Match (4 page)

The job of the chorus is to explicate the major themes
and to be constant as weather.
Girls stage-whisper pathetic fallacies,
the thunder of their ankles cracking
like hail on wrought-iron railings.
Is the red of their mouths on the horizon –
like the pigment from fifty crushed penny beetles –
a warning?
Whether or not it rains,
the themes recur,
the girls defer,
my chest grows new fur,
a gopher steps out,
leaving its shadow on the hook.
It’s spring again.

Two whatsits cheek by jowl in a kitchen.
She slumped over the bunion of the tuber.

As if the snow globe of the world shook
and they collided, an unlikely set –
Barbie and her jowly pug, heroine and sidekick,
kid at Christmas cradling her rare
albino coal, Madonna and infant
of an irradiated cosmos, shiny as ash.

But it was getting on supper hour.
I cooked romantically – you can guess who lost out.
I cleaned a dozen gleaming sockets
with my peeler’s plover end,
an eye, an eye, an eye.

In time a broom swept through, filtering
the little glints of sight from the tile.
Who knows what anyone sees in anything?

Is the firefly before the amber,
a vowel to bend a precious metal mouth.

Leaves the back seat ablaze with BBQ-chip fingerprints.

Pilots past in a bath towel before putting on clothes.

Is a phase of the moon of a Lazy Susan’s twirl,
first fleck of dust before a landslide.

Tickles in the throat of the pawn shop’s hourglass.

Dangles several centuries from the asterisk of her smile.

Slips into something so comfortable it’s permanent.

Is survived by upskirt voyeurs of the cathedral ceiling,
open-mouthed gnomes at the screes of wind instruments.

Sleeps under a duvet of soot thick as the icing
from candlelight vigils.

Brian is tiny, the size of a dime but slimmer
as he corkscrews down the funnel
to the Hospital Auxiliary collection bin.
As fast as a drop peels down porcelain
he slips downtown, underground, rock bottom.
He is good at it, athletic even.
Takes it like a flicked ant –
all its bones on the outside, glowing tarmac,
still clutching a diamond
of sugar for the queen.

Turns out Brian has more practice
than your average heartbreaker –
he’s been falling since age nine or eleven.
Hurtling brakeless on his skateboard
in the wrong kind of jeans,
powered by the wrong brand of batteries,
Brian bounced off the lip of his driveway
into the abyss.
Would you fetch some gladiolas
on your way back, dear?
his mother called after him repeatedly.
Brian was not ugly, but the other children
kept this information to themselves.

His one-time fear of escalators,
his brushes with halitosis, the reek
of his father’s mistress’s shaving foam
in the tropics of the bathroom.
The time he totalled a cat
on the grin of his sister’s Volvo,

and the sky turned fur somersaults.
When he was so poor and so clueless about cooking
he got scurvy. And a girl bowled his five-pin psyche
like a hedgehog down a gutter. The twenty times.
The forty. Poor Brian.

Tonight the sky from my window
is a thousand-storey game of pinball.
I make him out amid lit pegs in his shabby velvet plummet:
a freckle. The moss he gathers is a lint pill of stardust.
He lands, if anywhere, below the horizon’s overbite,
gets up to his old tricks, if at all, in miniature.
Not even seismographs detect
what his so-small-it’s-unopposable thumb
is doing to that blouse, what slim reverberations
tease out under.

A postscript:
I wanted to dream about something bigger than you tonight,
Brian, I really did. Lately I’ve been galloping on horseback
and seem to have the power.
But my war pony was itching for a charge
through the miniature theme park of someone else’s misfortune.
Not even the phenomenal muscle
of my Popeyed brain could stop her.
I am sorry about the lump in your lung or your gut
or wherever that bad-luck penny
landed – tails. Truly.
My imaginary girlfriend, her elegiac
scent of magnolias, is sorry too.

But it is your real life I am writing, the one where
you are a past-prime basement renter
wizened by twice-filched ideas
for tattoos, sun-belted patio minder sconced
in neon nylons and a grin like perpetual noon,
or even a man with a well-groomed retriever
and a falsetto for answering the phones.
A dwarf among sleeping women.
Your name Susan or Gertrude or Humphrey,
and the seams that hold you together
visible to the naked eye.

Degrees of separation
are in the low single digits
and dwindle as summer unfurls its rag mats.
You could be a friend or a lover
of my ex-wife; you could be my first
cousin, and would that be so wrong?

We’re linked by the crumbs of a hurricane trail,
cheques I’ve penned to you
with a meaningful silence in the memo field
like a line dashed down the centre of a road.

I stare at that line whitely
as the sun stares at snow.

Work week a tickle on a haunch
with no muscle, terrier strays
of a sleep-tossed sheet. Mumble
mumble. Side-saddle on a lint
wildebeest in underbrush,
celeriac jam of dentist-
numbed mind-traffic. Work morning
trickling out a variation on spring,
plucking the clotted daisies from
between toes. Comes like a
one-size-fits-all, non-optional
bargain-basement pedicure,
synthetic swabs of clothes.
Comes with advice scribbled sidelong
on damp leaflets in the bathroom:
Nibble the rubber bullet, dodge
the glockenspiel mallet.
An albino ravenousness
in the belt-trough trenches.
Tupperware tuna salads
food-poison nuclear marmot families.
Each fantasy of the ideal crouton
went soggy. On the psychopathy
checklist, a middling fibrous number
that is humbling to crunch with Wheaties.
Midweek dentists splint split teeth
with cat hair and glue
distilled from the jigs of grasshoppers.
Any given Wednesday, a breakfast table
chock-a-block with full-grown victims
of wave-pool trauma; their hamsters
are swimming in bowls of homo milk.
Oh gosh. The lengths of white icing, front-crawled.
Those fur-covered, sound-wicking walls
lowering over the week’s tiny ears
like a helmet. Shoebox diorama
ready for takeoff –

It may surprise you to learn
how high above ground
the employed really travel.
Each day a solar wind sucks us
30,000 feet above supper,
which is served in a sandcastle
ruled by an imaginary queen.
Each night I crash softly –
ploff
–
to build it new again.

