Match

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.