it comes back with an inside fastball.
By you I mean a four-door family sedan,
crack in the sunroof where the light
comes in. If you let something go and it
loves you, it comes back at its shiny best.
I’m the worst kind of fair-weather
love letter. Hubcap of need,
we’re all out of polish
and spit’s not gonna work.
FAILURE
Dot-com speculation. Violin lessons.
Behind your old grade school, the spotty field
you first drank in.
No, you’re son
has a failure to thrive. A train jumps its tracks
onto another, shittier set of tracks.
The spiny, thin-ribbed ego of success
takes a comparison to a condom personally.
Even though you meant it as a compliment.
And even though it’s true.
CHERRY COLA
Dark can, glitzy stripper
on a victory lap, blunt smell of synthetics.
Heartbreak, heartbreak, someone
must have paid for this.
Nerves light like a spool of fishing thread.
Rodeo Clown, Drive-by Aspirations,
please wear name tags; I can never tell
which one has the runny nose
and which the funereal sense of humour.
Hold me tighter, Cherry
Cola. Stop letting go.
A BOY AT PINBALL
A boy plays pinball.
A boy grows flippers and a launch pad
and sets into still life:
A Flower Vase in Bar Lighting
or A Fruit Basket Sets a New High Score.
After school a boy leans his backpack against a wall,
gains open-water balance, glides out
to the shoal of himself and plays pinball.
From the machine emerges the art of recycling,
the vanishing magic of exchange:
quarters into the arcing free-float
of a silver ball in transit, his synapses’
snaky response. Translates his body
into points, points into proof of cause
and effect. If he were a game show
he would be the wheel in motion,
would call it For Amusement Only.
Would demonstrate with concision
what extends from the fingertips,
what, when tilted, complies.
A boy is a collision
careening through a light-up display
that halos his plate-glass reflection,
buoyant amid a garland of elastic bumpers.
His quarters a coin-box splash in the concluding
pool of transaction: wood and metal
and the lickity-split of buzzers,
points of contact flickering
in the slipstream of final score.
FOUND: PRE-ALPHA VERSION OF A BETTER SELF
For Andrew, depreciation offers
a range of modest savings: montage, composite image,
speak of a sausage in a frozen field.
The 1990s suggested Andrew’s future
career: a country in the Eastern Bloc.
Of course, this was a little difficult.
Still, he dreamed and by 2001
he lifted the grey veil of place and exposed himself
in exhibition as a life-sized replica of the Cold War.
Known for its sensitive contexts,
it embodied years of time, care and thought.
Strictly speaking, no one was interested. The L.A. Times wrote:
‘Rough and sketchy, Faulkner is a perfectionist
and very slow. His show, Pre-alpha version
of a better self, is a different sort of challenge
and its successes are few. The inability of even art students
to appreciate his practice is telling.
After twenty-five years the marks left are obvious,
the copyright a black-and-white of intention.’
PNEUMONIA
Lungs a tenement, swollen, easy to move into.
Hair-clogged, bathtub a standing pool.
The ground floor is sublet by a fevered tenant
who wallpapers with wet newspaper and wheatpaste.
Water slips through a valve’s loosened fist. Drip.
A building of wood rot and mice, back alleys
cluttered with bone, shit, small bodies.
Lungs: welfare’s small-change jar.
Plastic, whispery, just for now.
HALF-HITCH
A harbour in spring. Nice weather time.
Love takes to the air like a gull.
Beneath a tarpaulin sky,
cranes unload cargo like the hand of God
managing the world’s chequing account.
A coroner fingers a gut’s undigested bits.
At the stump of the dock a tourist centre
spills out another historical re-enactment –
this time, with feeling.
Fog squeezes between my chest’s anvil
and the afternoon hammering down.
Once lodged in a body a bullet can drift for years.
You said you’d be here. Clinically speaking,
at least one of us is breathless.
RORSHACH
What’s stopping us from getting
what we want is unclear and frustratingly
good at what it does. A complex ecosystem
of trauma. The blotchy What
in What’s wrong?
or No, really, what’s wrong?
