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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770414556 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 04/16/2019 |
| Pages: | 80 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.27(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
East
The west stands for relocation, the east for lost causes.
— Karen Solie, "Bitumen"
Yesterday I thought winter had given up
all its images: white worn out,
utter glut of neutral.
But today, weird
mitt-ruts.
Snowbank
etchings
from kids
dawdling
their hands
to school;
overhead another storm
isn't breaking
but is moving on:
the elm-edge and the cloud-edge
slotting into each other.
As if the tree picked up
the sky secondhand,
and wears it —
a sapphire heavened hoodie
in the black and white film
of early March.
Then,
expertly,
the elm-clutch
lets loose, disrobes.
A sliver of blue expands,
becomes a sluice, a gorge,
becomes the whole damned naked winter flouncing down a side street shoving her hands knuckle-deep in the bank.
Cool Enough to Sink a Ship
I wanna be cool the way Patti Smith says
coool.
Take a peeler and scrape away these tough bits. Gnarly as a knuckle sandwich.
Oh don't croon it, baby. Siren it. Lure my ships in.
Hey Joe,
drop that pea shooter,
take me
on a cruise I can't afford and don't want to go on.
There's me bypassing
portholes and ice sculptures,
eyeing floatation devices.
There's me finagling bouillabaisse
and breadsticks
for the inevitable norovirus,
the predestined crash.
Hey Joe,
if things get choppy and rations run out, hawk me to the highest bidder,
the one who knows what's what in lifeboat soothsaying,
who isn't panicked when the waves crest.
Forget tarot cards and palmistry,
I'll show 'em their bank balance and tell them everything's coool
as an iceberg
'til tiger sharks start circling and I crank up these Popeye biceps, a chilly one-two right to the gills.
Stories My Father Told
The way it goes:
they're skinny as he is,
long hair clotted down their backs with different colours,
the fabric of their shirts growing stiff, holding shape.
Two acquaintances doused in paint meet my dad at a Montreal bus depot.
When passersby stare, they giggle,
walking from the station,
and my dad follows looking too clean in comparison
like a masculine Alice lagging behind two Mad Hatters,
all the way to their aslant meantime house.
Screen door off its hinges,
smacking into the front step.
Grains of the door frame splitting with dry rot,
wood faded grey-brown like bad ground beef.
Inside, the fumes of still wet paint,
this hyped-up duo opens cans,
tosses their contents through the air,
all over the walls and found-couches.
A powerless fridge —
neon green and taupe.
The floor muddy,
everything running together.
There's more, one says and hands Dad cottage-deck brown.
The fluid beauty of liquid airborne.
When they finish,
reaching for cigarettes and warm beer,
even the toilet's gooey and half-dried.
Later in BC,
my father sees one man curse another,
a wand revealed from a jean-jacket inner pocket and tapped against a fellow drifter's shoulder: Today,
you're gonna die.
That same summer my father digs clams out of the beach and stays — for free —
in a trailer.
Always happier telling a story where he had no bed of his own,
when he left us he crashed on couches and rented fully furnished basement apartments
while my mother bought a new bed for herself and repainted the walls a pale yellow to gather the morning light.
Neighbours Are Wormholes
The old lady in number 42 has the same last name as the crescent I grew up on. She's taken to shooing the squirrels off her lawn with her dooryard broom and a nonagenarian's rancour. I'm at war with them, she says,
is sure they're building a nest among the off-season shoes in the vestibule of the house across from hers. That the no-better-than-rats will chew through the wires to spark the wooden structure to blaze
Years ago my dog caught a squirrel and held onto the quaking thing like he'd been looking for one all his life, which to think of it, he had been: driving himself against the fence like a hockey enforcer against the boards. We thought he'd never catch one, had fun riling him up and setting him loose to frenzy his unutilized instinct out. And despite being three-quarters bird dog, he'd crushed the squirrel, refusing to unclamp, until left in my hands, this lacerated pickings taking so long to die — I had to lay it down on the patio stones and through tears, stop it with a brick.
Short-Term Desires
Eurydice, in that first microsecond,
must have hated her lover until she imagined the future they would no longer have:
This alt-universe Orpheus bets on the ponies with his pogey and never plans a real vacation,
just tags along. See him mooching rides to friends' rental cabins and forever borrowing sieve-like tents. There's the fool forgetting to pick up booze, forsaking marshmallows in an opened bag to harden back home on the counter.
