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  Match

  Helen Guri

  Coach House Books | Toronto

  copyright © Helen Guri, 2011

  first edition

  This epub edition published in 2011. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 282 0.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Guri, Helen

  Match / Helen Guri.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-55245-243-1

  I.Title.

  PS8613.U735M37 2011 C811'.6 C2011-901100-X

  APOCALYPSE WEDDING

  Light gallops in, signalling the start of the apocalypse.

  Soon it’s beard to beard with itself like white bison,

  as thick on the floorboards as the train of a woollen dress.

  For one spooled second everything glows,

  then the world starts tipping from its crate.

  My mother, who knew in her wicker-backed certainty

  that the wedding would be a disaster,

  now stands balanced on one ear in the impossible gravity

  and is vindicated, backwards: the disaster is a wedding –

  the foundation cleaves, cat’s cradle, to an aisle

  as the ground unravels.

  There I go down the centre to the white

  and everyone else after.

  In times like these, which cannot even be called dark,

  Uncle Charlie makes the best of things.

  He serves up saints roasted with onions

  from his backyard convection oven,

  whose helicoid heat plays songbirds on loop.

  The bridesmaids have all watched too many zombie movies,

  shriek in chorus, hike their dresses to wade

  across the newly liquid river of the atmosphere.

  Even the silver lining is blinding.

  One

  In which I am largely unrequited

  ALMANAC

  High on the hunch of the rattlesnaking slide, she bet I was the kind to piss the bed. Howled it out of the blue as she humped a sun-blind wave, like birds squall portents as they fly from power poles. The brick eardrum of the August schoolyard cracked.

  It was news to me, kid-iotic as I was, poking a stick into an aluminum can, imagining I was a T. Rex or a saint. Bits of nature, gulls, grasshoppers, stalled cock-eared in the wake of her yodel, the lightning rods of their listening – would she have names for them too?

  I’d never spoken to Ella even once. To be called anything at all was a prickling kind of honour, a drip of golden water. What a newt must feel dipping its toes in the river.

  Blunt-soft as a hot-tub jet, her coronet lungs and cardinal skirt gusts – bedwetter, she belled over the edge. A bolt of warmth pleated like weather between us.

  Meanwhile my real name, Robert, the eight compass points of polite distance, every woman in my kingdom-come blew in like fresh figments from the horizon.

  GLASS HOUSE

  Empty nester – my Kinder eggs hatched

  one by one into the thumb-tarnished world:

  an ex-wife, then peck marks of red-breasted predators,

  electronic footprints. No kids.

  So it’s lucky I loathe a vacuum –

  life at home is teeming.

  O census-takers of the five-to-nine,

  see how I slip through a cloud-glass pane

  and seal it like a wheel-and-deal,

  empty my pockets for the throb of red fruits

  in a hothouse of off-hours.

  Where my libido sends its sweet-pea runners up the walls,

  and by sundown even my plantar wart’s in flower.

  Tonight’s to-do of miracles

  under the clear big top:

  transmute self to pasture,

  turn the TV loose to graze.

  Let cross-breezes play my penny-flute holes,

  UFOs tortoise me in polka-dot code.

  While it sleeps, nip the lexicon’s wings.

  A personal ad lobbed like a rock into dusk

  gives edge to my pastoral sprawl:

  Looking for a top-dresser in a biplane,

  a Jeannie Epper pressure-hoser

  of pheromone fairy dust,

  glass-ceiling trasher

  a stem’s breadth from crack-and-burn.

  THE BODY SPECTACULAR: AN ATLAS FOR STUDENTS, 2ND ED.

  It isn’t I who peers at the draft of this atlas through beer goggles,

  inking it like a patient for quackery,

  but a stumbling double, dead ringer with a widget set

  of slashes, hyphens, dashes en and em

  mincemeating the margins, hinterlands.

  Exactly the kind of guy you wouldn’t want operating

  on you or heavy machinery,

  he skinny-dips his gloveless thumbs

  in the ebb and pulse of copy, stutters to the moat:

  This won’t hurt a bit.

  Meanwhile, languidly, with subtle difference, I

  illuminate the consonants of coccyx on diagrams of the female pelvis

  in my turret with the bird’s-eye view,

  just as Greta the Publicist, Dragoness-in-Chief,

  interrogates the hair on our neck of the woods:

  ‘Seeing anyone these days, Robert?’

  If I could split, I would – From the neck down,

  it’s all machine, claims a codger

  in a box on a dog-eared page.

  Siege ladder, I could footnote,

  brew a pot of black gold to the smoke point

  and sip, and drip on her slingback shoe,

  slug another gulp of my Hypocrite Oath:

  creosote, no sugar.

