2003: November 2007 Archives

And again, just like last week,
it is the word war. The war of words.
Threats hurled across polished wood tables
skid across the slick surface,
slam into expensive suits.
Arrows shot from between bleached teeth
pierce the air with poisoned saliva.

Every Monday morning she records
the battle waged in tongues,
where voice collides with voice,
and egos fall wounded onto the table.
But today she can't stop looking
at his pale lips as each syllable
fires from his mouth with military precision.
Each moist movement articulates
words designed to maim.
Today she wants those lips on her,
mouthing dangerous consonants and vowels
against her neck.

The slap of my skin on skin
interrupts sleep but continues
the dream. I half-wake to the sound
of my fists connecting precisely
with muscles and bones and teeth,
the echoless thuds of hands slugging
something surrendered.

And I am seven again, appetite
whetted by semi-conscious fantasies
of punching Vicki until
there was more blood than skin:
face swollen, bones snapped
her body a throbbing
passive purple welt.

But what I really wanted
was five minutes of
her eye in my head,
her tooth in my mouth.

She has never known this need:

to feel the texture of your tongue trace
a river over the topography of her shoulders,
to feel its journey over the pebbled path of her spine
mapping out each vertebra,
to feel the warm dampness of your breath
rise in clouds around each slight elevation of bone.

She has never known this desire:
to feel your mouth move over each square of skin, measuring,
to feel your lips search for freckled landmarks
as you chart each contour,
to feel your teeth mark out a legend
on the white expanse of her back, tasting
her geography, her terrain.

Wind creeps around concrete
darts across the pavement
and yanks up the woman's skirt.
People stop to watch her,
helpless, as the cloth lifts
like a kite into air,
white thighs and underthings
exposed to perverted play.

And the man in the blue suit
cannot help but stare
at the unintended exhibition,
cannot help but wrap his eyes
around the extent of shin and skin
stretching upward to the tiny pink
and polka-dotted panties
that she cannot cover with skirt
or hands or anything
in this suspended moment
when all is revealed to him.

From my ninth-floor window
I see the fair lights spin pinwheels,
orange and familiar.
And I am back at the Fall Fair,
with the aromas of french fry grease
and pungent onions, the odour of animals
and truck exhaust strong
even while waiting at the top
of a rusted red ferris-wheel.

Swinging suspended in drizzled air,
there is beer on his breath
as he moves toward me,
eyes shut, lips outstretched.
I relent, but wait for the moment
when the carriage swings downward,
knocks his head backward, and
fills my nose instead with
the arrival of Autumn:
the crispness that breaks
under feet like leaves,
and the dampness of earth
that floats up in smoke, buoyant
up and away from a clinging small town,
to safe distances across cities.

Pressed between two worlds:
a barren snowy landscape
of winter-white hills and plains,
clouds smoothed from the compression
of heaven and hell. Sky and earth.

If the window would just open
she would fling herself from the wing
land in a snow bank, petal-soft and cold;
she would gather up armfuls of white
and toss snowballs back at the windows
where white faces press against
the glass portholes in wonder.

All morning the air has tasted of smoke,
noses and eyes burning with the memory
of campfires, bonfires, scorched pine.
Weakened light stretches through
the haze and onto the streets,
illuminates particles and acrid breath.
In the valley, tendrils of smoke wind
along the river, curl around the mountains,
cloak firs and spruce with charcoal scarves.

Soon the sky is enkindled, alight
with the orange glow of distant forest fires.
Smoke slithers across the sky,
inches a caustic veil over the sun,
asphyxiating the light into
a smothered red orb.

We are on the way from the doctor's office
to the hospital as I loosen the flimsy tape
sealing the manila envelope,
and slide out its contents.
The light from the windshield filters
through the transparent photograph
of illuminated ribs, hips, and vertebra:
a map of places that have been traveled
on my father's continent of bones:
the landmarks and hotspots circled --
the ink heavy, pooled, dark.

For a few minutes I am fascinated
by the heavily-dotted landscape,
the patterns and annotations
that describe terrain, routes, density.
But when we pull onto the highway
my mother asks me to put it away.

We both know that what I hold in my hands
is not a map for tourists or explorers;
it is a radioactive record of sites invaded,
targets hit, strategies revealed.
A battle zone on film.

You examine my horizontal framework
as an architect, inspecting arches
in my building of bones.

Your hands gauge the volume of space
hidden within the foot foundation. You scan
the inclination of shin, the curve of calves.
Your palms press the bows of knees to survey
the stability of ivory archways.

Fingers inch upward to measure the circumference
of thigh, apply pressure to the bend of hip, assess
the resulting arch of back. Your hands appraise
the cushioned camber, estimate the curve of torso.

You palm breast-domes, analyze with fingertips
the area of each twin cupola, calculate
the sine-curved distance between breastbone and
neckcircle, and curvature of jaw.

