Perfection

Also by Patrick Warner

Poetry

Mole

There, there

All Manner of Misunderstanding

Fiction

double talk

PerfectionPATRICK WARNER

icehouse poetry an imprint of Goose Lane Editions

Copyright © 2012 by Patrick Warner.

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

Edited by James Langer.Cover image by Michael Valdez, www.istock.com.Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

ISBN 978-0-86492-768-2Issued also in print format.Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada.

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Culture, Tourism, and Healthy Living.

Goose Lane Editions500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330Fredericton, New BrunswickCANADA E3B 5X4www.gooselane.com

Contents

9 Waxing11 Ablutions of a Middle-Aged Man14 The Black Rats15 Polyurethane16 Elegy for a Single Measure 18 The Pound of Flesh Bazaar 20 Confirmation21 Blackbirds22 Anorexia24 Four Shorts25 The Chocolate Chip Pancake Is Innocent27 Interstellar Honkytonk28 The Animal’s Absolution30 The Therapist32 The Zone33 The Ravine 35 The Owl36 Cuba38 Fish of my Flesh 39 A History of the Lombards42 The Host43 Funereal46 The Chinny-Chin-Chin47 Keeping an Even Keel

48 Elegy for my Family50 Valentine’s Day53 At the Gallery54 Song of the Closed Road55 Anchoress59 Thanksgiving

for Annie

8

Waxing

It began when I hit the snooze and slept in late, got worse when I perched on the edge of the bedand in one fluid motion attempted to pull my still fastened shirt down over my head.

It was that kind of morning, a broken button I had once thought neat as a crescent moonlodged with force on the bridge of my nose and cut into my flesh, a sickle. Blood trickled,

dripped from my nose to my lip to my lap, thereby waking a sleeper cell in the form of a newly cut key which the guy at the key shop hadn’t properly sanded.

In no time at all it turned into a breadknife, quietly sawing a hole in my pocket, unbeknownst to me until the moment I reached for the gas pump and felt the spill

of coins down my leg. One lodged in my shoe, while several more scattered out in the slushwhere they seemed to refresh themselves, turned silvery in the pavement’s salted wet.

Like sparrows around a heated bird bath those coins seemed — if I can say such a thing — to be enjoying themselves, seemed to be saying that every cloud has a nickel-alloy lining.

9

They said ignore the fact that bad things always happen in threes. Look up, they said,and there above the park I saw a falcate moon, and felt again the pull of mysterious forces,

the magnetic coming together of pieces in a meaningless meaningful way — Professor,let me explain: it’s where the rule of three meets Murphy’s law, it’s the moment when

the number of things the average mind can recall is exceeded by one, but the spirit drawingon unstable power — not Strong-Cobb units of force, but Olivia Newton Joules of laughter —

invents an on-the-spot order. And so it was I took in the grin of that cracked-Aspirin moonaligned above the bust of Winston Churchill, an unusual bust sawn off at the nipples,

and placed on a chest-high plinth in the eponymous park in such a waythat it looks as though he has stepped behind that polished granite block to take a piss,

his bulldog scowl revealing not only his bloody-mindedness but perhaps a waxing trouble with his flow, much like that pump clocking five cents at a time in the early morning ten below.

10

Ablutions of a Middle-Aged Man

What’s in a name? Psoriasis. Seborrhoea.I apply a turban of saffron-coloured cream,read the label while the potion foams:alcohol, citric acids, a cocktail of salts, odd compounds prefixing various “-ates”:mercedes benzoate, pandemonium sulphateand my fave, nymphomaniac chloride.

The tingle comes fast, escalates to a burn.I step under the juddering jets and sloughthe chemical froth and my mineral crust:a pre-cancerous trout under poisonous falls.

Then ratta-fatta-pitta-patta on the terracotta tilewhile I buff my skin with a brand new towel.No old rag nobby scratch for me anymore — that would aggravate my burgeoning rosacea,the curse of the Celts, the sensitive blushthat saddles my nose with saddle soreswhen I drink red wine, an indigenous itch that threatens to sculpt a rum-bubble proboscis.

As with seborrhoeic dermatitis, there ain’t no cure for rosacea, no pill, no drug,though I’m partial to the citrus fruit and teathe herbalist, who lives by the river, serveswithout a trace of irony; she seems blindto the blood orange peel’s pitted texture.

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For this I prepare a home remedy: zinc bits flaked from leftover chimney flashing, magnesium from burnt-out New Year’s flares, sodium gathered from the salt shaker’s threading, iron filed from a rusted window weight.

These I pestle and mix with jojoba,then smear the infected area with paste while humming the theme to Glycol, the musical.

I eschew a shave — I want bristle to balance this grooming; I want a hint of the animal,

but not the scent. So I pit stop for deodorantand choose only those that contain no parabens, ’cos the Paraben family (Methyl, Ethyl, Propyl,sickly Benzyl and ambiguous Butyl)is evangelically committed to killing pheromones.

