by Liz Howard
SENTIENT: AN ORATION
I learned lower than blue in the public vestige where several minute species congregated the velvet stereopsis when temperature loosened it was a half-uttered sentiment in which even the tree bristled a proxy for the sheltered evening slept its marrow in husk of femur after walking these props for the intervention of simian traffic if the cause tumbled out into the grouping there were new expressions the future was something liquid extended into the politic that relegated all daughters to a camp called the sublime where to potentiate is such a small version of the total angle whereby your eye acquired sense to subsume resistance like a trick of violet in cursive some minute loops in the evening embraced the survival of a feminine striation where the one filial strumming did suffice phyla emergence such was our subsistence mantra did the freakish ecology lift you disembodied our crimes were lacquered and cured of milk the immaculate taser shorn miracle bibliography of silence where we entered into history a slackened joy along the tracks of the CP Rail what is afforded by transport sister this soil is tarred with blood rivers of remorseless terroir fanciful vacuum sugar apparatus in the hindquarters of something immersive did tow the fall of skirts over this museum into the body subterranean became a shield of resurgent oration we could celebrate the end of famished connection what selves said:
hey, self
are you lovely yet?
what about your sentience?
there was a filial striation
I became emergent
the tree bristled; the crimes lacquered, the liquid public, vestigial
we had a future in it
a mass was detected below the alternative space
where I surfaced and unlaced
one more mute variation
in my lung
I cut loose from the commons only to starve
did I ever have critical acumen?
did I ever bibliography with certainty?
did I ever, not in this, suffice a more barren terroir: efficiency
there was a filial striation
I became emergent.
my simian tumble, my velvet fictive, my freakish ecology
lifted
it was something only possible through a dialect
I digressed
some solar fixture before this
I assembled a trajectory
the selves
all lovely
did genuflect
PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY
From New Brunswick to Sault Ste. Marie
Bowating and northwest I came into being
with Jack pine thieves in the heronry
like Nanabozho I lost
my vision to a covenant
of ducks in vertigo
whipped a birch
to mark my name
south of the fortune
cookie factory on the
street where I lived I
lost the nerve to speak
stereotaxic
I had the stomach
of an ox
ruminative pulse
it’s always one-and-the-same-thing
just north of here
down in the ravine
a friend saw a man
burying another in
the earth before dawn
one midnight I rose
to guide my hand over
the hide of a black bear
hit by a blue pickup on 129
tectonic mandibles
palpable gulls
highway silt
fetal cells
resin of a loathsome pine
these remains in the cellar
my grandmother
numbered
westward I tried it my
relations splitting cedar planks
for the sauna is about my
inheritance of base pairs
toward the substance
of some arrival
walking always this man
I call Dostoyevsky walking
his long coat and old shoes
walking who is a man who is
beautiful whose liver is diseased?
a girlhood
a head of dandelion ozone
a camp called the sublime where
several minute species
congregated
the velvet stereopsis
coyote was this young man
in the convenience store
holding a piece of raw liver
out to his friend or was this
Whitecrow in Fort Frances after the hunt?
I made love to a man lost
his rib in poison ivy there
was a collective, juvenilia and
to be a woman was to be lost
so I hugged my ribs and laughed
copper dissidence
or a fallow deer so
rabbit speak
with relevance here
and curtsey
your superlative name
– agnosia
I slept in voices of smoke
by the basement wood stove
in that house by the cemetery
to be small and dreaming parallel
to ceremony and decay
I found the body
of a Métis fur trader
in the hunt shack back there
in those woods where I guarded
him like a treasure
before I left Chapleau
for the city, which vets me
scientifically
and by its shadows
also
a false shore above the original
dearest ones please know
I’ll do my best not to die young
in Toronto
HYPERBOREAL
NORTH BY SOUTH
was as if I really knew
but then the dream changed
stalactites under Mexico
become the show
ponies of our thrownness
gradually turning
into an estuary of blood and soy
bless it, unfettered
the open stone’s face
there are more totem
moments where the stars
have drunk the ocean
on a self-similar
confessional flight path over
the northern hemisphere
this account of light
as an acquired characteristic
became propositional
just as every forest
would come to speak to us
as a verb
Sweet citizen, I know you
as I know myself: a fictive province
of selves within
doppler range
O body sensate
your telepathy
so impatient
soon you’ll know hope
is no nutrient no last word
on forgiveness
opiate moment
unlatch the skull of a lake
from your trophy of red snow
we’re in this
for the killing fields
of every biome
prosperity
a glittering dryad
felled on the horizon
If there are poems
inside the camel
brush its hump
with simple syrup
ants come and eat
the flesh away
poetry evaporates
from the wound
your boots fill
with milk in the
lecture theatre the poets
stand with their camels
we had no words
our faces became
indistinguishable
Is this an indigenous or occidental dream?
