The Dream World Read online

  wandering far off the marked path of logic. Only

  the Real Estate Man with his locks and his leather

  might drag you back. Something’s building,

  some kind of craving, thirst that starts in the treads

  of your sneakers, sets you searching long miles

  of coastline, trail thinning out like a vein.

  First time in years you’ve got something to lose.

  The way to survive: unscrew your heart

  and swallow the contents each hour.

  MAKING AN OFFER

  Dead Man’s Pond, above St. John’s:

  how the lights from the city drop,

  pieces of clothing we flick off and shiver

  away from, exposed. How the water pricks

  our skin, reminds us of its name. If only

  a house stood just for itself; had only one window,

  one clapboard wall, a single door opening

  in. If it were simple as signing a form,

  awaiting a stranger’s reply. If only our hope

  was not that loon, calling out once,

  disappearing. We are divers, deep-down explorers.

  We’re back-of-the-mind diviners.

  Missing home while running from home,

  we are black towels, wrung out but wet, heavy

  with waiting, with weight. How it feels to name

  desire, how little we have to give back.

  We’re a first mortgage, a second. If only

  after achieving the goal, there wasn’t this dip

  of regret. House, loon, lights blinking

  out: look: they were here. Now they’re gone.

  ANXIETY DREAMS

  The day plumps up with what’s undone,

  rises like dough. We punch it down.

  We save our kisses in a safe that’s fat and pink

  but void of coins, and so we make

  a run for bed, pull the blankets

  over our heads. It makes the darkness

  no more dark. The pet we don’t own

  nuzzles her face into our choice:

  stay put, or don’t. Nothing moves,

  until a shadow lifts a finger, as if in thought.

  I think, for a minute, our problems are solved.

  Problems, you ask. What problems?

  TELEPATHY: Living Across from the Church

  The steeple bell breaks open

  the hour – two parts, four,

  a head-aching twenty,

  a mind-splitting forty, a migraine

  beginning just when you lose count –

  a pause. The street flicks back into focus,

  parked cars stunned and holding

  their tongues. Eternity flutters,

  caught in the gutter like some discarded

  church bulletin, and you too, darling,

  pause at your desk, a deadline looming,

  staring you down.

  You’ve not slept for days.

  You raise your pencil over your notebook,

  maestro before a momentous

  beginning, conductor’s baton

  aloft in the air, a signal some angel

  spots: on cue

  the bell recommences its bold brassy band,

  breaking the hour more fervently now

  like bread for the masses

  who stream from the church to slam

  their car doors and shout at their children –

  there’s no need to speak, my love.

  I hear what you’re thinking.

  ROBIN

  She must have thought this cabin empty (which, for weeks at a time, it is) to set her cup

  of twig and twine, like a glass of pricey wine,

  a golden goblet, gently down in the eave above

  the door. It seemed enough. She plucked its warmth

  from Easter’s closet, fashioned it from fleece and leaf

  and in it laid her regal prize, out of reach of porcupines

  and other probing eyes. Our wheels up gravel:

  sad surprise. She refuses, first, to yield and stays, puffed up,

  all huff and flush, ensconced next to the “Welcome” sign –

  a sulky host – but as the car is unpacked, slow, (as though

  a complex line of thought), and as the door keeps slamming closed

  an inch away from her abode, some base instinct

  makes her leave her nest for good and save herself;

  makes her swoop, a blazing breast, over to the maple’s safety.

  Beady gaze stays glued on us. Human will, says Augustine,

  is poised between a kind of hell and good that looks

  like feathered flight: the heart’s sharp urge to rise and hover

  over nature’s endless picture. Yes, to love it all. Now (the trunk relieved of beer and snacks and sleeping bags)

  we let the digital camera help: tippy-toed, we reach its eye

  above her hearth too high for sight, then bring the slim box

  down and crowd around its wordless snap. Selfishly,

  we hope to see the absence left by winter’s death;

  that hollow nest, deep and tough, and from it, thrusting up,

  the root of spring returned as form. Three blue eggs.

  Three perfect globes. And in the morning, once we’ve risen,

  three round dreams, eyes closed tight and beaks agape,

  dashed in shells across the deck. We stand, astonished,

  coffee cooling, all around us sun and breeze unspooling green

  between the maple’s flip, indifferent leaves. Robin’s gone.

  Her brood’s been eaten. Though it’s resurrection’s season,

  I don’t wish for them to rise, but, for once, for words that find

  some meaning I can get behind: oh yolky blot. Oh yellow

  slick. Let me stand and take their place, be this mess

  I’ve helped make; be broken, spilled, forgiven.

  ASCENT

  Forgive me?