I rub a jelly balm on my parched elbowsand knees, and also on the soles of my feet — the desert places of my body are advancing.I’ve made my own ever since Europeansdeclared petrolatum a likely carcinogen — just microwave beeswax and baby oil.It’s as easy that, just don’t let it boil.

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Petrolatum, they say, can cause breast cancer.I thank God I don’t have breasts, althoughalong with sagginess, dried-out skin,constipation and wrinkling, I noticethe first hint of a tit, a man-boob, a moob, a pair that boings whenever I take the stairs.How far off, I wonder, is a training manzier?

I bare my teeth and load my brush with paste:fluorides to harden teeth against rot,abrasives to scour bacterial films,and some kind of flavour (I like cinnamon) to mask the decaying bits from previous mealsand the taste of all those detergents and phosphates (toothpaste is conflictedand may be said to exhibit self-loathing).

That’s it. I’m done. I dress quickly and hitthe salt-strewn streets of the downtown.I promise myself, no more than three pints,and no cigarettes. Well, maybe just one.

13

The Black Rats

I shake with nervesall the tiny buttons of my synapses,tiny leather buttons openingand the white stuffing of my feelingspoking out through the openingsand it’s white, so white,not yellow at all, not soiledbut tough and not all that pleasant to touchfibrous, intertwined, full of word shardsroot words and single syllables,a Lilliputian world of onomatopoeia,all of it shivering under the furiousassault of its fathering fearthat all of the black rats of the worldwill find a way into the fibresof my feelings, degenerate ratsfucking and pissing and nesting and delivering their blind naked babiesinto my stuffing, and makingthemselves so at home that soon enough I will beginto proselytize on their behalf;I will say in all sinceritythat rats need a home too,that rats are no different from me or you,and thus become cheerleaderat my own infestation and death.

14

Polyurethane

The yellow-handled stain brushwith its choirboy’s blond fringe whispers slap-happy hosannas to the leprous boards, whileLight Cherry spreads her wet-edge flag of empire around the room.Everything speaks its dissatisfaction.The matte brown colour bores — it’s not how it looks on the can.And I don’t believe in polyurethane’smilky power, to pull wood grain to the surface, make ruby lanterns glow through industrial gloom, mine chunks of amber, make pink as though a mud trout turnedin a tea-stained, bog-hole pool.

15

Elegy for a Single Measure

We would never get along. I would never walk a rod in his shoes, nor he in mine. We would never get along not even if rod became furlong and furlong flowered into chain.

We were discussing the acre. His definition was Saxon: his acre a field that a farmer could plough in a single day. Actually, I said, in practice,a field is all that a farmer could plough in a half a day for his ox or his oxen must rest in the afternoon.

And that set him back a step. And seeing this, I pressed on,bringing into play the tractor and the low cost of diesel and the three-furrow plough and surely he must agree that the acre today must be much more than it ever was.

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And so he retreated into silence that compounded into cloves,stones, hundredweights and tons until it spoke volumes, until I heard in it his plan of attack:

the galleon that on a favourable breeze would slip into port under cover of dark and let loose a broadside,set ashore his pirates in uniform, his cutthroats with cutthroats to cut throats until blood filled barrels and hogsheads.

17

The Pound of Flesh Bazaar

High-glossed collagen Cupid’s bows schoolin bowls of sugar water, propel themselves with little pouts when the doorbell rattles.A half-stone of noses heaped on a counter:alabaster pert-snub and beaked Concorde, aquiline patrician next to broken-veined honker. Ears are dinged-up leathery scoops or tide and beach-sculpted Art Nouveau whelks. The furniture section is all backs and lumbars.Limbs are trimmed and corded like lumber.

In fez-shaped cages perch birdlike handswhile feet on plinths are painted stock-car red and decorated with spent blasting caps where hewn at the ankles as if the gamsthey supported lifted off, rocketed upinto the bodice of the heavenly bodies.

Each tit is taped to a willow stick’s tip,each a rod divining that deep-seated itch,luring you through a paramour’s screen,with a tinkle of beads and Kenny G,to rows of boxes: pinks with lacy hems,blues in sturdy cottons. Press a button and each lid oysters up to show, nestled on a bed of sphagnum moss, the genitals at rest, so demure, at peace.It makes you wonder about their reputation.

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And today they are offered at half price,or for only $19.95 you can mix-and-match to your heart’s delightanything in the store except what you came for,which may or may not be foundin the innermost sanctum, its entrance pulsing neon, its door not a door at allbut a leather blanket, sodden, dripping.Inside, organs gently piping.

