Saints in the Opeongo

by

Allison LaSorda

Honours Bachelor of Arts, University of Toronto, 2009

A Thesis, Dissertation, or Report Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Master of Arts

in the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: Ross Leckie, PhD, English

Examining Board: Edith Snook, PhD, English, Chair Mark Jarman, MFA, English Sean Kennedy, PhD, History

This thesis, dissertation or report is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

May 2011

© Allison LaSorda 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada

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For my father, Anthony LaSorda (1954-2011), who was unfalteringly supportive. Abstract

The poems in Saints in the Opeongo speak to a disjunction between the distant and the familiar - between the comfort taken from a sense of continuity and the melancholy evoked by the loss of an object or place. This collection engages with the multifaceted nature of identity confronted with nostalgia; it explores awful, wonderful, or neglected experiences, and illustrates the transformative abilities and failings of memory. The thematic elements of the poems are framed by their diverse settings: the intricate network of neighbourhoods in Toronto, along with the rural farmlands and villages of Ontario.

The derelict park project, the urban alleyway, the childhood home, or the overgrown farm challenge spatial order with cfoordered space. I have tried to present such sites of ruin as intersections of decay and beauty, tangible examples of the malleability inherent in places.

iii Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my supervisor, Ross Leckie, for his kindness, advice, and support.

My time in Fredericton would not have been much fun without Celia Thompson, Rebecca

Geleyn, Peter Forestell, and the rest of my UNB classmates. Thank you to all of the UNB faculty members who provided encouragement in both creative and academic pursuits throughout this degree. Thank you to John Barton for his editing and guidance, and to A1

Moritz for his inspiration and wisdom.

More gratitude goes to Sarah Pamiak, Maya Kamo, Amy Ashman, Chris Tsimbidis, Matt

Finkelstein, Jordan Ginsberg, James Miller, Kristyna Balaban, and Leo Barbosa.

Also, to my family.

And a heartfelt thank you to my reader and examiners: Stephen Schryer, Sean Kennedy, and Mark Jarman. Table of Contents

Dedication ...... ii Abstract ...... iii Acknowledgements...... iv Table of Contents ...... v Introduction ...... 1 Epigraph ...... 20 /. such trees do not grow How to Lubricate a City...... 22 Brick Works...... 24 In an Absence of Music ...... 25 Our Rectangle of Green...... 26 Outside the El Mocambo ...... 27 The Weight of Words ...... 28 461 Parliament, Toronto ...... 29 A Week...... 30 Marineland ...... 31 City of Refuge...... 32 Urbaines ...... 33 Garbage Strike...... 35 Labyrinth...... 36 Tunnels...... 37 A collection of messages received from Thunder Bay ...... 38 Your Working Boy...... 39 Towers in the Park...... 40 Navigator...... 41 Asymmetry...... 42

v II. fledgling variations Richochet ...... 44 The Road is Grey Tape ...... 45 Dear,...... 46 The Rub...... 47 Next Door...... 48 Loba ...... 49 Tin Can Rattle ...... 50 Eulogies...... 51 Whistle Nose ...... 52 Unlike Lightning...... 53 Metaphor of the Dog ...... 54 Four-dollar Pints ...... 55 All Majestic Things...... 56 For Bears ...... 57 Broken Consonants ...... 58 A Means to an End ...... 59 Roof Knocking ...... 60 Half Right...... 61 Splitting Glass...... 62 III. as in a hollow tree Notes on Going Home ...... 64 Ending in A ...... 65 Gi way din...... 66 Between Winter ...... 67 Eighty-Four Square Metres...... 68 The Role of Annelids ...... 69 Vankoughnet...... 70

vi Bonny Brae...... 71 Musk Years...... 76 At Ramsey Lake Market...... 77 After Boating...... 78 Apoptosis ...... 79 Bonnechere Caves...... 80 True Bristletail...... 81 Erin's Well...... 82 This is what I can tell you about Acton...... 83 Outland...... 84 A Dance...... 85 Combermere ...... 86 Silverman of Sudbury...... 87 For Glencolton ...... 89 Hagiography...... 90

Works Cited and Consulted ...... 92 Curriculum Vitae

vii Critical Introduction

1.

But I retained the landscape. -Henry David Thoreau,Walden

ThroughoutSaints in the Opeongo, I have endeavored to create poems that speak to my interests in memory, nostalgia, and decay. Often, the places explored in this collection are mnemonics of absence - they speak to objects and times that no longer exist. Just as often, the places explored in this collection offer memory a tangibleness; locales that are directly tied to memory can be as intimate as family homes, places of worship, or can be more collective places like neighbourhoods, parks, and schools (Booth

29). While acknowledging the diversity of nostalgic paradigms, Fred Davis calls nostalgia a “quintessentially human thing” (x); poetry can allow access to the shapes of nostalgia that otherwise are a very personal process of experience. With nostalgia, one may grieve a loss or moum a past that can never again be made present, but one may also override or neutralize loss through reparative transformations of pain associated with past 1 experience. I wanted the poems in this collection to engage with the multifaceted nature of identity confronted with nostalgia; I hoped they would delve into awful, wonderful, or neglected experiences and illustrate the transformative abilities and failings of memory.

I started working on this thesis alongside the type of poems I enjoy reading, that can be related to personal identity and individual senses of place. I found works by Erin

Moure and Louise Gluck spoke to perceived boundaries and memory in language. I was curious about nostalgia in renderings of the urban and the rural, particularly within a

Canadian context, and often looked to Jan Zwicky, Michael Ondaatje, and A1 Purdy.

These poets, among others, offered inspiration in trying to achieve a balance between the everyday and the weird or grotesque. I also found myself drawn to seemingly diverse documentary films that focused on topics from the revitalization of marginalized neighbourhoods in Toronto to the devastating effects of agribusiness on Canadian family farms and rural communities, but that shared a concern with alienation and the instability of place.

One of the most difficult and inspirational places that, in my writing, I was drawn back to was the home. Home is significant not simply as a place, but as “the imagination’s place marker for a vision of personal (and cultural) re/union, encompassing both that which actually may have been experienced in the vanished past and that which never could have been” (Rubenstein 164). In many arguments, place is seen to exist as spatially particular and temporally particular, in other words, place (and home) may only be as it is remembered (Trigg 32). My poems feature this idea as they examine productions of memory, nostalgia, and culture that are subjective and changeable; I hope that my words indicate a fascination with a disjunction between the distant and the 2 familiar - between the comfort of taken from a sense of continuity and the melancholy evoked by the loss of an object or place.

Lynn Huffer describes nostalgia as “a system of thought that begins with the idea of return, (from the Greek nostos: ‘the return home’)” where “home takes shape and becomes meaningful through the back-forming imagination. It marks a yearning to return to where you never were” (14). Huffer further grounds the feeling of nostalgia by explaining that you can return to whence you came, but, to use a platitude, often nostalgia happens with the realization that you “can’t go home again” (14).

In his work The Aesthetics o f Decay, Dylan Trigg suggests that nostalgia predicates itself on “the desire for the absent. In the return to remembered place, space and time disunite, causing temporal categories to unbind” (Trigg 55). The nostalgic individual often experiences a realization of uncertainty upon witnessing the disparity between experience, a perceived memory, and the change that will inevitably affect a physical place over time. Trigg continues to underline the intersection of memory and imagination in experiencing nostalgia:

only the imagination can reconstruct the decline and growth that occur in

our absence. But this invariably falters when the imagination calls upon an

already lived past to reconstruct an indeterminate present. When we

return, a collision between past and present invokes an uncertainty in

memory. Place refuses to be placed and so becomes overwhelmingly

uncanny. (55)

Trigg speaks of “uncertainty in memory” as linked with the uncanny, a connection I’ve attempted to present in this work. While I am not a Freudian by any means, I found 3 aspects of his definition of the uncanny appropriate. The uncanny, as Freud describes it, often “leads back to what is known” and long familiar, yet it is the opposite of what is comforting - eerie, weird, and arousing a sort of fear (121). What generates this feeling may be an instance when something “we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes,” for example (Freud 145). An uncanny effect is most often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced. The past is embodied in actions; the (unreliability of memory is conveyed with the way personal experience and history influences present time and present places.

