Elsewhere in Dreams

Sometimes when the air shivers
on the paved horizon I
move toward it expecting
that might shake
me.

I need to be shaken,
often: a man prone to doze
off and wander
from the path.

You need to shake me,
often, like a honeybee
shakes a crocus -
hello spring!

Sometimes when I’m near
the Atlantic, I imagine
this continent vibrating
and sending waves
to their whirled companions;

that is the way you need to
shake me: leave your
fingerprints on my arms, on my
cheek: I am inside out,

and you need to shake me
as often as you think
I’m full of shit and vinagar,
and as often as you’re full of
the joy of moving
my plates a little farther
to the left.

You’ve got to wonder how they
feel up there on the 34th floor,

working in a fist punching the sky
right in the kisser - what?

Oh, it’s like skin: you never notice
till someone sticks a knife in it.

They taught her in creative writing class
how to take the narrative voices and
dip them in pudding; she (of course) always
said but stories aren’t animal crackers!
they’d (narrow-eyed) ask what she meant
and if by any chance this was a metanarrative
(she would later remark how the word always
came out in (austere) italics) and if so, how
did two plus two equal four, eh eh eh?
I always told her a physics major shouldn’t
write fiction. You’re too concerned with
facts, I said. You don’t like bullshit.

We don’t often speak about
wheat: I mentioned
barley once and you
replied with corn.
But never wheat.
Odd, since it’s everywhere
and in everything.

We’ve talked about hubcaps,
leather seats,
love, a squirrel, waterfronts,
maple tree, skiing, condos,
traffic, lusty
gypsy women, organ music,
leaves of grass, art theory,
bungalows, and
spaceflight.
But not wheat.

Now, when you read this poem we
will finally tiptoe up to the sheaf.
I will have fixed that little problem
(brushes hands, grins) in my tin-
pot megalomania.

There is a poet,
Amanda Lamarche,
who writes convincingly
about trees;
I picture her planted
somewhere - no, not
planted, that isn’t right -
rooted, that’s
the word - I picture her
rooted somewhere,
creeping ever
closer to the stake.

I read her poems over
several days, until
I had drained the book
of ideas - I felled
them one by one, how
clever - the
poetic equivalent, I
think, of eating a hearty
meal rather too
quickly.

But the strange thing
isn’t so much
her words or forests or
trope (what’s a trope, again?)
but that when I
turned to the last page
I thought it was you
in the photograph.

What a trick! I said to
myself, you publishing a book
behind my back and
waiting for me to say
pretentious and entirely
wrong things
like Charles Bukowski
as a nice young lady.

Of course, you haven’t
attended the University of Victoria -
yet - nor would you
thank your fiercely supportive parents.
But if you do publish
someday, don’t tell me about it.
Let me open it to the last
page and say (because I talk
too much),
is that Amanda Lamarche?

It’s a few minutes before
dropping off a cliff
into the sea. I’ll
float until morning
on currents under
another’s control. I’ll
crawl half-dead onto
tomorrow’s beaches
and shake the sea off
my body. I’ll
be damp till
noon.

They are like a commuter
train in the morning, bleary-
eyed and stepping
to mixed diamonds and hearts,
almost asleep
in line.
Outside, winter bites
at lungs between sips,
but the city is
slowly coming
alive.

A man walks by and we
notice his femur is a
cello. A woman with
bowed back carrying
a child made of stretched
sinew.

We look up to where the
birds perch in midair
and notice their wings
covered in keys,
the ravens and the doves.

There is our mother,
wheelchair-bound,
speechless after the
operation,
but her eyes
Bill Chase on the
trumpet.

When highways unfurl it’s
always something like a smile
or joy at the ossified sounds
of engines, their constant
rumble:
you are smiling
behind the wheels,
your stomach dropping
to trail the disappearing
ground, humming
to the tune of tire and
asphalt:
she steps into stillness
and shuts the door
on another world:
they are liquid in passing,
flowing above, under,
around the
world.

Mississauga is, I think, a city much like Los Angeles - or at least the Los Angeles I imagine. It’s a mound of buildings raised where highways cross paths like tangled string, roads all six lanes across. Where one drives everywhere, and everywhere is built for one to drive to.

I remember New York from travelling there, and how different it was. I’ve never lived in a place the majority of people simply have no need for a vehicle of their own, but it seemed like everyone was going somewhere by subway, or by bus, or on foot. The legion of taxis take over the streets at night - one doesn’t need a car. And in that way, it seemed like everything was connected by bloodstreams of transit. It seemed like everyone was entangled that way.

Mississauga has no connections. We collide at shopping malls and faceless big-box stores. We murmer apologies, bumping elbows. We get into our cars and go our separate ways. Only the poor take busses - one knows income level that way. You aren’t rich enough to own a car, or two.

I live in a basement apartment in the knowledge that it would be entirely possible to never interact with my community at all. In New York, at least our bodies interacted, even if we didn’t like it. In Mississauga, I go from the sanity of my dwelling to the sanity of my car to the sanity of my work and back again. My blurry-faced neighbors do the same every morning. I know when they leave for work, but after that they are lost. They come home, and are lost again.

Something tells me that Mississaugans watch a lot of television, if just to have a window into outside, if only to see other people. We are safe, I think, and rather dead.