19

Confirmation

Pictures of Charlton, Best and Stileswere my bedroom’s one decoration,stubbly chins, missing teeth, folded arms,Adidas, Adidas, Puma and Adidas,blacked with dubbin. Play made each boota sort of pouch, marsupial, and supple as my mother’s breast, I guessed.

I was eleven, I’d just been confirmed.I don’t know what I was expecting.After such infusions of catechism, visits from the bishop, I was hoping forthe literal. But no dove dove downupon that boy wearing beige slacks and a ribbed, form-fitting green polo neck.

Cruciform church in a cruciform townthat had no bookshop, and where the literate gasped like fish in the air.This was where I learned the facts of evolution,the dying to become that is really dying — those posters fluttering on my bedroom wall,each a one-of-a-kind specimen.

20

Blackbirds

Hidden behind a scripted screen I watched the blackbirds chatter in the courtyard,drop their feathers for electric plumageonce the gates were locked behind them.

No longer common blackbirds, true thrushes,there were Gianni Versace ravers from Rome,Alexander McQueen’s smart London birds,fabulous Parisian Jean Paul Gaultier chicks,

who flew to order when called by a cardinal (she who had come disguised as a starling, my Mohawk vermillion-crested lesbian friend from a tobacco town in Southwest Ontario).

Crouched in my blind, Sir Richard Burton,I could have crowed to see what until then was anathema to me, how these hijab birds so craving of touch, kissed and caressed,

how they traipsed across mosaic floors, and with hooded eyes observed their teacher, who drawled the rules of English grammarwith broad vowels and cot-caught merger.

21

Anorexia

The less there is of you the more of me.The doctors refer to me as he.He is not you, they say to her.She takes a shaky breath. She runs aroundand I run with her underground.

I play my hostess like a violin,my minimalist concerto for torso and limbs.That’s you in the loo, your woodwind guts,the cymbal splash of watery vomit,the kettledrum of bowels in the bowl.

I am the heart of these stick figures,don’t bother asking where I come from.Look to the weak strain in your code.Look to notions of perfection,to where you fall short in execution.

My hostess dreams of becoming an actress,dreams of the lead in Les Mis.She gives me such a deep and hungry kiss;she’ll end up in the hospital next to the hospice,where I may have to tighten my belt.

She imagines a memorial Mass in Maine:the mourners arrive by private planeand are ferried to the church in limousines.I play the mourners like a violin,my catgut bow weeping and wailing.

22

I spend most of my time not dying. They spend most of their time trying.Those last two I plucked from Fred Seidel.I could go on, in fact, I think I will,my passion for girl flesh is inexhaustible.

Tuesdays we meet with her group — the Boa-restrictors, my own little cult.One has a ribcage like a catcher’s mittOne takes pills to make her shit.One shaves lanugo off her limbs.

Clouds cluster and turn the sky purple.Little children splash about in puddles.A Pomeranian takes on a Bichon Frise.My little pets are down on their knees.The less there is of you the more of me.

I spend most of my time not dying.They spend most of their time trying.I am the Caesar of their seizures. They are the kill.I’m at the heart of these stick figures’ hearts.I could go on. I could stop. I will.

23

Four Shorts

1. Boy Racer

He’ll go out kicking and screaming,cursing the truck that crossed the line,driving the steering wheel throughhis breastbone into his spine.

2. Crow

With a wheezy cackle and cawcomes a crow he once shot, on a whim. Only after its body went limp did he know what he’d done was a sin.

3. Fox

A rheumy-eyed stare through the dimlight of an evergreen clearing,his head hung low, tongue lolling,the coarse bark of hounds closing in.

4. Nurse

She’s seen hundreds of people die.The end is no bare-knuckle fight.All go gently into that night.

24

The Chocolate Chip Pancake Is Innocent

The chocolate-chip pancake in the dockis slightly flopped over at the neck, as though he were microwave reheated. The judge, a profiterole, has a whipped cream hairdo that is far too young for his face.He looks well past his best-before date.

The chocolate chip pancake doesn’t want todwell on this, and tries his best not towhile the prosecuting solicitor, a saltine cracker,begins to lay out her case: Your Honour,last Sunday morning a fourteen-year-old girl walked into her kitchen. She was still sleepyas she consulted the Canada Food Guide,and poured into a bowl the bare minimumof granola, set beside it a red plum,opted for mild cheddar as her dairy,and recorded her choices in a black diary.

Afterwards, she sat, as in a daydream, looking out on the garden, at the green shoots that had just that week appeared, pushing upthrough the recently thawed mud. Then, seemingly on a whim, she looked around, saw a stack of pancakes in the microwave oven,and, overriding her dietary restrictions,had one. Note that she gulped it down.No sooner had she finished it, however, than she ran to look in the hallway mirror,and there she saw, to her mortal terror,

25

her obese twin looking out at her.At which point she fell to the floor.This is where her mother and fatherfound her, unconscious, six hours later.

