brown clouds on the ceiling.
Freckles on Formica.
A string of rosary beads.
The sound of locusts.
A magazine index.
The ABC’s of signing.
The fridge door.
Peanut butter
without a hole in it.
Couch Potato
The couch potato gets the cosmic fits
when purple feelers rise up from his pits.
“Feelers, feelings, Ha! Ha! Ha!” he quips.
His will for a long time an axe blade,
but then, one day, the way would not open,
each blow dinged atonally on the grain.
His mood for a longer time a bludgeon,
with a clump of hair stuck off on one side,
like a hair of the dog killed yesterday.
And now these purple feelers rising,
unfolding green serrations on their way
to eat through dental moulding, plaster,
to bracelet whiskery joist and rafter.
The couch potato jerks with laughter.
Entertainment
I was on my way to see a film, Bewitched,
to bask in the alien beauty of Nicole Kidman —
I’ve been obsessed since Eyes Wide Shut,
since Moulin Rouge, since Dead Calm.
It was 3 o’clock on a Saturday afternoon,
and I was not alone. Many hundreds milled
and many hundred more formed lines
that snaked from concessions on either side.
Behind the counters, pock-faced teens
in visors and tight polyester shirts hustled
to fill jumbo popcorns and jumbo drinks,
to fill trays of nachos drenched with cheese.
The line I was in was like a sleeve of cups.
I was like an empty white cardboard cup,
my mood as light as that funnel container
I would soon fill with effervescent desire.
My mind was a cow about to buck and run,
as if to escape some burrowing tick.
My thoughts like spires of rattling grass bent low
that spring back hard scattering seed.
Nothing happened then for the longest time.
The closer I got to the point of service,
the more I dithered between Reese’s Pieces
and a giant popcorn with golden topping.
Until — ode to the big bang — out from one end
of that grass seed whiskered a blue white root,
while from the other end uncoiled the palest stalk,
sending forth its green two-blade propeller.
The sun shines. The wind blows. Rain falls.
And everything goes according to plan
until again that hidebound ruminant ark
of complacency comes, this time to graze.
So it is, I thought, the grass blade grows
through meat to make meat and dung
and the musical tympani of milk hitting
the galvanized bucket’s freckled bottom.
Salted and churned cream will make butter,
rich living relative of this ghostly topping
that spurts from the stainless steel spigot
known to concession jerks as the jizzer.
The New Economy
I walked to work only to find it closed.
A sign said the workweek was changed
and might change again without notice.
It was a Tuesday, the new weekend.
On the way home there were catcalls.
At my house I found my wife unshaven,
wearing a three-piece suit with wide lapels.
She handed me a gown, said put it on.
That night, in despair, at my friend’s place,
I prayed again to the one true God,
and He answered me thus: with the taste
of wheat in my doughy white bread.
The Snows
Snow in summer and snow on the mountain,
snow berry, milkweed, and dandelion seeds
all might have been read as foreshadowing
this glare, this mid-winter snowblink
which renders my neighbour’s dog a snow bear,
my neighbour who is from the snow belt
and who for years was the only man
on our block with a snow blower.
Prescient now seem his snow plans
in this winter of 10x snowfall.
A giant, sixty feet tall he reaches
and fills his arms with billowing snow,
snow like sugar hardened from damp,
snow that is like the fine ashes of summer foliage,
snow that groans under boots like boards,
snow that squeaks like a barman’s towel,
snow like a horse eating whole pears,
all these he gathers up
and fashions loosely into a bale
he underarms up the garden
where it explodes
into rock fall and powder.
As a man, some find him snow co
ld,
while his wife ( slightly crushed ) is a snow queen,
a cone tinted with sweet red syrup.
Dealing with her is a snow-course
where at first one walks with the stiff
splinted legs of the snow crab,
but soon there develops a snow craft,
a feint and thrust to her snow creep,
her devil, and snow drift.
It’s a kind of addiction this banter —
my nostrils bell for my snow queen.
I have become a snow dropper,
snow dropping at will from her washing line
her snow white panties, for which
I’ve become a snow finch, a flea,
a snow fleck, a fly, a snow gnat,
a snow goose for her snow grain and grass,
a snow grouse for her snow gum and snow hole,
a snow leopard crossing the snow line and snow pack
for snow lily, snow pea,
a great snowy owl, a snow petrel, a snow wolf
prowling the snow slip,
hunting the snowmelt for snow mice,
juncos, snow vole and partridge.
III
Augur
The road was a length of blood-dark gut
stretched on an off-white marble counter.
On the other side, a car flashed lights,
honked and slammed on brakes, slid
to a halt on its duck’s black feet.
I watched the driver’s side window
descend, a sheet of ice-storm glitter
in time-lapse photography melting,
the old lady driver nodding in time,
a leathery chick pecking through shell.
Some chick, some egg, some place,
I thought, just as she verbed me:
Is it going to storm? she asked. My
mind saw pixels; somewhere in there
was a weather-bomb’s sleety vortex.
I’m sorry, I said, but I didn’t catch the
forecast. Her features fused.
Can’t you tell by the sky?
I cocked my head and looked up,
cast iron pot lid, salt-flecked. Silent.
She spat from the root of language,
horked up a word not yet a word, her
mot juste for disgust. I was chuffed,
buff-happy as a plastic toy placed
with love under a synthetic tree.
This was the gift beyond my meagre
means, the one I wanted so much
I pretended I didn’t want it.
