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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.

She reads the future
in the crumbs scattered across the table,
brown bits arranged into dull
constellations on the shiny wood:
heroes and warriors
going against the grain.

The veins on the back
of your tan-coloured hand
rise up like snakes of sand,
swirl across endless desert:
fishscales that shift and ripple,
catch light in flash movement
against the etch of settled silt
beneath shallow water.

I expect your hands to feel dry
against my face, expect the crosshatch
creases to chafe me. But there is no
desiccant clutch, no sandpaper scrape;
your desert hands do not pull moisture
from my lips; instead the dry warmth
brushes my skin with warm weightlessness.

Slowly you blow against me, hot breath fills
my ears, my eyes. My lungs struggle against
your increasing heaviness.

The veins on your forehead rise to the hot
surface, ripple with intensity.
I am thirsty, and into my open mouth
you deliver sand.  

Wind gusts smooth the field of long grasses
bend the tall thin blades to their green-silver underside;
Dip and ripple. Swish and splash.
The breeze blows grass into sea.

We dive headfirst into cool greenness, arms part
blades with each stroke, legs sweep past jade stalks
that curve in our wake. We pause for watery kisses,
tongues tasting salt and green sweetness.

I could swim here for hours with you, slice through
shining wind-waves as the air rushes above. But you
begin to feel the familiar pressure, the need for breath:
it draws you to the surface with brutal buoyancy.

You explode into air, suck lungfuls into empty chambers
as I wait suspended in familiar green below. I wrap fins around
your ankles, pull you down into the swell, know the short time
you can spend submerged, the necessity of breath.

Small bubbles leave your lips, travel toward
the surface. And I wish for a current to catch you,
endow you with the gift of gills,
draw the mammalhood from your blood.

I

Found a finger in the snowslush:
a perfect digit with an iced-blue knuckle
and purpleblue nail, stiff and pristine.
Thought a finger would be useless
without a hand, but it made an impeccable
utensil for writing names in the snow.


II

This past Autumn our pines and spruce trees
were weighted down with an abundance
of cones: heavy brown omens of a long
and treacherous Winter, of dangerous drifts,
and bluecold faces and fingers.


III

Mittened hands shake snow
from a girl's hat and coat and marbled skin,
poke fire into her hypothermic limbs;
their eyebrows are stretched into question marks
but their eyes lock in truth, knowing,
as they drag her from the bloodstained snow,
gloveless and missing one finger.

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.

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.

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.

Your mouth
leaves a slippery circle on my thigh:
a temporary brand of possession,
a shining ring of moisture
like the corona of condensation
left on the bar from our screwdrivers.

Your mouth
traverses my stomach's plain,
climbs to the peak of my breast.
You stab the orange paper umbrella
into my skin to announce your discovery,
your claim, your love?

Large gatherings of people are oppressive:
the claustrophobic swells of voices,
the stickiness of too-close skin, the odours
of lunch lingering on collective breath.

Reunions. Strangers meeting and leaving
still strangers. Conversation attempted
where an exit beacon beckons nearby:
questions that poke into skin eyeballs mouths,
foreign hands that grab stomachs
searching for signs of procreation,
lips that blather about blissful births and parenthood joys,
voices muted by the screeches of bored and hungry children.

There is no comfort in the warm potato salad
and stale rolls. Consolation can only
be unearthed in the bowls and bowls of coleslaw.
There is solace in mountains of shredded cabbage;
it has been fed through the grater,
has felt the grating of nerves.

Midway through dinner, it is easier to steal outside
into cool silent air to inhale narcotic aloneness
and pick cabbage, shred by shred from clenched teeth.

A fish swims between us
side by side as ocean floor
swishes around aqueous legs
and undulating hair; coral and seagrass
swaying in the lilt of water.

A fish swims under arm-arcs
nibbles at sandskin
searches caverns for food; a fish swims
into my watery caves: dormant holes in the sand.

A fish swims above our planted bodies
breathes globes of air that trail and spiral
upward onward airward
to a surface we can no longer remember.

To sit by the window in my apartment
above the shops. Screenless. Curtained with gauzy
white sheets smudged with smoke and car exhaust. My feet
rest on the window ledge, one toe eased into damp
windowbox-soil. Searches out old geranium petals, still-soft
against skin. The room is hot; heavy breath blows curtains,
lifts my skirt to cool the back of clammy knees. Sweat-trickles
tickle the flesh between breasts and shoulder-blades
Suddenly I wish that I hadn't finished yesterday's wine.

Amateur guitar-strumming soothes me.
The street musician plays wildly beside the outdoor
patio where the thirsty exchange of ideas is whetted
by the consumption of ale. Their words ring familiar,
form the lyrics to songs I had forgotten, cause me
to remember fervid coffeeshopbanter of years past.
Nostalgia-warm, I fan my face with a nearby paperback.

Sandaled and blue-skirted girls pass below, necklines
and hair billow with warm wind. They cross
the car-dotted street, past the stone steps
where the black-haired girl sits in late afternoons
scribbling into yellow notebooks. I call across to her
my voice smothered by car-hum and wind. Invite her
to my warm-winded place. To discuss
where we had hoped to be at this time in our lives
on a day like this. To discuss geraniums.

His skin was green. Not the green
of trees and wild grasses.
Pale greyish-green. Celadon.
The death makeup had glazed him
into pottery, smooth and shining,
glowing porcelain green.

I wanted to place my hands on his face
on the cool ceramic surface,
his wrinkles etched deep
into the bone and ash:
designs of age and adventure
swirled into the clay with steady hands.

Gorgeous and cool mint-coloured skin
varnished and hardened into death,
he had become his own beautiful urn.

The birds arrive at 7:30 exactly
swoop down from above the apartment building
in flocks from the east, vast and trembling;
darting upward, they catch air currents
in perfect choreography, bank left
and dart downward. Thousands move in,
plummet into the treed expanse below
in a swell of chirping, a constant squawking chorus.
I look down from the balcony onto trees:
leaves and limbs bounce from the gentle weight
of so many birds. They dart and dive into leaves,
move from branch to branch in graceful arcs
like fish leaping in and out of green waves.

My voice cannot climb above the crescendo of bird-song,
the noise obliterating traffic, neighbour's TV;
it suffocates the sounds of engines and music,
their vibrating voices amplified by trees
and the distension of air
like a swollen stomach full of fish.

I wonder how they know that it is precisely 7:30
night after night, what alerts them to the time,
draws them to the same sea of trees. How do they
know when to gather in flocks that fan out over twilit
sky when to dive into waves. What beautiful instinct
to know when to turn into a fish.

January's fingers always find me
as I tread warily over a crust of snow,
brittle and vulnerable as old bones. His arthritic digits,
crippled with cold, ache to clutch my warm skin.
It always begins as a blue-veined fondling, then the sudden
shackling of ice-handcuffs. His biting breath lifts my scarf
from my neck, forces its way under my collar,
rushes down my shirt.

I want to sprint across the barrenness, to suck
breath after cold breath as he thrusts his icy tongue
down my throat. January's fingers press into the back of my head,
numb my skin and skull. Then his arctic hardness
slams against me.

They wear secrets on their matte faces
smoothed on subtly into a makeup mask. I saw them
pass traces of stories on linen napkins,
on handkerchiefs, saw them brush their lips against
ears, leave stories behind in russet smudges,
wipe foreheads and lips with delicate finger-strokes
then press gossip into palms,
gossip that rubs off like face powder, like lipstick--
like pollen, passed from flower to flower
from anther to stigma
the stigma of others.