Thus concludes the saltine cracker, who nods to the profiterole, who in turn nodsto the court-appointed defence solicitor,a sugar-coated pretzel, who in consultation with her client, outlines a defence in which they opt for dismissal based on a scenario of wrongful arrest:This pancake could not be the guilty one,because the guilty pancake was eaten!And with a triumphant wave she sits down.

The crusty judge shakes crumbs from his gown,which means he will have none of it.With a whack of his meat tenderizer he pronounces the pancake guilty.And later, in his lengthy written judgement, states no reasonable doubt can be establishedwhen one is dealing in irrationality.He imposes sentence. The pancake will fry.At which the defendant is led awayby a strudel and a rhubarb pie.

26

Interstellar Honkytonk

Because he was too shy to sing he set up mirrors. He ran about with a length of blue chalk string, snapping it gently so as to leavesuch marks as slugs could swifferor the heavy morning dew erase.

He set one mirror on the hilltop,another in the apple tree, taped another to a dowel wedged in crazy paving stones. The last he lodged inside the feederthat clings by suction cupto the kitchen window.

All this to bounce one beam,make his own pinball machine,make silver dollars in the dusk,and sunshine in the pantry.

27

The Animal’s Absolution

Best of all were the brilliant thick globs of custard that shook and wobbled like fat. One summer my job was to fill up jars with the stuff, yellow bombs to range on shelvesbefore packing into boxes — mindless workthat freed my mind to wander. Out back, criss-crossed with hawsers, some great animal lay dying, an elephant or an ox, its sore-covered hide weeping rivers of pus.

The boss would tell us how to speed the flow, how to mask its stink, and — nudge-nudge, wink-wink — why the animal, racked with pain and terror, made no sound when its scabs were hacked off, the woundsdrained to fill some last-minute order.

Then one holiday, when the shop was thick with customers all vying for the last tort or cake, I heard from every aisle a rumble — mackerelthrashing ice to smithereens down at seafood;dull thumps and pops where parsnips and carrots launched salvo after salvo towards asbestos-covered rafters, while over in meats, choreographed by a butcher’s chart,shank joined brisket and chump with rump,chop slotted chop with an audible slapas meat reassembled back into animal.

28

I watched it list, stagger towards the light,take up position by the sliding doorswhere it reached out a red-stamped, stitched and reconstructed hand to everyone in sight:to those just coming in and to those sickened by life, who wished to escape it.

With a wink of its eye and a click of its jawit conferred on all its animal absolution:Thanks a million, it said, for the farmland and forage, for the warm barn in winter, for allowing us to thrive while others failed.

29

The Therapist

In just five minutes she gave us our narratives:you were the smoother-over, the peacemaker,while I was the perfectionist, and togetherwe had passed these traits to our daughter,given her food for her eating disorder.

“Do you want to be right or be happy?”she asked. “That’s too simple,” I said, “it doesn’t need to be one or the other. I feel happy when I’m right and right when I’m happy. They can go together.”

In just five minutes she gave us our narratives:you were the smoother-over, the peacemaker,while I was the perfectionist, and togetherwe had passed these traits to our daughter,given her food for her eating disorder.

This was the pattern to be broken,the second nature that usurped our natures,but only if we admitted the problem:that was fifty percent of the cure, the restwould come from time in her care.

“Do you want to be right or be happy?”Who doesn’t want to be happy all the time?Who doesn’t want to believe in that fable?She said she could fit us with flexible tools,I thought about hardware. We nodded like fools.

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In just five minutes she gave us our narratives:you were the smoother-over, the peacemaker,while I was the perfectionist, and togetherwe had passed these traits to our daughter,given her food for her eating disorder.

She told us we each had the power to choosenot to let others take over our lives,then she covered herself by means of disclosure:“I myself was something of a perfectionist.I myself was the great smoother-over.”

This was the pattern to be broken,the second nature that usurped our natures,but only if we admitted the problem.She showed us the root and solution.I squirmed in my seat, a retrograde symptom.

“Imagine you’re old,” she said, “at sixty-five.What then will you think about having been angryfor the best years of your children’s lives?”I nodded my head while plotting murder,“I’ll do anything,” I said, “to help my daughter.”

31

The Zone

A downtown hotspot, a black-lit bar, where suits and cocktail dresses flock for wings, and to knock back shots of lemon-scented kitchen cleaner.

The latest shooter has them six deep at the counter, rubbing shoulders, buying rounds, and by end of happy hour dying to confess, come clean at last.

Their sentience a slow drip back downbrain stems, their instinct like a brawlerboasting the body’s honest smells: pit stink, crotch funk, butt whiff.

32

The Ravine

Plasticity, they call this quality of the brain,the ability to reorganize neural pathways.If associations can be made, they can be broken.What is delusion but persistent belief in the face of overwhelming agreement to the contrary?

