83
The highway passes through town after town after dark,
populations under each name announcing numbers
like 146, 217, 91, a mush of snow disappearing
against black pavement, you switch your high beams every few minutes
to be polite to the headlights floating your way.
You’re close enough to start watching for motels, you go
to a high school tomorrow morning, 8:05, to talk poetry
though you haven’t been able to put a good metaphor
in motion in months. AM radio fizzes,
you catch some Oklahoma City, some Chicago station
for a few lines before it shifts into buzz. FM rolls
on its own, the numbers keep moving, no place to stop.
The trains all move east tonight, high beams blaring, poetry,
you will tell them, connects worlds,
shows how one thing is so much like another
that we should be ashamed we ever missed it. You listen
to the tires squish and crunch and hum;
looking--headlights dingy with grime, slush smearing
across the windshield--
for metaphors.
84
i
Early morning air opens like old metaphors,
not cool or blue but the color of raw clay tiles;
their feeling as they wick away the oil and the sweat
from the palms of your hands.
Half-red and textured, unripened sounds cloud above
my forehead, pressing my ear drums, calling to life
eyelid circuits with shorted switches, tracing currents
in the half-dawned harbour.
Sailboats confound into crescents and men with oars
pull garbage speckled water into small spirals.
The barnacled iron ships, soundless, slit the fog
and hover in like thrones.
Thick city streets fold back upon their crooked lines,
appearing in the flecked and peeling paint, a sign
or a broken shape in the boundless pattern that
marks the entire city—
ii
these are my delusions—the city soaked in symbols
like rainwater pooling and drying on the stone;
the markets peopled to capacity with emblems
that parse the universe.
That in a diffusion of rubble and gray sand,
hidden by the peeling wall of a whitewashed school,
God lies down, talking certainty with Heisenberg—
the two stare at the sky.
Near dusk they’ll rise and walk the streets to the harbour,
every night just as the half-light dims and dark settles
fifty or sixty men dressed in white
climb down the rocks
and race across the inlet.
The water heaves under the shocks of ploughing arms,
a shallow valley dressed in white foam structures
the harbour. Fuming limbs, God and Heisenberg lost
to roaring, and the spray.
iii
At noon I cross a tourist beach, out from the shade
of a white clay hotel, the salt up to my chest,
sun reflecting off prisms in the waves, forming
bands of light on my neck.
I turn and wade back to the beach, my hair still dry.
Across town I fall into sleep, my bloated pack
rests against my bed. The wind leavens the morning
and uncovers the harbour.
iv
Three years and I wake to the roar of a furnace,
the tired shudder of dry aluminum ducts,
the need for thermostats to control a house-sized
atmosphere in the night.
Some mornings, I take Mombasa and hold its weight
in my mind, I take and divide my creations
from the metaphors that go on and on with no
need of an observer.
When I return God and Heisenberg will be gone.
For Mombasa is not the metaphysical
centre of the universe I imagined where
God muses with good friends.
I may concede that plodding down to the harbour,
or swimming across the inlet, two parables
exist. Wearing plain clothes at market, unwilling
to reveal their true names.
v
In Edmonton, in the grit-snowed suburbs at night
I imagine what happens in the pale houses
as I work out what my childhood was, between
the walls that I knew best.
A mauve SUV’s meaty winter tires spit
gravel and slush back into the cold street, I watch
not understanding my own driveway. The symbols
retreat into the dark.
If I cannot tell which was a load bearing wall
in my family’s house, what separates people,
what invisible, pulsing edicts continue
to cluster humans at night,
How can I tell what is a truth-bearing symbol
in Mombasa, what explicates the swimming men,
the worn red tiles near the harbour, what metaphors
begin before I speak
85
The mouth of the city is tongued with tar
its glands gutter saliva, teeth chatter in rail
clatter, throat echoes car horns and tyre’s
screech, forging new language: a brick city
smoke-speak of stainless steel consonants
and suffocated vowels. These are trees and
shrubbery, the clustered flora battling all
hours, staccato staggered through streets.
Meet Rich and Eleanor on Brabourn Grove
as he wrestles her wheelbarrow over cobble
stones to the traffic island by Kitto Road
where this night, coloured a turquoise grit,
cathedral-quiet and saintly, makes prayer
of their whispers and ritual of their work:
bent over, clear rubble, cut weed and plant.
