by Helen Guri
The whole neighbourhood inexplicably in leather pants on leather couches.
A man with a tracheotomy steps into a windstorm, yard-long notes fluting the pitch of him.
The water balloon does not burst immediately upon hitting the tile.
The squint of a swab on a kitchen cut. The little rubber tires of calamari.
Unoiled machinery in the off-leash park.
A chromatic scale-playing violinist windlassed up the brickwork.
Teeter-totter.
The fishmonger spills her catch to the seals.
The revolutionaries get paper cuts scanning tabloids through the checkout.
High-pitched appliances join the all-candidates’ debate.
He learns, aged three years, kazoo in mouth, that he’ll not be back this way.
The crickets are confused about the time of day and the location of the countryside.
A soccer match you won a long time ago, the zealous aunts.
The neighbours negotiate their separation on helium.
A hot-water tap squeals its emergency.
Not last words but last noises.
Cassettes wince back to their starting points.
The kettle.
RESONANCE IS A DIRECTION
Some tuning fork, some string
in my gut sets to humming
when Charlotte describes
what she saw last night on television
and Brian sprints his ears over
and the room swerves its attention like bees.
A doll – life-sized, Pyrex complexion,
breasts, raw loaves,
You can guess what she is for.
A pair of paws on Google Video confirms it,
kneading her chest counterclockwise for
four full minutes.
‘Necrophiliacs,’ decides Greta.
Charlotte worries her husband might just –
the doll’s pliant teeth yielding like trap doors
to a room in some terrible mansion.
‘Sad dweebs,’ Brian assesses,
mousing up a JPG of Alfred Truelove,
the man who keeps two
in a shed out back of his linoleum-clad shack
(‘Like prisoners,’ says Greta)
and blogs studiously each evening
of their loves and hates:
Sandra likes apple fritters
while Tammi prefers pulp fiction.
Both love Alfie to pieces, despite the fact
every real woman who ever knew him
stole and lied.
Alfie is 52,000 ineptly hashed pixels
in the screen’s rectangular eye.
Papier-mâché white
and gristle-smiled.
Charlotte pointedly calls him a headcase
before retreating to her seat.
Brian cartoons him peeling off
Sandra’s Velcro-secured face,
slips the page into Greta’s inbox
so she giggles in long, slow gulps.
A short memo on the ‘suction effect’
of silicone orifices circulates.
COGNITION
My brainwave is the size of an arena –
please grab a seat.
Watch the mystery run laps
through a device
composed solely of antiquated childhood games
and ancient pains:
a crescendo of dominoes
sets off a model train; conductorless,
a flashlight’s plasma siren
burrows through textbook
migraines, refracts in a rat trap
below the buzzer – which one,
what colour?
Keep your ears pricked as baskets
for the unmapped sound, for the crash
landing of a tossed girl.
Let your cogs be a crowd in a wave
of plough and follow.
COURTSHIP, RETROSPECT
i
When I examined the lips of the moths,
I found my answering-machine tape shredded
to glitter. They had eaten Linda’s message:
a promise to bring food for the ornamental pepper
and for us too, a dish of glass noodles.
By the time the moths hightailed for their hometown
of mill dust in the rust veldt, the holes in the story had taken over.
Lifted: a synthetic scarf from the far side
of a free-swinging door, a single bleached strand
from the vanity, a thumb’s oil slick from the spare key,
clipped nails from the carpets.
ii
The possibility that it was a rescue.
Nature dispatching its search patrol:
Luna, Saturnid, Clearwing, Wax, Pandora
teamed and trained at the week-long intensive.
Now she with the delicate means
to turn and be lifted
to that place in the night where no light radiates –
no cook-fire, porch lamp, glow-wand, splinter-
planet. Not even the twin pinholes of my alarm.
iii
Having renounced the known universe
in favour of anyone’s guess,
she is, naturally, quite hard to pin down.
The words that skirt the edges of her name
carefully as toreros goad a bull
without ever touching it – lindane, linac, limuloid
linarite, lint and even linseed –
are crystalline compounds, blue crustaceans,
particles speeding from a Spanish plateau,
soft insects in the wash of flax fields.
Sometimes I imagine her mantis-elbowing
her way among these other things
like a genie in a crowded market,
never brushing anyone.
Or she belongs to the breed of ascetics
who starve their way to enlightenment.
Each food she renounces buoys her higher into the air
like a balloon dropping ballast,
until, eventually, there is no balloon.
The first thing she gives up eating is my sweaters.
All November the terrible acrylic patterns fall like rain.