Mirror, Mirror on the Wall is a strategy.Self-perception equals hypothermic waters in a world where ideas have the status of facts. Money, family, country, and race: all are ideas consecrated as fact.

I picture Sunday Mass, the priest holding up before us the magnum-sized host, the chalice of mini-hosts and then the golden cup filled with wine. I hear each time the sonorous bongthe mushroom-shaped bell makes when hit with the leather-topped stick. I rememberthe feeling of the slim white Communion host dissolving on my tongue, its stale taste.

How strange if transubstantiation had really taken place, the wine thickening and tasting like pennies; the host swelling into soft rubbery flesh. It’s impossible, of course, but what is possible, infinitely realizable, is the human capacity to behave as though sweet sherry were blood and a dry wafer a sliver of parchment.

33

What is really real? Know them by their fruits, I hear my old parish priest say. He would agreethat how we apprehend the world is largely illusion.It’s possible to be afraid of chocolate.

Once I was so thin I could encircle my claviclewith my thumb and my index finger. The mentally ill sometimes see themselves as visionaries. Many of the saints were probably mad,and many of the scientists, too, perhaps.

Despair turns into a cramp in my colon. Hope at such moments is in being irrational: If how we see the world is largely imagined, can we not break and remake associations, reorder?

Putting one foot in front of the other, I start a list:strong as a hare, swift as an ox, sly as a bee, quiet as a dodo, busy as a fox, hungry as an eel, dead as a peacock,weak as a badger, slow as a lamb.

In this way I make progress along the ravine, my boots crunching thin layers of ice.

34

The Owl

The vole’s pink foot clattering through dusksends decibels binging off the owl’s disc face to root in her tufted ears.

Her oscillating head’s a radar beamcovering three quarters of the pie.

This owl’s crepuscular. Her crypticplumage blends with dusk. Her serratedflight feathers muffle wing beats.

There’s nothing there but disturbed air.

Another poem for the great philosopherwho will eat three thousand in a season.

Leave behind a grey-brown pellet,a fur and bone scroll for school kids.

35

Cuba

Where is the revolution?

Not in the concrete watchtowers rising from scissored-out palms, from sabre-like grasses.

Not in the soldier-boy’s slumped shouldersthat seem to say: I have given up my dreamof going hand-to-hand with a US Marine.

Not in the wide-bodied cars right out of the Eisenhower era.

Not in our brown-skinned tour guide’s eyesthat are blue as the distant peaks of the Caucasusand cool as the Caspian Sea.

Not in the slat-windowed cinder-block houses,each one lit by a wide-screen,as we bypass Holguin.

Not in the crabs that side-step the lawnslike surveillance drones.

Not in the yellow-eyed blackbirds that skim the buffet; not in the vultures pig-tailing thermals above the tiered pooland crying Raoul!

Not in the gardener’s iguana eye,not in the gardener who with a machete

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keeps pristine the grounds around our chaletand presents hibiscus to the señora.

Not in the sun that chases the zebras at nooninto the shade of the cabanas.

Not in the sea wind whipping sand in our faces,keeping the catamarans tied, the parasails grounded.

Not in the guerrilla thundershowers.

Not in the gift shop’s shelves of cigars and racks of revolutionary literature.

Not in the Coke cans I find tucked away.Not in the golf shirt embossed with a decal of Che.

Not in the sunscreen’s vastly inflated price.Not in the bank teller’s determinationto make a three-tourist peso note the smallest denomination.

Not in the sugar-fat clerk who insistsI gave him twenty, not thirty.

Not in the slogan I see at Frank Pais Airport,in letters five feet high:SOCIALISMO O MUERTE.

37

Fish of my Flesh

He spoons the red sauce with a silver ladle.It’s my vice, he says, and talks about its structure:its slow-releasing triple-layer taste:spice to make a poker of the tongue,salt to wash out cankers in the gums,sugar cane to soothe. It goes best with fish,he says, the fish that lives within our flesh:the whiskery slab with dead doll’s eyes that sleeps below the bull’s eye circles wishes make,inert before syllabic streams that trawl right past its picket lip.Other than my sauce, he says, only deathcan rouse it, set it thrashing shallows,scything reeds, swishing shore grass,a bubble jet of jet-black roe it smearsin abstract patterns with its tail.

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A History of the Lombards for Carmine Starnino

i Because I no longer trust my eyes, I can tell you about the Lombards, who not only hauled their huts on sleds from the frozen reindeer lands, but also brought the frontier with them, presenting it to their enemies, the settled-down folk, the soft and comfortable, the easily fooled.

The further south the Lombards went the more gullible the people. How else to explain the deception carried by the Lombard women,who in beards woven from their tresses stood disguised as men among their men, a shadow army, flickering between campfires? Ahead of the Lombard advance ran rumours of dog-headed soldiers who ate nothing but blood-soaked oats, and would, if kept from battle, gut themselves so as to gorge on their own gore. In this way, whole armies weakened and were broken before the fighting even began.

