by Helen Guri
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.
MY OPINION
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.
DEAR ANGELA,
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.
MODEL
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.
PERVERT FROM WIDE ANGLE
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.
PINCH-HITTERS
i
When the ceiling sprang a leak,
I stepped aside and dialled a number.
Miraculously, someone else stepped in.
A bum double substitutes the movie star
in the love scenes, but about this understudy
we know next to nothing –
what does he like to eat for breakfast?
The way we have no idea whether the catsuited woman
who back-flips off cliffs in action flicks
is skilled at turning flapjacks sans spatula.
Most cells in the human body are not human
but bacterial, and even these crawlies
may be swapped for a variable
in the mathematical model.
At the bus stop in my dream:
Pinch me, requests a stranger.
ii
Once, I stood by
as a Heimlich-trained schoolteacher
pressed a grape from my dinner guest’s windpipe
using factory-grade forearms
suitable for modern winemaking.
Her real arms so flimsy
they sat the round out,
like wimps in gym class,
without anyone noticing.
I’ve never choked,
but was once caught swallowing
the last of the expensive cheese.
The wince of my esophagus, my sheepishness
(that urge to pass the buck
one species to the left),
is the nearest experience I can call on
to understand the victim’s bottleneck.
He likes to claim he wasn’t present.
Very few people go to parties.
iii
In hindsight, I’m MIA.
Where I should be, cakeside,
in birthday photographs,
there’s a puffer fish, blowhard
oohing at trick candles
that reignite at one-year intervals.
Looking ahead, in waiting rooms
where patients play musical chairs,
I glimpse a man whose face is
a wattle-and-daub wall of bandages
with two tiny windows.
It’s easy to let his eyes, whose stillness
is a mystery, be x’s. Though likely he still
has exes, even l
overs –
for all I know, he spent the morning trembling
like two bowls of Jell-O atop an actress.
STORM PORTRAIT
When the rain falls so richly
it is almost flesh-toned,
it is hard to know
what is background and what is person.
As through the warping wall
of a shower stall, the billow of a human form
asserts its minor strengths on a watercolour landscape
before the world ends
three feet later.
Everything tempts the appaloosa eye.
In the photo booth of the weather,
a snail falls for a tape dispenser,
a stag for a candelabra, happy as a clam
with a compact mirror.
The statue is a private encounter.
A toy digger, bolted in playground dirt,
describes rainbows endlessly
with its T. Rex arm.
Is it possible to become so practised
at failure in love that you can do it solo,
like an ocean voyage?
Like a fruit fly dancing spastically
along the lip of a glass of sweetness.
Can the neighbours, caught in their own
dances, see steps of mine too?
The air is a series of windows
stippled with their thoughts.
DEAR ANGELA,
I rarely swim, but what I crave
is Blue to Blue. Each lap lapping
the tidal mind, my letters fed to glass bottles
like miniature sharks
on their way to the moon.
STUDY IN A BATHROOM MIRROR
Not human after all, my mug
more like a volleyball, more like a waning,
swamp tuber dug from peat, scrubbed
and peeled. Little serpent of a lip, pothole eye,
lone pore with a hair pushing up, road-kill nostril.
Signs point to slow-mo crisis or
slow-mo recovery. Erratic on a hillside, glacial sluice
in the valleys, fine lines like skid marks through cream.
Fifty-one: birthday party for a meteorite, pop-bottle island,
microbe foxtrotting on a slide. Will I blend
into the landscape with surprising guile,
or explode like an improvised device?
*
Flick, flick the switch.
Begin again slowly, approach
this dim blowhole. Holy antelope!
Come to steam at the well of the sink.
Wait motionless.
So it lowers its mug to my palm full of water,
withdraws moistened, mammoth.
Blinks for me a while in the dark.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The italics in ‘Marriage, Early Days’ are taken from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; the split quote in ‘Anagnorisis with Sex Aid,’ ‘From the far side of the ocean/If I put the wheels in motion,’ is taken from Van Morrison’s song ‘Astral Weeks’; ‘Sonnet for the Uncanny Valley’ is based loosely on text from the RealDoll website: www.realdoll.com; and the epigraph that opens ‘Rubber Bride’ is taken from Louise Glück’s poem ‘Ithaca’ from her collection Meadowlands.
Early versions of poems in this book were published in the magazines Grain, Riddle Fence and Event – my thanks to the editors. An early version of ‘My Cactus’ appeared on the parliamentary poet laureate website in 2008, under John Steffler’s watch.
The Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council generously provided me with much-needed funding to work on this book, while the Banff Centre for the Arts gave me a wonderful place to live and work among friends for a month.
Improbably, the RealDoll company in San Diego invited me to visit their factory to snoop on their production process, and, equally improbably, the University of Toronto gave me funding to make the trip. Thanks to both organizations for their sense of the fantastical.
For their editorial first aid, I am indebted to Michael Nardone, Don McKay, George Elliott Clarke, Linda Besner, Lindsay Zier-Vogel and David Seymour. Thanks especially to Kevin Connolly, whose tenacious and insightful use of the question mark dragged many of these poems back from the brink.
My gratitude to Alana, Evan and the other model human beings at Coach House Books for their elegant work.
My love to Tom Howell, with thanks for the word ‘limpets’ and many others. And infinite gratitude to my family and friends for their aiding and abetting.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Helen Guri graduated from the University of Toronto’s Creative Writing program, and has taught writing at Humber College. Her work has appeared in many journals, including Arc, Descant, Event, The Fiddlehead and Grain. Match is her first collection. She lives in Toronto.
Typeset in Adobe Jenson and Edwardian Script
Edited by Kevin Connolly
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover art, Mastodon, by Lori Nix, courtesy of the artist
Author photo by Tom Howell
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