And she'd have followed,
tired of nagging, tired of being the sort of woman who spoils the fun,
though she doesn't remember real fun anymore, just an unsettled feeling,
like spinning on a schoolyard merry-go-round that is her own molecular structure centrifugally yanked: herself pulled from her very centre.
Oh, would she have chosen instead this fantasy Orpheus who didn't check on her progress out of the underworld,
the one who assumed she'd be A-okay?
While her synapses stretch and kink,
she thinks of him being banned from highway driving because of his inability to use the rear-view, pulling into occupied lanes, once nearly side-swiping a double-decker but only knocking off its chrome mirror: this lifelong love of hers,
never ever willing to look back,
and her now changed, clarified by double-sight, made and unmade by the corkscrew truth that she's better off snake-bit than love-sick,
love-mouldered, love-bored.
Tick, Tick, Tick Went the Machine in the Bushes
(a post-pre-post-apocalyptic poem)
* * *
The old saying plump in his ears.
Red sky at night,
scrapmen take fright.
Red sky in dawn,
scrapmen are calm.
So he pitches a camp at pink dusk,
gulps a lungful of moisture,
vapour on the tongue.
Knowledge of stormpaths —
rain that's cheekbone-driven,
or that gusts between shoulder blades and sends his rucksack a-clattering.
The man with the past in his pack,
he's a noise everyone avoids.
* * *
With each footfall or windburst,
always that discordant, rackety echo —
the world is not sweet in the end.
He remembers honeycomb sweetness but also the sting and the sleep of deep-breathed smoke.
What of the din? Sound so overlapping it seemed monolithic but was divisible, like damn near everything is. Down to a single mortuary bee bearing the dead away from the hive. More dead than a hive.
* * *
Pull the machinery apart, pull it apart.
The ground a tip of cursed sprocket,
of doohickey, of chrome carnage.
* * *
Pull it apart and take it away.
Some had been told of palaces of tile and copper where instead of squatting like a pure toad in the scrubland,
people sat and shat, bathed in battery-suckled, handheld light —
the sin of mass diversion —
before having their hands sudsed and sprayed down,
before paying alms to hot air,
palms up like a beggar's.
Mostly his old-folks jawed through post-harvest smoke,
the smoke of tight rooms,
the hearth hot from fires ever-stoked —
constant cooking mixed with winter smells —
windows shut tight, bodies musky most days,
more than musky on others, dried herbs hung high,
and damp clothes placed near the heat overpowering anything subtle. Until all talk turned to good and evil, prized and untouchable, morals and scraps.
How it was plain wrong to owe things allegiance you wouldn't pay to another, your own lover couldn't light you up that way.
* * *
So he keeps on hauling.
On his shoulders the straps digging in, as he carries another sack full of smithereens,
metallic forgottens,
un-talismans,
west and away,
for good and always.
* * *
Sophocles's Jalopy
The father attempts to start his son's piece-of-shit car. Got it going once, but the timing's rough. Our bedroom funks with the reekof burning oil. It was puffin' blue smoke. Now it won't turn over. Annexing the driver's seat, the son gives it a go, desperate for any sign of mechanical respect. But his elder is all ever-present, gum-chewing disdain, which emanates from him like whatever it is dribbling from the exhaust pipe, smearing our shared dirt driveway. Persistent as a raccoon drawn on by the perfume of antifreeze, doesn't his kid just push the pedal down again and again while the older man gruffs: Trash the goddamn thing. S'no good. But the kid won't stop, maybe can't. His foot riding an arc of true need down to the floorboard, the engine's rough racket: guttural scatter pops — more alive than any car just off the lot — again and again, until his mother — a solo Greek chorus urging compromise, dealing with reality — comes out to serenade them inside. And the play, whatever it stands for, ends. No curtain call needed, the car's deep-bowing silence, an empty stage, an uncrowned king dying peacefully, the drama elsewhere.
Spring Solstice Blues
Damn eagles think they can get away with run-on sentences because they're so majestic.
— Martin Ainsley, Facebook, 2015
This town's eagles have taken to sending tenuous text messages, their talons tapping buttons like surly DMV workers in a bad movie.
I blame the dusk, the squirrels,
the exhaust-stained snow.
Drab dinner near invisible, uncatchable.
