Three Poems

I.
Virtually all the steel used to make Geiger counters comes from warships sunk before the nuclear tests in the 1940s. This is because in the wake of all these explosions, the air has been contaminated with nucleotides, which makes “low background steel” impossible to make. We had to choose carefully from my friend’s baby pictures when making a birthday card because some were taken after his father’s death, and he does not consider those years childhood.

II.
Consider the feeling you get when you learn your friend has a Very Big Dick
But you don’t know what you should do with this information. Should you treat him differently? Should you revere him?
Finally somebody with authority!
He is a few years younger than you though.
That doesn’t seem right.
And now you’re sitting in a room. Just you, your friend, and your friend’s Very Big Dick.
And now you’re at the movies. Just you, your friend, and your friend’s Very Big Dick.
You are confused by the V.B.D.
You are confused that it means anything at all.
And you’re angry at your confusion that your friend’s V.B.D. means anything at all.
In your mind you stand in a courtyard arguing with yourself about whether or not it should mean anything at all and a third party comes over and says you’re arguing over semantics.
As if semantics isn’t the most important thing in the world.
As if sifting through data in an infinite puddle of the stuff isn’t the human project.
A project we now spit on with that bitter cud ‘semantics’.
And all the while you’re baffled and disappointed that your friend’s Very Big Dick has somehow “changed the friendship” when not even the death of your friend’s dad “changed the friendship”.

III.
Sometimes
I wished
I wished
I wished to shoo you,
perched on my arm like a bird
but I
(like the man in North by Northwest who gets on the
unexplained
cornfield bus
when he says to Carey Grant
on the bottommost step)
“Can’t say it’s true cuz it ain’t true”.

Nestle

Some of the time
(A rare old time)
There’s just
The two of us
Nestled
In our thermocline
And not a mind between us.

And here
How could you speak
And rend the words
The halves to thirds
The one
To twos
To fours
The truths to leathered apple cores
Littered on the floor?

I don’t mind.

It’s just
I liked being nothing more than your body
And now
The room’s
Sort of
Pluralized
And
There are noises outside
And where
We were at home
Comes the sound of
Being one
A lone
jackhammer drilling at the median. 

This Old Tree

This old tree,
branching palsied crosses
to the sun’s heat
its trunk set in our neighbour’s soil, its roots
know no boundaries.
its branching canopy its own jurisdiction,
clearing its own airfield.
Two clotheslines, one in use
one growing in, underused
The tree claims its gift.
One tree, wider than it is tall,
growing steadily
southwest
to the space between the houses, the
street.
And sheltering six backyards,
a legislature sprawling, benches for
the magistrates, black-cloaked crows

debating the integrity of a fallen friend
“A con, a con! No a competent bird!”

One tree pressed in love
to an electrical pole
straight laced, vertical, a working man
Cedar; Catholic.
The two a play on opposites
a contrast revealing
more from them both,
as the tree sharply turns upwards on the path of the pole’s spine.
My Fair Lady.
The pole clapped on the back by saplings,
a party guest.

This tree still recalls the fledging days,
when a friend warned it of the city’s lie.
A desert of concrete
with a marketing firm,
and so it settled anyway,
a sapling nestled in a residential patch of moss,
growing warily,
wavering in those first springs.

One tree, dignity itself,
worries long since turned to sugars,
metabolized,
having no use.
Having built its own confidence,
found its own place
to shelter us come winter.

No Tree, No House

My father cut spruce into ten foot boards

Shaved and plained them
but left a scruff
(His sandpaper face)
And levitated them
each to the canopy
Where they boxed a space of needle-crisp air.
And there, I,
in
My villa diodata,
Sat safe,
Legs crossed,
On my picnic sheet spread
And chewing mini pizzas
(The winking light of the low summer sun
Through the beech gnarl
Filtrating through my libertalia,
Slowly irradiating
The plantisol on my purple T Rex shirt)

I was up there when the towers fell,
And I was there the night before the front collided with the island
Peeling roots,
stripping fields,
Unspooling those yarns of light
Caught in the crooks
Sending them through my walls,
pulling down my hidden home.

When we surveyed the damages we found a crook and ruin,
My villa in tatters,
In shards afloored,
And the hairy spruce planks seemed, winkingly,
Gracious at the gift of those cloaks.