One person can make something for another person to touch.

Any number of hypothetical arms explains why my hand is reaching.

Art means giving an object a mind, letting that object use it against you.

Curiosity is love, a lot like it.

Unanswerable questions receive air shipments of emergency provisions.

I give you a mind, will you hold it against me?

I nod off on a pillow of cumulus that is a factory where God is a woman.

Spoon, tea, bowl, cup
pot simmering
bald spot
three prickle-fine hairs on the nude part

electric light on, off
heaving of the curtain
yapping of the lock

yammer of the unoiled
mailbox hinge

in my mouth
always a mild taste
of idle duty, epoxy.

Sun lending its ribs
through Venetians
to a chest –

for several golden hours
the day has bones.

A drawn straw’s chance we’re siblings, split
twins – still I want to see you wear that seamless
zip-up godsuit you reserve for formal galas
and stand-up performances.
Where you deliver that rubber woman,
the punchline of my life, sweet-knuckled
for the first or umpteenth time.

Everything you speak rhymes.
I go out in storms to get struck by lightning,
hoping I’ll glimpse
your index finger, pointing.

They proliferated like the season:
kittens on spin, pinwheels
in the tantrum of morning.

An antsiness at the edge of walking,
jazz hands or a buffing brush,
a vitamin blush tinting everything.

The lawns lay down in their tanning beds
and were lit from every angle;
the sun didn’t orbit the earth
but each individual on it.

Darkness never came.
It was the bumblebees
and not the weeds
that went to seed eventually.

Around this time I asked my friend,
Have you ever seen a picture of a lanternfish?
and a cross-breeze waltzed in,
taking all our hair away.

The row of them like a stuffed-animal audience,
their reactions contained.

Perhaps my life is just extremely boring.
Or they are baffles swallowing echo infinitely
at the symphony.

For a week at the end of last winter
an abandoned plush piglet
fattened like a sponge in the gutter,
drinking up the thaw.

The urn that held my aunt had room to spare.

What do they know?
One wants to tell them everything.

Maybe they are rubber teats
clothed in fleece
for human sheep.

Greta’s fling with Eugene has wound up
far out. She tells Brian by the stationery cabinet
how the elastic band of it pinged
from her hair to other galaxies. (No one notices
how a metal drawer lifts gradually from its tracks
until one day it can’t be opened.)

The whole thing began in the legs,
she says, a feeling like insects
shinnying stems. Then lit dust, pollen,
no way to explain the thrill of a frozen grape
inching warmer, helium baubles of sound
let slip from cellphones, a lipstick teetering up its turret.
Buildings winched a pinkie’s width from earth,
the whole city twirling in its Archimedes screw.
Crane operators high above the lots
ate blimps of leavened bread.

One velvet-roped night,
the soprano hit the high note,
then nimbled even higher to an alien pitch.
For a drawn-out interval there was no other sound.
Then it passed into the realm of zero gravity.

There is a place, far out in the ether,
where canaries zip like submarines
on the jet-power of their song,
which thickens the air like fog
as they pass from sight.

High seas. Who doesn’t arrive here?
Leaning out like a surfer
from the handle of a stuck drawer.

Now Brian lends his weight like a shadow:
two surfers.

My opinion is not asked, but I know she needs it too.
In the background as lighting, a wave slowly rising.

Like any two people,
at some long-gone vanishing point
we could have made anything.
So what did we?
A non-biodegradable space jalopy
with spectacular tits
and a do that frizzed
and a spine that eventually unspun.
I have no regrets.

It was the pig in the middle who had it made:
a Jenga of twigs with a roof,
and permission to play wolf
when the nights turned to doldrums.
Sometimes for no reason except to amplify my sneeze,
I lean two cards together on a table with my tea.

Mine was not a middling happiness on those drafty evenings
my matchbox car trafficked me to a matchstick house,
wherein my perfect match – in this case, a matryoshka doll –
was cultivating a cathedral of darkness for an inner life,
a darkness in which any number of faces was possible.
(I saw one such doll not too long ago composed of U.S. presidents.)

That house came down as it went up.
I spent several months in a huff
assembling a model Taj Mahal I scored for next to nothing
at a fire sale. Three thousand numbered pins
held down the edges of my breath
as I wound my pinkie up inside the beehives.
Onion domes, they are called.

My model existence
is peeling layers off my skin on a powder-puff beach
among scattered bleached shells occupied by hermits.
The light so bright it damps
the limpets of my eyes.

To nap each noon
with the news as a roof on my nose
is never to see past the tip
of the tail of my dream:
a model undressing for a wind machine.
Her stockings blow loose
to chase their illusions freely.

Don’t let your eyes focus, this honeycomb
is more becoming. I could be nude –
not singular like the lone goat I am,
but multiplied by ten thousand, all the me’s
arrayed on a beach or in a city square
for a portrait by Spencer Tunick, casual as landscape
or an outsized chenille throw. The drape-moss
of our nose hairs. Sparse, tired down
of underarms, inner elbows quite comforting
to drape around yourself come winter.
The slow dance of our voices a scattered,
slow murmur like forest wind.

It is obscene, an absurdity, how you
are permitted this June day to stroll
in our company and breathe
what we exhale as you remove all of your clothes
and mark with a felt-tipped pen
the outposts you too will eventually abandon.

Alone
, you say, and the word resonates
as if in a flock. Dandelions. Turning, a smell
like lichens winged out in a window frame to spore.