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ii

The Lombard king, by this time half-blind, halted one evening his piebald mare so she could drink her fill from a fish pond, but what he saw there made him stare for some time, made him twirl his birch lance and with its butt end stir the waters,

what he saw filled his heart not with fear but admiration and gratitude for a life that could still move him to wonder. Long he squinted into the brackish, leaf-flecked pool where squirmed seven infants, his attention undisturbed by the laughs and advances

of the prostitute who had just that morning delivered them, the spell broken only when a fat fist gripped the ladling spearand the old king, seized and shaking, raised from the fish pond a banner: his streaming, wriggling, blue-eyed successor.

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iii

The day the Lombards faced the Heroli the sky divided. Above the Lombards it brooded while above their enemy it remained blue.Both camps read this as an omen. It was clear to all there would be a decisive victory. Dear reader, can you tell me which side won?

I guessed — from that blue sky — the Heroli, but I was wrong. Who knew that a spell brewed in the Lombard’s cloud boil? Soon thunderhead hammers fell on their enemy, so confusing them they mistook the green flax fields at their backs as pools

fit for swimming, and reaching out arms and kicking out legs tried to breaststroke. This was how the Lombards found them, dazed creatures thrashing a foreign element, defenceless babes, carp in a well, easily caught, easily speared, easily killed.

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The Host

That night the universe played in reverse. All the stars, like the headlights of motorbikes and cars in the derby of time, tripped close.

And among them torches, flashlamps, glow sticks, the pulsing cones of lit cigarette tips. These marked the coming of the host

of ethereal creatures, entities a mickey on the wrong side of nothing, now orbiting the flue of the burnt out,

clattering like reeds in interstellar winds,rattling like silver dollar plants in the fall, layering my tongue with brittle, papery shards.

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Funereal

The VictimAn acolyte of the Western romantic tradition,a dyed-in-the-wool man, right down to his socks,now he’s wrapped in linen in a plain pine box.

DiagnosisA bacterial or viral infection in judgementbred in him an anaphylactic response to duty: he came to resent every intake of breath forced on him by his autocratic body.

Who KnewThe carotid could be used as a siphon?Why death, of course. Amen.

What the Cleaning Crew FoundAll over the counter: his flash-flood blood,jars and tubes of body ointments ochredwhere red had dried, while under it all,like a breath-blown sign on a cave wall,his negative handprint on Victorian tile.

SymptomMore and more he spent time in the bathroom.Dazed before its gilt-edged mirror, he sculptedhis hair’s puff and quiff with gobs of productuntil side-on it looked like an ampersand.In marketing terms, his hair was his brand.

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CauseMore and more he spent time in the bathroom:as if channelling his daughter who died in the womb,and who that summer would have turned fifteen.

Being VainWas as unpleasant to him as the memory of his wife ranting and crying and calling it risible that he wanted an abortion; it was his beliefthat a child would make their art non-viable.

The Funeral His childless wife wants him buried near Nice,in the place where they first fell in love, that day they drank Château Margauxfrom the bottle, smoked home-grown grass, and where later she asked him to undress,pose naked in a Feminist deconstruction of Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l’herbe.

The Role of the StateBut the state will not let her bury him there,in the fresh air, under those poplar trees, flashing binary code, now dark, now minty green. The Final SceneShe must bury him in a consecrated plotat considerable expense. She pictures the gravedigger, reading a pocket Hamlet, and sipping black coffee in the cab of his mini-excavator, which he has parked discreetly behind cumulus bushes.

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Her GriefThe lilac’s flowers have all turned brown,though their heavy scent still lingers on. His Best FriendSuggests a private ceremony to followthe official ceremony. They will bury him in effigy at that day-trippers’ spotwhere they quaffed the Château Margaux.

The EffigyAs effigy they will use his teddy bear,a threadbare, long-limbed Pooh, its beige earsbrowned and still a bit sticky from the honeyhe was given as a child, to sweeten his dummy. The Bear FactsThat bear was with him even in the last hour — its fur stained darker all down one sidetells how it stemmed the tide,stopped blood from seeping out under the door.  The Widow’s Last WishMorbid, sentimental and true is how his widow wants the ceremony following the ceremony to be. Brown earth on green grass, river flow,foam rubber and fur against the cold.

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The Chinny-Chin-Chin

You push a genetically modified burger,pork engineered to taste of green apples,smothered in foie gras grown under glass.I opt instead for the transgendered bison.

When you ask about my just published noveland what it was like to explore a new genre,my original vision’s versions and revisions riddle like bouquets of aerobic bacilli.