Ulukhaktok

Canada Goosed in hardy down
she stands
(Arctic Chartini in hand)
the daughter of my son’s daughter’s friend
on a steel lattice
above the rainbowed sea
Trading ribs with a casual sex partner
As the sun’s sliver, breaching
the day,
Lifts the veil
On the procession,

Tusked pilgrims,
Shuffling Bearers of the burden of
Our Lady of Perpetual Dispersants.
Cloaked in adipose
And trust in generations
In deference to that holy order
That keeps Her Glistening Hair aloft

The company on the Farley Mowat III
In awe
At these jowled priests
Who punctuate the dawn
Beaming with ecumenical trust in
“the tiny bugs which as I’m sure you know will eat up that oil in no time”

St. Pinniped thrusts forth
An offering, a clam, to the communion slate.
The altar boys, ten pups, all clamour
To lap the juice.

Somewhere below the deck
An engine engages,
Kick sputters a surge of flowing life,
For an instant disrupting the sheen of coloured crude
And sinking
A crowd sighs “Not again”

The priestess turns glassclouded eyes
Up to the heart of heat
And stills
and yips a blessing,
Aldermen confirmed
Was heard once those engines shuddered up.

Trust in this,
children cold and cowering in
Our crispen kingdom
Whose lights are but shell bangles on the bracelet
Of the Mother

Forgive them, they have fallen back
While we have shuffled on.

//integrity

Black rot gathers on the bathroom ceiling
As the outside seeps in we step out,
waft through the city
streets bare
azoic
And an uncanny solitude
That fools us
For an instant
As we speak circles,
Throw lithe motions of the hands,
Flashes of cusp
That obscure the presence
Of others as much
as the slatted siding and gyprock
Fooled to seclusion
Nothing to do
Then a rev
Two revs
Reveal that maxim
That there is no outside.
There are no sides at all.

Windeaten By All Charters

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Life has a brother who paints.
He sits waiting, casually, in soft points of light
For inspiration.

And (staring off through parted trees)
I think of climbing
of sinking geodetic marks,
hard points
deep into its crust
and reading the patterns on those rocks,
spiralling in their complexity,
Perching inimitable
Windeaten from all charters,

But soon I sigh and settle for some rest.

Last night I sank into my sheets like the HMS Ontario
And I buried myself, deep below the thermocline
in the lake mud of my bed
And dreamed
Of that perfect imitation,

And as the plants offer up their berries
And the mushrooms jettison their spores
And my sister waits hands clasped to become pregnant.
As I mistake a bird berry for a blueberry and fall sick
As my poppy learns to walk on an aluminum crutch

The painter throws down his pallette
Squeezes the life from his acrylics

“For all my work,
All my love”
he says
“I can’t make a stone”

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Craze

I should write more. I’m hungover and when I’m hungover my head aches and the queeze sits like a spiny grape in my abdomen. I feel more for people when it sits in me, but removed from them. A thrush on a bullrush,

perched to whistle and sway and watch,
eyes half full,
as the frenzy passes over.
“Your father is like really depressed eh”

I sat and read a play. A good one, then I talked to a friend who told me it didn’t translate onstage.
She had just gone through a breakup and I talked about the Butcher
without asking her questions
when I heard the quiver in her voice.
Soon it passed.
“It was a big “fuck you” to the producers to include that little girl at the end. Like, she was still making union wages.”

“You should call dad. You should call him soon.”
“She was onstage for, like, five seconds.”
My roommates make pizza in the next room. I clean the living room.
One hour has passed, I am folding blankets,
a thrush on a stalk of rush.

“I let my guard down, you know? And I’m just angry that he got in. It’s like, I built up this security system because I let people in and got so used to them that I started to assume they loved me, but they always left. So when he came along I was already in there, like a monk in a mountain, you know, like, like a guy in a fortress. He got in because he knew what to do to get past my system and he got in and he never seemed like he was toeing towards the exit, no matter how many times I warned him. “

I am cleaning my room now, and I’m drinking old cider, yeast collecting in a sludge at the bottom.

“And he left. And he played the mental health card. And I’m mad ‘cause, you know, I always knew he would use that card. Like, I saw it when he first told me he hit himself.”

“Your dad is getting worse, maybe call your aunt. Heather’s been worrying.”

Later this week I will meet with Natalie and the café will be all full and buzzing and she’ll wait outside as I grab a drink. And we’ll drive around and I’ll be nervous at first cause I won’t have seen her in a while but we’ll talk and she will still want a coffee so she’ll get two cortados and a small muffin at the Battery and I’ll think for just one second that it isn’t ethical to bring a foreign coffee into this place, like I’m taking firewood between provinces, but then I’ll stop because there’s no bark beetle that will leap out of my cup and eat the café’s beans.