As this project developed I became increasingly interested in the idea of decay. Of course, the connections to this theme spilled out in diverse ideas: vanished landscapes of childhood, re-examined neighbourhoods, marginalized communities/spaces, places of desolation, and homecomings. Nostalgia itself examines sites of decay, as in returning to places that are distinctly changed from a pre-existing memory of the place, where one’s imagination falls away upon confrontation. If encountering a site of decay for the first time, one inevitably brings prior personal history to interact with it. Images of places of decay often have simultaneous invocations, reactions of repulsion and sublimity, disdain and longing. The derelict park project, the urban alleyway, the overgrown farm, challenge spatial order with their bordered space, and I hope bring forth the (sometimes elusive) affirmative nature of ruin.

While being fascinated with places of ruin and decay, I have tried to weave the thread of nostalgia into these poems, emphasizing the significance of imagination and

4 remembering through various places and individuals. In Getting Back into Place, Edward

Casey writes that imagination, memory, and place are

complementary in character. Just as imagination takes us forward into the

realm of the purely possible - into what might be - so memory brings us

back into the domain of the actual and the already elapsed: to what has

been. Place ushers us into what already is: namely, the environing subsoil

of our embodiment, the bedrock of our being-in-the-world, (xvii)

In Saints in the Opeongo, evasive and unsettling places at times appear as heavily influenced by imagined experiences and representations. The thematic elements of the poems are framed by their diverse settings: the intricate network of neighbourhoods in

Toronto, along with the rural farmlands and villages of Ontario.

2.

Nostalgia takes the shape of a maze composed of many visible and invisible cities, including the native one. -Svetlana Boym, The Future o f Nostalgia

In the city of Toronto, neighborhoods cultivate very distinct senses of community and contrasting individual senses of place. Though there is a diversity of neighborhoods in downtown Toronto, neighborhoods are enclosed spaces defined by the relative homogeneity of the people who live in them. The cityscapes in my collection are often those of order and regulation, the boundaries are delimited and linear. The inhabitants of

5 these ordered places know and often must respect the limits imposed upon a given space.

City parks, for example, are provided with maintenance and grooming that contributes to their domestication, preventing visual decay, wildness, and uncontrollability. As such, certain indeterminacies are evaded and the impression of these spaces as how they ought to be, “productive”, can be maintained. My poems, however, cut against or across these boundaries, exploring forgotten, abandoned or marginal spaces. The poem “Our

Rectangle of Green” features constructed, designated areas o f leisure that, instead of hosting activity, are vacant:

The playgrounds are empty: a friction-less slide curls like burning paper.

Red plastics flush with lack of action; the cushion of gravel under a swingset stirs no dust, mitigates imaginary jumps.

Colour’s been chased out of the fire escapes and alleys, stripped of movement;

presence slips under the fences of graveyards, a glare of shade through public pool gates -

A domestic city park in this case is an inactive and static place. The action in the poem takes place in “fire escapes and alleyways,” places where “sharper textures intrigue small hands.” Alive with decay, the objects of the alleyway seethe with life too. As in other poems like “The Weight of Words,” “Tunnels,” “City of Refuge,” “Labyrinth,” and

“Brick Works” discovery and experience remain active in unused urban spaces, underlining the problematic preconception of a vacant object being disengaged from its environment. 6 The poem “Brick Works” brings another abandoned urban space into focus by figuring the vital role of memory in constructing images of a city landmark. One of

Canada’s preeminent brickyards, the Don Valley Brick Works was active from 1889 until the 1980s, when the site was acquired for public use. Before the city’s revitalization program was fully completed, the ruined buildings remained accessible. The site was quite popular for “urban exploration” activities - which are attempts to examine the often unseen or off-limits parts of urban areas. With this idea of infiltration in mind, I wanted to imply the unshakeable sense of history that surrounds such a place:

Found solace in its history: hundreds of chipped blocks pressed to go nowhere.

Quarried clay from Mud Creek, sweat greasing the sinew of forearms,

sledgehammers, prisoners of war, tough labour and conjugation.

Though describing a visualization of a potential historical scene, both sections of the poem illustrate the space for activity and discovery that the ruin site provides in the present. Places of min or decay create “a unity between space and the idea dormant in that space,” as locations where the senses of unfamiliarity, uncanniness, and bewilderment converge (Trigg 97).

Poems that focus on metropolitan spaces and places in Saints in the Opeongo deal with their fragmentation and internal dynamics, materializing in ideologies of home, disparities of perspective, and class-identified neighborhoods. While the intervention or imposition of constructed features in the urban landscape are attempts to engage citizens

7 in downtown areas, implicit boundaries often tend to enclose the space of marginalized people.

The apartment towers of St. Jamestown, though imposing, are nonetheless bracketed off from the surrounding regions of the city of Toronto. The bordering neighbourhood of Cabbagetown is also bracketed off, but for the purpose of creating an enclave of wealth, gentrification, and a simulacrum of the rural as represented by the bordering Don Valley - a physical landscape feature that visibly separates parts of the city. These two neighborhoods are merely two examples of the striking divisions of ethnicity and class throughout the city as a whole. “Towers in the Park” is set in this area, where subsidized high-rises that host low-income and immigrant families are divided by one street from wealthy, single-family historic houses. The title is taken from urban planner Le Corbusier’s concept, which inspired the design of St. Jamestown neighbourhood as compact towers surrounded by green space. Decidedly unlike its inspiration, at present approximately 17,000 people live within a four-block radius, making it Canada’s most densely populated so-called minority community (Anisef 356).

From this, the poem directs, “call it the world within a block,” playing with the city’s spin on St. Jamestown’s cultural demographics. Some names of the building names are detailed: “the Halifax, the south-facingMontreal, / the Vancouver complexes reach / for

Canada the familiar, yet their monikers / feel further still.” The proceeding lines, “there’s an ether, delimiting, arriving / between food bank and food basics,” further express the notion of boundaries around recognizable places of poverty and the construction of marginalized space. The racial and class differences between St. Jamestown and

Cabbagetown are acute, and illustrate the degree to which class-identified 8 neighbourhoods become viewed as segregated, chaotic spaces. Such dichotomized spatial categories invite their own dissolution - they create a binary, a margin on the border of space where particular place is categorized.

In connecting nostalgia to marginal places, I found there to be areas involved in a feud between the disrepair of the present and the persistence of the past. A prominent example of this is the poem “Asymmetry,” which obliquely references Toronto’s Regent

Park community:

This isn’t new or old but keeps things steady rocking only the margins.

Fault lines crumble under an invisible city. Pathways funnel, drag a current back to wash over the noise of his fast-paced stride.

Through thin walls the sound of neighbours wrestling with the asymmetry of day.

The “invisible city” mentioned here stands as the public housing community and the dilapidated buildings themselves, both often isolated and presented as being expendable.

I connected this with Regent Park residents being separated from their homes for the city’s revitalization project. Because of the territorial impasse of neighbourhood boundaries, the order in such an area is vague; a “paradigm of city planning failure”,

Regent Park has been “ghettoized and demonized by outsiders” (S. Purdy Ripped).

The home, for some, can function as a symbolic storehouse of memories; it may secure intimacy within its walls and allow one to be oriented in a familiar place. Relating 9 to a home where stigmatization is a conspicuous barrier to overcome then gives way to a complex and challenging experience of place. The character of “Asymmetry” struggles as he leaves his home - a place that contains private memories and yet exists as a location of discrimination: “All he’s known is here. But there’s no / wind whispering prayers, no wish / for heaven: he isn’t sentimental.” In writing this poem I considered displacement and distance; these emotions complicate nostalgia because the home conceivably holds comfort as well as trauma, anxiety, or sorrow. This may result in an idea of home that one continually struggles with, both in the process of remembering it and in relating it to the present. What poems drawn from urban inspiration exhibit is the transformative capability of spaces; such variations are found within an individual interpretation, an imagined meaning or significance.

