Perfect Service

Perfect service,
and the brush of a stranger's hair
on your arm.
And wanting to write like Hemmingway.
And wanting to write like Joni Mitchell.
And wanting to paint as if their words have stumbled somehow
from exhausted presses,
whose letters no longer say
but only mean,
to the biggest empty page that they could find.

Wanting to paint as if you have
forever to understand these words
not scrawled across the canvas
but embedded on,
embossed upon
its surface. Wait forever
for the perfect sleepless night to take you
out of skin and meaning
of the darker sky and room,
the bed too warm,
too wide.

Wade
across the stillness
of a house with no one in it
save for Ludo, and he's sleeping
to a painting full of circles
looking forward to the spring.

Home Barefoot

I walked home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot, in the rain.
I walked, home, barefoot in the rain.
I walked home barefoot; in the rain
the ground was warm enough
when puddles soaked, stroked
and soothed my ankles,
and falling water whispered to me.

Falling water whispered,
to me of all people,
whispered to me,
of all people.
All people
whispered to me
of
water
falling

on the drum of my umbrella's skin,
on
my
skin.

The ground is warmed when exhaling.

Evening

Sex and the smell of lilies
or peonies, lurid blossoms hanging heavily obsene
in the twilight.
Your skirt riding high
over white thighs.
Bixies pedal furious
bat patterns.

Ten o'clock, and nothing calls
like bed and a cool home
full of silence.

Nothing like a warm drum,
a stoned drum,
an easy fuck between laundered sheets
and memories of the lavender
I keep forgetting to plant.
Was there ever such a thing as an easy fuck?

You Told Me

You told me
that artists come and go a little farther
than the others;
we feel it when we fall so much harder
than our mothers
ever warned us.

Artists see the light,
and musicians are jonesing for the perfect sound
and it's alright
that loving feels like I'm about to drown.

Across the Sheet

That fiercely empty
half bed and belly
where a man or child should lie are sharply hollow
and full of secrets.

Too far from the wall, the bed's too wide;
its distance makes my foetal
curl unable to cross
between myself and the destiny bred in my womb.
Girl-woman, turned on herself away
from the bare cold of a night
when the others are burning midnight oil for music,
when even the weight of a guitar on her belly
would be better than nothing at all.

Ice Bridge to America

Middle morning
and swallows are flying
everywhere over water
miraculous in its stillness.
You behind me do not move.

There's a canvas resting behind us, sleeping
at home in the dark
of my closed room, the pause
between the flick and stroke of fingers
and the scrape of charred wood.
You behind me do not move.

Girl at Myriad

Old pale lace and steam from your tea
combine. What are you writing,
lovely girl with your double-bridged nose;
what language are you learning?

''You know what they say about girls with red shoes,''
an auntie told me once.

If she only saw you.

Listening

Think of me
as swallowing all that you say to me.
I will take your words into my open mouth,
taste them,
feel their shapes, sharp and flat as river grass.
I will envelope these blades in my body
and they will be no more.

Bohmerwald

Even though I miss you, I'm better off missing you
than with you while envisioning
what I thought we could be.
I'm better off with others,
many filters for my fractured
sense of unity.
When your words are barbed wire,
and your skin is too distant to touch,
and the skin of your arm is this cool,
and your eyes are cold,
and your voice is invulnerably male,
I crave the middle distance
of a day without you.

In the fragile middle distance
of a room behind closed doors, I listen in
to conversations
when you don't know I'm there,
or when you've overlooked my presence
like so many times before.

On your way home late this evening,
I'll be singing under water.
As you wander in the darkness
I'll be passing through the glossy wooden

hall. You turn the handle
of our heavy wooden door,
but I'm already sunk in shadows
in the green room, Bohmerwald.
Behind the forest's door,
the middle distance calls.

Twisted Conversations

Fragments of aching loneliness echoing down the hall,
when the only one who can comfort me is the one who won't,
when the song is right but I can't,
and my voice is clutted with words I'm forbidden to speak,
and my limbs are crippled with places forbidden to lie.

