in which the narrator is asked for spare change

for two Canadian dollars –

a medal for a place

between second and first –

I take possession of all poems

written by a man called E.J Pratt.

then, for three, I take the bus downtown

spend twenty-five on dinner and a beer –

Czechvar, 500ml, with a neck of golden foil –

before a woman introduces herself

as homeless, in need

of a hostel bed to sleep away

another day of hell, to dream of abuses

her father meted out when he got drunk

and I tell her to her toothless face

that I haven’t got any change

bury my toes between the cobblestones

look askance at the unloading dock

which lines up perfectly

with Kitsilano

on the other side of road-dust

dusky waters –

those freighters in the bay

must wait their turn

to come in and use the red

monstrosity

in order, then, to leave –

they’re parked like cars might be

or a pod of shadowed whales

come to surface for the purple clouds

and a few vital gulps of the balmy air –

there could be prestige cars in some

tonnes of Dollarama miscellany

in others – it’s all unloaded

with the same machine – screened

signed off and stacked for later phases –

a Porsche Cayenne might sit atop

a crate of tit-shaped stress balls

this very moment, at which time

the woman, whose eyes are green

but wreathed in striking yellow

wishes me goodnight and is on her way –

one, as this guy Pratt might have said

of the multitudinous

     voices that would tell

of the move of life                      invincible.

mountain poem 1, part 2

the girls enter the water, paddle single-file

like a family of garrulous otters

to a matrix of reed-covered ropes

still affixed to the bottom but without a raft

and hang there, buoyant, despite a lack of salt

heels and arses bobbing like planet and moon

pulling the landlocked boys into orbit –

five lines seem to cut through the air around them

I count twice and then grope for my knees

fiddle with the limp patellae, count again –

it’s one of the rare occasions that I feel

my youth was misspent, and I look away

to the east of Olympic Village, to Bayshores

to Nordic Heights – in fact it might be the west

I’ve never needed direction to mean anything –

in the village, I watched a couple dance on the lawn

with hula hoops, beside the concert stage

and brightly-coloured deckchairs – I drank a coffee

with two ristretto shots and boiling, bubbling soymilk

yesterday when everything was different –

I bought the cheapest camera the store sold

and failed to capture mountains

or the bubbles in my beer

or the salt on the sweet potato fries we shared

at Longhorn waiting for Sebastian to cut work

and come climb, come shake my hand –

*

so numb after drying off at Garibaldi

I couldn’t hook the pole loops to the fly

feel the bloody mosquitoes I had crushed

open the mattress nozzle for inflation

put my hair, cut too short in Toronto, right –

what was it that the old man pointed out

to the woman, so overweight I wondered

how she’d made it up as high as she had –

on a distant ridge, more naked than the rest

under the only exit point for the sun

from the cumulus glacier lifting blue

and dropping oily black – black bear?

I only wished my eyes could see so far –

or else, perhaps, a path less trodden

than the one up to Black Tusk

where the vista from the top was still eternal

and the waning altitude air like light through the veins –

but they were out on a little island spotting trout

scrounging for mushrooms thought a superfood

but against the law to pick, just as for those without

permission, a trout could only swim around and glimmer –

in the interior, Anna said as I took out my i-Pod

for the first time, and lolled my neck around

as slow as the miniature waves came in and lapped

against the freezing rocks, these places are common –

I’d gotten up then to fetch my sleeping bag

lie it down a metre from the shoreline

and, once warm, placed the earbuds

snugly in her ear – listen, I said

and she did, and she understood –

I began to think in frigid absolutes

and killed more bugs

and shivered – the huge glacial wall

opposite me never moved – a humility

immanent in mountains and in her

I’d never know except to recognise

as the only altars I would have, but couldn’t

bow to –

*

hot enough now to have a second swim

the butchered breast stroke hurts the shoulder

I hurt when lunging for her serve

not a month before today

but too far back to travel without pain

greater than I feel as I belly feebly

for the towels and my day pack on ‘the beach’ –

that’s what they call it here –

drying off, it strikes me in a hazy spell

of emptiness, that I could leave tomorrow

or never leave – that a Zen monk might have appeared

on bonsai island, a monastery imbedded in the mountainside

a shoal of flying fish taken off

towards the airless heavens, only a short flight

and nothing would change in me –

why then, when I look around and find

the teenagers have left, do I feel

a sense of pity for that decommissioned rope swing

a sense that the rope swing has been falsely accused

and is now, as it will be until with age it falls

utterly alone, and beyond saving?