3.

And it’s true, the little city we came from long ago was a squalid failure. -A.F. Moritz, “Warren”

Away from the city, bucolic towns and farms are often idealized as safe havens, linked with a sense of belonging and a connection with the environment. But place is unstable here, too. Perhaps the structural and material decay so obvious in urban areas more easily becomes part of the rural landscapes. Disused land, tumbledown bams, or yards filled with outdated machinery are commonplace, yet they speak to a decaying image of the rural as ideal. Despite being surrounded by natural beauty, and at times, 10 wilderness, the rural places represented in my thesis feature experiences of personal alienation and community struggle. The rural community is divided by contrasting views of its space: visitors, tourists, and farmers or local individuals all obviously experience the environment differently and so are isolated and do not share a sense of place.

Poems such as “For Glencolton” gesture towards the social and economic issues that are faced by farming communities, such as the deteriorating conditions of the family farm and its marginalization in context of agribusiness. “For Glencolton” specifically points to a case of a Durham, Ontario family farm that faced years of multiple lawsuits for selling raw, unpasteurized milk. I was intrigued by this farm’s practice of biodynamic agriculture, which is a method of organic farming involving such factors as the observation of lunar phases, planetary cycles and the use of ritual substances such as minerals: “Tasted the tough / diversity of seeds and soil, / of the raw witchcrafting of a farm.” I was also interested in their seemingly more “natural” methods of food production being demonized, particularly amidst increasing concerns over grain-seed patents and genetically modified products.

This farm is somewhat idealized in the poem, but the context of nostalgia throughout the work fulfills its place as a constructed longing for thepure rural, showing itself in glimpses but ultimately attached to contemporary market struggles:

This is about more than rotations - it’s clear like the wax on apples that cozens teeth into biting imperfect surfaces; It’s simple to depend on the intricacies of tubers, a lattice pattern of roots.

Not the short sights that contaminate fields with patent-seeds growing in grackle-pecked air But fields, flickering with shadows of turkey vultures. 11 Red-headed and dizzying themselves above, they are carried by the breeze as it cascades across their feathers, rises up under wings.

Glencolton’s relation to tradition is that which seems to rely “upon a preservation of the past as well as a restoration o f‘lost’ value. We value the past, but from the vantage point of a supposedly progressive present” (Trigg 59). What Trigg points out in this passage is what I hope is conveyed in this piece, as well as poems such as “Ending in A,” “Musk

Years,” and “Between Winter”: the nostalgia for a constructed “lost” time, for a place that is no longer present. Following in this theme, the poem “Apoptosis” is situated in the evolving Niagara escarpment region in south-central Ontario. The highway 401, one of the backbones of traffic networks in the Great Lakes region, cuts through country areas and resultantly brings visitors to many small communities and conservation areas.

Despite the allure of picturesque villages and quaint family farms there is often something uncomfortable with the cultivation of stereotypical “rural” landmarks or businesses. “Apoptosis” outlines such ideas:

Houses weren’t built around antique dealers or to flank the wailing degranulating sideroad shoulders.

This point’s become an arboretum, a falling away from wild.

The escarpment area referenced in this poem is an example of a place that was once agriculturally focused, but now its residents mainly appeal to and rely on tourist

12 passersby. Rather than an authentic experience of nature that one would associate with rural life, it offers an encounter with a place that fabricates a nostalgic idea of the rural.

Other poems in my collection that rely on the home as inspiration speak to a rural

Ontario that does not exist anymore, but that may be revisited in reminiscing. “Bonny

Brae” presents a visualized return to a childhood farm, a remembered place. Divided into four sections, the poem starts as a recollection, as “the adventures of childhood were seasonal.” Yet looked at from the present, the objects and images of this once-familiar place are dream-like, bordering on grotesque:

We collected slugs in Pepsi cans, built dams to fashion muddy lagoons, and pulled a dead goose out of the forest: oozing, stiff, and luminous in a coat of emerald flies.

We stepped diligently around junk piles and tires, holding its limp neck high in dignified procession among the insane hum of mosquitoes.

Images of decay throughout the poem’s parts (a goose corpse, road kill, a deer-hunting trophy) speak to the unpredictable potential of memory; experiences expected from an idyllic childhood environment reveal a hidden, unexpected quality to the place - a sphere of desolation, as the “indeterminate realm of the organic and the discarded ... comefs] to embody a decentered place” (Trigg 128). Even more relatable activities that evoke nostalgia, such as “swinging ropes / in haylofts and contests / of holding on to electric fences,” seem to take on a sinister quality. Trigg speaks of the “spectral quality of the past,” and explains that “if lived places contain memory, then by returning to them, the 13 likely result is estrangement and not affirmation.. .This realization that space and place fall from certainty coincides with the experience of nostalgia” (55). Unsettling elements of recollection in the poems of this thesis open up interpretations of memory, challenging perceptions about material and abstract notions of decay.

4.

The idea of a thing which a man framed for himself was always more real to him than the actual thing itself. -Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Poems in the middle section of Saints in the Opeongo I compiled as detached from any specific spatial category and instead retains a focus on what resides in the individual. Functioning as a pause between “real” places, this “Fledgling Variations” section features remembered impressions of being in place; rather than providing a distanced exploration, these poems are focalized through displacement and attachment, and are palpably tainted by given experiences. In Remembering, Edward Casey talks of body memory, alluding to memory that is intrinsic to the body:

habitual body memories are at once pre-reflective and presupposed in

human experience. As pre-reflective they form a tacit, pre-articulate

dimension of this experience.. .As presupposed, habitual body memories

serve as our familiars in dealing with our surroundings - as a constant

14 guide and companion of which are typically only subliminally aware.

They are always operating in our ongoing lives. (Casey 149)

Here Casey interestingly asserts that memories are constantly infused within our present actions. The body has its own ways of remembering as the natural subject of perception - it is being in the situation itself again and feeling it through the body (.Remembering 148).

As much as prior experience informs our perceptions, Casey emphasizes that “what matters most is the experience of being in the place and, more particularly, becoming part o f the place (Getting ” 33). I attempted a reminder of this feeling of place in my poems, whether with an uncomfortably personal exploration of one character (“Next Door,”

“Loba”) or the mutable relationships and circumstances between multiple characters

(“Unlike Lightning,” “Broken Consonants”). As Tim Lilbum writes, “when we love something or someone, we are reminded obscurely of a larger presence ... that feels most like home” {Living 44). And so my aim with these poems was to create an intimate familiarity, as one may have with the notion of home.

In her work Home Matters, Roberta Rubenstein writes that home functions

not as a tangible place but as a liminal site ... a place that is not a place,

and a time that is not a time ... In that domain, in that transitional space or

time where meanings remain temporarily open or suspended... [one] may

discover that home is ultimately a state of mind. (164)

As Rubenstein points out that home is a “state of mind,” we are vulnerable to feel out of place even in the home, where the uncanny anxiety of not feeling “at home” may afflict us (Casey,Getting x). The sense of what this feeling of being in place is stirred by is often beyond comprehension. An instance of involuntary memory often shocks consciousness into introspection: “an entire landscape of memory can unfold, reflecting in its grime evocations so distant that they appear real” (Trigg 28). “The Rub” exemplifies a realization of the unreliability of memory:

Even garment haunts turn into non-places, they turn over and grow, forget us. Memories connect to where we’ve yet to visit (...)

You’ve rubbed yourself into fictional scenes, set lame footprints in the soil of a yard because the driveways we carved our names into are grown over.

In this portion of the poem, the speaker is unsettled by the realistic quality of her created place, and evokes images so “real” they blur the line between dreams and memory. Like the borders between physical places, the line between imagination and actuality, may be difficult to locate. Such elements of obscurity may produce feelings of the uncanny as we adapt our judgment to the imaginary reality and regard it the same as our material reality

(Freud 151). One can unknowingly “place” memories, convincing oneself that a created circumstance has truly happened or that a new location is imbued with a sense of familiarity.