My only defence is to answer by asking how happy you are with life in the bedroom.And when you squirm in your seat and lean in,I tickle that hair on your chinny-chin-chin.

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Keeping an Even Keel

At nine, the sea was a sheet of tin.At nine-o-eight it began to corrugate, a carpet with land-bound eels underneath.Small wavelets lifted, their crestslike washed apothecary bottles,I mean those streaming greeny blues.

Some lifted higher, showed lace hems,bringing back (after a fashion) a fashion,the canned can-can, and everywhereundergarments began to show,dragging generations to the surface,many still in nightcaps, whitecaps,setting them to moan and thrash.

Spittle flew and unravelling braids blewin streaks downwind. Dense foamerupted as though tons of detergents(for years dumped quietly in the ocean)betrayed a wish to come clean.But the ocean only rolled a shoulder,swallowed white inside more white.

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Elegy for my Familyafter Morrissey

The winds blew colder by a few degrees,the bog cotton bent so low it dippedits puff into rain-softened muckin those lonely places where as a familywe’d drive to picnic on a Sunday.

Somehow, no matter how warm it waswhen we left home, no matter how blueand unobstructed was the summer sky,a cloud would condense, as if from sin,and all afternoon block out the sun.

Where we spread our plaid blanket,a toad would squirt with a flash of yellowand frighten my sister who would frighten my other sister, causing meto tip over our flask of scalding tea.

My father would shout, and I would cry,and my Ma would sigh. Why, oh why, oh why we were there in the first place,where black-faced sheep, their woolshowing stabs of red or blue, bawled,

where farmers saw no need for walls.My family picnicked in lonely placesbecause we couldn’t stand the thoughtof making small talk with strangers.There was something special about us.

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That something special was in me as well,who climbed to godforsaken heightsin search of some external paralleland found perhaps a ruined cottageor something equally pathetic.

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Valentine’s Day

The flatbed trucks of chickens have arrived.The crates are stacked on top of one another.Some are wrapped in sky-blue tarps and some are bare. The wind inspects the snow-white feathers.

The meat plant men step outside to smoke.They smoke to get away from the smell.They inhale and reminisce about delinquent days,getting high and pipping off from school.

They stare across the lake at Her Majesty’s Pen,filled with small-time crooks in mid-career,those who given a choice between a life of crime and a life at the abattoir

chose not to attend all day to a spigotthat fills baloney skins with hot baloney.The empty sheaths are flesh-tone johnnies.The machine shits turds of briny meat.

Nearby, in an office tower, it’s lunchtime.The secretary shakes cheddar on a chicken Caesar.Her supervisor fumes and sips some water.They both work for a real-estate tycoon.

It’s Valentine’s Day and the day before the anniversary of the Ocean Ranger sinking.They say a freak wave smashed a portholeto blacken the harvest for Big Oil.

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As she fills her mouth with moisturized meat,the secretary tries not to think about chickensand the flatbed trucks full of snow-white feathersshe sees on her way to work each morning.

Her tycoon boss should have a view from prisonfor bribing city officials to rezone.Where once were trees, there are now houses.Where once were houses, there are big box stores.

The tycoon thinks of his office staff as whores,and he often longs to unpack his sausageand have his secretary suck itwhile he reclines in his swivel leatherette chair.

A squabble from the lunchroom wakes himfrom his daydream. The radio is switched off,and he hears the supervisor bark.In the ensuing silence he is aware of his hard-on,

the one in his pants and the one in his mindthat pulses black and blue, black and blue and whiteas though he had been staring at a lit fluorescent light.In the silence he can almost hear it hum.

The supervisor walks into the kitchenand switches the radio off. I wish they would shut up about that, she says, that crowd on CBC.What do any of them know about grief ?

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She is angry because she did not get a valentineand because she does not want to rememberhow her father and his best friend drownedor how glad she was to be rid of them.

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At the Gallery

1. Narcissus

How you wish to be seen, Narcissus, to be taken at facebut not seen through.

2. Young Turks

Eager boys with notebooksloose trained, sceptical eyesand read for signs of duckwithin each painted decoy.

3. Upholstered gallery chairs

Grief fermenting in the deepsof their bruised black fabrics,they venerate white stuccoand asymmetrical rococo.

4. What pictures feel

Our sable strokes and gazingas the faintest purr,as the stereoscopic blur of moth wings on vinyl siding.

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Song of the Closed Road

Nervous as a hare I start on my way,delusional, trapped, the world a dwindling avenueof brown leaves and precious few choices.

I will need all the luck I can find. I have no luck.I will make a song of my grievances, keep my distance, hoard,carry a compact of neuroses, born of books and book births.Tense and unhappy, I will keep to the back roads.

The earth it grows not what I want.I search for a ladder into the stars;they are lonely up there and need me to shine themif they are going to suffice for any of us.

