Recently in 2002 Category

My mother told me
that if I ate apple seeds a tree
would sprout, grow in my belly, push up
through my throat, out of my mouth.

My fingers sink into a bowl
of peeled and pitted fruit:
berries, apples, plums,
the flesh chilled and wet against skin.
Pulp slips under my nails, gathers there in
raspberry-dark crescents, purple as blood.
I bring stained fingers to my lips, suck
juice and swallow tiny seeds, let them
settle in my stomach and lodge in the lining.

And I wait to bear fruit.

They prattle incessantly about the shape
of the waitress' breasts, place bets
about their realness or falseness;
one of them says that it doesn't matter,
look at them, they're perfect: two beautiful
globes beneath a short grey T-shirt,
rounding out where every woman
wishes she did. And I can't think
of anything but that hard black nugget
that was plucked from my sister's pink flesh,
invisible to the eyes dragged over her,
so perfect and round
in the soft clicking light of an MRI.

Black sky, crisp with stars
scatters dust-coloured patches
into Rorschach clouds:
they are vapours that shift
into indiscernible shapes, drift
over darkness and moonlight.

Breath clings close to my mouth
in shapeless clouds, lingers
in the chilled air. These amorphic
ghosts absorb into pores,
shiver beneath skin,
whisper cold against bones.
Become apparitions
in the blood.

Half-drunk on the sidewalk
the taste of cheese and skin
still salting my lips,
I want another glass of wine,
but would prefer more grape-
laden breath in my mouth.

Alone and half-drunk
I place my hands to my face,
struggle to hold the moment
between my palms,
but her crusted kiss dissolves;
leaves only a burgundy lipsticked print
on my glassy chin.

She wears water on her skin:
welts of cold and melted snow.
Her brittle lashes crack
as a warning. Her coldness comes
from the january breath of lovers
who have stolen her heat, left
whispered adorations that clung
in frost to her neck and breasts,
licked with tongues that stuck
to her in passion and kept the skin,
leaving little raw patches
where the cold crept in
and settled into bones.

In the pub's half-light
past mascara-smudged lashes
and beer-stained pupils,
her eyes widen as she drinks in
the image of you,
irises crackling green and expectant.
Lipstick clings to her empty pint glass
streaked with stout foam;.
the imprint of red curving lines
is a map to her desire.

Sitting in the din of slurred sentences
she wishes for one moment
to suspend, for the bubbles
of your beer to halt for just a second
so that she can slide a hand to yours,
feel the bristles on each cool knuckle
gripping a glassful of warm beer.

His glances press against my back,
fingertips grip my skin, then release,
tickle like lashes fluttering shut.
Each finger exerts a different pressure
in search for the soft spots between bones
where the words burrow in.
His stares probe the obvious
openings and retract, misguided,
the weight of moisture on his line of sight
slides down me. I try to tug
his eyes upwards, drag sensitive pads
up along my soft corrugations
pausing between ridges. Patient

but he can only watch, can only touch
with his eyes, and part of me wants
to fling off this dress, have his eyes
rest on my hundred glowing perforations
but, yes, that would be too easy;
these burning holes are something
that fingers need to find.

After he retired, Dad couldn't sleep,
and soon after we moved into the farmhouse
on County Road 3, he became a geomancer:
a diviner of earth, a divider of space.
Out in the backyard in his plaid bathrobe
he would position rods carefully to capture
the auras of the soil and trees, striding
in determined angles, concentrating,
listening for the "lines" in the ground:
negative energies beneath the earth's surface
that disrupted his own energies, his equilibrium.

We began to move like nomads across the country,
as Dad followed invisible lines in the cornfields
and hills, charted underground streams and
energy disturbances -- first with wood then with special
copper and steel needles, tracking "earth radiations"
(sicknesses of the ground) as we tagged along
like frightened but slightly curious bystanders. Awestruck.
Wondering why the ground never spoke to us.

Early evening. The air is still and you
have fallen asleep beside me on the grass.
Your breath blows against my arm,
through the hair-seedlings, soft as pine;
accompanies the cricket-bliss in nearby hedges.

I want your air exhaled through my continent of forest,
of scattered woodlands and grasses: a zephyr
to tickle through toes, a wind to curl around contours,
to waft upwards through thickets and luxuriant wealds.
A warm wind to wander across open plains,
over gentle hills and hills.
A moist breeze to hover in the valley of lips -
blown from the hollow of your mouth

that moves only in sleep.

The taxi driver has a poem
fastened to the steering wheel:
verse inscribed to lined paper
in clean, unshaken, capital letters.
From the back seat I try to steal
a few words, try to piece together
lines and stanzas, but I just catch
the serif tails of "history", "daily", "rich"
before they slither beneath thin dark arms.

I wait for left and right turns;
as we turn corners, a few full phrases
glance up between his fingers,
and I can almost read them,
the words collecting, accumulating
like the numbers on the fare machine.
But then we are driving straight again,
where arms protect the secrets on the pages,
shield me from the truths
of a steering-wheel verse.

The taxi driver has a poem
fastened to the steering wheel:
verse inscribed to lined paper
in clean, unshaken, capital letters.
From the back seat I try to steal
a few words, try to piece together
lines and stanzas, but I just catch
the serif tails of "history", "daily", "rich"
before they slither beneath thin dark arms.

I wait for left and right turns;
as we turn corners, a few full phrases
glance up between his fingers,
and I can almost read them,
the words collecting, accumulating
like the numbers on the fare machine.
But then we are driving straight again,
where arms protect the secrets on the pages,
shield me from the truths
of a steering-wheel verse.

