by Liz Howard
bless it
unfettered
the open stone’s face
it was as if we almost knew
but then the scene changed
a false shore above the original
EPILOGUE
With light shining through my pantsuit
accidentally, I tilt
a flute of wine onto your carpet
I’m so sorry
I say
I was “lost in thought”
which means
for a brief moment
neither the flute of wine nor the carpet
existed for me
as an actionable consequence
of causality
sorry
finality is the hubris
of the new
as in act now or receive
a lesser dessert
and I’m nonetheless blind
for believing science would find us
full and laughing
bottom nature expressed as the rhythm
history of every
one
the mind in its disguise of curtains
while we wait for applause
here in my costume of forestalling
a proper exit
the account of a body in trouble could be
so beautiful
I say to you:
excess and its containment
is the problem space par excellence
of late modernity
here I am
an odd fellow
in extremis
hyperborean
all of us
only ever trying
to have a thought
SOME AMERICAS
The vertical interior of the Americas
dreamt my spine, pulling through the eye
of each vertebra a tactile thread
connecting the nape of my neck
to the foot of Tierra del Fuego
mutated derelicts of principle I am
your contagion the inconsequential air
I cannot purchase having no stake in allegory
can’t climb the gate
of lucidity a raw plumage
the last vestige of reason clung to
amid a patronage of phosphorescent blue
the nuclear winter of another era
as if a punk psalm entered
my head to be unwritten
all swallows of our better misgiving
fictive tree fictive finch fictive treaty
rails and rails beyond
this pyrotechnic envelope
a cinema of self in
neurochemicals
and what now?
that I see in you no boundary
only heaven
mirror cells
in a dark marsh
make for the bridge
REDRESS
Wearing a hand-me-down
dress out of season in
the basement stoking the
wood stove with a can of
sunflower aerosol the wood
is wet I can’t get it to light
take the can to a match
make a mini-flamethrower
that ignites the cereal box
cardboard tinder the weekly
newspaper that prints
the ministry notice about
which replanted clear-cut
will be dosed with herbicide
come spring the obituary
of old Madame C. her goitre
casting a shadow onto her
chest in the picture winners
of the fishing derby the prize
pike coming in at just over
10 pounds when my stepfather
screams from the heat grate
above my head You dumbass!
that’ll explode in yer face
and yull be deformed n’
suicidal rest’a yer life!
crestfallen I go back
to my windowless room
open the Inferno’s
fire-rimmed circles
of lovable sinners
STANDARD TIME
Reality appears within itself:
a bunny turns to expose a growth
irregular as an asteroid with a faint pulse
Exiting a space formerly occupied
by her right eye, there are sciences
that claim to be natural though nothing is
A false creek of straightened hair
where Galapagos is a seismic multitude
keeping time outside of traffic
Getting ready for the world atomic tour
28 neutrinos from beyond the solar system
in an ice cube a mile under the South Pole
Let the RICO of heaven come clean
the mind’s eye an antique stethoscope
constantly blindsided
Fifth station of the cross, the backyard
stricken thermometers of botany
cattails and long grasses gone yellow
Either by diesel or the particular season
we find ourselves in a sonar encampment
of suffragette terns so delicate and forgetting
What little there is beyond impermanence
conspires with a half a mind on the original
to sew us closed
OF HEREAFTER SONG
… an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries
and for responsibility in their construction.
DONNA HARAWAY,
A Cyborg Manifesto
PROLOGUE
the smoke that beckons
mind lapsing choleric forest
pine for coma is air treble
tremulous echo re-enter
attest circular dynamism
no nabokov reed no tidbit
no beatitude found no hyacinth
eternal the ermine and thieve reverie
eternal has ignition feathered ermine
eternal blastula even homeric for reverie
eternal thaw linger roves laced in cinder
eternal gosh angle of watered hormone
altered birth was slick and rind emergent
hung errant method
hung sky enveloped
no veridical deer no rabid name
no plenitude abound no abhorrence
no abhor
original
Is not the hybrid a melancholic? On a line between
appearing + disappearing?