(Still, sometimes I feel lightness upon me,the tentacle reach of commitments withdrawing,and I can’t believe this is happening.I am emptied of them; and they are emptied of me in return).

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Anchoress

Stares arrow at evening to my beehive’s lit window,and at midnight hover,a blur of moth wings,white moths like angels that once were worms

•

It’s the same old story:woman’s eyes are a pit,her long neck is a pit, her full lips are a pit,these words are a pit, all should be coveredlest the animal fall in

•

They say I’m the pelican that lives all alone,so quick to anger she murders her chicks,then beak stabs herselffor blood to revive her tattered offspring,a devilish trick

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•

They wish me to starve,when fasting has mademy arm hairs long, lash my bare skinwith rushes and sticks,suffer a hair shirtuntil my wisdom’s salt flavours God’s meal

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Meat rots without salt,breeds worms and stinks,and treated too harshlythe body will die;God doesn’t want this,He is bound to flesh,to the mud of it, to the filthy mass of it

•

Those who would hurt meare tools in God’s hands,as a man beats his sonto show him what’s right,so God uses manto further His purpose,then crushes him flat:this I can’t understand

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•

Priests say I’ll delighton Judgement Daywhen devils with hammersthin out my tormentors,but I foresee no delightand puzzle why Godwho feels all men’s paininflicts pain on Himself

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This body’s my home,but it’s a strange land,a prison in whichI live in death’s cell

•

But I must be patientin the face of temptation,submit to being tested,as the goldsmith’s fireburns off false gold,makes true ore shine,so my illness is firewhere shines my crown

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•

Tonight I will dream the view from my parlourand it will eat my promise,dismantle my chamber,and if this keeps goingI will find myself scorned,following the goatsby the herdsmen’s huts

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Thanksgiving

Spinning floss, tickling puffball dandelions, Sunday night’s bale of laundromat lint torn open by cat claws, a free fall of pinfeathers, a milkweed squall in the trees of her lungs.We watched, concerned, as a dry hard cough made a marionette of our youngest childthat whole afternoon. We watched until the little flesh depression, above and behind her bird-like clavicles, began to pop,then took her to the hospital where we waitedfor the mewling kitten to drop from its perch on the highest bronchiole branch, for the pipe organ’s endless tune-up to stopor to belt out Handel’s Messiah.

Enter the doctor, with sounds of flags snapping,so newly minted, but with bedside manneras homey as gathering sun-warmed sheetsfrom the line, a shoulder to bury your face in,his prescription pad a snow-white magic tableton which he inscribed in hieroglyphicstwo spitting cobras backed into a cornerand a horse kicking hard against a gate.

Eleven consecutive green lights later, the Drug Mart’s jittery double doors parted,the only branch open late. Mission driven, I zigzagged down abundant aisles

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to the altar of the pharmacy, where I handed in my sheaf of scripts — two puffers, one steroid — and my handy lock-pick Blue Cross card.

“This could take up to ten minutes,” said the pharmacist,apologetically, while touching cropped grey hair.Waiting, I perused the racks, noting Vagisil,Vaseline, Vicks and Visine, until my contemplationof the order was brutally interruptedby a woman I’d met once, years before, at a party,a bloodless Goth, in bustier, boots and black vinyl mac.

“I could see her from the car. I watched her preen,plump, haul her pantyhose up. She stalked you,” said my wife, her feathers pleasantly dishevelled, when I returned, less than ten minutes later, carrying a small white bag, its top edge folded down to a lapel, the stapled receipt like a first-place pennant.

With Blue Cross the drugs cost twenty dollars.With no coverage they would have cost far more. I thought about this as I lay awake at some ungodly hour, next to my wife, our two children asleep downstairs,while all around us, invisible, lay the earthly poor.

Then I thought about the time I was stricken by acute appendicitis, rushed to the hospital and saved. In the olden days I would have died, and my wife, too, a whole continent away,asphyxiated by severe childhood asthma,a tent caterpillar inside the mesh of her cocoon.

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Melodious, now, the sound of her snores in the room.Harmonious the symmetry of our bodies, one floor above our children, safely dreaming,lit iodine orange by their turtle lamp’s glow.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the following people who read and offered valuable advice on many of these poems: Rochelle Baker, Mary Dalton, Elise Partridge, Anne Simpson, Carmine Starnino and Annie Warner. Special thanks to James Langer who edited the final manuscript with care and patience.

Thanks to the editors of the following magazines in which some of these poems first appeared: Riddle Fence, The Fiddlehead, and Paragon.

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Patrick Warner is the author of three collections of poetry: All Manner of Misunderstanding; There, there; and Mole. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals, and he has twice won the E.J. Pratt Poetry Prize. Born in Claremorris, County Mayo, Ireland, Patrick Warner immigrated to Canada in 1980 and since then has lived mostly in St. John’s, Newfoundland.