mountain poem 1, part 1

they pull up short up of the shoulder

just shy of the overhangs

when the rope swing blows towards them

cut in the fortnight prior to half its length –

tied too high in the ferns to get at properly

the Whistler authorities have put it out of service

much as the ski runs not converted

to mountain bike trails are in summer

or the chairlifts hanging in PVC bags

so high above the bears on Fitzsimons river

because a boy leapt off too late and later died –

and so they swim out to the furthest raft

tied like a timber planter box in the turquoise

of Lost Lake – a naked man who looks adrift

lies belly-up on the middle raft, long white hair

laid out on the treated pinewood like a spill

and I am on the closest, eyeing the snow

stained a corrective pen red by summer algae

from the point where vegetation dies away

up to the summit – that black and white candelabra –

one boy decides to eat his apple core –

the stem he tosses almost hits the head

of a whiskeyjack buried in wildflowers

a holograph flickering over purple pixels

or so it looks to me in the alpine glare –

another boy is so hyperaware of his steps

so conscious of the places his feet go

and the will that ferried them there

that he strikes me as far older than the rest

like the glaciers frozen over all year round –

even when it’s thirty degrees down in the village –

I spied from the edge of rock faces

mossy with marmot hair, almost motherly

swans behind their signets of spearmint water

and the pine hills, higher and lower than most

of the sloping meadows, but always whiter

stiller – less convivial with the sun

but conduits so faithful as to boil out eyes

or put the sharpest into misapprehension

not glaciers but clouds, or raw brightness, or

raw silence – I think I see the Quicksilver

logo on the bikinis of all three girls

riding their feathery weight down to the boys

and on their bags, that expensive yoga brand

all Canadians love, especially the men –

so dazzling is the pink – the green – the blue

like malamute eyes, that the bathers must be new

must never have been in water –

I’d never been in water as cold as Garibaldi Lake

where sunken trees were teased by rainbow

flurries in the clear-as-teardrop shallows

bonsai pines held fast to every outcrop

glacial runoff threaded from the green

into spillways overtopped by folkloric footbridges

and every tree branch was a caribou antler returned

chipmunks darting from tent to bear-proof food bags

never less than desperate to look upon the unseen

to move, like the boy who’s nature seems more mystic

  

than it is, with purpose unswerving

       but always just beyond grasp, like the farthest raft

             on account of the naked man, farthest outcrop

on account of hypothermia –

the aluminium ring around the billy can

blackened as the water boiled, turned green

at the points where the kerosene flames licked

the ice on the path to the drop toilet, bored

by snowshoes searching for grip atop the slick.