Additional poems follow memory traces of home and their inexplicable reappearance as they coincide with depictions of ruin, as shown in “Richochet”:

A trail wears out from door to field to grassy cellar and back; always a return route tracing the boomerang of stray thoughts.

16 Here, I have tried to illustrate a landscape image that corresponds to a pattern of nostalgia, a return route that continually leads back to the same starting point of home; the recollected image, like the physical home and the trail, wears down and becomes cloudy with the distance of passing time. Casey writes that from a young age, throughout our lives,

we suffer from a series of separations, all of which involve aspects of

place: separations from caring parents, from siblings and childhood

friends, from a native region and its characteristic beliefs and dialect, from

things we have done or witnessed.. .to refind place - a place we have

always already been losing - we may need to return, if not in actual fact

then in memory or imagination, to the very earliest place we have known.

(Casey, Getting x)

5.

Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them. - Dennis Lee, “Brunswick Avenue”

Edward Said claims that with home and love of home “loss is inherent in the very existence of both” (185). Coming to terms with this loss, I feel, is an interesting and possibly transformative element of nostalgia. Aside from evoking a longing to return, revisiting places of past experience, even in imagination, provides a mnemonic to what is inaccessible, even nonexistent. Similar to mourning, the dynamic of this process is 17 centered on the irresolution of memory. It is irresolute because that memory becomes a duplicitous idea, evoking the representation of an image yet simultaneously lacking the origin of that representation (Trigg 29).

Saints in the Opeongo’s final section opens with a poem titled “Notes on Going

Home.” This poem shows an eerie connection, and gives future potential to a familiar, seemingly dead-end place:

... a town that stops breath; convinced that she’d once been to Chatham as field blurs into field, as generational

acres seem familiar, in that dead, thawing, mustard-grass way.

Inseparable from its remembered history, memories of the distant town will continue to haunt as, unseen, the place transforms with time. The strange nostalgia shows how this feeling leads us to search among remembrances of persons and places of our past in an effort to bestow meaning upon the persons and places of our present (Davis vii).

With this poem and the collection’s final poem, “Hagiography,” I wanted to leave the reader with a feeling of intimacy, but have the rootedness of this intimacy remain somewhat unresolved. The “chiseled saint sculptures/ that leak light through pores” in the second section of the poem are concrete re-creations of those that belong to places that seem inaccessible, unknowable. Though adored, their stories may evoke distinct memories and associations, attempts to situate their origin, and even re-creations. And so it is with memories, even painful ones, when they have become remote from their place of origin, they often “acquire a domesticated quality ... [and] we enter a luminescent 18 state; and in turning them over in our minds in this way, we tame them yet further - to the

point where they become our own re-creation” (Casey Remembering 157). Yet the real

memories and re-created memories blur together, as they are likely to do. The chipped

statues, like many other objects in this collection, are beginning to decline. I have tried to

present such examples of ruins as an intersection of decay and beauty, a tangible example

of the malleability inherent in places.

Like carving names in a tree, remembering an experience testifies to the trace that remains. ThroughoutSaints in the Opeongo, I hope to speak to traces that remain,

conveying the striking versatility of identity and memory; remembering a past (now absent) place may not necessarily be a painful process, as Roberta Rubenstein writes,

“even as the remembered/imagined vision of home is a construction, it also constructs - and stokes, and sometimes even heals - the longing for belonging” (164).

19 There, I came to myself among an unknown people, in a hidden life that always waits the same, is waiting now, ready for me to come across, I don 7 know where, someplace in a city where I once lived.

-A.F. Moritz, “Nostalgia”

But everything fades and wavers into something else, the seasonal cycle and the planet’s rhythm vary imperceptibly into the other

-A1 Purdy, “Remains of an Indian Village”

20 /.

such trees do not grow

21 How to Lubricate a City

They gather, save, tuck phlegm away into cheeks. Paper, tongued till pulp again - pliable and warm. Fingers sink into the preformed mass, smoothing the hardening child-figure totems.

Amid the delicate shells of metro-grid, moulded beings come to shape with moisture. In twitching cytoplasm, nourished fibres fuse, hold corpora together with coat hanger bone frames.

Glass dishes are vehicles to propagate and baste, citizens fumble with glue and flour-water, pulling chunks out from finger webbing in a race against coagulation.

*

So what of movement weighed down by bodily fluids?

Wetness doesn’t quench, and yet all attentions turn towards salty secretions, gelatinous gametes, to seedling ooze and saliva.

Or to glassy eyes, the pattern of upper lip sweat on summer days.

Cities lubricate their children with fire hydrants and garden hoses, animal-themed slip ‘n’ slides. They allay heat that wriggles up from asphalt: the horizon unsteady with steam.

*

22 After showers, the streets throb to the rhythmic tide pull of cigarette butts in runoff slicking into storm drains.

To build something better than papier mache: a mash-up of tactile and disheveled.

There’s a lack of human-spun webs, nests, and functions - so heads brim with imaginings and drownings, unseen tenses in nervous water.

Though composed of carbon and what makes brooks babble, they strain for consistency in liquid when there is nothing to do but coast.

23 Brick Works

Pre-restoration, men in hiking boots infiltrated it - attempting to stoke activity in a vacuum.

Found solace in its history: hundreds of chipped blocks pressed to go nowhere.

Quarried clay from Mud Creek, sweat greasing the sinew of forearms,

sledgehammers, prisoners of war, tough labour and conjugation.

*

Decayed walls are entrances, fence posts are rotten teeth pulled out of an unused maw.

Glass persisting in geometric shards, disordering the broken windows.

And dusty kilns that fired the bricks for enduring city halls.

The malleability of a boundless ruin.

24 In an Absence of Music

Nassau Street means watching, talking volumes over childish tambourine players and plastic bucket drummers.

These people look spun out of electric sugar and decades-old wool. Dreadlocks toss to the toots of recorder, off-key broomstick singers.

But we silence for the defiantly harmonic, for the Native string virtuoso - a southpaw shredder who plays over his shoulder, taps electric strings behind his head and smokes a cigarette, too; quotes Johnny Cash with biblical severity.

Or for a Colombian with equatorial rhythm who only sings when he’s drowning; his voice thumps out like a garbage truck or his syrupy tongue trills against willing ears.

We’ll keep listening. And later, settle for a pretentious violinist with half-a-hundred-grand of stained wood and guts purring under an equine bow.

The strings’ tension breaking the heat of this street’s noise, the thick-cut gain of transverse waves in acoustic summer.

25 Our Rectangle of Green

This place is an etch-a-sketch, a gradual building up that flattens, erases with a sudden shake.

Perpetual edges compete with the blur of sprouting. Jolted out of their chlorophyll hue, plant tendrils grow lushly dull, wings of clover reach around solid grey. They caress where street games are traced in chalk, numbers smudge through each other in humidity.

The playgrounds are empty: a frictionless slide curls like burning paper.

Red plastics flush with lack of action; the cushion of gravel under a swingset stirs no dust, mitigates imaginary jumps.

Colour’s been chased out of the fire escapes and alleys, stripped of movement; presence slips under the fences of graveyards, a glare of shade through public pool gates - into places where sharper textures intrigue small hands.

26 Outside the El Mocambo

Holding conversations to their ears the crowd is a bricolage of public privacies. There was a rumble of throat clearings, perked cochlea, agile thumbs, the depression of high pitched alerts and dial tones.

A box punctuates the sidewalk: the increasingly rare, sweat-smeared phone booth with its hungry slots, stippled mouth piece, grime cozy in embossed numbers.

I remember when the sky was personal: its baritone sag pulling some cord of our beguiling - it seems distant, now.

Now our intimacies rotating beyond wire, connected through capsules in unseen patterns, suspended beyond the swell of dark.

27 The Weight of Words

He said he writes about the emptiness: whatever remains after the marrow has been sucked out.

It seemed to me futile. So I grazed each line, chewed through letters, my tongue explored the cavities for content.

I found traces: the mention of condemned toy factories, sparks discharged from streetcars, in the abandoning of your pashmina for a dine and dash, in ascending rusty ladders to rooftops.

