This work by Jerome Paul is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Canada License.
Landings
The empty plot of mud grazed land behind my house
is the vortex of the neighborhood.
It spins its dead leaves around its rim and
a whole host of loose things are magnetized,
drawn without discrimination through Formica tables,
brick, glass and concrete, even the sturdy vaults of bone
to gather polarized and therefore solitary
in that stubborn bowl of earth.
It is a legend around these parts.
‘Tie down all your loose things’, the neighbors said
when I moved in.
Keep your change in a metal box.
When you walk beside its sun baked glare
keep your eyes to the road and
offer it a tithe of food – a piece of bread
or the empty husks of evening snacks
so it doesn’t raid your cupboards at night.
Nobody bothers to lock doors anymore.
What’s the use, if it can steal doorknobs and hinges
as well as doors?
Nothing held was too secure, too grounded, planted
too certainly to immovable things to escape
the pull of the land.
With each loss its hunger grew, the clumps of
wild grass darkened, the soil became a fine
brown dust that devil swirled into open windows
coagulating as skim on soup and a persistent
hitch at the back of open throats.
We took stock of all the things held within walls
before going to sleep, and in the morning
counted solemnly the things it had
decided to leave behind.
It didn’t change anything, but our anxiety now
ritualized in the long lists of things owned helped
us sleep, and in waking content ourselves by saying
‘Well, at least the land didn’t take THAT’.
As to why nobody moved, I suspect another hunger.
There is a dangerous need for gods in this place.
Evening
With the advent of latency
comes a failure of resolve
which in him has the quality of
a snake in a barrel of oil
thrashing its one long muscle
in future fires.
We do not know what to do.
Fetch a net, someone says,
and I run down the beach
to a fisherman I knew
but it is too late:
return to the hoots and
aiiyo baba hollers of the men,
glee-ridden, sarongs pulled
tight between their legs,
eyes fixed on that sine of
blue flame in the sand
struggling to the ocean,
and He is cradling his arm
sucking poison out of the bite
and spitting it into dark.
We know it cannot scream
but we hear it anyway,
the black split of sinew
a hiss like an angry wound
and the incessant pounding surf
swallowing it all up.
How to survive a vacation
My cartographer left me in the night,
stole away with the best horse
and a shaving kit my father left to me last year.
No note of absence did he pin to birch or elm,
no path beaten down in the brush;
so for a month and eighteen days I circled in his wake
my beard grown long and my lips turned to paper,
pursed and un-parted in that land without lakes.
Denied company I learned the grammar of stones,
would stack cairns three feet high
and polish pebbles with my tongue.
Ropes I made from strips of bark
and fence-posts of what remained;
a well nearby and a patch of grass -
these things I sought to enclose.
My borders so drawn,
my states divided and fenced,
the capitals of my being now named,
I could kneel on the grass,
feel safe and protected,
entrenched in my morning weeds.
comparable prospector
turtle rock river flow fine gold seam stress
make time stitch shell over ground mud step
in hole for cash haul cash time cache
talk of man talk of town now big mind shaft
sign name trade name paper kill over will
fell trunk circumspect Inuit grave road
con verse old sage tell sage no sage
turtle rock blown up bits and pieces sewn up
con veyed two stage lee way trucker wage
coke cain to build strong arm stone skin
out tune throat strings can’t sing won’t sing
now dark held close all of us less home
built up sign post tells way of ghost
false loom spins fools to work under great
sage dead mud road paved now one way
margin eyed famine men for get in way
belly seed given by dead god water less
bold books big words leak out head less
cut grass clean house wife gives good head
spirit lost car clean head lamp burnt out
dish wash good meal child sleeps breast less
out side snow falls man sings deaf years
Cast Aways
I.
Brow beaters. Close charlatans of an
unheeded succession. At the apex of a
joint venture into the Yu Shan he looks
up idiot faced from an empty pocket,
as if hoping the oxygen tank he had
forgotten three kilometers down would
materialize, likes loaves or fish, from
our snow shielded compassion.