  No.

  An angled reminder,

  your two-letter answer, a rock in my boot,

  a cramp. The hike now steeper

  and clearer in scope.

  Please?

  Silence. A sky full of gulls –

  there’s some dying thing on the beach

  they’re in love with. They circle,

  circle. All at once,

  plummet – ripping the ropey red life

  from its wound. We’re pulled apart

  at the heart of our natures,

  hinge between water

  and sky. Gulls stitch the gap,

  dragging our insides

  up through the gape between bowls of blue,

  ocean and air, that infinite

  absence. The high shrill squabble

  of hunger. Forgive me, I ask you.

  The winged gods are feeding.

  Heaven? An echo:

  Forgive me.

  WRITING POETRY

  She sewed him a boat out of birchbark

  and thread. A gift in the flow

  of her steady affection, one moment freighted

  with many. Perfect

  and useless, it sat on their shelf,

  unfit to weather the rising of water.

  Too small to stand up to anything

  real. Now it seems

  a magical vessel, able to travel

  upstream, back in time. A tiny

  reminder: the heart slips its anchor.

  She’s glad she has something to keep.

  THE HERE AND NOW

  Stuck on an island of unmoving hours,

  forever is ours for the keeping. The present:

  a glut of perpetual pleasure, gladness we gather

  from each grain of sand, from beach-glass and seashell

  and every pale wing: the hawk floating out to encircle

  the dusk; even the horsefly that lands on my forehead,

  fulfilling its fate – that sting. Red rise
s up

  from campfire light and hovers, the twin

  of a sun that can’t set. Stranded in time,

  the tide slips away like an unwanted guest

  at a wedding. We marry the moment and promise

  our faith. You heap me with sand, right up to my neck.

  The game binds me tight to the here and the now,

  the itch on my forehead, sun’s fiery

  match. Too late, I realize the sting of nostalgia,

  my hands buried, cannot be scratched.

  ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT

  Longing hurts and pleases.

  Two more months of snow. Streets

  crawl under blankets again; eyes closed tight,

  empty storefronts are children waiting

  to be tucked in. Nobody comes. Storm after storm

  releases loss into slightly deeper banks, and quiet

  flakes through streetlamp light brings to mind

  the bedtime story of my oldest love returned,

  at last, from all those years. Once, drunk,

  dating someone else, you held my hand in a cab.

  I want to go back to that kind of wanting

  and you not wanting me back.

  DOG-EARED

  I fold down the tips of my memory’s book.

  The page where we sat on the porch before dawn,

  listing the guests for our wedding – marriage

  remote as a tropical country, one we would never

  discover. I mark the humid Guyanese dusk,

  my hammock strung between two trees, a heat wave

  hung, thick and building, there between

  our bodies. I came to your window,

  your mother asleep, and mark your bed,

  bed of your boyhood – not the kissing, but pressing our faces

  together, the shield we would make. Remember?

  Holding our hands up to keep the world out.

  The radio rustled, low in that dark. Waterloo nights.

  Nothing could stop us. No wall of pleasure

  would get in our way. Pushing and tunnelling

  into each other, trying to puncture the bliss.

  We knew we would need to break it to keep it,

  to barrel through into the real, the adult –

  to ruin our artlessness, squander our luck.

  The last place is dog-eared before we knew pain.

  Then, the pages of unruly scrawl,

  sentences struck, the pen tearing through,

  tear-stains, pleading, my unmeant cruelty,

  your unmeant cruelty. Then blankness.

  Waiting for years for what we had earned

  while time’s bold parade passed us by.

  The final installment – I wish I could tell you –

  the rest of our future, unwritten. A crumble

  of petals between the last pages.

  The red rose you gave me.

  The remnants.

  TALKING OR NOT TALKING

  SCRABBLE

  I’ll tell you a secret: I’m making this up

  out of the letters I drew. Everything written

  is just provision, the word now sprawled

  across the corner of the board:

  a triple-word score. Still,

  the wine cannot conceal the little failures

  we both know: the X in hex – just been played –

  falls short of expectation. Let me say I love

  the way you lay your tiles with such abandon,

  slapping them into their slots

  like signs accepting

  meaning. Because, tonight, the game implies

  that things may be the way they seem,

  that spelling out the lack in language

  won’t result in less. Less, well-placed, makes liver

  sliver, conjures up that slip-of-a-moon, the one

  that dangles from the sky

  as image hangs from speech.

  The way your glance makes more of me;

  slide your R in next to my E. We’ll build

  a ladder of consummate

  pleasure, one long vowel at a time.

  THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN

  The nuns live on the edge of town

  overlooking a lake. They take

  turns cooking, dress in slacks.

  I stay for a week, descend into silence

  which soon overflows with what it refutes.

  In bed, my breath writes notes to the night,

  small puffs of steady contentment. Drifting off,

  I bask in the inkling of pleasures piled up

  like layers of cake; I open wide into a dream

  about the sullen retreater beside me

  whose sulky demeanour takes shape in the wall

  between his room and my own. The same lake

  lies east of our windows – nevertheless, our views

  diverge. Morning arrives, a stamp on its corner,

  an airmail letter slid under my door.

  Rain shimmies down its thin silver pole.

  I stroll the ambit of my mind, gathering gladness

  like seashells and whelk, and find

  the man inured to angst evokes in me

  a giddy thanks. The wall between us

  joins us – I count on him for my existence.

  THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING

  On the seventh day Solitude comes to my door

  with a bottle of cheap scotch

  and matches. It lights an inferno

  and banishes me in the fashion

  of Plato with poets. So much for use.

  So long, you beauty. Outside,

  I trample a path to the pasture. Cattle,

  untended, their udders distended,

  moo at the honey-and-milk

  of the moon, that monocle leaking

  lacteal light. Suddenly blinded,

  I wander afield, fingers outstretched

  like ten small antennae

  and find myself back at the site of the fire,

  one I can sense but not see. Solitude

  smells like an unseemly lover,

  cigarette smouldering deep in the blankets,

  a lover I wish that I’d never

  invited. But how to assert this considerately?

  I practise, repeating, I need to be alone. Solitude, it isn’t you, it’s me

  TOUCH AND GO

  Friday shucks off

  work-week shackles,

  busts out of its prison.

  Booze on your breath,

  you press me up

  against the bar

  and force me to choose:

  life, or art.

  I’m whisked by taxi

  back to my room

  and fall on the bed,

  head reeling. I swallow

  the moon like an aspirin.

  Lit from within with liquor’s

  speed I need you

  in my bloodstream.

  Addict’s bargain:

  I’ll choose life

  but only if you

  choose me.

  THE METAMORPHOSES’ METAMORPHOSIS

  It would be easy to call me the violet,

  to say my face shadows you

  morning to night

  as Clytie’s was said to shadow

  the sun. Let’s take Ovid for his word,

  follow his myth across the horizon

  the way a jealous, lustlorn girl might

  dog her heartthrob’s every move,

  refuse to take her eyes off him,

  to shift out of his steady heat, and so

  sprout roots, a flower’s face. Petals

  plucked out one by one, the story wobbles

  on its stem, meaning changed

  in every telling: loves me, loves me

  not.

  LANGUAGE TRAVELOGUE

  Words bleached white,

  hollowed out. Cups,

  the steaming stream

  of time, how we hide in the
heart’s

  excuse. The truth: we know

  the secret code but keep it

  to ourselves. We cross our legs,

  take small sips, smiling, our lips

  pressed together. Nervous passengers

  boarding a train, pigeons

  above in the station’s arches,

  a brilliant flapping

  in back of our eyes. We squint,

  say nothing, clutch our passports

  against the emptiness

  under our ribs. Someone steals

  a last goodbye, the briefest kiss,

  there – the heavy doors

  are bolted closed – there’s no guarantee

  we’ll survive. Farewell to tea

  late in October, a loved-one’s

  parting words. Farewell, farewell to

  everything looted: the empty

  jewel-box. The mouth.

  WINTER LANDSCAPE: Reading Gertrude Stein

  As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.

  Topsail beach, early December, all of the tourists long gone –

  move out past the man-made stairs, the lookout’s bruised black eye.

  You are a stranger whose bumbling comes from the fat lip of trying

  to name: the ocean isn’t a mirror held up to the damage of sun

  in the pines. A hiss in the underbrush up on the cliff and the trail

  lopes sideways, down to the rocks – you’ll need to hike in several

  kilometres past your craving to get it all down. First thin crust

  of winter’s glass, the same encasement as language: a shine

  so bright you can barely see through it. The quiet popping

  of ice in spruce. You can’t hear the trees’ real names.

  SILHOUETTE

  The words of the elms have fallen.

  Loss speaks in frost, that careful lace,

  white-gloved fingers

  reaching. All the selves you couldn’t hold

  come back to your window now,

  frozen children wanting in,

  voices loose in the dusk.

  Snipped from the clouds, the day drifts down –

  grief is the shadow it casts.

  You turn away from the one who calls.

  Her mittens pressed to the glass.

  DEONTOLOGY

  The fledgling ethicists, forced

  to school, fold their hands at their desks.