Today, as I'm returning books to the librarian whose eyebrows tilt like art-deco awnings,
my phone emits a dirty guitar riff until the symmetrical stoicism of her face is marred as she cocks one brow, strongly hints I should leave.
The bird's message:
U CAN'T MAKE BUNNY-EAR AIR QUOTES WITH UR MITTS ON NO ONE KNOWS WHAT URE SAYING YUV GOTTA PEEL EM OFF
As if I'm the one who's got razor sharps.
As if my mitts are a pedantic pair of crows,
chasing a winter-starved eagle away, back to the river,
squawking, Stay off our campus.
Use a semicolon.
Know your place.
And I keep my hands covered because all I wanted to say was that it's impossible for this winter to have gone on "too long."
That time's tactile as a Slinky unfurling between two six-year-olds who just want to get it all straight.
That spring starts when spring starts.
All of which is not worth the effort of baring palm and knuckle to the elements.
So I bury my hands in my pockets. They've seen their shadows. They'll keep a few more weeks.
How to Invoke the Patron Saint of Procrastination
St. Anti-Expeditusia
"O ye patroness of yo-yos, pinwheels,
handless watches, day planners martyred by burning,
cartwheelers, crabwalkers, patroness of lighters of copious numbers of candles —
o ye glitterer of paper, crafty, o ye of needless culinary quests, spreading homemade brandy butter on homemade plum pudding,
oh ye brewer of tea, knitter of cozy,
ah blessed midnight organizer of books and journals by alphabet,
by genre, by country of publication,
by size and year, by mood,
o ye of catnapping, roundabout inspiration,
ye chooser of stillness before action,
rushing at the end, your mind and stomach teeming with startled fauns,
we've brought images of you braiding and unbraiding your shambolic hair,
of you blowing Hubba Bubba bubbles the size of your holy head,
oh please, please grant us guidance by ensuring that whatever we've promised to complete is accomplished,
ah let us eventually disappoint no one."
Every Dusk, Mothertongue. Mothertonguing Every Dusk.
So you want to be a companion of the streets, my son, even the sea caves and creeks where the water is soused with disease. Your father was a caterwauling tomcat, with a chunk cut from one ear. He could hear the wind change, even when it blew soft; I could only hear his rapid heartbeat. How your father's heart thumped! I never forgave him, but I'll forgive you for leaving. Sons leave. Seasons change. The sea is a different sea every day. Always, when I taste bitter and underripe fruit, I will think of you, my son.
I will think of you, my son, always. When I taste bitter and underripe fruit, seasons change. Every day I see the sea differently, so you are forgiven and should leave. Please, leave; harken your own thumping heart. I never forgave your father when his began to blow soft, could only hear his old rapid beat. But he heard the wind change, even with a chunk cut from one ear. Your father was a tomcat too, caterwauling soused in diseased water, those sea caves and creeks. You and the streets are companions of want, my son.
Out(r)age
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die,
than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.
— Julius Caesar
Right leg. You've done it this time. Across the horse track's
gritty parking lot, pinched pain scorching down joints
to the ankle so that I have to drag, like Kevin Spacey does in The Usual Suspects.
My half-truncated gait pushes loose stones around,
such a tough guy,
despite its meek and gormless exterior. All the privileges I gave you, righty:
kickball home runs, first step-offs at each crosswalk,
each stair,
even letting you always rest your more muscled self atop lefty. Cain
smothering Abel — now more able than you!
And around in circles —
like I would walk now if I didn't correct myself,
one painful
lurch at a time — a horse gallops, lampoons me,
rhythmic
and metered: an echo of this afternoon's hard-as-knuckle-duster
rain. The power's failed from storm or heat. Horses stare callous-eyed
from their stalls. The stable doors slung open,
some with ropes
slackly stretching across. No dance-club bouncer here,
but the humidity
making us all sweat. And look at him: a harness racer rings the track,
whip grasped like a fly-fishing rod, tipped up so the leather
jangles loose. Showing off in denim instead
of racing silk. Too muggy for frippery.
At home
the power's back on. Loneliness of the newscaster sounding-off
on the awakened TV; the fridge vibrates, making up for lost time.
Unsettled, penne and spaghettini rattle, like finks,
in high-placed canisters,
magnets threaten to dislodge themselves, to spill all their secrets onto vinyl tiles.
Trappings
Hold your tempo and bless this house.
When I stop craving wild ginger and a sky dense with pollen, I forget the bees and their busy communion,
the Jack pines and the sea.