  THE SINGLE LIFE OF LAVA

  Glory me, she likes my _____.

  And even at this late age.

  Another one, she likes my _____,

  could come with me to the wine valleys

  of the mid-century boogie

  for a weekend away, laurels ablaze.

  My lines grow more shameless with time,

  I’m the proverbial bulldozer.

  Tell me, do you come here

  to bathe in pure Gewürztraminer,

  and, days later, show the tub ring to your mother?

  Mine’s buried three leagues upstream

  from the one we’re in now.

  You seem a little out of it too –

  but by this age, let’s be honest,

  we’ve both swallowed villages.

  You’d think I’d stop apologizing

  and level the field.

  Sure, I agree it could never work anyway,

  what with your absence of interest

  in my bronto-thesaurus, the brass thumbtacks

  of my private whirlpool.

  The myth of our obsolescence is hardening.

  There may not even be time enough

  to fling rotini between the bucktoothed canyons,

  melt lettuce to lace negligee,

  and depart like racing slugs

  from each other’s cracked lips.

  And I just remembered my mortal fear

  of addressing the opposite sex –

  it has to do with my aversion

  to upslopes, my latent acne of the soul.

  I’ll be off now to my hole under the hill.

  But if it’s any consolation, I’ll treasure

  the might as well you seem to cough

  to your palm as I go.

  Seismographs will sense

  how I scorch all the way home

  on my own steam
at the very idea.

  NATURE MORTE

  All breeze stalls mid-cough,

  so the fumes of coffee

  floss the room, and the plume

  of Greta’s voice on the phone

  steadies like a feather.

  I know her voice is the shape of a wishbone

  thanks to a third person

  who lay still as grapes in a bowl

  while intrepid physicians mapped

  a diagram of chords

  in what could have been anyone’s gorge.

  SLIP-UPS

  And Brian drops his full mug of coffee from a height:

  Shit-whoops-damn! Hot white splinters

  in a stimulant tsunami.

  But he doesn’t really mind –

  his bending a chance to ogle Greta’s ankles,

  scooting toward him like brooms.

  She kneels to read the inkblots

  on his jeans, while he gleans advice on their removal.

  Everyone agrees it’s no big deal.

  The incident bleeds into the ledger

  of bloopers, office gossip,

  which runs on tit-for-tat to infinity:

  Last week Greta made out, as by accident,

  with a pucker not her husband’s,

  and Brian plucked a nylon string itch

  with the publisher’s daughter.

  (It was her funnel-shaped breasts.

  Alcoves, we are meant to imagine,

  like a lick of Manchego cheese.)

  But something funny is happening to the puddle on the floor.

  Like a dropped object returned to its pocket,

  or a skunk turning to light at the spine as it streaks

  across lawn, the dark liquid vanishes,

  resets to an invisible web of tripwires throughout the room.

  I keep very still, hold my place

  like something nearly caught by spiders,

  or like the would-be thief

  of a large and opulent piece of art.

  REVISION

  Let me be perfectly clear.

  It is not a triangle I mean but

  three dots.

  Rash,

  Orion’s belt…

  Not

  love but inflammation.

  Wasp sting.

  Constellation.

  MARRIAGE, EARLY DAYS

  Each morning reeled

  in like a dragnet of rock It is true

  doves – holy horse-crow-cuckoo! we shall be

  Soft creature in the thread count.

  She had her quirks too,

  didn’t like to wake touching, monsters

  a beach towel bunched

  between us, just in case.

  Evenings we spun silk cut off from all

  between the sofa’s goalposts.

  I drank novels,my pulse grew the world

  fat, fur-lined. but

  At lights-out my very own

  stinging insect called Linda –

  slight torture, her white legs’ needlepoint. on that account

  We gathered into parallel dens, magnetic we shall be more attached

  as eyes on owls. Mouths swooped to one another

  with unzipped alarm.

  WALLFLOWER

  Near the dissolving edge of the garden party,

  a tulip dives up slowly

  from below ground, against gravity.

  It’s like a little-watched sporting event on rewind

  at a bar no one goes to, those pink-tinged feet

  a single bullet bound for heaven

  while the whole remainder of the universe swims on,

  undisturbed, in its habitual direction.

  Now someone presses ‘pause.’

  Stuck upside-down, a foot shy

  of solid ground and wearing nothing

  but the wind’s leotard,

  the tulip must turn her feet into a head,

  her mind into toes.

  She begins by rooting her fingers

  under the heavy metal cabinet of the earth.

  Her torso is as spare as the twine between

  two tin cans. Now the other end is talking,

  or trying to. Listen, and you might barely hear

  the arches of her feet

  rehearse the embouchures of speech

  surreptitiously to the air.

  You are right to be suspicious.