I recalled the cold fire-escape metal that singed the grip of my palms. No creaking voices in the iron persuaded me to climb down to street level, just weight, pulling me back.

28 461 Parliament, Toronto

Breakfast food is lovers’ domain. Those Benedicts and Florentines leaning over each other, giddy with hangover, tousling uncombed hair above pancake platters and blushing. Kissing teeth with silver tines, entitled continental style.

Melt into mornings where people come out of apartments for a scrambled brunch: pre-buttered toast sogging into itself, the hash browns need a makeover; a layer you can peel off the over-easies like week-old sunburned skin.

A waitress scuttles by, maple syrup running down her leg, while an octogenarian spikes his cup-o-joe.

How can any of them eat, when there are table legs to be leveled out with sugar packets, when there are cracks in walls, voices, and sidewalks, gaping spaces waiting to be filled with falling into or caulking?

Some patrons leave voids, settle into vinyl. Tattooed with dermal visions they map out, anchors aweighed by lifted biceps far from the nausea of seawater; blurs of insignia reaching for salt.

29 A Week

He tosses out names like magician’s cards. Argentina might be nice because he likes its shape, it reaches down to claim some Antarctic ground, and the wine tastes like sailing ships. Being a doctor has benefits, too, maybe a season in Montreal. But in this stale hemisphere, far north of the shores of Patagonia, ice is only appealing in the crackle of a gin & tonic.

What kind of man doesn’t want to be needed - the moment she asks, he’s pulled by the gravity of that distant pole where December swells with heat and mouths fill with ciervo patagonico. He left her on tiptoe, looking for that Southern mirage.

A week is an eternity to him while thumbs wander through pages of aLonely Planet guide amidst a year of expeditions across the pampas.

Waiting for the memory of a stampede of breath coming in gallops, wood boiled down into pulp to press swirled prints into her; for the beat of acacia falling; a thumping jugular mess, a clattering of digits and faces opened up like Spanish fountains.

30 Marineland

All the roads in this city are useless on indoor days. We’d wind them up like ropes in his apartment: a high rise frozen stale in winter where warmth was expensive.

The base heaters turned up, diffused roasted dust and frozen windows seeping ice doilies from their panes.

He took my hand and traced it across the phone book map, repeated to cement the ground around us— trap routes to a fixed location.

Commercials jingled into our cartography and tv’s glow spilled onto our papers - there are polar bears at Marineland; this arctic, iceberg mammal lounging awkwardly in an emptied out pool. We wondered about hibernation in captivity and whether beats still slow and pulse together.

31 City of Refuge

Riverdale Park is carved out, a picnicking mouth to the north trails; following the Don, it’s a city’s kind of wilderness.

Razor grass sticks to skin with a slap and slices from unexpected angles across knee-joint tendons, in a sickle shape, a careful cradling of delicate anklebones.

These strips of red mark people, but they’re only reminded of each other upon seeing abandoned, soggy sleeping bags crumpled at the river’s edge; a bicycle strangled with bungee cords and duct tape; shoe insoles drying against a cement pillar.

Under bridges, in pulsing miniature marshes the city is alive in vague sound - the grumble of sixteen wheelers, and in odd streaks of highway luster like a long-exposed night sky.

32 Urbaines

It’s only a couple of men that gather by a Tim Hortons kitty comer to the liquor store.

Skin sun-blasted and tired, stringy hair plaited, coasting down mountainous spines.

They greet each in rasp voices that could raise curls of pulp off a wooden board; lean into familiar embraces, settle onto sidewalk cardboard for conversation, the meeting place for cowboy gear and ten-year-old shoes.

A slow dull nothing transposes into drunk. They wonder about the legitimacy of youth, potential brothers lost in deep wood scuffles or a rumbling fall following another mistake.

Chokes of anger cough out of their talk. And perhaps it’s stroller after stroller passing across their comer that sends a nautilus spiral back into memory about what could’ve been pastoral but really:

It’s about just how quick ten dogs multiply while three guard territory: all sorts of colours spill out onto the pups brindled, blue-eyed, cow-like spots.

Or water that quenches like a mouthful of pennies.

It’s about the north not being true save for a compass.

33 And all the words for snow that don’t make up for that absence of words.

The comer men - mouths open now - wait for something to speak through them.

34 Garbage Strike

June and July smelled like everyone’s things. The scourge of Moss Park, overgrown with fruit-punch-stained-mattress playgrounds, banana peel paddling pools and crumpled fliers for hot summer deals.

The neighbours exaggerate, but it’s relaxing to blame someone: expect to find Satan stretching black plastic until it gapes, staking out piles of leaky batteries and frayed toothbrushes in backyards.

He could be a man with a thin moustache rattling coins for coffee in a bowler’s cap. Or a decision maker holding salaries hostage. Or the smell of distended-belly dead raccoons - entire nurseries surfeiting from inner city banquets.

Or an old woman with a styrofoam face, melting waste with the hot oil of her gaze; at the smell of neglected house plants, mold-gilded old breads and rat trap Tupperware she’d sneer, if she could.

He could be the one to split town this season, enjoy the cake icing snow on sapling fingers elsewhere, and no one would notice.

Perverse love for the scapegoat isn’t for extinguishing grease fires or piling up aluminium-cloaked cold tamales to keep them warm, but for the hunt.

Probably he’s hitching along the shoulder of the highway, following the sun westward; knee bent, thumb pointing skywards, his body all angles of dignified desperation.

35 Labyrinth

We maneuvered through the city grid to listen to the gossip of strangers, their babble a sinkhole at the centre.

Found paths worn by caverns of noise; pushed through dawdlers and past windows reflecting traces of green, a glimpse of sky - meltwater blue among the complex of stoic apartments.

Digging through the speech that spills like a waterfall in slow motion. Left with the taste of mineral upon our tongues.

Eavesdropping, bathing in the steam of our coffees, we stared at shadows stretched into homs, half-beasts, perched on a bench.

36 Tunnels

Our heads loll from the crowd heat; we’ve paid for danceable light where bodies turn a club into the climate of a mouth.

Blindness: foreheads touch and the sebaceous bump becomes electric. Someone behind you is breathing a keyhole into shadows, curling lips away from black-lighted teeth.

Come morning, let’s meet in the middle of downtown. And when we get there, pass the punks’ porch where faces age rapidly as bananas.

We’ll come up for air on synagogue steps and day dream about the sting of salty water on cankers, tourist traps, that restless, hopeful child-sleep - maybe wish we were somewhere else knowing we’ll never leave, not knowing what holds us here.

We approximate areas marked with characters recognized but never named.

37 A collection of messages he received from Thunder Bay

Tonight will be my first night in my new tent and I'm looking forward to seeing how my new tent looks like from the inside. I expect a nylon cave.

There's a dog here. He’s half wolf, half big furry dog and his name is Blue.

Sorry about the telephone last night. It was fine for a while but then it cut out at the end. You have a wonderful voice. I've always told you.

People keep asking me about the outside - outside being home. What do you do on the outside? Questions stretched taut like blue tarps, pinned over us at impossible angles.

The bush is making me a romantic. I guess by now the realist in you is laughing.

I wish that you were here in my tent even if you got up four times in the night to pee, even if you stole the blankets, or left the heat on too high.

Can you write me longer letters? Or more? They don't have to be funny or amusing.

I think I’m starting to look like a clear-cut. Cuts, bruises, bug bites, odd brown tan line patterns, blood everywhere, and that salty crust that develops throughout the day.

"Golden Brown" on your mix cd makes this big tough tree planting Labrador guy Derek cry every time I put it on. He wanted me to thank you for some reason.

I am miserable. I haven't had time to have a nap yet. And I know you're probably not expecting much but if you're expecting anything at all you might be expecting too much.

38 Your Working Boy

Droplets drizzle, drip down the plaster as it wrinkles, squinting. A leak etches frown lines flexed beneath layers of paint.

In a room that now smells like yesterday’s paper, comers dimmed with cobwebs, potato bugs are scuttling under the soothing wires of the fridge.