The idiot yelling from the back seat makes the woman
in the sixth seat uncomfortable. She clutches purse
to chest, coughs with dry nervousness. Hands bolt
like startled animals, claw through the contents of her bag,
search for mints or receipts or change to clutch.
And her fingers find a stone that Natalie
had plucked from the beach last summer
when the water was cold, sky overcast, sand dull:
a stone -- a little chunk of iron pyrite
mistaken for gold.

The man yells again, claims that he could drive
this damned bus better himself. Reminds her
of her dead husband, the way he was
convinced of his expertise on everything,
the way he had pitched the glittering stone to the sand
chastised them for foolishness, cursed them with poverty.

And the sudden richness in her hands makes her smile.

Slowly she is grinding herself away
through the lift and shift of weights
the ascension and fall of chest and knees,
limbs raised and lowered with concentrated precision.
She works with controlled movement
toward attrition.

Yesterday there were more beautiful purple grooves:
tributaries mapping the progress of shrinking skin,
plum-coloured striations marking
territory she once occupied.

She is shrinking. Into a plane
of chiselled flutes, of river channels
cut through glacier-worn hills,
of pink and corrugated flesh.
Of less.

We had six weeks to lose you:
to spread out photographs and videos
from family trips, to blanket you
under the familiar weight of memory.
Six weeks to move through the house with you,
hold your possessions in our hands
and still feel the warmth left by your touch,
to travel hallways to the room
where we nestled you in bed
and blushed warmth into your cheeks --
prepared you to welcome others
to lose you.
They left memories
on your bedcovers like coats
from dinner-party guests:
heaped, weighted and warm.

When the breath left you and dissipated
into bedroom air, we bundled
these layers of fabric, piled them
throughout our house as coats against cold
when we needed to feel warm
in the cold and the still of your absence.

Each Saturday morning I see you
handing bills to the cashier at the checkout
and the skin on the back of your fingers
is workworn, chaffed by the elements
into which you plunge your hands each day:
soil or flour, I don't know which.

I want to move my fingertips down each rung
of the ladderlines of your fingers,
across the grooves in your palms
where this secret lies.

There is a freckle on the back of your hand,
and I want to touch my tongue to the skin
to see if it tastes like earth or chocolate.

For Tom

There are ten times as many weeds this year.
My hands reach down between wet green leaves
search with uncertain fingers for foreign
plant life cloaked by beans and peppers.
Dew clings to my fingers, paints
iridescent lines of water across skin
as I pull my hands up from the jungle of leaves,
weeds exploding water drops in a multitude of directions.

Tom had told me that during the Depression
his mother enforced math lessons
as they spent hours hunched over the garden
plucking dandelions and Queens Anne's Lace
from between the vegetables to a rhythmic
recitation of 12 X 5, 12 X 6, 12 X 7 --
each weed a deliberate act of accretion.
His mother remained silent as they divided
corn from velvetleaf, peas from pepperweed
until it was time for a new table; 13 and 14
snapped from her lips like green stalks
between determined fingers. Applying math
to nature was his mother's faith that
the carrots, turnips, and onions would multiply
beneath their fingers, bring enough potatoes
to divide amongst kith and kin for another year.

We used to come here to swing.
And now, thin branches, black-barked and bare,
spread cracks across the greying sky -
a filigree of fissures where chilled drafts enter
and sweep downward, vibrate trunk and limb,
loosen fragments of sky
that fracture at our feet.

It reminds me of the sidewalk on James Street,
narrow crevices cutting across cold cement,
scars mapping the pathway into small, safe places:
a network of skeletal lines over which we leapt,
superstitiously.

It reminds me more of the grey wall
at the bottom of the stairs in your house,
the large indentation where it connected with
a mother's body, the fine cracks reaching out
like branches of a tree.

In the third pew I saw her
turn to reach for a hymnal:
a woman, turtle-shell green and radiant,
verdant skin and eyes marbled
with veins of copper and silver.
In the stained-glass sunlight
she shone metallic, like the flash
of fish in northern Ontario waters,
or birch leaves in a September wind:
the flashdance of chlorophyll and silver-white.

The others whispered that she was a
victim of a misplaced needle as a child:
a sudden and irrevocable infusion
of emerald-green into every cell.
And she was permanently transformed
into a serpent.

But there was nothing reptilian
about this living jade sculpture,
this perfect singing jewel.

Her hands clasp my face
grip shining cheeks with leathered
palms that smell of oranges
'We give ourselves away
through words' she smiled
and released her citrus grip

Up the aisle I trudged
trailing metres of lace and silk
hands wound around clumps
of white blossoms meant to give me luck or courage
(or something in between)

He grasped my hands
with fierce nervousness
fingernails buffed and cleaned
with orange sticks
My lips spoke 'I will'
and I gave myself away.

After several beers and tireless bragging
about the planes of pectoral rock
beneath his shirt, he asks you to hit him
in the chest, really punch him,
put all of your weight into the blow.
And the ale swirling and swilling inside you,
smothers your usual hesitance, chokes off
any sense of momentum or strength.
You strike him just below the collarbone
fist and muscle colliding like stone
against stone. Sparks radiate from his shirt:
small blue and silver comets
shoot outward from chequered flannel,
bursts of cerulean light
that fade in the fall toward worn carpet.
No one else sees them but you and him.
And me.