But more than seeds are sown here. You
can tell by his tender pat on tended patch;
the soft cuff to a boy’s head - first day to
school, by how they rest with parent pride
against stone walls, huff into winter’s cold,
press faces together as though tulips might
stem from two lips, gather spades, forks,
weeds and go. Rich wheelbarrows back to
Eleanor’s as vowels flower or flowers vowel
through smoke-speak, soil softens, the city
drenched with new language, thrills and
the drains are drunk with dreams.
The sky sways on the safe side of tipsy
and it’s all together an alien time of half
life and hope, an after-fight of gentle fog
and city smog, where the debris of dew drips
to this narrative of progress, this city tale;
this story is my story, this vista my song.
I cluster in the quiet, stack against steel
seek islands, hope, and a pen to sow with.
86
There is a house that only grows headstones in its tiny front yard,
surrounded by a feeble fence. Each window is cupped by steel grates
for shutters. There is little light inside. Just across the street, high rises
recall staccato stratagems of raids puncturing walls and dimpling bricks
and blood can mimic rain puddles. The house of headstones admonishes
hurried mothers, the bop of cut & measure, buck wild youth, too tough
elders headed to work, the doctor, school, toward open-mouthed kisses
or sweet sink of sofa , or on the passing bus or getting coffee next door.
All of them still standing, warm and brea
thing. Their eyes avoid blank
slabs eager to be etched with names. During the day, the door stands
ajar for whomever might come calling, in tears, in need, in absence.
87
I
As the story goes, man emerged from a void with an
incurable sensitivity to duration ticking inside his head.
With this internal antenna came a healthy curiosity
for the signals it would pick up, and alongside that
curiosity, a fear of the singular signal it sent: I am now.
His fear, not unfounded, had a reason to grow over time,
for whenever he pondered his signal, he was forced to face
himself, and his place, in the mirror of self-reflection:
If I am now,
when am I not?
And if I still am,
that when must be looming nearer.
Ah, sweet obsessions. His mind was nothing if not a portrait
of observations, a repository of all the evidence pointing
toward an unobservable moment when the ticking stops.
II
Just what is this ticking? What else but the gauge of how long,
of the time it takes to: make a fire, cook without burning,
watch a log become ash, touch without being burnt,
be touched without being burned, live a day in
the arms of a body that cares for nobody but you.
You, who? Why, you the 206-boned skeleton that takes
20 years to fully ossify. You the circulatory loop that
changes its oil every 3 to 4 months. You the supple-skinned
habitat hosting 1,000 different species of bacteria.
You the flabby folds of warmth nobody wants to wear.
You the flex and the flow of a strength that moves the world.
You the heart the size of a fist with the capacity to encompass
the universe, and the compassion to collapse under the weight
of so much suffering. You the monthly fertility window in which
your instincts can call into the lineage another reproduction of you.
And you the central nervous system that coordinates all of your
movements and keeps each of your constituents up to speed.
You bawdy, naughty body, you. Maybe so. And what, pray tell,
say you of the you of which the body is a constituent?
You say a year is everything to a babe but only 1/67th of everything
to most of the population that nears the end of its incessant ticking.
You say the rings inside the oak say it bore 700 cycles of seasons,
and limbs it lost lingered in scents no man alive knows existed.
You say mountains have been shown to become plains, and
bets are on that the Midwest is an ocean waiting to happen.
You say the so-called solid ground beneath your feet moves
so quickly and so slowly you think you’re standing still.
And you say anything you say can be held against you.
III
Well said, or well enough to make it worth standing behind
as a saying, a saying spanning approximately 165 ticks,
be it ticks of the clock, or ticks of the old ticker, the two
forming the rhythm of a poem not quite upon its bed of nails.
If you could arrange those nails one by one and make them
say something to someone of the stars, what would they
look like, what would they impress upon a body
that had no inkling of the measurements of man?
You’re afraid a poet working in language has no such powers,
but if he did, if an expression could communicate understanding
and bridge the gap between himself and his kin, as it so often
fails to do, and then go on to bridge the gap between species,
you like to think it would flay the tick and lay it bare from its
essence to its enclosure, t’would twirl before the eye a sight
that looks the same from every angle, that alights a design
so simple and precise there can be no misunderstanding—
a point, if you will, in which the shape of humanity resides.
But failing such prowess, you give it a try, and say something
along the lines of:
The body and experience are common to us, as is the moment,
now. Time is a now followed by another now and an immediate
recognition of both. Every body has its own hue of experience,
emerges at a particular place in time and moves along until it doesn’t.