  By the time her eyesight rights itself,

  she’ll be a periscope spying for the underground.

  She’s building a subterranean fortress

  lit by multiplying bulbs and

  powered solely by the stationary cyclone

  of her mental gymnastics.

  The breeze is her own personal brand

  of highly flammable hairspray.

  She’s shrewdly packed her appetite

  in one of those green tortoiseshell valises.

  When the party goes shits-up, her getaway

  car will come on tiptoe.

  IF LOVE IS A SLEEPING JACKRABBIT,

  ears long on the chest, settling, spooling over time

  to conch shells with her hush

  and tick-tock in them.

  Critter that twins its springs in a gizmo,

  keeps its leaps sly

  between twelve dens in sleep.

  In dreams where racing is necessary,

  our turned-out pockets fly behind us:

  matching kites of lint.

  In a fabric-panel alphabet, something illiterate

  slips through the hole

  in the middle of a letter.

  Its listening cranked

  like a silent egg timer.

  ANAGNORISIS WITH SEX AID

  i

  Things happen. An event rubs up on the available canvas like a cat scratching its back on a pant leg – static. A marble dropped in a Rube Goldberg machine. I left my wife, or she left me, glass pebble down a copper pipe. The house had been drafty in winter, the stews too autumnal or not autumnal enough, radios tuned fractionally out of earshot. So we slipped seaward, and the vendors hawked yellow roses on the waterfront when the red ones sold out, fish when the yellow ones wilted, then tails and eyes. I bought a silver skeleton and kept it in my pocket.

  It did not matter anymore whether I read articles on evolutionary psychology or peeled the potatoes clean as a nude thigh, filtered scum from the fragile ponds of sun in windowsills. Sounds blanched like jackets from the meanings of words, faucets leaked, abstractions such as the internet got out of hand like a frog colony under the house. No one pruned anything. Spittle bugs foamed cappuccinos on the undersides of leaves while I fell victim to three grey hairs in my beard, surrendered for long intervals to a shard of a tune, From the far side of the ocean … My divorce was a breeze shot through with salt. All around me a great mind was porpoising – or was it? Coincidences welled like cuts.

  ii

  Happenschance. A woman from work gets stuck to the flypaper of a TV special on dolls for grown men.

  Ninety-eight-proof pure reality, a triple-distilled fairy tale, the dolls are as addictive as living. Then came commercial breaks.

  Have you ever noticed how strangely most people walk? As if they once had extra limbs which now are missing.

  iii

  Imagine a story where the hero has been lost at sea for decades, until several dozen tiny currents lap him to an of island made of chrome and glass from the washed-up wrecks of Mercedes Benzes. Nothing grows there except women, like pillars of fun-in-the-sun. One with a voice like an ambulance sings to him when the wind blows over her mouth. The hero would be quite happy to stay and escape old age. Consider also: he has very little choice.

  iv.

  … If I put the wheels in motion. That’s what the unnamed factory worker must hum as she plants the newly minted body in a crate and ships it, oversized love letter coasting the highway, reverse funeral, a wink from the gods. And if a parcel arrives at my doorstep? A magnanimity about the gesture,
a certain spite too. Let the dying love the undead, let the cool-blooded man from the age of tinned sardines meet the cold lady from the internet, let events of the cosmos drop like hail the size of cue balls, throw them spinning into a pocket.

  LIGHTS OUT IN THE WESTERN HEMISPHERE

  A laptop plays dead, rehearsing,

  its white light gauzing

  the end of a tunnel.

  We sleep, it and I, in a bachelor oxygen tent

  made cozy by breath from our dark rooms.

  It is like a tablecloth tent made in childhood.

  The windows are blinkered, the precise depth

  of thin books. We spoon at a five-foot distance,

  exhaling deeply into each other’s ventilation systems.

  We would dream of monsters in Technicolor

  clawing the heads off peonies,

  but we are not quite turned on enough.

  The whir is our molars

  in a gradual dance with tough seeds

  it might take decades to complete.

  The whir is our fan blades in the long grass

  of distant summers, grazing.

  This might be as close as we get

  to parsing our relationship to the bovine.

  But we expire utterly

  every four years.

  Let me tell you what I know of close spaces.

  A parking garage reserves certain smells,

  which refresh memories of being small, and engines.

  Each sedan steaming like an astronaut’s supper.

  A one-door room binds imperceptible

  steam to the skin; the molecules are wishes

  reabsorbed in wish nodes.

  A room contains everything

  until it doesn’t.

  Hedonism will be staying up all night.

  Hedonism will be clicking every clickable

  until a crash.

  BIRDS IN THE A.M.

  Friendly fire.

  Pups jostled in twilight sleep.

  A marker running dry on its whiteboard diary.