GAIL SCOTT,
The Obituary
CONTACT
We rested back unto the lakes and marshes
into the light dialysis of heron and arrowy
swallow with all the trees of silver tongue
gently from the melting lakes and streamlets
into the sweet radiation of the earliest flower
in the Northland intolerable toward
the red stone the stem a reed
into the puffed metastatic coal became the water
into the affirmative action embryonic mortality
of the loon summit robin gazed
into the bigger than the big-sea-water
bioaccumulation became us Athabasca
sweet reconciliation spoke in
mercury, arsenic, lead, and cadmium
along the physiognomy of the amphibian
via which we descended
the women of bitumen looked over tailing ponds
like a cloud-rack of a tempest
rushed the pale canoes of wings and thunder
to kill the wilderness in the child
sweeping westward our remnants
sulphur infinite, sorrow extracted tuberculosis
under the jurisdiction of ravens
in the covert of pine trees
or an education by thieves in the evening.
A RUDE INSCRIPTION AT THE TOP OF HEAVEN
Hush
all the falls of pulp +
paper graveyard invertebrates
before any thunder contagion muted us
in the temperature-dependent
marshlands
that opened all tributaries
of reddened mercury
when those lilies
fell me
naught a human heart nearshore the minimum
criteria
an uninterrupted silence
laid against
the fields
the fields
laid against
said DNA along the marginal pause
a disparity of garments trimmed the skin
to a threat
of arrest above
the overcrowded fog
with mosses
dioxin
so lovely
I forgot who I was
HENCEFORTH, THROUGH THE FOREST
What auspice will lend me a sacred belt?
northwind skyping
the real of consumer goods
asleep
and cumbrous
all nations in a night
terror
that’s a bear
on the porch pawing
at the screen door
for meat
I wrap around this neck
a stolen show of courage
on the summit
maw plied with mosses
spotted grey and earthen
I evacuate them with red nails
before calling it a day
in a fluid movement
I remove my belt
and snap it
at the stakeholders of the commonplace
at a crucifix
at the tariff of longing
at the dawn
at my own name
heavy breathing
the hour was a body scan
and I will be as loud
as I need to
LOLing
in the middle
of mere existence
in the throes
of mystery
a thing
with claws
TENDER PATHOS: A DENSER, BLUE VAPOUR
Fresh + simple
any possible lake
could tell a bushwhack saviour
loon’s likely moved
to crown land
a place time
would inscribe
as cloudless
in the rear window
of no fiscal return
last June
in heaven
tailwaters did valley the hydro
atmospheric adverse
emergency shelters
of children taken
on advisory
boil this water
of false men
electric
among haunts
of new aquatic species
as I heard them in autumn
before the prairie also
hoofprints
half-effaced
spread
as legs in the corn
groping, lifted up
my lodges
my beaver
my own face
in the meantime
dredging every wetland
for a starry green + silent
recreational home
BIGGER THAN
Level spread
the lake my bosom
and its shadow
exaltation lifted
my liquid features
from the corroded mist
I have as much at stake
in speaking this
as the water
which also
discloses futurity
in a little black dress
for all history
awaited you
was open to you
bade you
entrance
to an unequivocal buffet
of redacted mischief
we’re just friends
hanging out
in my apartment
until the world ends
and now that the world
has ended and we have not ascended
into heaven
here comes the future
let it in
let it in and let
our consumptive prom
begin
EVERY HUMAN HEART IS HUMAN
Ministry of the shaking dress
I could call this
a streamlet a better
coordinate, simply
lamprey
in the trafficking
style no matter
any purple sky
or blue vapour
tender pine
became women
working the real
number is even
higher
when I was
out already
cunting in the fields for that fallow
had escaped me
in some marsh
of insufficient housing
laughing
all the time Christ thought me
a fossil
I, Minnehaha, a small LOL
fiction antecedent
to quarry a nation
I gave you this name then said
Erase it
SKULLAMBIENT
ANARCHAEOLOGY OF LICHEN
In the towns I wear a sash monogrammed Jacques Cartier
and paddle through the desiccation of mute origin
if I wasn’t such a bâtarde I’d swell dissident
and beaded aquatic, take to water
tender stairwell of mares
limbic foals all miskwaa nibowin
red death of my arms and horses and horses
lichen for the stomachs of caribou you track me in this herd
the city now a dénouement of the assimilative purge
symbiome: what it took for you to enter
history, a slackened joy
John Clare and I and 37 Claires well versed in literature
each have a simulation of a raven in the crooks of our arms
tepid swallows
be your own antecedent
where possible
or a coda to my bibliography of silence, a fur-lined oneirophrenia
ascetically charged moral pastures and thought systems of rivers
specious
but not for lack of wolves
or inside of wolves or beside the point of wolves
also teleology
what cache of stone flaunts umbilical sinew and lesser hides?
