Chorus (13 page)

with knowing. It's more wish than fact more times than we like.

Anyway, Kate will write you a song, and you can crash

on her floor, and some time in the day she'll curl next to you,

and together from the bed you'll watch something bad, Nick Jr. or

some dopey movie you've both already seen.

And she doesn't seem to mind

if you suck up the smell from the crooks of her arms,

She doesn't seem to mind if you use her for finding:

some taciturn love in her unlaundered bed,

or infinite summer

in the daytime cartoons

and the big strokes of sunlight

breaking in

through the glass, or whatever it is

that you needed to see. For every moment, t
here is
a past tense

version, a place further up

with boring banjo music, with
a new brand
of cigarettes

(whatever's on sale),

an unboxed bag of wine, and talking in circles

about what happened before.

Like, I had a train-friend once who preached

the Word of God to his dog

vis-à-vis hunger by way of his own.

I met his folks once. They said “the Word
of God
”

more often than anyone

and condemned us to damnation or something.

My friend's folks, you might guess, were really fine people

as leads in a different morality play, but what I need for my spiel

is bit hypocrite parts. This is called story (what can you do?

We're still terrible messengers)

and aside from subsistence (the eggs and the toast; the sun

and the earth and the air),

it's the only thing a human

can really say he needs. What the fuck is a latte?

What's consumer reporting,

or what was it that morning, with the sun breaking in?

When the sacred, muted laps of small chores began again,

the way the place hums

with people like blood cells, the coffee beginning

to gurgle, the guy who can't stand you cutting the bread thick,

and the truce he'd called by passing you the

High Life bottle filled

with hot sauce before you'd even asked. The big rock candy

mountain of it all. And some guy in some room

probably at the same time,

was flipping his shit about the President's birth.

“Don't be that guy” is the advice we're always offering.

Don't be that guy, and definitely don't be his wife.

At all times, there is something better to do,

memories to be having

or making—the way, that small morning,

that everyone mostly just looked and didn't talk,

except every few minutes about what they might do,

what time the library opened and where the fish bite,

and the girl in the corner who only spoke to the dog

like a bona fide adult.

She asked him, “
What do you think
, Petey
?
” like she planned

to use the answer,

or like she really just honestly wanted to know.

The highway passes through town after town after dark,

populations under each name
announc
ing numb
e
rs

like 146, 217, 91, a mush of snow disappear
in
g

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 t
on
ight, high beams b
l
aring, poetr
y
,

you will tell them, connec
t
s w
o
rlds,

show
s
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.

  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
shock
s
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 wha
t
happens in the pale houses

as I work out w
hat
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
meta
phors

begin before I
speak

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.

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 breathing. 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.

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 reaso
n
to gr
ow
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.