by Helen Guri
The cryptic luck of numbers. The ulterior motives of all the objects in a room.
My little walnut of sadness through clothing. My close-bitten peach pit of glee. The texture of the legs on all the spiders in the room.
The bath of my senses like several tides around her, the shoal of it.
Certain gadgets reserved like Egyptian artifacts for later.
The island of plastic bottles in the Pacific that is a secret the size of America.
The wine stain deep in the turning lane of my Pentax-squat.
Why my better half looks so steamed in all the pictures.
CUBICLE LAND
In the beginning, before matter settled
on a direction to take in life,
the ice cube tray clattered
from the ice world.
Swaybacked, it let slip
a quantity of chilly beige
silk-and-corkboard bergs
into Atlantic. They swashed
like lobster traps, or mismatched
colours of the Rubik’s,
in surf that sorted them
perfectly into a continent,
crystallized their salt-licked sides
into an office of translucent barnacles.
Here people went to work as afterthoughts,
the individual consciences of molars.
Inventions were shaped
by the circumstances:
single-serve waterfalls
from heaven in the ceiling.
A shark toy the exact shape
of the interior of Junior’s drawer.
A device for transmitting sugar cubes
of sound into astronauts’ ears.
Wonderbread,
and moving crates of ottomans.
A tooth fairy
ferrying a fortune in bricks.
RUBBER BRIDE
The beloved
lives in the head.
– Louise Glück
What I remember is not inviting you up.
You raccooned a gap in the ceiling’s logic,
foiled the bolts with a calling card,
stole across the ocean of an inhale.
Locked out, I pitched camp on the dew-thralled lawn
while you pissed behind a bookcase
and juiced a crystal vase
to pulp and crumbs.
The gutters ran with light.
I watched you keep the midnight house –
silhouette celebrity propped on one elbow
in the lumbar region of a synapse.
You turned out the resident swallows
and invited new ones in
as the leaves on a tree near the window turned
to paparazzi.
Your feather duster was a dove you disoriented.
The morning you upset the shoebox
of shrunken heads from seventh grade,
the season careened its bend –
you, snug in the wool place, beading a necklace,
and I without a coat.
*
People at work began to notice
my smell of must and rumpled lilac,
how my eyes were tumblers where trapped goldfish paced.
The chronic tinnitus of your shower opera
was embarrassingly loud in public places.
But when I called the city to get a permit for your removal,
they told me you’d been designated a World Heritage Site.
The tourists came with cameras, prams, ham-sandwich luncheons,
first editions of certain folk tales for signing.
Their kids playing chicken in the intermittent drip
of mood light from the windows.
I took work in maintenance –
sank my pincers into litter,
mowed the acreage with a ride-on
while you let out a feral howl
in perfect pitch with my petroleum drone.
The children flocked and scattered.
It was not long before I turned into a cat
and you flicked paper mice between the shutter slats
on fly-rods. You knit your golden hair in windsocks,
I ran into a paper bag.
*
To grasp it – a hint of the flu, a bell receding
on a length of yarn. Tuck it gingerly behind my teeth,
which would become a string of paper lanterns.
To haul you out and fit you back
into the limp glove of yourself
on the landing.
Or climb a lattice and join you in hiding.
Catalogue the various conditions:
When you wear velvet, I grow muffled as a trumpet case.
When you shiver your fork, I flinch silver.
DOLL CHORUS
The imagination has no bottom line. So here girls sing,
flag their long legs in procession – a wind-up music-box
Girl Machine with whirling gears of crinoline. Let there be
an infinite number in the ladders and pagodas of thinking.
And a whiteout of lights
where the tunnel of the wings empties
like the snout of a bloom.
Where an audience waits, swollen as an artifact,
to be released from its ice age of watching.
IF
The song in her nook is the song on my lips.
The white ankle socks I’ve bought fit her perfectly.
White noise means agreement, an entente of politics and weather and the thermostat’s freewheeling.
It doesn’t matter that the awnings are carnivorous with icicles, that people go blindly through doorways.
The parade float of her skin parks here. Each molecule’s measured trumpeting.
I stake my quiet claim between two steamed panes.
My ex-lovers are kindling and the colour burgundy, and they wish me well and have come to dine.
We clear a glass table to watch – as if it were on television – our shins debate the meaning of the signs.
The material – a swathe of chiffon – lies at the root of all philosophy.
The records can reach their crotches with their mouths.
One root of philosophy is love.
Oxygen is thrilled by my antics. I light beeswax, wing the unbuttoned fronts of my shirt.
I am a groundling before the shadow theatre of my wall: two people stencilled on the verge of a room.
We could write to the ones responsible – in the factories and thought factories in the sky, if any are there – for sending wood and flesh and metal and cast-off Fruits of the Loom by milkman to my door.
LETTER TO A FACTORY WORKER
Dear Angela,
This pseudonym you use
to answer the factory phones
brings to mind an angel
making copies of herself
on a conveyor belt,
a kind of statistical paradise.
The way those selves lie parallel
under invisible buffet covers
is the way two people fall asleep
in separate cocoons
to dream or not dream,
sneeze-guarded.
DOLL CHORUS
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.
STILL LIFE WITH LOVE DOLL AND POTATO
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?
Three
In which I burn at both ends of the afterlife
MUSE:
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.
THE MEN OF ACTION, FALLING
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.
DEAR ANGELA,
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.
HIVE
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.
IF
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.
SMALL ROOM
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.
DEAR ANGELA,
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.
DANDELIONS
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.
DOLL CHORUS