All this never happened, but he was marked
nonetheless with the slip shod light of
gutted campfires, gossiped into being
as one of those men,
one of those who slicked their bones in
axle grease, quiver slid through the bolt
holes of an otherwise secure hull-life,
and free, didn’t bother with apologies.
II.
Distant purveyor of freight trains. Their
oily piston clack over half-buried ties,
parallel lines of sun coshed metal ticking
faintly in the aftermath of that great forward.
sayer of goodbyes, of good riddances and the
temperate accommodations of lonely keepers;
she was never there to begin with, only the
crimped movements of shadow cast from
a meeting many leagues ahead, subtlety of
permanence flattened to a garish masquerade.
She doesn’t understand circles, prefers the
projections of asphalt and gruff conversation
from calcified truckers. Relies on the quick
spurt of a switchblade, the promise in every
city of an anonymous relinquishing.
She is not running away.
III.
The broad sweep of gallivant, its
meaty arms in poised embrace, ready
to squeeze away small sentiment,
inhibited motion, the whispered excuses
of solitude. Has the girth of a planet,
belts himself in acquainted debris, moves
quickly to assimilate all that orbit too
near. Gets drunk in the afternoon and
picks fights with invalids, vocalizes split
lip harmonies to a pair of slightly amused
Balinese cats, amazed at their quiet dignity,
the alert sobriety of snow.
If only he could be a reflection. If only
he could pitch his radius to farther
intersections, encompass the sad center
of spilled inkwells and unlined hands.
IV.
No, never mind, I don’t care, talk
to the hand. Overseer of fixed points.
Manages well in real estate, owns houses
in Laos, Alberta, Berlin and Karachi;
Confuses travel with the liquidity of assets.
Compulsive hoarder of bulb filaments,
their tungsten wave suspended between
two stubborn wicks, his ability to
burn inside sealed globes, mistake a
little light held for the incandescence of
bone fires. Gains comfort in the sight of
a felled tree, a man of retrospect, short
sentences, the ring lined map of a
widening death laid out in the fifty
three skins he will wear, the one place
he will see anew with each shedding.
Etiquette
He first noticed it at dinner,
a slow accretion of discomfort
deposited like silt at the
base of his spine,
an opaque marble of anxiety
that knotted muscles and
oscillated marrow:
he could not sit in chairs anymore.
He sought counsel in vain.
Discarded by specialists and
reduced by doctors to a
lack of motive, he floundered.
Straight-backed mahogany,
sleek Swedish curves and
knobbly German ergonomics,
once tried, were relegated to rot –
a temple of rejected comfort
in our backyard.
For awhile he found solace on window-sills.
We would see him sometimes
around the city,
perched against office buildings
and sympathetic restaurants,
sharing his seat with pigeons and jackdaws.
He stood in empty streetcars
and leaned on subway doors,
would haunt the back-row of theaters,
losing snippets of plot to
smoke bubble whispers.
Simplified to a duality of pose,
he had difficulty saying what he
once did sitting down.
Things like “Change the channel” and
dirty jokes took on new meanings,
hung in charged air like stunted grapes
that no one was willing to pluck.
He had to eat standing up,
make us shift about uncomfortably,
searching for something to say.
We took to apologizing every time
we sat down.
“Sorry”, we would say, and
“Sorry, so sorry, it’s such a shame.”
The Invention of Language
In the beginning
there was only the sun and sand and Nile,
and I was not separate from the things I said.
You would have thought me a silent chap,
speaking not for the sake of it,
but only out of a necessity to remember
a vase bought, an urn smashed,
and numerable sacks of grain
that fuel my creators in their search for you.
Their fervent rituals of cleansing and cloth,
the annual fear of tides, Nile waters rising
and the mediocre souls Anubis claimed:
these things I observed, for you.