“And, like, I knew he would play that card, but there was still a part of me that wanted to believe he wouldn’t, so I let him in.”

And Nat and I will drive around and look at the pretty houses all framed by a gradient of leaves and the colours will permeate each other.
Nat thinks she’s colour blind,
I say I see it too.

And we are colour blind

because we see a small section of the visible spectrum.
But even in the leaves we will whizz past, as the grape crouches in my belly and I’m getting jitters from the coffee, there’s an infinite spectrum contained in the green-yellow-orange shift, and that infinity will confuse me. Cuz I just said we’re colour blind, but right now I’ll look at a few colours that will have revealed themselves to be infinite. And I’ll think about it as I thought of the coffee, for a second,

till I drop it and talk about shirts with Nat.

She has too many

I don’t have enough.

 

“We went canoeing on Sunday with dad and he was really happy and we had a picnic in the woods and the leaves were so pretty and we put the food on a rock and we talked for a while and I thought it was all right.”

But how can there be different kinds of infinity?

The car will drive and Nat and I will stare out the window
talking and being there but, not.

Two whistling thrushes in a wine coloured car.

“And I let my guard down. But now I’m like scared I won’t do it again. Like, this defense mechanism I made to protect my personality became the personality I needed it to defend.”

“Call dad. Just, please call dad.”

And my aunt Heather picks up the phone. I ask her point blank if there is a lot of depression on my dad’s side. She answers “about 90%” and I get it

I get it

I get it I get it

I get it I get it I get it

I get it I get it I get it I get it

But how are there two kinds of infinity, huh? How does that make sense?

“I’ll call him, I’ll call him.”

Heather says she hasn’t felt it, but she keeps herself busy so she rarely thinks about it,

“and maybe your dad could use this stone from my homeopath, you put it on your belly and lay down and it just sucks all that anger and pain and hurt away.”

 

“I love you Meg! I’ll call him.”

Bullrushes

 

“I’m sorry Heather, but your brother doesn’t think that way.”

Bullrushes.

The house is clean now. There’s no cider left. The pizzas were apparently good, my roommates ate them all.

Just two bullrushes driving a sedan through the leaves of that moment. A thrush perched on the phone for three hours.

“I’ll call him.”

A thrush drives my bull rush to its bicycle in the rain where I left it. Nat gives me a hug and my hands twitch nause I’m wired and we laugh about that

And I love you Sarah, take care,

And I love you Meg, take care,

And I love you Heather, take care,

And I love you Nat, take care,

And I pick up the phone and it whistles at me.
The birds alight from a silent marsh.
The leaves,
a car door opens and a spectrum of leaves rushes out.
Two kinds of infinity, one you divide,
you fit it into a finite space,
One you expand, that can’t be contained.

And my hands are shaking
Because of the jitters, the coffee, I swear,

The receiver poised by my mouth spitting out leaves.
And I speak, a nut.
A king, something something

Count,

king,

infinite space, what? Dividing & dividing & dividing
& dividing Noise, light,
a voice
And colour comes out
And sound

  dividing

A dead bird in a coffee cup.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry I don’t call more
I’m sorry, I’m sorry you’re dividing
And I’m pushing my bike And it’s wet
and I’m slicing through light And I’m sorry and

colour

I miss you

I miss you dad.

I love you.

I love you too pal, thanks for calling.

Matter

A jet threads a a vapour needle through a cloud,
as it swims along
connecting her to her brother.

The waves on the West river go North
While the tide goes South,
it can’t make up its mind.

And I heard there were waves undersea,
kilometres wide,
and pushing kilotonnes of water,
under the ocean’s silent surface.

And I understand that the tides are not limited to the oceans and great lakes.
They affect the most solid things too,
all matter bears influence upon all matter,

People,  parakeets, and the stone that flows underfoot,

So everything is liquid now.

Trop tard

Maranatha was a genius
and as such he very rarely felt the need to prove himself.
In the centreville he had considerable difficulty
parking his bike
so that we all had to continue on without him,
trusting he would find a place.
But by the time that he found a place to park his bicycle
the movie had ended
So that when he finally entered the theatre
he met us all on the way out.

“Maheureusement,” he said,
“je suis trop tard dans un monde trop vieux”