* * *
Briny drafts shrink these rooms,
spoil salt fish and meat,
potatoes from the cellar.
Mouthfuls of brackish wool:
mittens and scarves laid out to dry on the radiator.
In spring we'll try to air ourselves out —
snap rhubarb stalks from black soil —
and dredge up how we look in sharper light.
* * *
Last night I dreamt about pitting pin cherries.
I laid the stones in a row on the table,
tossed ripe flesh into a bag under the sink,
and sensed you were gone.
You have run off, again;
I'll abandon these sweet things 'til you return.
Renters in pyjamas
embrace stout cats in discontented huddles, while kids sleepily lean against fleece-covered legs.
Word spreads of an actual fire,
not another false alarm choked out by thirty years of dust,
from carpet being slowly replaced, floor by floor, but someone deep-frying while drunk.
Black smoke of peanut oil catching.
Smug cabinets bursting into flame like they'd planned this auto-da-fé all along.
Patience — a rolled up pant cuff coming loose — soaks up dew.
A medley of cellphones dial to awaken lazy non-worriers,
non-insomniacs, to haul them from between their sheets and down cement stairways that smell like old and fresh piss.
To lure them to the promise of drama,
the tale that'll be bandied beside the mailboxes for a few weeks.
Silence ascends like hose-mist as latecomers trickle out from emergency exits.
Others try to guess the guilty party who may be among them:
Anyone wobbly or standing alone.
Trying to catch a whiff of booze fume, of char.
The foreman with the grey handlebar moustache no longer chats with the super. Instead his ear's stuck to his radio like he's waiting for his jackpot number to be called, for his life to finally be different. A cottage on Kennebecasis,
an all-the-trimmings Ford F-250
with fast-action heated-seats and rear-view mirrors that defrost without being scraped. He answers with a voice that's mostly rasp.
An asbestos-coated cough, structurally unsound,
like the ceiling finally collapsing.
A Millennial's Poem
Once a good deed per week was enough to keep the world on its Easy-Bake axis.
A 100-watt light bulb and we can chew-goo through this together.
Now I'm not so sure how to tally and what goes in the column that adds up to me being a good person.
Here's a youthful narrative and a roll of Fruit by the Foot™.
I've gnawed on both but only one bruised my tongue Grimace-purple. Here I am grimacing, letting slip my slap-bracelet age. Devil Sticks™. Skip-It™. Stack of timeworn Tiger Beats.
I too am old enough to have once been a magazine subscriber, to have once hoarded Pogs™ in a fanny pack.
Grandfather galaxies untraded before the bottom fell out of the schoolyard marble market.
Lodestone, what an attractive economy hardened from left-out Play-Doh™.
I'll trade you my TV memories of hockey pucks lit-up in ice-dense USA,
you hand over the future and whatever ease middle age garnered you. Bargain basement, Top of the Pops,
holy shit, you'll not believe what I haven't had a chance to have lost.
Excerpted from "One Thing — Then Another"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Claire Kelly.
Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
East
Yesterday I thought winter had given up 10
Cool Enough to Sink a Ship 12
Stories My Father Told 14
Neighbours Are Wormholes 17
Short-term Desires 18
Tick, Tick, Tick Went the Machine in the Bushes 20
Sophocles's Jalopy 26
Spring Solstice Blues 27
How to Invoke the Patron Saint of Procrastination 29
Every Dusk, Mothertongue. Mothertonguing Every Dusk, 30
Out(r)age 31
Trappings 34
Renters in pyjamas 35
A Millennial's Poem 37
Then
Westward U-Haul Gothic 40
West
In the Land of Cinematic Drought
i) Spit's all that's holding me together 44
ii) We don't do anything right now 45
iii) Water's precious. Sometim.es may be more precious than gold 46
iv) No man needs nothing 48
v) Now pick up what you can and run 49
Avoiding East-Coast Nostalgia Out West 50
One Thing - Then Another 51
Nobody Every Day Keeps Saying Nothing 53
How Turkeys Become City-Dwellers in Edmonton 55
Steady Work if You Can Get It 57
Boyle Street Triptych 58
D2O 61
A March Commuter Considers Newton's Third Law 62
Her Pillow Smells of the Special 67
The There, There, There 68
My Grade Six Meteorology Lessons Help Me Categorize Pedestrians 69
Turtles All the Way Down 71
Notes 73
Acknowledgements 75
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