He drags toenails across fields of fiberglass and tile to wash hours off his skin. Rivulets of water strum against his feet, crinkled-red.

And eyes dead as prunes, pupils waxy and dilated with disinterest at his bathroom window. He looks like the type whose nerves gather in a white-crud bundle, conferencing at the comers of his mouth.

Wall shades of ecru, and bone with a butterscotch ripple bolt of rusty rainwater creeping to the floor, marking a river landscape descending from the top molding.

Like a boring Dali dream devoid of variety, the wall melts, robbing the space of sanity; he watches as it folds in on itself with this unfortunate spring thaw.

39 Towers in the Park

Call it the world within a block because of spoken language statistics shimmied into a four-block radius. The Halifax, the south-facingMontreal, the Vancouver complexes reach for Canada the familiar, yet their monikers feel further still. There are initiatives westerly positioned in patience but there’s an ether, delimiting, arriving between food bank and food basics.

While two boys leap and stomp noiselessly, weightless in spite of themselves and unpresent to automatic door sensor.

They clear the entrance for a woman striding with the doors’ exhale with a month’s supply of canned fava beans and ackee fruit boxed and balanced on her head.

They watch as a pasty neighbour swoops toward a still-smoking butt, peels it off the sidewalk as careful as money.

In the bus shelter, jewel tones of saris seem to crave sunlight as they billow beneath the hemline of parkas. Call it an island within a block.

40 Navigator

Right: a funeral home employee placing stiff notes on cars to mark mourners through traffic.

Left: sidewalk displays of stargazer lilies, wilting fern fronds on salt-weathered milk crates.

What is there to be said: an aged woman gets lost in Roncesvalles, can’t find her way home through the road work - she’s afraid of streetcar tracks and runs fingers along the bobby pins in her hair.

Left: a spaniel being lifted, flicking its flat tongue against the drinking fountain’s spout.

Cover her, hunting for something to stir memory - a lamp etched in ornamental iron, astroturf stapled onto a front stoop - but stumbling upon mystery.

Suppose a right to consistency of storefronts, to keeping the closeness in a recognizable avenue.

41 Asymmetry

But to whom can I be responsible, and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? - Ralph Ellison

He knows it’s easy to get bruised, but being black and blue doesn’t stop simple machinery, steel or stone.

This isn’t new or old but keeps things steady, rocking only the margins.

Fault lines crumble under an invisible city. Pathways funnel, drag a current back to wash over the noise of his fast-paced stride.

Through thin walls the sound of neighbours wrestling with the asymmetry of day.

All he’s known is here. But there’s no wind whispering prayers, no wish for heaven: he isn’t sentimental.

Chooses a focal point besides the housing, the media fetish for poverty; the bubbles in linoleum, drywall peeling off in caterpillar chunks.

Time only gives itself over in wages - the feel of webbing between a mother’s fingers.

Must be hard to see through, a toughness other neighbourhoods never have to grow.

42 fledgling variations

43 Richochet

There is a body that walks by on my legs. Stretched out, I recollect, watch myself become a child, still, in a place that captures youth and holds it hostage. Supple limbs propel, flex, then fade, ache and stiffen. Age implying loss and movement; recalling slough or maybe the elastic of sole skin bullied into calluses and walking over small-stoned driveways and plough-trenches. A trail wears out from door to field to grassy cellar and back; always a return route tracing the boomerang path of thoughts. Home, for some, is a state of grace.

44 The Road is Grey Tape

The men behind big desks tug the silk ties at their throats, overlook words on cue cards and shuffle your memories.

They revisit the reports on winding roads with snipers coiled like cobras on top of hills overlooking a seized Sarajevo: broken and burned.

An opaque image of your father swearing, changing a tire on a one-way street under the flutter of a hailstorm.

This is why you remember the smell of street food, at random, fedora-topped old men. The reason for climbing mountains - rising to snow that melts through altitude sickness, wandering down to peel duct tape off of blisters in the warmth of the valley.

Consider your bravery, hunting bats in the endless summers of refuge on Mali Losjin; the thrilling capture of cockroaches. Parading past the neighbours with the trophy in ajar.

Forget then, the photo of a much younger man with eyes on dough stretched the length and width of tablecloth and recall off-camera how rapidly it receded.

45 Dear,

She gives me something that I can hold in my mouth like soda - alive, reactive; her look a grocery bag to be slung over shoulders.

When licked hip to hip she folds her mouth into an M, inhales: the convexity of stomach flattened for a shock of bones.

Migration patterns mapped with breath scent in spit crescents across a row of ribs.

In our exchange we offer something buttressed, something burned. She embraces accusation. Seagull arms bow around me to debate the presence of a swollen belly.

In those inches I track down her impression, the ruffle of heavy, dated hair, a weighted nest; in a note I’ve read three times over, but cannot place the handwriting.

46 The Rub

You buried your face into my clothes to relieve dryness, mouth-comer foam lapped against lip shores. All the good angles given to your cheeks and jaw marked a scent where to recognize, revisit.

Without those fibers I wouldn’t remember that we share a hometown, were raised within mere kilometers. Spent dreary nights separately, dreaming of a garden with a maypole, tentacles of ribbons interlocked in dance.

We saw the fields dissected, suburban houses pop up like deformed gourds, sloping west.

The escarpment looked heavily upon us, perfumed parking lots with limestone breaths, it was there we loitered behind video store/dry cleaners, hid magazines and beer cans in the woods.

Even garment haunts turn into non-places, they turn over and grow, forget us. Memories connect to where we’ve yet to visit as if arguments always happen at my childhood home.

You’ve rubbed yourself into fictional scenes, set lame footprints in the soil of a yard because the driveways we carved our names into are grown over.

47 Next Door

He studies knobs, cylinders, and spindles, the button-locks that push into a smooth orb, pirate-ship latches of flimsy gold,

safety-slide chains. They’re all the same, like the reason for dead bolts. He leaves his doors unlocked.

No matter in a bachelor, its William Blake posters, dull tea lights striving for metaphysics.

He licks breakfast knives for a hint of leftover butter and crust crumbs, leaves tongue smudges

and slides them back into the drawer. It’s this spit-washed silverware I stir my drinks with when I can’t stand

to talk, water down some caffeine crystals, liquefying my speech. Eyes ajar, I peel cheap candle wax off a tablecloth, sip in silence.

I chew my way through the smooth leather of dehydrated fruit to mask the vague, potential openness voiced by hinges.

He pulls a cupboard handle, offers black mission figs -wrinkled oddities, shrunken heads in a twist-tied bag.

48 Loba

The things he loved about her were bizarre womanly assets: plump arm flesh that spilled out of t-shirt sleeves; black hairs creeping up her avocado-shaped stomach, perforating her dimpled chin; a mane of wiry red-brown hair that he raked into and became ensnared.

For months he locked into her and chirped how when he was alone he missed the garlic-scented wrists, the gravelly breathing and drowsy twitches of Loba’s restless body.

The green budgie caged in her bedroom kept him awake enough. With its rubbing of cuttlefish bone perches and sudden unnatural urges to molt. He watched her sleep. The bottoms of her feet were filthy from the bird’s scattered seeds and citrus feathers.

He whispered of reigning in the feminine, perched, holding those copper tufts behind her ears, wary of her illegible ink eyes when the earth began to tilt. He challenged others, everyone, to weigh against them, to see-saw with their elephantine love.

49 Tin Can Rattle

First came the days of belted threats: alcoholics always go for the belt. And we laughed because it’s not for purpose, but convenience, the closest weapon within reach for stumbling, slurring gentlemen, because most nights we were kids within a belt’s length.

Mine retained a bit of class - it was left over from business trips. He’d slink in our door late, gave up on the stairs, in wrinkled prune suits that smelled of smoke infused into the shoulder pads - we’d find him deflated on a kitchen chair come morning.