It was enough
she saw me as a local man.
She hauled away, her red tail-lights
glowing like Export-A tips flicked
into the mid-Atlantic. I was back in,
alone inside the labyrinth
of ever more complex exclusions,
beginning and ending with
that porthole view on the self,
claimed as objective, third-party,
dispassionate, removed. She had put
her finger on a numb spot —
like a scar in thinking — that all day
had made me irritable, a dread
I now know to be coeval
with atmospheric pressure, and
imminent arrival of new weather.
The Mole
As though a hand had reached inside to rub
my liver. This was the nose of the mole.
Later, I felt a prickle, a draught in my eye.
This was the southwest breeze blowing
where the stone-blind mole had passed.
This was the meat of what was unspoken.
The absolute bedrock of morals, the top-soil
of incomprehension in which you turned
and said: Your wife tells me everything.
This was the unknown known, the mole
surfacing through the green. And blinking
by the swings on that suburban lawn
was my penchant for darkness and filth,
my penchant for sticking my nose in.
The Scientist
Where did the seal heads come from?
They were a present from a fisherman
who wished to woo the scientist.
Not an answer. A queer posy these,
a devalued currency, almost contraband.
Queer to the fisherman her request,
when he would have taken her to a dance,
or out in boat to the island of turrs,
placed her there among the puffy chicks,
her eyes hard and cold as a gull.
And calculating now on the beach
her stance, how to accept this gift from him,
how to turn gift into transaction.
Tie them with rope in a nylon sack,
a nylon rope — chain might be better.
Make do. One makes do in the field.
She looks back at the cone of coiled rope.
Looks for snags. Feels the heft
of the bag as she starts to swing,
rhymes to it with a rock of her hips.
Thinks metronome and swinging scrotum,
then laughs as she tosses it high,
watches its weird centrifuge as it falls,
its Hockneyesque splash,
the rope feed, slacken and curl.
Everything up until now has been
a rehearsal. Time now for action,
for the crab to cock a beady eye,
tilt its way across the sea floor,
time for sea slug, for conner, for lobster,
for starfish, sculpin, and jiggling tides.
In theory, three months’ work by these
will strip the harbour seal heads,
leave three seal skulls fresh from the sea,
cold and clean enough to lick.
But in practice, flesh clings stubbornly
and must be picked away with a scalpel,
a job the scientist will delegate,
not wanting to relinquish objectivity.
So in latex gloves, with blade and hook
the student help sets out to unsculpt
actual flesh from actual seal. In cotton
masks they face their subjects, their eyes
dark and water-filled as they inhale
the sea’s brine and onion smell.
The Pews
If that hardwood spoke redemption,
it was a message coded in the form,
in how the pew backs rolled vertebrae
that was part massage, part rosary.
And if that hardwood spoke for the weak,
it was the gun stock I felt when I laid
my cheek a certain way and sighted,
down the line, a kneeling enemy.
And if that hardwood spoke of elevation,
it was in the cursive free-hand grain,
and in the peppery raw-wood smell
that oils and varnish could not conceal,
that coaxed my nostril’s shy snail foot
to creep along the pew-back’s rail,
until its wax and spice ignited sneezes,
great earth-shaking bugle blasts
that cleared the way for other scents:
soaps and Right Guard antiperspirant,
tidal waves of Old Spice aftershave,
hairsprays that hacked bronchial tubes,
mints melting on the heights of halitosis,
lavender tucked into beds of cold cream,
and above it all, the whiskey-like whiff
and heavy musk of expensive perfumes.
Whenever I think of hardwood pews
I think of these olfactory disguises
that sanctified but could not hide the news
from the most angelic of our senses.
Snowbirds
Though I struggle, it won’t be with moral choices;
an overnight flight from winter to summer
may r
esult in wrongfooting the senses,
as sticking your hand under a running tap
and being unable to say if it’s cold or hot
starts a six-day-all-inclusive package junket,
a six-day-all-you-can-eat-and-drink excursion,
with full limousine service from the airport
to this hotel resort. Hardly enough time
to acclimatize — but somehow I’ll enjoy it!
Enjoy the view through these sunglasses
with palm-trunk arms and fronds over frames,
bought from a crippled vendor named Juan
someone — he either said “Juan” or “I am,”
whatever! I had to buy to get rid of him.
As if I hadn’t contributed enough
to the local economy — but forget about him
and his tin shack town just over the hill,
enjoy how these lenses turn the ocean red
and the surf, where it breaks, to pink lace.
I will enjoy the form of the American surfer,
by his crewcut hair, I’ll guess, a military advisor,
cock-of-the-walk as he rides a rolling comber,
and forget what I’ve read about local police
and their unofficial war against the homeless.
I will enjoy the beautiful girls on the beach,
all locals, and not one afraid of being topless,
especially this one who sticks out her tongue
when she catches me watching her watching him,
that surfer turtling seaward through the swell.
She will torment for the rest of the week,
reminding me of what it was like to be young,
and without inhibition. I will think of her
as I flip-flop my way through the tide pools,
gathering whelks, mussels and sea snails
And I’ll recall, over papaya, the newspaper piece
( Focus section from the Globe, weekend edition )
about workers on these exclusive resorts,
and how the radiant eyes of young women
do not signify natural health but malnutrition.
Which will make it harder to live vicariously
through this surfer, to enjoy his reach,
Mole Page 2