in a whalebone summer I’ll hum “que sera, sera” on tundra
just below this earthen burial urn is our
mammalian warmth place a hand
to tend it the
velveteen recognition
slides down
the artifact
desire calcified
where all our mementos assemble subthalamic
in post-coital alluvium – all dressy – take the small bend of it
for memory for stamen for intoxicant
no sister flower could ever recover this
selfsame pleasure.
WATERSHED AND SHIELD REMINISCENCE
Amid moonscape tailings one brother was born
cognition drained its basin on land black from the mine
all ventricles sap and terminate welfare
a girlish toss of stones into water sulphur
green from copper apartment
limbs angled and familial as industry dead and still the water
these days without antidote great-grandfather worked
tumbling into silt the old trap-lines
sleek as a grey lip another cadaver lake into a highway with horses
ground seepage of acids using dynamite to clear the shield
hydrochloric said the railroad a glacier had worn
came after the caribou or smoke a nest for the river
to crack the sky open this caust
ic history his horse fell down its bank
of moisture into a shattered femur
before the caribou metabolic alleys nothing for the horse
diverged but the dynamite
into currents and embryos placed it lit
crack the sky into a filter of words within its mouth
mutagenic empathic demolition
lux below the sole
sucrose blinking traffic
norepinephrine light in the centre
whether our engine of the possible? of town an elder
asked this atomic history of silt diabetic amputee from
in the watershed the farthest reserve
this lift of waves placed his last
recurrent hand on my brow
from this shed called upon
all water flows north Gitchi Manitou
in a memory of sleep to secure my exit
where I am four from poverty
and falling through
each level of a house:
there are four corners
piles of clothes
carpets of old smoke
a staircase
mummified
placenta
brittle
slightly flaking
a soft drift
to when the cement floor signals
awakening.
FORAMEN MAGNUM
Into a concave mould of atmosphere
spilling out
of minimal consciousness
a persona or some other lineage
sedated creeks pulled under the blankets
foliage tented over clumsy mouths
a river of somnolent fauns
heady, white-tailed apnea
our sleep a fossilized memory sequence
in a crosshatch of rented weather
shake a vertebrate from its tree and dance
tramp the rafters of recollection: moss sovereign
if I allowed myself your mouth
living outside the Trans-Canada my heart
became an oil tanker fantastic
found in the forest and loosened
from its usual hunger
I’m retracing absence with a smaller claw
(in place of the third digit on the left hand)
my dull commissures pump out
something like a father in the east
what else is a river but the promise of a text
this is my delta some neural asymptote
where else could you cull such a clanging nerve?
STEINIAN APHASIA
I that I am thy.
At thy happenstance of atoms.
Were the where of my happening into happened.
But only slightly.
So many, so manlike, multiplying thusly.
Into a permanence of flux, disconcerting.
Sister.
Sister none.
Other than the keeper.
Of another heart bleeding in December.
Boys.
Some of those boys who know no boredom.
Golden, even, in the significant design.
Sing glyph.
Sing slow creep of limbs and neural tube.
Gone too far too few in fathers.
A husbandry of worms between.
There.
Over there.
The sigh almost silenced.
Thereby a maple tree.