Your father’s leg was mangled and tom away in a sailing accident - he looks like a war hero, but really he’s just clumsy. Now he hops on a plastic shin and foot: evidence of not having a problem. Whiskey in one hand, telephone in the other, calling to tell you how his stump is feeling in a tin can voice: you should be ashamed o f being ashamed o f me.

In spite of all this, we look for heat; we hold our palms out to be filled by our bellies, wait for a warmth like the fresh-laundered towels or like a hair dryer between bed sheets to thaw cold toes.

50 Eulogies

We noted good things to say at each other’s funerals: nothing about character or virtue, only concocted memories that would encompass conflated selves.

How you’d grow armpit hair long and go sleeveless to make your mother uneasy. How after summers in the bush I’d shower twice a day to get the smell of sun out of my hair, or abrade callused palms along an expanse of kitchen grease.

How you’d rip phyllo layers of my clothing apart to mend, while I’d fall into a week of coma-sleep. How we’d argue about burned flapjack mornings (yours); whether one can butterfly a thumb or not, the race to pick all the good bits of fruit out of jam.

These eulogies seemed more important than fighting in future tense - we’d block out plans with nostalgia though longing wasn’t possible as we clung and closed shades around us, knowing you’d leave when sap started sludging through tree veins.

51 Whistle Nose

Loud, sudden ugly-animal grunts of exhaustion wrenched me out of surrealist dreamscape: vivid globular crystals dripping from cacti, just beyond touch the flexing teeth of a fly trap; an image-puree, stiff peaked visions of a fetid garden, its growth time-lapsed, until my eyes fluttered.

I hated the way he slept. Digging a palm heel into the pillow, his leg brought close then swung back, mule-like, I’d tense for impact. But you have a pull to your breathing - a white noise whistle in your nose. There is rhythm to your twitches: gripping and releasing wrists you’ve pinned above my head, the urgency to be close, remembering to lower your weight onto me because in dreams I like to be flattened. I awake, gasping in our scent. We shift for space, slope our backs away until we look like cherry stems, grope for hips spreading fingertips open like fans. The lull of sleep-garbled speech routinely whispered into my mouth: syllables a snagging hook under skin.

52 Unlike Lightning

Said that he could walk around his love for her, and did. It was on a string, a hanging tea bag; they could walk everywhere but into it.

For myopic eyes it was easier to discern: an elaborate construction, ceiling frescoes and pear-shaped domes designed from scribble swirls stuccoed with intent, functionless.

He never evaluated sketches, but gathered and folded the ink lines bled into quilted napkin protectively.

Trompe l’oeil on dixie squares, the ballpoint architecture dampened, sweat away in use.

Black streaked across his face and the only trace of movement in the room a pink tongue, hunting morsels of a scrunched idea; a line of words that he’d grown into cities.

Columns crumbled in their planning, felled by steely epiphanies. Said what his love wasn’t: lightning. Instead, he kept it slow, industrial, unblinking.

53 Metaphor of the Dog

But the days of poetry are over - you’ve resorted to story-telling and recycling old love letters, the names and places substituted.

He can’t stand your crooked bed, so you left him sleeping elsewhere, tiptoed out when dawn slanted in at bleak angles, through doorways where you used to inhale his neck, claiming you were addicted to the scent: a police-trained shepherd, sniffing for someone wanted, absent.

54 Four-dollar Pints

His face seems gilded in the mustard eyes of late nights and nicotine affairs, clothing soaked in pollen.

Every colour reflected looks like an aura of wealth, a halo that encircles us with Amazonian dust.

Those crane fingers trace the lines along a pockmarked table, they run through the wet hula-hoops birthed in humidity, turn them into Qs.

He studies the posture of braver, breastless women while etching initials on the space between our glasses, w.e. was here. All Majestic Things

Of all the majestic things men can do, he writes letters. But more than that, he sends drafts of the same letters to his diaspora: the heinous and heartless women, his chicken-scratch insults read like a baby pummeling its dumpling fist into another baby because it has what he wants.

His anger starts slow, creeps up like trash blowing against ankles on Spadina Avenue. It rises and falls in the focused grudge rhythm of teeth-grinding.

It isn’t about aging: old men seem more comfortable away from youth, glowing in their obesity and polyester. It’s the stasis that shocks him - the same unease wearing down alongside forests and cities, remastered music albums, reunions. Watching a lover fray expensive thread with her teeth over and over.

Otherwise, he likes art inspired by North American peerage, drawn from the exhaustion of living easy; no abstraction: a moose in the sunset - he knows what that means.

He won’t write in front of women. Won’t stoop to admit his tactics, refusing to acknowledge that he will always be their last authentic man.

56 For Bears

i.

The bears skulked out to nibble tourists’ snacks; paws pressed to cracked car windows for souvenir photos.

Some fantasy, some legacy woven into children’s book pages and stamped onto cartoon reels made us believe

in secret bear affection for self-promotion, campers’ food and runt companions.

But the charm got lost in real time, snuffling noses into dumpsters, straining bristled shoulders under picnic tables for scraps. ii.

Ursus arctos horribilis has a bad reputation built in to its taxonomy.

Grizzly claws are as long as a man’s fingers.

Black bears can climb faster than they run.

Hundreds of pounds of muscle and fur curled up and hidden, spending seasons d reaming of simple things: plump berries, scratching of backs on sun-warmed trees.

58 Broken Consonants

Confronting stamped papers - estate ink, bequeathals fanned before a cocked head like architect’s blueprints.

These junctures, these lines read as Bon Echo’s loops and tumuli, its shores and gravel sinkholes; its canoes floating towards pictographs, paddlers squinting at red scrawl. Interpretations spit and fall lakeside. The sun: lost in the smell of gasoline.

Ashes in fire pits, their quondam popularity, the smearing potential at rest but kindling a faraway connection to Norse funerals.

Studying drafts away from cliff faces, planners drink around oblong tables file the old man away into signatures.

You can have it all; nothing turned itself out to make another ending.

59 A Means to an End

By accident, he burned nutmeg in sesame oil, sent it scalding and smoking on a cast iron pan and rubbed the remnants behind his ears.

He massaged some into the padded bones of her pelvis, the two dimpling peaks between love handles. Palms coated her calves in grease.

The sting of spice in razor-nicked ankles, as heat spread through muscles like a current and triggered: the feel of rubber-ribbed lawn chairs sinking into the backs of leg flesh, afternoons marked with sweaty crisscross scars.

60 Roof Knocking

Numbers roll over and we resolutely resolve to read more. Pine trees lay out on the sidewalk; their smell soured, scraggly tinsel branches dip like paintbrushes into slush.

Something leads you back to tanks and villages that might have existed in your memory. News and narrative fill in the blankness of childhood years, nineteen ninety - two? three? The fleshed out Bosnian Is and js together are foreign sounds tickling your tongue.

The trigger is embedded in newspaper. This morning brown faces look out from under headlines. Captions for their image read reaction: an enclave of mouths open in silence, eyes reflecting links and crumbling mortar, a child or two wrapped up like cigarettes in white to be buried - this is it. You remember: our country understands retaliation. Pages turn.

61 Half Right

Some bees are buzzing in his head, a glass jar; they ricochet, flinging apini bodies from front to double side -ping within- his parts; they bounce off the lenses of his eyes.

These insects are the sudden crush, a weighted drop of nihilism (a strain on soft, bookish shoulders); the calendar days in increasing doses to balance flight patterns in the skull-bonnet cradling his brain.

There’s a bee moving air to stillness with its rapid wings. No tongue flaps fast enough to argue - it’s all he can hear.

And each beat sounds like scotch tape being pulled across a serrated edge. No, like nibbling through a hang-nail or pupils sheathed by lids, narrowing out light.

62 Splitting Glass

Suppertime is when most animal-vehicle accidents happen.

He wasn’t watching for onion-kneed whitetails at dusk or even for road signs stenciled with action cameos, instead he saw the stasis of shoulders, a passenger’s clavicle hollows bared against the window with a brief view of lake, too quick to slip into.

Stopped. Because he couldn’t drive in the rain: the reflections of headlights and road lines merge into glaring, black sheen.

