Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent Page 3

  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 withr />
  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