and highrises it’s God sticking a hose
into the Devil’s hole to flood him out.
And when the floodwaters rose,
where was everyone?
When fog risen from the lake assimilates varietals
of exhaust, evolves through the financial district, renders toxic
the neighbourhoods, swells over suburbs, the Devil
has forsaken another project, saying sometimes
I can’t fucking concentrate on anything.
He says he does what he does sometimes because
the Devil gets in like water through his weak places.
When it rains like now the Devil yells at God
I’ve told you not to call me that. When it rains like now.
And every time God laughs at this
roofs lift off along the Eastern Seaboard. The Eastern Seaboard
will never understand.
When we are broken, to whom are we opened?
God’s taken all the fish home to live with him, honey.
And when the earth shakes that’s God rearranging furniture
not a bomb in the subway like we thought.
If you feel the Devil with you, he is there.
If you think God has abandoned you,
you are abandoned, his attention
on the World Series, more important than any one man,
smiting the hell out of the Rangers’ big bats as the Giants
lift fingers to the sky in praise and the ordnance
deployed in his name, in making straight the way,
would fill the oceans.
And each foreclosure is a failure of belief,
each immortal jellyfish a failure of belief.
When those who will ruin us are elected,
where is everyone?
And when I return from the desert it’s with the Devil
cast out. With God cast out. Because it wasn’t really me
who did those things before, that wasn’t me.
LIFT UP YOUR EYES
It’s dark by five. The time of year
we cleave to lightboxes, their travel
versions, and dawn simulators ordered online
from the SADLight Super-Store. West, there is some
daylight left, and later, by the north’s lantern, its plains
read in black, white, grey, and lighter
grey, a beauty acknowledged in the animal way
with the whole mind, in a strategy. Distance
lies heavily on that municipality, its roads,
as will the snow, more so now the school has
gone, and the store, closure of which inaugurated
the season and its proprietors’ bankruptcy. Neighbours
rallied to keep their electricity on, but when even this
could no longer be done, they moved in
with family in some other town. He’d been back to gather
a few last things—people had seen him there—
and in his daughter’s home died of heart attack
that afternoon. I met him once or twice,
it being years since I’ve lived in that place,
which like all others is unlike any in the details
of its luck and failures. We hate the one to whom we belong,
and love the one to whom we don’t. Winter will say
its long mass over him, over troubled ground upon which
are written the liturgies, the ends of the earth. Anything
going has far to go. As they wandered. I heard the news
on the phone. They’d come from the east coast.
ALL THAT IS CERTAIN IS NIGHT LASTS LONGER THAN THE DAY
Look at your past, how it’s grown.
You’ve known it since it was yea high. Still you,
as you stand now, have never been there. Parts worn out,
renewed, replaced. Though you may bear the same name.
You’re like the joke about the axe.
In time you’ve learned to behave badly isn’t
necessarily to behave out of character. To thine own self
be true. In script above the nation’s chalkboards,
the nation’s talkshows. And not a great idea,
depending. It’s too much for you, I know.
One day your life will be a lake in the high country no one
will ever see, and also the animals there, figures
indistinguishable from ground.
All of time will flow into it.
Leave the child you were alone. The wish to comfort her
is a desire to be comforted. Would you have
her recognize herself buried alive
double-wides of friends, and friends of friends …
Some of what you would warn against
has not yet entered her vernacular.
She travels unerringly toward you, as if you are the north.
Between you, a valley has opened.
In this valley a river,
on this river an obscuring mist.
A mist not unlike it walks the morning streets, comments on
the distinction of Ottawa from Hull, Buda
from Pest, what used to be Estuary from what used to be
Empress, the ferry that once ran between them.
KEEBLEVILLE
Sausage makers, salt farmers, whose wives and daughters
smoked menthols. Their bake sales baffling displays
of unexplainable choices. They’d built themselves
an indoor pool by 1979. We had none. Our curriculum
embraced partnership for the sake of our physical
education, so each swimming lesson was a lesson in defeat.
Our cries rang off the Quonset hut’s corrugated steel.
As our school failed, theirs thrived, its sprung wood gym floor,
ceiling domed and beamed, classrooms around a mezzanine,
they wielded it like an unassailable proof, assaulted us
with it. All in that ridiculous accent, the inexplicable
outfits. Now our school is gone. Where once we fought them
in the parking lots, the arenas, left our blood and teeth
in the arenas, on the street in front of the bar, after band concerts
and ball tournaments and grad, and sometimes during,
now must we compel our children to be bused there,
to disembark the Blue Bird like prisoners on work detail.