When my quarter barricades
a gumball machine,
I’ll shake it for what’s owed.
As an apparatus of joy, I do what I do.
Midday slump, don’t you think
it’s time you let go?
I’m more habit than gumption.
Once you realize change is infectious,
you dive right in.
On the hood of my car you swore
you fell in love with metal.
I’m dewy, damp with effort,
lurking in the middle distance.
Hold me is an interpretive response
to a battery of stimuli.
My thoughts are guilty as charged:
Out There, context-free, wrangled in hazy
half-truth’s attic light.
HEAD
A broken air pump
breathed into. Shoes spit-shined,
then scuffed. Hum and stitch,
a retro Singer. A pop-song hook.
Tracing paper. Practical
hydraulics. A river robbed
of its bed. The seventh-inning stretch.
A fist of reason wiggled free
like a Plinko chip.
No, wait, that’s the heart.
REMOTE
What do you want me to say?
Like a bent wire I let radio signals
tie themselves about me.
The hearts of larger animals
signal intent like a high-wire act:
what’s up there leaves us smitten
and then leaves us. In commercials
they always get it right the first time.
X-rays confirm our first suspicion: there are things
we should have done. At times I’m seized.
Like a minor sitcom character, I appear at the edge
of scenes. There are those who say love is a symptom
of the middle class, leather pants a symptom
planets our laundry loses its studio crispness.
It’s not a matter of trying harder.
Believe me. I’ve tried.
THE MOON
Clean, sharp, a knife stepping from the shower.
A pock-faced snowglobe without the snow.
Moon, stop peering through the su
nroof of my Volvo.
When it humps, the moon insists you hump.
Bump in the belly of an ex, bump of an object
beneath your car. And when it cries out
like a wounded raccoon, who will collect
donations for its rehabilitation? You?
After several costly surgeries, the moon is still hideous,
but oh, the arc of its nightly touchdown pass.
From the First World’s left ventricle I pump
my fist furiously for each small victory
while the moon circles back on itself:
notch another one for The End of History.
PASSENGER
This place is compact as a small-town convenience store,
cramped as a big city mayor’s heart, car with its
clutch on the left and factory-leather cologne.
It’s barely morning. A headline reads:
Study shows space in our cities declining
and several folks nod when a commuter train
shudders and halts. Slack as a punctured tire
we wait. It’s late in the morning.
Across the Gardiner the sun walks from hood to hood.
Here on the island of office politics, everyone’s basically
pretty nice to your face. After lunch I tinker in Excel
at the edges of The Great Office Poem.
The afternoon’s light arrives like mail
through a door’s small slot.
To say we are equal to what we do
is to lend a softer glow to the underground
parking garage. And then, on the hour, cars stutter
like a misplaced accent. We are always on our way home.
According to the radio: from Avenue
to the Don Valley. This little red wagon
won’t pull itself. Sign as close as you can to the x
or adjust your expectations. It’s deep into evening.
In the hundred or so metres of existence
a porchlight blinks off, then on.
It gets later and then it stays that way.
LIKE CANCER
In response to a common theme, my moustache grows.
Regarding irony, my moustache curls at its ends.
I walk, then I walk some more. Thus my days are filled.
It’s true what they say: if you’ve been around the block
you know the block rather well. Billboards rise
like stubble. After a while, the block resembles
the middle distance in a high school art project.
I shave and I shave. Thus my washbasin is filled.
In response to my face, I weep and wonder.
The lines of your face
draw such pretty little pictures.
Sharpen your crayons, there’s some shading to be done.
With gears dense as headaches we chug along.
Like cancer we’re full of ourselves and make our own fun.
HANGOVER
Outside is a wet cigarette. Last night is
half ash, half scrambled porn.
I put what where? There’s a dead rat
in my mouth. Teeth fuzzy,
fermented, near-victims of a flood
hauled up sputtering and waterlogged.
The morning crackles like the desert
between stations on the AM dial.
The stock market is one thing,
an op-ed on abolishing the penny another.