note the presence of wildlife
and anxiety about money
we stand at the lectern of origin
we stand here not only
to be counted
I felt I needed
&n
bsp; to walk far out into
the woods through
the woods to a river
and walk upon the
waters of that river
dissolving and the silt
of me returns
to Hudson’s Bay
to the Arctic Ocean, is dispersed
further into the Beaufort Sea I often
dreamt of when small
napping beside a book of maps
in another dream
it’s evening
I’m to photograph
three women who face me
with their babies
bundled in their arms
poet scientist Anishinaabe
smile at me
and one by one
the babies
explode into flames
that same year I sat looking out
of the living room window
at a boulder across the street
a glacial erratic split into three
pieces by the growth of two birch trees
I remember when that stone was whole
my mother said behind me
this is what life does
In a tradition not quite ablated by pox
TB, and/or Christ the dreaming self
as corporeal in its endeavours
as in a waking state I go somewhere
into a kind of felicity
unforgiving
Taking our birth names we headed south
vaulting
the tractionless sphagnum
for a credit card
our only limit
will be of language
my carry-on could be your carry-on
only I am not a corpse
but a citizen
I tie a knot
around the throat of all knowledge
insist I know
where my own body was
when the whole earth retired
from intimacy
when presented with history in the form of an ellipsis
I must continue
feral, I enter
the court of words, December, December
of my mind
launch toward more than NORAD knows
of the taiga
STANDARD TIME
The world is everything that is the case
it is real and it is a desert
and I’m here, hypnagogically
A fly with a metallic orange thorax on my forearm
tangents come to take you away
I can still feel you when you’re gone
Synaesthesia means
A is red in my mind and the number 1 is white
inimical as the perjured self
Before the days’ tarry of hooks
all memory being a kind of death
smiling and every love poem
A self-portrait of childhood
Dwight Yoakam in tan leather pants
telling me he’s a thousand miles from nowhere
There’s no place I wanna be
and so also
2 is red in my mind and the letter I is white
Pulling myself from sleep
voices from my temporal lobe or elsewhere:
Oppenheimer’s air reservation
Orchids, where do they go?