His voice down the vacuous hall
is calling,
and he wants an answer,
and I have dozens,
mais aucun n'est l'un qu'il veut.
Old story.

'Are you okay?'
It's alright, I'm only singeing
and the noise is only burning
from your voice acrosss the yawning
chasm deep into my throat
where words float, encumbered, in potentia,
and I'm sinking into sleep.

I'm not sinking, only drowning,
lying face down on the sheets
my mother gave me. She embroidered
tiny flowers on the pillows.
This quilt my parents' wedding spread,
frame my father built
from rescued parts. It's not enough.
These close familial charms
will not protect me when his arms
are all that can keep the wolves of his words away.

I need an apotrope.

Green Medusa in the no-man's land
of the middle rooms, the only rooms
where we can meet.
In all others I search for you and am lost.

In yours I am a child.
In mine, an exile.

Watchers

Eye draws.
Eyes draw me into your line of view,
your lens sight where I see you clearly
or as clearly as can be
between the wishes of hand and eye
and another blank page flaring white at noon
in the sun
over Phillips square.

Page as pale as the whitest hijab
I've ever seen, strolled by me,
and a woman all in blue beneath.
Electric blue silk,
and the river rises from below
to swallow the square and the ankles of all who stand
or sit on the edge with our legs dangling
in the lake we haven't noticed
rising slowly, lapping steady
north of every old high water mark
of floods from seasons past.
The waters rise. On every back, on every collar
blue is cool against our skins, and even higher,
when your mouth is open wider.
Let it in. Open wider,
and let the river in.

Photograph

This is a camera's click, a
paper's flash,
a lens flare,
and your face is no more, my dear.
Your closed quiet face is no more.

This is the blotted
page, the mottled
stain, spreading fast, ever still on the square
of illusional silverprint locked in a drawer
where I once found a silverfish scurrying dear,
and I once lost a lock of your hair.

This is a number, or seven.
Odds are even
now it wouldn't fail to reach your ear.
When the meaning isn't ---
and the past is a deafening cadence,
there's enough time between us for silence.
Enough is behind us for --- .

Ludo, my Insomnia

Have you met Ludo?
Inexorable, and therefore made at home,
I'll never be alone
at night, eyes open wide,
with Ludo by.
Dreaming of a home I'll never find,
of arms not mine, Ludo laughs,
and forgives me my follies.
Yet Ludo forbids me my night's errant pathways:
"Save them for the day,
don't think of it 'til day."

Ludo, I have carried you
from one room to another in this house,
and then another, until you know the place
almost as well as I. Please try
not to hold this against him.
But after all,
who know better than you the turning routes my unconscious takes
when it's past the end of yesterday,
and tomorrow is too far off? No wonder
that I drag you from room to room for hours on end.

Ludo, my insomnia.

This Battered Night

Tired body changes
before dawn from animal to woman;
body's skin slips on again,
pulled from reluctant corners,
resistant and harbouring, along with the hide,
seven consecutive stages of sleep.
Skin slips on again,
fits like a second layer of,
still loose, raw in patches,
not yet attached to body.
Skin slips on again.

This battered night and tortuous waking,
to seven stars still low
on the horizon, wet with fog,
and you are missing.

Offer me this morning
as if it were yours to give, this rising
sun as if held in your hands, enormous orange
in a country sick with solitude.
Give this day to me in spite.
In spite of differences, we rise
under the same sun.

All my suns are on the street.

Her Eyes

Her red hair against the green,
her red-amber eyes from the shadow of the porch
watch all,
are seen in return,
don't mind.

She raises cups of strong sweet coffee to her lips,
sets them down again on blue and white saucers.
Drinks to hide her thoughts,
the smile and scowls that chase across her lips
on the very edge of St. Joseph.

Her pale winter skin,
white hands,
flaxen forehead, eyes of silk
left too long out in the sun.
Her stilled voice,
sighing now but what she
says you can't understand.
Her ancient forest voice,
the rustlings of sap, brambles reach,
and every tree is woken.