There’s a recession lurking somewhere.
I’m out of Advil. I can’t think of what to give up first.
AMEN
What’s there can fit in a hand. Take, for example,
the lines in a hand that years have called forth.
You can’t be around nothing, thank God. On an ocean
liner, people cling to one another. On an ocean liner,
a slow heart beats. I’m frothing at the bit.
Dear computer, please live one more year.
Minister of Loping Through One’s Twenties
Like a Three-Legged Dog, I’d like to make a deposition:
I’ve slept in the tall grass while someone mowed
the lawn. Some days I wake up less, wake up missing,
knotted or stripped to the wire. Tell me anything
in your best foghorn voice and I’ll believe you.
INCIDENTAL
I was a stranger in a dream. From a high window,
I looked down. A bass line with legs to its tits
and tits to its chin took a long walk out of town.
I was as lonely as the first Jew in America,
as the last dollar in a wallet.
Some nights I could drown in fun.
This is about the economy adrift as a kid
in his dad’s suit. It’s a wide-open continent
and the Kool-Aid here’s the best.
This is about what just happened.
This is about what’s next.
WALK HOME, EARLY MORNING
The air, leaned on.
An unfinished pillar,
a suburban basement
hungry for plumbing.
Sleep a lazy hook
winching you forward.
Chain-link fences cut cookies
from a doughy sky.
The moon rattles along,
a fat child with a stick
and a blooming appetite.
A radio with a bent antenna
tracks light crossing state lines.
A bottle, pissed in,
is a movement toward
clarity – like you, reclined
against a brick wall,
trying not to spill.
And the day kicks it over,
sunny and dumb. An AM station’s
call sign circles the vandal
like a squad car.
Hello, caller, and welcome
to the show.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these poems have appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, Dinosaur Porn (Ferno House/The Emergency Response Unit, 2010), The Fiddlehead, Ottawater, The Puritan, This Magazine, The Week Shall Inherit the Verse, Toronto Poetry Vendors, Wascana Review, and the Windsor Review, as well as the chapbooks Useful Knots and How to Tie Them (The Emergency Response Unit, 2008) and Mean Matt and Other Shitty People (Ferno House, 2012). Thanks to all who produced these publications.
Thanks to the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous support.
‘That’s what she said’ is for Leigh Nash.
‘This time with feeling’ and ‘Big sighs’ owe a debt to Christian Hawkey’s poem ‘Up here in the rafters everything is clear’ (The Book of Funnels, Verse Press, 2004).
‘Found: The smell of gas’ is a cento of lines taken from a number of Canadian poets.
‘Notes on a theme’ is after a line by the band The Hold Steady.
All the text in ‘Found: Pre-alpha version of a better self’ appeared in various forms on andrewfaulkner.com and the now-defunct andrewfaulkner.net and andrewfaulkner.co.uk.
‘Head’ is after a poem by Jeramy Dodds.
High fives to everyone at Coach House for their endless big-hearted work. Big hugs to family for their support, especially Jean, Steve and Ben.
Thanks to Spencer Gordon, Mat Laporte, Elisabeth de Mariaffi, Jeff Latosik, Aaron Tucker and Nicholas Lea for comments and advice on earlier drafts of the manuscript. And thanks to Dionne Brand, Karen Solie and my classmates and faculty for thoughtful readings of my work throughout my time in the University of Guelph’s MFA in Creative Writing program.
Thanks to Kevin Connolly for early edits and encouragement. Thanks to Jeramy Dodds for his sharp and tireless eye, and unerring insight.
Last but biggest thanks to Leigh, my first and best reader, for her love, large brain and unwavering attention to detail.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANDREW FAU
LKNER co-curates The Emergency Response Unit, a chapbook press. His poems have been published in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2011, and his chapbook Useful Knots and How To Tie Them was shortlisted for the bpNichol Chapbook Award.
The print version of this book was typeset in Aragon and Aragon Sans, from Canada Type.
Printed at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited by Jeramy Dodds
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover art by Masahiro Sato
Coach House Books
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Canada
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