Match

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