Following the Wake

(Written in the early morning, February 15)

How long
since I have seen this light?
White light, mingled only
with the blue of latent evening,
early morning,
daylight shifts receding
into twilight. Slips th'abysmal
thread of lucid admiration
onto fingers white with plying
river waters. Under chariots,
under bridges run the tendrils,
gellid fingers, run the marvels
of a winter early dying,
of a February morning,
of returning, of the past.

Of the past, and of the passing,
as the snow is briefly falling
over aquaduct and thicket,
spent the summer briefly waking,
spent the autumn bearing berries,
spent the winter spent, and making
up for time lost in the turning
of a tertiary season.
'Tis the season.

Winter, call me.

Ceilings

Late morning Saturday,
late February,
late winter in the month
before rejuvination, motion
to the new old house, seeking
always to be home, to come to this nest of pillows,
music soothing from your cavern to the south.

A creature of the north, I adore
this house.
The ceilings call me,
after many nights of gazing
in the gloam of early morning
at their ragged, crannied skins.

Squalls

The wind has changed direction.
By the flag over the house acoss the street, I know this. Blowing from the east,
a storm is coming. Is it true
that squalls against the city threaten more than rural hurricanes?
Someone wrote that once,
a Parisian.

Napping and Dreams

Napping
February 21, 2010
5'' x 8''
Pencil, coloured pencil on paper

i/
Dreams

of reading together, glorious uprooted passages

purring through the cave of your belly to my ear,

through the cavern of my larynx to your fingers on my throat. Know what matters.

Know that the pattern,

the precise colour of late-afternoon sunlight from the south,
pollen-yellow,

faintly apricot,

I will not say gold,

is so much more essential.

ii/

Know these things,

and why I want to live here.

Know the purpose of a canvas on the floor.

Know that doors opening inward

only beckon. Know that

the ladder on a balcony only ever leads up,

while the mountain only ever leads down.

Know which streets call us away,

and which ones bring us home,

and which chords are always warm,

and which words heal me.

iii/

Know the reasons I sit up late

in the front room, barely rocking,

watching early-rising walkers on the street,

with a paintbrush in my hand.

Know the textures of the floor against your back,

against my thighs, sitting childishly,

while everything important

hangs in the air between us.

Everthing important,

in the ocher coloured air.

iv/

Dreams, sienna dreams

of henna tinted home. Words flow.

And in the early morning, have I woken?

Have I slept?

Does it matter? Mist is fading.

On the street, the early walkers

hurry out against the thinness of the day,

but you won't rise for hours:

'Below the thunders of the upper deep . . .

The Kraken sleepeth.'*

And so, until the end of days,

or else this afternoon,

which I would argue is even farther off,

the sun and I are lovers without you.

v/
A room for dreaming outward,

and one for dreaming in,

and all the other moments of our house, in the spaces in between.

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 'The Kraken,' in Tennyson (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004), 42.

Room 1051

From the tenth floor, I see no difference between animal and ♂. I know that what you've given me is no accomodation of both.

From the tenth floor, I
wait for all things personal
to arrive, in taxicabs, or
walking on the street, or
slipping satin dressing gowns
from sunburnt shoulders. I
fail to see the good when it arrives.
I wait.

I wait for change, an end to waiting, for
the next, the very next car to
come around that corner to
be the one which bears you
to my door, and all your colours flying,
and all your colours flying
in the flaying, thrashing wind. I
cannot bear the wading
any longer into spring, cannot
take the subtle merging,
without borders, without
soul, without soil on which to claim,
''Here I stand, come high water,
come the fever, I remain.''

On the tenth floor, I am barren; I am
February morning. I am
February burning. I am
water, I am dust.
From behind the parted curtains comes
a crooning, comes a whirring,
comes a steady billow blowing
through the ever-present window,
where the omnipresent shadow
hasn't yet made its terrain.

I am burning.
I am burning.
On the tenth floor, I am yearning
for the onset of the rain.