paddle boarders pass me, headed north

to the busier shore, the one on Blackcomb side

alive with a sort of bucolic, carefree whimsy

I’d thought dead – then a kayaking armada

headed by the only soldier over ten

a First Nation woman with hair like black boiled wool

takes the naked island – the savage flees

and is made to flee even faster by the names they call

so loud the black bears hear, and the laughter –

in a squint I can see the polish

on the second girl’s toenails – orange

like the tigerlilies opening, at last, in Anna’s garden

at the corner where the hangers meet the herbs

and the first of the tree log pylons

pushing the ceiling to such vertiginous heights

begins on its concrete bed –

on their pine needle plinth I sight those feet

as one might a photograph of better times –

dark red lint from the bamboo socks

all there was adorning mine when suddenly

I found that both my boot soles had fallen off

to the toes at the foot of our six hour hike

to the lakeside campsite, and with no other choice

I cast my heavy pack off onto the trail

bent the legs, feeling the strain of the early start

and the weight of the camping stove and three days’ food

stretched a sock over each boot to the heel

where the glue had come unstuck, and toiled as if

in snowshoes up the jagged switchbacks

the soaring, sunless ascents through walls and rooves

of ferns like the one that rope swing limps from now

intermittent glacial panoramas

rivers turned from thunderous to mute by single hairpins

and the soundproofing of a thousand trees, a thousand boulders

floral galaxies orbited by bees

                                           with paler stripes than those at home

rustle of cold cascades passing under the path

sweat paralysing my back where the load pressed hard

brooks like gutters formed along tree root escarpments

my resolve to keep from breaking up the moss

to keep the sodden soil away from my mouth

the soil shaken free of the body by a wind that only blew

when the terrain opened out, and a lake, unnamed

on the map, would soon appear

fitting and starting like light off the dewy grass –

poem set in dirt and water

with our hands we dig new tributaries

we heed the call of Lake Superior

intrepid and yet so rooted in one place

as distance and digging tell me I am –

its hairline ripples, the hearths aglow

on its archipelagic shores

water held against its will by giant weirs

moose antler cairns, moose antler curses

sunken elk far afield of its crystal tracts

dappled with old age, dew from arrowed ferns –

as she tires, I feel that my pace quickens

just as the antithesis happens when we fuck

no more free space behind my fingernails

I’ve been too awestruck, too occupied to bite

no pain but an ecstatic quiver in my back

dirt in the crook of her elbow, eyes overcast

with effort, a sense that this is all for naught

our bare hands are well-meaning but not enough

the hummingbird chasing the hawk always falls short

the hair on her arms too short to be moved by the wind –

I paw at wet soil and rub my hands together

until what comes away is warm, short pastry-like

over-handled, smells like darkest winter –

the sound of the friction calls to animals

who answer silently – she’s up to her knees

in this enterprise uniting us through strangeness.

lament on the decay of Canada

fitting, perhaps, that the air smells like microwaved mud

curlicues of brown paint peel from every signpost

rigged with wiring and traffic lights, reminiscent

of homemade bombs, and a scaffolding rig topples over

with the weight of a family of pigeons, when

sitting fearfully out front of its elm-flanked

old city hall, I think what has happened

to Toronto – to Canada, my mother’s birth country?

long layovers make me see things wrong.

a fact, but I think that at any rate I see

not what’s bad a priori but in decline –

*

why do the number of flags lining the streets

measure up so faithfully to the number sleeping on them

the masses of real flags – those without maple leafs

with red and white stripes not from dye but bad sunburn –

sleeping in gardens, the hospices of the city –

asleep on vents until the muggy morning heat floats across

from the far side of one Great Lake or other?

why do so many men want for shirts and equilibrium

in these infant hours? so many tributaries

call to me from younger, kinder memories.

*

Canada, your people don’t know which way’s up

but look down enough to see just where that is –

your daughters’ daughters live in Kitchener

in houses with rooves for snow, garret rooves like bells

and weep – stare, from Winnipeg, into the endless prairies –

your daughters’ husbands paralysed or dead, or destitute

your daughters’ sons as afraid of people as people are of them

your daughters’ sons baying for the blood of Steven Harper.

*

Condominiums are eating Toronto alive.

the oversized moustaches drawn on propagandist billboards

above the photoshopped lips of gorgeous blondes
relaxing in the trappings of a better life than yours

a space age life thought up by Ice Constructions

or one of the others, are justified – ashen gulls fly low

over junkies coughing up phlegm and hot dog roll crumbs

as they totter by on lifted bikes towards the east, where the sun

is newly risen, low over coffee houses, bathrooms nightly filled

with the urban hell borne like a worm in the bowels

of urban paradise – famous chocolate-gelatine glaze

staining suit collars like war paint the cannons on tanks –

sidewalks never empty and always silent.

*

I know that my underwear is probably stained with cum

that I’ve gone to bed

with three girls in as many days

that age, no matter the grace, bottoms out at decay

I know that cities, countries are nothing if not bodies

born to grow strong and then grow weak and then go

but time suggests that Toronto’s not terminal yet

nor Canada, only that its people have lost something

that, as Wittgenstein thought, makes itself manifest

only that a lot of its people have gone sort of wild –

*

the auto virus has struck Ontario down

so hard that no more need be said

so hard that I cry just to think of what’s to come

for all those folks with houses worth thirty-five grand

and the waterfront casinos making record profits –

Alberta’s vast tar sands aren’t filled with oil

but the worthless ink of Krakens playing defence

and the biosphere’s black bile –

while Calgary is underwater, climate scientists drown

under heavy state-imposed surveillance –

lies are sanctioned, truths must be signed off –

the Espanola paper mills run all day and night

the steam from the press so unearthly as it plumes

out into the gorge above the river, so ceaseless

and pale, too far from the highway to smell

like a conclave of ghosts confused about what they're haunting  –

what of the plights of Quebec, run by the mafia

and the West Coast, what of the Northwest Territories

the Inuit, the First Nation graveyards resembling Hollywood sets

the island on Lake of the Woods owned by Bruce Willis

what of the Moose and the Elk, the Bears, the Bald Eagles?