the word is a purple gash I could write
a surgical line through this day
to excise the softened part
the day with its pit between my teeth
the line’s quake along the surface
BILDUNGSROMAN
The sky opened onto my
simple face I’m nineteen and
begging Orion to relieve
me of an abject longing for
stasis the marshes sullied the
trenchant pleura with stuccoed
purpose beseeched me in the
flagrant errors of any small
girl there is the stuff of
fables whether false or
guileless in speaking of what
happens my mother combing
through trash at the landfill
I’m twelve out among the
ravens and black bears in an
air of death I sit in the back of
the flatbed truck knees to my
chest reciting, Tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow from
the entrance the gatekeeper
smiles without teeth and winks
at me then it’s fifteen years
later I sit in the innocuous
green of late summer I who
unfolds in full view for no one
in particular I rest one foot on
the curb the other on the roof
of the world’s mouth so much
that is beyond me high beams
on the dividing line of
the highway I take my
galvanic bath outdoors to
repair any derelict vowel
if even your forests abandon
the crucible of self and grow
weary into a climax of fur
Manitouwadge, Manitoba,
Manitoulin in situ it is neither
I nor the white of it nor you
who are yellow and black
and gold Orion we all
should have been born on a Tuesday
REVENANT: LOSS
These canticles of cedar burn skyward
out from the woods where blood has rusted snow
our fierce theatre split between two worlds
liberal arts by proxy flank every pole
Our basement a psychic economy
of static fog and what we cannot know
the odd love we burn for heat dissipates
and each spine sprouts a new-found yellow smoke
Any limb could learn its place in the pines
the fact of standard time is illicit
the broken flight of a bird half-shining
measured by the extent of a street light
No perfect confidence in being born
still we dream of Tierra del Fuego
REVENANT: MISREMEMBERED
In our old apartment
epiphytes and dark stars
left behind and inside me
a paper cut of lost sleep
One afternoon with Copernicus
and I’ve learned to doubt with my eyes open
the table is mentholated water
my shoulder pulled away from the gesture
A ledge of toes under each dress
my lips were kiss-chapped and spectral
a necklace of money I flash at the modus of power
resurrected in a need for extension
Habitually, honey
poured from the cinema of our better misgivings
REVENANT: HEAVEN
Adrenaline
Tetra Pak jets of anaesthetic
a failure in Latin
fetal oil drums cut from
the curfew of dilated freeways
or the terminus of animal doubt
A mucosal crib of unknown distance
the sky a barb of blue wanting
everything abdominal and yet to be emptied
in a daffodil chorus of posthumous laughter
this clapboard passport
where Wordsworth is a doll
The unsubstantial structure melts the embryonic
psalms of heaven, all lushly punk and pyrotechnic
APOSTLE OF DOUBT
Hills of pseudoephedrine and lavender
you fell away
through the abortive canopy overhead
ochred the earth
with red needles I will ask you again
where is my good
gloss? under the pulpit, ammonia and wine
I required a field
guide to persuade the hours into use
but found only
scraps of old paper, receipts, transfers
scrawled with
illegible coordinates I had only my legs inside
some red shredded
tights as I went headlong down the ravine
my collar bone
flexed its impression into the soil
what is left
to be said through the gap under
the door
I can’t tell you how many times
I’ve tried
to find this easy and just close
my eyes
to become one of those women
who can wreck
the infinite as if I ever knew a swallow
to be more than
its significant derivative in my dream
Erín Moure told me
Don’t let the oligarch of your cup get into
the network
swimming a heavy-handed reflexive crush
my forebrain
a lesser charge I radiate some stumbling argument
with the fog
concomitant and coming in droves our winters
a modern retelling
of forced labour selling milk in the woods
sisters I continue
to mop in the direction
of pleasure
RING SAMPLE: ADDENDUM
You bleed a moss creek, I’ll halve a bone fisher
unprovable in the hail, I invert our quiet atoms
infinity rushes our small bodies into distemper
our questions spill out onto the green money, your passport
swinging from the incision along my child’s throat
a song of copper wire and submerged currents
come spring we’ll burn the anonymous kitchen into verdigris
a static fog inside the animal I am, and doubled
out from the machine that cuts the skin away from belief
I knew it as a dream flinched in my potlatch another animus
rhythm history expressed as the bottom nature of every one
our mashes darkest, our lucidity an unwritten thread
sinners, lovable, fallen wet in the tinder
a delicate sonar with our pulse on the original
BINGO RIOT
Coterie of the senseless
I will not refuse the moons
you show me
caught in the gutter water
body glitter
hypodermic, a pocked
nickel from the ’70s
your jean waist is high
higher than your actual waist
here’s the horizon coming into view
a spackling of misremembered stars
that misremembers you
as someone from high school
in a town you haven’t met
the light breaks red orange
gorgeous across the symmetry
of your face under the viaduct
I am laughing
at the perfect nothing I find
in my hand my father is missing
the future is approaching
on horseback
clopping metrical fits along
Lake Superior’s shore
the night rears up from under
this lost fur inversion
modernity is so destabilizing
as is the architecture of any bird’s
wing the carpals the metacarpals