You were not invisible then, preferring instead
the pomp and feathered majesty of
public demonstration, and your numerous aspects
adorned every nook that was deemed bare
(I still miss you in the corners of walls).
In the beginning, I could find you
in the absence of you.
Looking for water
She has left me alone for a day,
to teach me how to forage.
The sheets still remember the shape of her body –
in white cotton valleys and polyester bays
I look for the stray bits of warmth
she has forgotten to take along.
She said to me:
“You must learn the virtue of self-sufficience,
you must learn to exist without me, outside of me,
you must learn the time to abandon love –
for after all, what is love without the fear of its absence?”
I was parched for her words;
I swallowed them like a drainpipe after drought,
sifting through the stones of her meanings
in search of a face that I could wield.
My feet, I find, can only walk in spirals:
begin at the apartment, Bathurst-intersected,
then away and around in increments of pavement.
She has marked out my borders
with the color of road,
laid down silent whirlpools of her absence
like traps in the wilderness,
and snared suddenly in the empty chair
facing me
for lunch
I bleat,
wait for the sheparding hands.
Shaving Hands
The only sign of my father’s absence
was a message he left when I was drunk,
celebrating the end of a Thursday night.
He had never been one for ceremony;
his words were hard and gilt-edged,
chewed carefully for a day,
then spit out at night, when we were
too tired to respond.
Later, he had surrounded himself with
the Good News,
slept in piles of palm-sized pamphlets
mis-spelled words on cheap paper proclaiming
apocalypse in a thousand different ways.
The message was of a dream he had on Labor Day,
the words deliberate and paced like
stones across a pond.
He called back two more times to finish.
St. Clare of Assisi walks down an empty street,
a frayed sackcloth hanging over her thin bones
which she constantly adjusts to keep from
falling off her shoulders.
When she is closer my father notices the small
holes in her hands and feet, and the slice of
blood on the cloth at her side.
Her mouth is contorted, lips curled around an
invisible peach-pit, features frozen as if
submerged in wax.
We gather at the church
cloistered in quiet conversation,
white lace and black ties curling
in the wind like flags –
to clutch a feather and pull the
arrow to my cheek,
feel the tunnel of air it must travel
red light and splintered wood at its end,
and a small compensation for
that cool drifting breath.
In place of eyes there is static.
My father is afraid.
She extends her arm to him, palm up,
and on an unmarked hand holds a
silver pyx
which my father must take.
My father is afraid.
She leans closer, face almost
touching his, and he can feel her breath,
an unbroken exhalation of stale
bread, rotting fruit and wine left
too long to ferment
escaping her lips without sound.
I conjure a root-cellar carved into shale,
limestone walls wet with the perspiration of mountains,
wooden shelves stocked with canned soup, dried
fish and strips of meat cured in salt and vinegar,
a damp corner enclosed with shoelace,
iridescent mushrooms sprouting in the stink
of driftwood,
my father splayed out on cool earth,
waiting,
nothing but the crucifixes of a hundred crossbeams
to support his faith.
Bent knees, bowed head, cupped hands,
body of Christ
blood of Christ
peace be with you
and with you
and with you
and with you
and I can feel Him in my throat,
His white pulp like new paper
drying and unfolding inside,
filling out my edges with the
gestures of confirmation,
repeated in front of priests and mirrors.
She bows her head and licks the hollow
of his neck,
but when my father opens his eyes she
is gone,
and his hand is closed over her gift
which he opens to find not
flesh but birdseed and
awakes.
Later, my stomach full of milk-rice and sambol
I find her outside,
praying,
bare white arms and white pleated dress
hiked above her knees
and the light that blurred my edges
is gone.
I kneel beside her and
place my hand on her thigh,
hoping she won’t notice in her joy.