Will our heirs go on to name their own after the wrong
soap opera characters and country music stars? Thirteen miles
down the road, and you’d think it another planet, a hostile
one, or overly friendly, in any case backward and impossible
to understand. No doubt, they’d say the same about us.
Which only serves to confirm what I’ve been telling you.
BIRTH OF THE RIFLE
Gunpowder in the water or wine, the willow
charcoal, potassium nitrite crystals emergent
in manure, barrel in the ground and stock in the tree,
and a new mechanism flowers along the Danube,
along the Rhine. Power without accuracy
is a triumph of unreason. He shot
the passenger window out. Thought it was down
and saw a skunk through it. An idea of the good life
for a person must be based on the nature
of that person. From the Pennsylvania colony
through the Cumberland Gap, by the Rockcastle
River and the Dix, Daniel Boone carried
what was named in his honour. It leans on the seat
of the half-ton where the girlfriend sits
on weekends. It leans in a corner by the screen door,
avoiding the federal registry. Pursuant to the protection
of individual rights against the common purpose
of our ene
mies. Your dinner does not willingly relinquish
its spirit, whose shape remains, whose qualities
are eliminated. Survival relies on the subordination
of non-rational aspects. River Forth, Water
of Leith from whence Patrick Ferguson brought
his breech-loading flintlock and was shot through the elbow
during the American Revolution. Eternal rest
by the Catawba in the arms of the Carolinas.
The totality of things will not change, there is nothing else
for it to turn into, one’s essence a body made
of elements distributed throughout the entire
aggregate, an admixture of heat. By the harbour
where empties the Mill and the West, Eli Whitney
was credited with the interchangeability
of parts. The beauty and the naming of parts. Revealed
in feeling and abilities, ease of motion
and the processes. It rides with us into the fields,
among the seeds in the ground. It goes
to pieces on the kitchen table in copper residue,
solvent, and oil. At the summit of his thirtieth birthday party,
he fired four rounds into the rental’s drywall
to a purpose mysterious to him. If we are good,
it’s because we have recognized goodness. If we are
sharpshooters, it’s not because of Christian Sharps
and his patent. Who moved to Connecticut
to become a trout farmer. Ever looming,
Plato’s “civil war in the soul.” Without extremes
there are no limits. Sighting scope long
as my forearm. Through it may be seen creatures
single and continuous, presenting harmonious
attributes. Once apprehended, they are real
and may be taken. We followed the Henry Repeating
Rifle into the west, and the Winchester
1873. Emptied, the bottle has no reason to live.
When we speak, the blow inside us
produces a flow similar to breath. Prepare
to kill what you eat and vice versa, he said. If not,
what good are you. It was our better half. By the North
and South Saskatchewan, by the Red Deer and the Bow.
The soul resides in those constituents whose removal
leads to our death. For Christ’s sake will you
put that thing down. One day, he said,
you’ll crawl out of your hiding place and thank me.
THE ROAD IN IS NOT THE SAME ROAD OUT
The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn’t looked back, driving in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
experience. Many things we know
by their effects: void in the rock
that the river may advance, void
in the river that the fish may advance,
helicopter in the canyon
like a fly in a jar, a mote in the eye,
a wandering cause. It grew dark,
a shift change and a shift
in protocol. To the surface of the road
a trail rose, then a path to the surface
of the trail. The desert
sent its loose rock up to see.
An inaudible catastrophic orchestra
is tuning, we feel it in the air
impelled before it, as a pressure
on the brain. In the day
separate rays fall so thickly
from their source we cannot perceive
the gaps between them, but night
is absolute, uniform, and self-
derived, the formerly irrelevant
brought to bear, the progress
of its native creatures unimpeded.
We have a plan between us, and then we
each have our own. Land of the four
corners, the silent partner, $500
down, no questions, the rental car
stops at the highway intersection, a filthy
violent storm under the hood. It yields
to traffic from both directions.
It appears it could go either way.
FORTY
It was a black-and-white episode,
our stroll along the shore road at
Tobermory. Sodium lamps did the best
they could for us in their limited spectrum
and reach, walked us out to the end of the dock,
made a short-armed gesture to the total dark.