One hand holds the cheekbone convex
as your other fingers touch protrusion of lip,
explore the vault of mouth with curving bone roof.
And when you withdraw your dampened fingers,
you reach only for your notebook
to record your observations.

I kept words in my pocket
shoved down my shirt and
packed under my fingernails.

I collected them, protected them,
placed them in small white envelopes
to keep them clean -- except
for the dirty ones; those I slid
under the elastic of panties
or into my shoes to bounce
around with the gravel, dirt
and tiny stones.

But now I hide words in my mouth.
I like the taste of them. And if
I open my lips a tiny crack,
they can peek out, see the world a little.
(After all, I'm not that selfish).

I am selfish.
Now I will not even rinse with mouthwash.
I want to keep the words to myself,
my own cultured bacteria. Want to enjoy
the feel of them hugging my gums,
rolling from side to side
as they bounce off my teeth,
click against enamel, tickle
my tongue as they try to escape.

The breath inside him gurgles
heavy, asthmatic, and laboured,
as oxygen attempts to filter
its way through accumulating fluid.

Like the old coffee-maker at home
(it always spits and sputters
through the last twenty minutes
of dinner): a loud, wet, bubbling
that fills the room.

The pamphlet in his room describes
this as the 'death rattle':
the lungs' loud announcement
of the lingering, but nearing end.

We sit at the dinner table
with empty mugs, waiting.
It will be less than an hour
before it is finished.

Her memories are layers and layers of leaves;
earthen papers inscribed with sounds and scents
of the past, pressed together with soil
between the moist skins of reminiscence.
It is these recollections closest to the surface
that she remembers best:
the crisp and crackling memories
that smell slightly of the past
but crunch with colourful familiarity,
chafe her fingers like truth;
these memories she rakes into a pile
and runs through them, rolls in them laughing
like a child unable to care what lies beneath.

The older woman in the sixth seat
on the #26 bus eats a banana
quickly, eyes never peeled
from the couple in the second seat
up front who nuzzle and cling to each other,
hands and faces fused. She watches
them through spotted sunglasses,
smeared sunlight daubing a golden
aurora around their figures.
Marvels at how youth clings to them
like a thick warm yellow skin.

There is no division between sky and lake;
we glide close to the marsh mats,
beige and blurred markers that guide our journey.
Within them, spring peepers punctuate
the discourse of red-winged blackbirds
protecting nests unseen in dried grasses.
Your paddle slides silently through water
soft and black, inking the sides of the canoe.
My paddle dips in, swirls words into water,
leaves messages for water spiders,
sky-writing for carp.

The palpable greyness holds us close to land
with porous arms and silent dense breath,
urges us to listen to the poetry of the marsh.

I want you to touch my body as vellum,
let your fingers flutter over bone,
travel the rises and depressions of rib-ridges,
interpret the bumps and ripples of skin,
the raised lines of scar-script
that have become Braille.

These marks are a history of leaving --
an exodus from my body. These grooves
that stretch across stomach and abdomen
in delicate, curved arcs and shining lines,
these purpled shadows and globed nubs of skin,
are the indelible disclosures of absence;
they mark the departure of organs,
children, and blood. Of the pieces of me.

I want to write a letter to my narcoleptic muse,
asleep under thick and warm duvets,
on rattling streetcars along Queen Street,
beside the pier where silver-blue ice fissures and flows
as one continuous frozen wave.

I want to write and find out how she's
getting along without me.
But she would never get to the end of the note
without slipping into sleep,
without laying to rest all of those beautiful
and necessary words,
without closing her eyes and drifting into
the cold, unreachable hyperlimnion of sleep.

Half-naked in my closet-like waiting room,
and sitting with the curtain open
I watch the white, soft-shoed feet of technicians
fly across floors without sound; they speak
to each other in an avian language:
chirps uttered between gulps of coffee
and the rustle of papers.
Monotone music pumped through the waiting area echoes
the dull thud of blood
squeezed through my featherless body.

This thin robe is all that separates me
from the mechanical hum and antiseptic chill
rushing down from the vents,
down hallway branches.
Other patients shuffle past
but we cannot make eye contact,
cannot lift our lids to share apprehension;
immediately our eyes dart downward
like scared birds.

I sit with my arms crossed, cold,
and wish for wings, wonder about the oddly
smiling man who walks past me with eyes
focused on me like a worm. When he passes,
I follow the flight path down, see the familiar
pinkness of my bald breasts hanging useless,
exposed in the armholes of my gown.

Stepping into the shower
my skin smells of martini,
its cheap perfume clinging
to the curve of my shoulder.
The stream of water washes it away,
replaces the pungency of gin and olives
with shampoo and soap,
but it does not dilute the fingerprints,
does not scrub the impressions
of your thumb and fingers
from the concave of my back
from the arc of my jaw that last night
smelled only of a ten-minute shower

Strawberry crushed
into the white linen tablecloth:
a bullet hole in ivory skin,
a pretty puncture into
the centre of the table;
this is the entrance wound,
the pulpy opening
through which my interest
bleeds.