This trajectory of the body we call duration, the length of a life,
how long it takes to stop moving. The body keeps track of its
own trajectory, and within the body operates an awareness
of countless trajectories, an awareness that shifts and sweeps
with the direction of the body’s attention. The awareness
takes periodic readings from these trajectories and uses the
readings to inform the body’s direction. Some trajectories
may never appear to the body, but the awareness in the body
recognizes that it may nevertheless be part of their movement.
You may be such a body. If so, thanks from this body within you.
88
my teeth are crazy because i sucked my thumb until i was 16 because one time i answered the phone at 8 in the morning when i was 6 in our dank basement suite to a man heavy breathing and moaning and crawled into bed with my mom and looked up at the window ledge through a crack in the curtains at the condensation thinking about a conversation my mom had when she didnt know i was listening about a neighborhood peeping tom. then i thought about my strawberry shortcake bike with the banana seat rusting under the back stairs because i didnt actually learn how to ride a bike until i was 20 because i was scared because someone tried to teach me and accidentally steered me into a parked truck because i never trusted adults because i was fucked with because i didnt have sex until i was 22 because i was a late bloomer because i was scared because i could do things that repressed myself easier because i was smoking cigarettes at 10, smoking weed at eleven and doing acid at 13 trying desperately to beat up girls with my friends but instead always picked up their shit for them after my friends hit them and told them to get out of here quick so they wouldnt get hit anymore because i always managed somehow to not get beat up even when i was threatened by nicole who had a reputation for beating girls with a chain and then taking all their clothes leaving them naked and this shit terrified me not because of the chain but because of the taking of the clothes cos i had body image issues from all the boys i grew up with telling me shit that doesnt mean shit to me now except as faded history for what i fight for now because i dont want to hear a man or a woman say anything fucked about someone’s body ever again because fat isnt condemable and i dont care about your standards because im tired of remembering my mom and aunt in front of the mirror scrutinizing their bodies not realizing the young sponge sitting on the bed watching. im queer, because im not gonna assimilate because im not worried about gender lines because i believe in counter culture and new ideas of whats hot because most of us are survivors and need to find safe spaces to heal because were still scared and were fierce and we lose our shit and find it and keep moving forward because we have to.
89
We have the right to explore this world without your filters
To smell incense burning in a den that exists
Light years from your mess hall
This world belongs to no one and to everyone
We are not a calculation
Our dreams are more real and more profound than your masks
We have the right to be citizens of unknown territories
To be tourists inside our own hearts
For love needs no visa
; For laughter requires no proof of identification
Our agendas are blind finger paintings
Our movements coax stars to align
We are random and illimitable
Like the song of the coqui in the rainforest
That is our childhood and our retirement
We have the right to make and unmake ourselves
To fall tragically and to patch ourselves back together
With the fears of our lovers and the sorrows or our mothers
The press conference is an illusion
The senate hearing a regurgitation of brats
Our kindness will be erected as a shrine
Our confusion will be the garden that complements its entrance
We are a brief and never-ending pageant
When we embrace a bridge of light expands across all 14 dimensions
When we cry we give birth and host exquisite banquets
We have the right to exist unfettered
To be shamelessly imperfect
To belch and call it a Samba
We cannot be bound by economics or psychological analysis
For we are the dream The memory The drum
The electrical impulse
The stone The water’s offspring The dust The silence
And the opus
We have the right to question everything To be temporary and
nameless and anonymous
To surrender to the scent of the passion fruit To spread our kindness like a cold
We have the right to become boundless
To acquiesce and wave at strangers
To live in the infinitive form of the verb
To be
90
We met him on a crowded city street in a nondescript city.
I can’t remember the day or year.
I just know that it was an autumn afternoon . . .
He said
“My name is Happiness, Happiness Santiago,
And the pleasure is all mine.”
He was half Cuban, half Dominican,
and was raised by Puerto Ricans in an Italian Neighborhood.
His smile was infectious, almost intoxicating.
“Yo Happiness, what’s good homie?”
A passerby yelled.
“Everything’s good my man. I’m about to read a poem to my new friends” he said with a smile.
All of us laughed a little.
We had already been hooked.
“This poem is entitled the Auto-Biographical, Biography of Happiness Santiago. It’s a love story for the most part.” And he screamed:
Chorus Page 10