You posed on a cache of traps. Seamlessly,
we integrated with the background.
It had been quiz night in the Mishnish Pub,
the river bordering Zambia on the tip of our tongues,
rugby, as ever, an unknown quantity, like the Latin name
for onion. We couldn’t pick Lily Cole out of a lineup
if she’d robbed us at knifepoint, and now couldn’t see
through to the limits of our sight. A constellation
of pale boats emerged floating on the air, the horizon
had closed its eyes and disappeared. In this,
our own were not deceived, it’s the mind that makes
inferences. When lying in a small room in the dark,
you often survey distances in a kind of daylight,
don’t you. You left me sleeping
and went back out to the seawall, the drifting
boats, each a new month awaiting your captaincy.
In the cell water, eye water, the water thought
floats on, rigging clanking softly in the breeze
and afterbreeze, you were anchored
by unseen lines to the harbour.
LIFE IS A CARNIVAL
Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit
of disclosure, we trail Google Earth’s invisible pervert
through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier, or grossly
contemporized, denuded of childhood’s native flora,
stuccoed or in some other way hostile
to the historical reenactments we expect of our former
settings. What sadness in the disused curling rinks, their illegal
basement bars imploding, in the seed of a Walmart
sprouting in the demographic, in Street View’s perpetual noon.
With pale
and bloated production values, hits of AM radio rise
to the surface of a network of social relations long obsolete.
We sense
a loss of rapport. But how sweet the persistence
of angle parking! Would we burn these places rather than see them
change, or just happily burn them, the sites of wreckage
from which we staggered with our formative injuries into the rest
of our lives. They cannot be consigned to the fourfold,
though the age we were belongs to someone else. Like our old
house. Look what they’ve done to it. Who thought this would be fun?
A concert, then, YouTube from those inconceivable days before
YouTube, an era boarded over like a bankrupt country store,
cans still on its shelves, so hastily did we leave it. How beautiful
they are in their poncey clothes, their youthful higher
registers, fullscreen, two of them dead now. Is this eternity?
Encore, applause, encore; it’s almost like being there.
ROOF REPAIR AND SQUIRREL REMOVAL
Natural squirrel men, those two,
ladder up the side of the rental, into the attic
before you could say “humane spring-loaded exclusion
device,” footsteps confident, efficient,
though they didn’t speak, presumably
communicating in the unspoken language
of those born to a trade. We’d never heard a peep
up there. Daily, nightly, the main-floor tenants
pushed their ambient electronica
through the vents, but we hadn’t a clue
a halo of chewed wiring threatened us, that the inferno,
as the landlord said, was nigh. Getting used to things
is something even distracted people can do. They thought
they owned the place, but once they leave now,
there’s no returning. It’s time we were moving on,
ourselves. On the walk, ruins
of what an extended family of nuisance animals
had made its nest from. Shreds of paper,
insulation, twigs from the smoke bush, and the bitter
broken wood of the invasive tree of heaven.
SAULT STE. MARIE
A storey of blue flame, the “Bay View Candle,”
from the coke stack at Essar Steel Algoma
marks the southwest corner of the Italian
neighbourhood. Flare from blast furnace pipe #7
in the foreground as tractor trailers and students of cheap gasoline
cross the bridge into Michigan as though everything
were normal. Each day a new frontier
to break upon. The fires mean for now there’s
work. The drugstore clerk plans to stop in to the casino
for a couple hours after shift and what so-and-so
goddamn doesn’t know won’t hurt him. She’s not talking to me
so I’m inclined to believe her. How difficult could it be
to stay here? Anonymous and thereby absolved.
Everyone’s dogs look crossed with wolves.
A hotel guest is an awful thing, repeating I’m not from here into the night
while the money lasts. Perhaps it’s not contentment
animating patrons of the food court, the sanguine tenor
of my waitress, and the men pray for the burners
to go down, the three days off required to heat them back to temperature.
The time it takes iron ore pellets to ship by water
from Cleveland Cliffs, for an epic run at the VLTs,
for mercenaries to shoot 233 protestors in Tripoli
according to the flatscreen above the lobby bar.
WRAP PARTY
The party planner has transformed the space.
Subtract trousers and voilà, an outfit goes from day to night.
And the bartender’s eye elusive as inner peace.
It’s your trickle-down economics in action, the crane shot,