My house overtaken by incense,
Christ reasoned out to the basement,
I surround myself with the competition:
Krishna with his river-hair and drums,
Buddha etched in perpetual laughter,
his stomach spilling over his waist,
and a small shrine to the moon,
surrounded by a sea of dead cigarettes.
I sleep soundly with William James
tucked safely beneath my pillow,
to insure against dreams.
Lunch Break
betel-nut wrap leaf red teeth
he has
never seen so many
spittoons,
silver polished shine
blinds drawn against mosquitoes
fat and blooded from
so many feasts,
fruit protected from flies and sun
but the men don’t care,
swat each other playfully
spit and drink from canteens
before going back
to work.
Glimpses
There are no more pit men but he emerges
nonetheless with the sheen of coal-dust, released
in labors five miles below our aerial comforts,
the possibility of colors, red when he closes
his eyes to the sun. He must sweat to slip out
of himself, enter the mastaba through its false
door, follow the shaft and its misleading echoes
of flywheel conveyances, ignore the picks of
sharpened men to come at last to the seam. It is
the mantilla of earth that he must peel with
nothing but a headlamp, winnow that black snake
from pressure-cooked sleep, its careful globed
threading. It is dangerous work that the new
men scorn. He is alone when he shifts the mantles
below all he calls his keeping, and in the pliant
gap of work sees far beyond known seeming.
Rabid
After supper we tend to our wounds
tongues flicking gravely
over the day’s incisions.
Our esurient healing satisfied,
we slip off our clothes
slink cautiously into the night,
bodies glistening like wet wolves,
teeth bared to night’s pale bone.
You lead me to all our old haunts,
the dark holes full of people:
women burrowed in from the cold
and men who followed their scent,
feeling along the soil and sniffing,
aching to suckle at their breasts.
Under a layer of spit we gleamed,
slid wetly through the thicket of limbs
the ends of our ears hollowed out
and replaced with drums.
When approached you would curl up,
hum quietly in my ears,
talk in endless variations of the present.
Convinced that a failure to detect
symptoms was a sign of love,
I traced your features with mine,
perhaps in feigning madness madder than you,
madder still for worshiping that mirror.
You tell me of all the people you had
pretended to like,
and arch your spine as you laugh.
The hair on your arm bristles
with each eruption.
Our mouths smeared with minerals,
I lead you to our oldest church,
occupied now by weeds and glass.
We light the candles you
bought at the store,
board up the windows with leaves
and pieces of frescoes
limp with yesterday’s rain.
The moon’s white smile
bled through the broken roof,
and our love was overseen
by a family of raccoons,
lined up in order of age
on an overturned pew.
I told you not to call to them
for fear they might be rabid,
but you held out your hand anyway
and didn’t cry out when the
mother moved forward and
bit off your thumb.
In Defense of Mitigation
Sativa held close on the borrowed bed,
a head of flax hair in quiet supplication
against my chest. Outside, snow falls.
What does your name mean?
Nourishment. No – a bowl, a spoon and
cupped hands, the seam of pliant air
between our twinned bodies. I call you
again and again and gain in that holding
a fulcrum for my life, all the water burst
greens you prepare in the kitchen,
so recent of earth and air that our
mouths hesitate in closing them in.
Other severings have made me immune:
The whiplash treatment of Ethan Godfrey
who whistled a walk home during curfew,
was questioned, stripped and beaten with
coachwhip boughs dipped in vinegar –
how the bones in his face seemed softer
in jail light, as if that vital web of fascia
that fuels all recognition had dissolved,
leaving in their wake only his painted shell.
How to resolve such fissures?
The whole of my doing has been this stitching:
the note light skip of your fingers on the
cutting board, their precise preparation
that makes me an intimate of time,
your giving that makes me askless;
and that night I bailed him out to take
him home, cleaned out the button sized
gouges in his flesh with my Uncle’s spirits,
wrapped his rib thin body in treated gauze
and watched him shroud-like across
the table, asking nothing.