FIRST DATES AT THE HOT DOG CART
Pupils slick in chipped saucers, chapped palms at a shard’s distance.
Beach of bad-luck mirrors where the sun sloops, king squid, into its socket.
We crab-stroll the shore without credible skeletons, held up only by our pleats and the absence of a bench.
Other pairs are chain-linked at the elbows. They brew ketchup storms in Dixie cups, leave carrion for birds.
We post a request to our biographers: jig those jags into embrace. Meanwhile, tentacles of reddish light
pose questions. What could crumbs of the dropped colour wheel know of one another –
of a warm tomato flush below the gulls’ shrieking while the Lunchosaurus locks up and ambles home to its era?
MY CACTUS
Let me tell you about the cactus Linda bought and I kept,
Echinopsis oxygona, I learned later from a plant encyclopedia.
How, surly as a toe fungus, it parked on my sill
and bit when I came close. A year after she left,
it shrivelled like a blowfish. I thought it was dead,
put it out on the patio beside the frozen shoes.
It was only the thinness of my slippers, its petrified tines,
that stopped me stomping its insides to goo.
But night passed frostless, first time in months, February breaking,
and morning rolled in like blue paint. The bloom appeared
to snuff my sleep, its bright megaphone
lip-locked to a crack in my door,
the faint, breathless static
of its sewing pins: a southern belle’s crop
of varnished nails. Wide as a parasol, volatile
as an allergic nostril,
funnel to suck
the known world of colour: my cactus in bloom.
I took it inside and placed it on the table,
drained a glass milkless studying its throat,
a goosey impulse pluming
greyly from the root
like a fuse. Lighting an element,
I told myself: don’t be stupid.
A plant is its own thing – try to see it literally.
Two
In which I find my match, light it
INVENTION
Each night slips to hold –
Purolator will not deliver.
Transfixed by the perfectly empty
box of my skylight,
I look up to where children smashed
their tennis balls through the sky.
Accidents happen.
It begins to seem inevitable
that a confused migrating goose
will one day land in this box,
as if on water.
DELIVERY
A cube van achoos and here it is:
a crate of elsewhere, special delivery,
tangled hatch to hatch with labels
and loose ends of tape – bits of the canopy
it snagged on its trip to earth.
It pauses in the river of the street:
an abstract expressionist soldier in camouflage,
poniless carriage, young couple’s first sofa,
vampiric mode of travel –
Come play in traffic, it calls to schoolchildren,
who hesitate in the awnings.
They’ve heard of people going over Niagara Falls
in boxes much like this one.
Those who believe in tabula rasa
and those who believe the rectangular mass
tells the sculptor what to make of it
should set aside their tedious chiselling
and hop into this sweet ride –
short of a fall from the mouth of a stork,
nothing in life compares.
But all new arrivals are dead weight
to the delivery man, who grimaces as he hefts
this latest up from the concrete
to my door. I see through
the eyeholes in his uniform
he’d be happier as a ranger
driving herds of Trojan ponies
home through twilight.
‘Mr. Brand?’ he asks.
Ink answers to the charge.
THE BELOVED AS BLOW-UP DOLL
Why is it best to make her orange and so hourglassed
she’s abstract – a Matisse nude composed of Goodyear blimps
in formation?
If what I’ve evolved to crave is Fanta’s antigravity,
sickle edge of sundown, the colour of night vision,
marshmallow-broil. If what I’ve evolved to lift
is the weightless barbell of a cartoon circus.
Wearing orange jeans, teens out at dusk
blushVenus, leak their Crush sodas on pavement.
They keep their synapses
limber with self-tanner.
If living is gradual overexposure:
the teacher’s silk kerchief, a meatloaf ’s Florida sheen,
ladybug piss on a skinny wrist,
a dinner plate’s blazing Frisbee.
Moreover: that old sorrel named Bliss,
the weekly Lutheran basements
with paper walls. Where wax crayons labelled Goldenrod
blistered as skin – what a rib shimmied into
to be more comfortable.
Fly me to the moon, sings the hot-air balloon,
and so my makeshift drifting furnace
feeds, breathes vermillion.
STATUESQUE
She is actually the weight of one hundred and ten
one-pound bricks of butter, the manufacturer cautions,
and will weigh this anywhere I set her.
She could yawn an awning, sink a sack of pups,
plunge a roller coaster into its stone-age theme park,
swing on hunger’s hinge like a club to stun a doe.
The fossil quiet of a creek rock hearth
is her infilled ear and her infilled heart.
She’s an oak-ankled heirloom cabinet
or a fat aunt reduced over high heat.