*

I’m shot. I see a lot of Toronto in me –

I’m half Canadian, I’m three days between showers

I’m loveless and irascible on long layovers –

loveless as the trade unions turned upon by people

turned upon by pennilessness, who clean the parks

and sidewalks while the protests keep on burning –

loveless as the churches, mosques and synagogues

duking it out, with mostly blasphemous arsenals

for the right to be the saviours of the wretched –

loveless as every scapegoat bleating in a foreign tongue –

the roads are wrecked and good food’s hard to find

good coffee impossible

the roads are faded white like old pyjamas

like the facades of Sears and Walmart and Canada Tire

and Target and Petsmart and Thisbarn and Thatbarn

and Dollarama and Safeway and Jimbo’s Emporium –

all faded, all crowded, all cheap –

“don’t get hurt a second time”

say the personal injury lawyer benches –

“keeping Canadians afloat”

say those for credit loan stores

“always fresh”

alleges the great Tim Horton’s juggernaut –

Walmart now sells groceries too, and so the markets close –

alarmed are the frosted windows on every home.

*

Canada, your people cry foul

your wheelchair companies are building multiplexes

your Gotham City architecture

and modular cottages

makes every heart the heart of a cave diver

who’s contorted into a nook of the deepest sea

and can’t get out –

do something, my god, do something –

where is the spirit that built Ottawah

and plotted the Rocky Mountains?

where is the spirit that wrote on Windsor’s sign

“let the river and the earth sustain us”?

where the fuck are your city planners, Toronto?

*

I guess I’ll be moving soon –

the next place I see will be in its centennial year

fireworks in all its convenience stores cleaned out

a plaque laid, or fountain built, in its central park

curtains drawn on every house to let the occasion in

some sweet old movies showing at the mall

the strongest of Canadian accents broken into songs

of homage to a sanctified past, hope for a future

that begins, for me at least in September

and maples, everyone knows, look better come Fall.

poem in which a nervous traveller watches

one-legged pigeons drink what leaked

from the coach now taking me to Thunder Bay.

to watch them, I crane my neck so hard that

if I’d been wearing a dry suit for an ocean dive

the neck would’ve burst and I’d be colder

than I am now in this hyper-air-conditioned cabin.

only my shirt collar echoes back

silver thread in the thick pin stripe glinting –

the glass is so dirty on the outside

the glass is so fogged-up on the inside

but even the sight of that collar revolts me –

the first Greyhound in line is cut loose

leaves slowly – its driver, I noticed earlier, was sweating

profusely, was bald with the face of a baby who might

win beauty contests – then we go and the pedal pushes

betray an urgency like that of the pigeons drinking

an urgency both pneumatic and pointless

for downtown Toronto thirsts day and night for traffic.

poem in which a woman's life story is told

not for thirty years has the barbecue hotplate been washed

nor has the chorus of plush toy elephants

and monkeys and bears and lambs watching her from the top

of the wooden playhouse – under the roof her dad built

as she burns the new man’s dinner.

mistletoe squares on the patchwork pelts are almost opaque now

mud-frosted – red pompom on the monkey’s toque reduced

to its last four tassels – his red lips kissed from puckered to concave

his sad eyes hanging by a few ancient threads – lamb a foundling

aged by an infanthood of hardship, a torn blue ribbon

held by too many well-meaning little hands

touch, no matter how delicate, is all ruinous in the end

that’s how she feels with this overpriced spatula

with all eyes except his eyes glued to her –

where is he? inside? out of the stifling evening air

and earshot of her curses – writing in that mangled diary, maybe.

she turns the patties over – half don’t turn – she curses –

they say three decades of pent-up flavour

is imparted like memories on everything that’s cooked

on those deeper than usual, heavy cast iron ribs

they say time is picked up by the palate more than anything –

she tastes rain, smells it – a bouquet that urges her

to close the hood and smoke that mess ‘til ready –

fiddle the screen door back onto its mucked-up track

take ketchup, mustard and sweet relish from the fridge

put them on the table – take the brocade seat cushions

from the den – out after dark alone and they’d be stolen –

a bread bag with nothing left but two crusts and a slice

plates and glasses and two cans of low-cal iced green tea

turn off the gas the way her father used to

when the house was his and that chorus of toys was hers

when her mother was still alive –

scrape off what’s left of the burgers, feel for the first raindrops

open the umbrella, its white and green candy stripes

almost too bright to look at without squinting

sit down, think fleetingly of her body in French lingerie

her body smoother than it is or will ever be again

wait for him to return from wherever’s he’s gone

nibble at the food, imagine scoffing it all as he watches

sit back as if the world’s gravity has just quadrupled – wait.