Crate of condensed milk, sweetened,
chromium-toed, canting a balance point
in my horoscope just by standing.
Mythical and horse-like.
A crystallized set of nesting dolls.
In the huge amusement park of the world,
doing nothing but gravity.
The ground accepts its role as lap,
gets pins and needles
thinking into her lean.
HOVERCRAFT, OUT WARM, LOVE DOLL
What is it to be plaster-cast in the dense cream of June? Robed in a chain mail of summer afternoon, your dainties hang like bricks from a clothesline, the mouth pares its possibilities: gape or zip,
and the weed-whackers make no noise at all. So far from the mind you can’t hear its nagging, you slip into your own padded room. A diver diving with the line left off the hook. Or, in a poplar, two hatchlings are prodded to the nest-edge. One takes flight while the other falls plumb –
you have the sheer luck to be that stunned one on the ground. Now in the office of the taxidermist, gussied in a way your twin never will be: Q-tipped, unstitched on cotton. A patient two leagues under, lid of the rib cage ajar, spacecraft giving gravity the slip. If the mood lighting hits a certain temperature, and slack lip on slack lip means fainting.
*
Where there is no inside the everything. As if all the pulse and genius had washed up on shore. Stroll your fingers on the low tide of her mind’s eye, the whole wild surface of the concept. Dress her in strapless brassieres that moon through wool sweaters, undress her, loose her long hair on the pillow, repeat –
as thinkers repeat questions. What is it to be sealed in late spring like a peach in acrylics? If three buttons go pop, a cord slips…She is body, beloved. What are you?
SONNET FOR THE UNCANNY VALLEY
eyes may need to be adjusted after seating the face into position ripple
lip style ‘Britney’ w/ full plum colour windfall
hair cropped sienna may be switched for any other cataract
skin tone fair, slight tackiness to the fingerprint dimple
nape -of-neck hook for easy storage and standing positions minnow
bust custom 34B, realistic gelled silicone will not leak bottle
hips custom 33", be gentle when shifting otters
flesh high-grade silicone rubber can stretch 300% logjam
flavour -less, odourless ether
heat -resistant, can withstand over 300 degrees F zenith
water -resistant, solid construction Coleman
stain -resistant, nothing sticks to silicone water
weight of a real woman tackle
arch and instep moulded from life-casts casts
WIND THE SWAN
I startle a chickadee from a rusty latch,
a pewter bloom from its bouquet.
Unlock joy like a grate
in the paper-boat highway,
or the crosshatch of a mannequin’s palm
at the fortune teller’s.
Find romance at the seaside carnival,
winter. I bob for stiff sherbet mounds
of girl in an Atlantic of comforters,
where I am lost like a quarter
cup of blizzard in a blizzard
of down I’ve whipped up
from scratch.
I tug the line that is a curtain cord
that starts an outboard motor,
pulls the pin on a boom of white birds –
so her French twist slips
into my grip like a tuft of breeze,
by roots. Where now,
o sailor, oh maroon?
/> AFTER ‘STILL LIFE FAST MOVING’
In some pictures, objects come alive
and the living are objects.
Picture, for example, a slide show of a food fight.
Sliced bologna is a rare bird whirling
past people graffitied like vacant buildings.
A man turned jack-in-the-box
terrifies a peach pie into losing its lunch.
And when the cops appear like matching statues,
it is the tomatoes who confess.
So it happens that my ex-wife
is a velvet-shaded table lamp
in the hinterlands of a party.
It’s a lamp I’ve wanted back, badly,
lately attempted to replicate
by dimming the eighty-watt stare of a life-sized doll
with a lace bucket hat
and balancing the delicate contraption in my sitting room.
The doll flexes in the camera’s shutter-snap
like a twig in the mouth of a rhino.
The revolving doors of her eyes
recall an early experiment concerning flight.
A shorn second and she’ll have buckled –
but,meantime, she palms the apple of her hand
to my galloping sorrel sofa
and comes alive.
Memory throws its voice
like a master ventriloquist,
like a flashbulb shot-puts sight.
SUBJECTS ON WHICH MY LOVE DOLL COULD CONCEIVABLY HAVE OPINIONS
Being secret, like a leg brace from childhood.
Not having anything, to eat or worry about.
A bus transfer sailing through seven seas of air. The resting places of lost raisins.
The lobster, boiling. Surgical procedures to revive the senses of those born blind and deaf.
Common senselessness, the dripping sponge of it.
Emotions duned like ash from the work week’s smokestacks on a little side table.
A sudden wind from the patio, its fairy tale.