The wind corrals raindrops on the glass, hundreds land, stream into each other, webbing across windows - too distracting to be dangerous. In hindsight, the drops were a collective, multiples becoming one, if one can be water. III.

as in a hollow tree

64 Notes on Going Home

After an hour listening to aimless voices searching and finding the nature of daylight to be mirror-like, she asks, let me be a tube feeding oxygen through my father’s hungry nose; the plastic cannulae once seemed wasteful, frightening, but let the cylinders and loops be lungs breathing for his.

If not, she’ll head west to a town that stops breath; convinced that she’d once been to Chatham as field blurs into field, as generational acres seem familiar, in that dead, thawing, mustard-grass way.

65 Ending in A

We should just forget about women with names that end in A. Phonological bombshells: Laura, Svetlana, Christina and Mari-a/i swell off the paper like breasts pushing in front of us.

Remember when we were awkward critters? The rugged mainland girls had boys chasing their names out of baseball fields, long hair whipped across their wan faces.

How to forget how men look at women: at some, but through others like doorways to a stretched out vision: a field beyond the highway that once held ample bounty giving rest to rows of yellowed husks.

We’d hope the everything nice girls longed for in the county districts were put to shame in glossed pages blossoming with collisions of the worlds best features. Roman noses, Slavic cheekbones slice androgynous angles into French bread beauty.

Yet it’s too difficult to forget about a woman whose name has a dozen songs written after it, because things rhyme with her. When men speak it, harmonies of pronunciation come unbidden.

66 Giwaydin

Wait for it: Some guttural stirring roar to crawl up and leap off teeth, rebounding wall to wall.

In a dedicated learning centre tucked behind mall store fronts voices hit hard against those blackboards, sending chalky plumes overhead.

To rip open color - splatter knowledge and singe assimilation books, that the echoing generation retranslates.

In the ash and in the soot in the scent of paper set to flame, smoke that sticks to lashes and hair that coats skin with a wary veil, in that burning is a fire.

67 Between Winter

Now is the season of skidding across lanes of traffic, patterns sliced into powder; cars compacted like milk cartons against imposing clusters of pines.

Think of those citizens of Yellowknife, Whitehorse or Iqaluit - they’d scoff at our weather warnings, our blizzards. Folks there don’t see the monster that is winter because they don’t fight it; metro commuters hold slushy grudges, imagining they solemnly nod to each white out, every battering of hail-ice-rain reasoned with grace.

Soon iced breath on scarves will thaw and the scuzz of shrinking banks become sullen puddles.

Because last spring brought us trumpeter swans we look skyward; they’ll call cacophonous scales, limbering up to a brassy symphony on their return north, necks curved to a treble while they pass, wings spread open and singing like tone-deaf angels.

68 Eighty-Four Square Metres

On that sardine-can street my grandparents’ home is squatting into the ground, sinking since the fifties. Wrought iron railings choked by Christmas lights blinking on a hog-brown porch year round, Canadian Auto Workers flag in the window.

There’s an awkward comfort in a couch with a plastic cover. In this house the piano never gets tuned; when touched, keys clang and expel a sinister din to the edges of eighty-four square metres where nine children moved through adolescence in one bathroom.

In the basement rest taxidermy mantelpieces. Penny-filled jam jars. Saw blades caked with wood pulp dust. A&P grocery coupons from 1978 onwards yellowing in margarine containers. Tomcat drill bits and bolts fill a shoebox straining with metallic weight.

On a warped shelf: an old photo of two kids shin-deep in mud, stuck, the hungry ground sucking at their boots. Socked foot twiddling and panicked, balanced like a front-lawn flamingo.

69 The Role of Annelids

Many spaces no longer belong to the ones who once filled them. - Dennis Lee

She used to reach into wetted dirt, to plant seeds and let earthworms weave through her fingers, their dirty-blush bodies draining too slowly.

Among these annelids nothing sprouted. She tried to forget about embryos in soil, burrowing worms, radicles and vigor, all these buried things.

The friction stopped, heat rolled away into winter but she searched for the husk embodied in a heap of drugstore tests in the trash bin, a drey massed in backyard branches, in a vase of grocery flowers; she peered into drains swarming with hair - nothing. Unfound, she’ll leave abstruse relics: pastel quilts, hollow terracotta pots, noodles stuck to a frying pan.

70 Vankoughnet

Because I didn’t believe it when you said it while we locked eyes, coiled legs, you tried to translate it into action. Footstep trails in knee-deep snow to follow so I could watch ice break and crash in the whirlpool river. I was cautious of falling come winter; at the risk, I waddled.

It was the sound that scared me. Frozen hunks being flung together in the rapids, destroyed, the splashing as they mounted the river’s edge. At that angle, an urge to lean away and draw back from the frothing water. Insistent, you tried to push words into my vocabulary; I sidestepped gesture.

Imagine that my body arches, flees from the current but for a string of letters to make meaning, pulled taut, anchored by tongue.

71 Bonny Brae

i.

The adventures of childhood were seasonal - most treasures we’d hunt in springtime.

We collected slugs in Pepsi cans, built dams to fashion muddy lagoons, and pulled a dead goose out of the forest: oozing, stiff, and luminous in a coat of emerald flies.

We stepped diligently around junk piles and tires, holding its limp neck high in dignified procession among the insane hum of mosquitoes.

72 Prodded the inside of a summer calf s mouth; fondled an absence of teeth, pink gums and new molars, sandpaper tongue coated in oil.

We were told to take shelter from downpour if the cows were lying down, their awkward limbs crumpled beneath burgeoning udders, expectant, but their intuition faltered - most days there was no rain. In winter we’d bait possums. Wrapped mittened hands around our faces and waited behind frayed thumb edges; couldn’t smell the cold beyond the wet-dog scent of wool.

We strained to see them sneer and slide rat-kin bodies around comers, reassured by their roadside destiny. iv.

The autumn held the compulsion to crunch dead leaves; started with swinging ropes in haylofts and contests of holding on to electric fences.

Couldn’t go too far. The orange vests were at it again. Buckshot cleared, sprayed into flesh: a deer prize, a tongue-hanging-out horror, flailed on the blood-stained hood of a car, its bones and antlers to be ripped out for garage ornaments, upside-down hooves glued, flexed to hang coats on.

75 Musk Years

Before the rosewater there were musks, and pine needles spilling from her pockets. When horse saliva was smeared from palms to denim, oat’s pungency suffused into fabric.

Art wasn’t always a struggle, it frolicked out of younger creativity - came unexpectedly like charcoal burned into a summer breeze.

She would’ve once let dust fuse into her hair, tangled when other brushes held her attention. Mits pawed at patchouli thighs whitened from winter and studied the spidery blues creeping across them like a Rand McNally.

A lumpy body, burgeoning with solitude; visions of her lines exploding over paper edges, she thought hers was a shape that couldn’t be reproduced.

Deep into her shelf of paint-by-number books and how-to watercolor guides rests some half-smeared canvas. It may’ve once garnered focus but now it’s as a chandelier in basement storage. She’s delicate now, and folds up like seasons, tumbles towards the forgotten scents and shades of entire years.

76 At Ramsey Lake Market

There’s a road that ends where three maple leaf flags wilt in front of a grocery store. I haven’t seen a man’s face yet, each one is covered roughly - darkened by baseball cap brims, brows creasing like tarps on the foreheads of oil sand sweat bags and big rig heroes.

A rest at the laundromat down the road. I loiter around broken washers and tumbleweeds of dryer lint, joggling quarters in my pockets as if waiting turns for a payphone.

I’d milk for a reaction, a facial tick, a nod, for a change in weather. Maybe a funnel cloud could rise on the western tree line: my mouth ajar, dreaming of some frothing ash slithering down dead-pine ridges.

I look for clues in supplies on the conveyer: talcum powder, thumbtacks, no-name neopolitan, daisy razors, a can of smoked herring and a bottle of bismuth. I wait for pantyhose or just because greeting cards, but there’s nothing special: potatoes, meat. Bread and butter.

77 After Boating

They were new colts, toddlers in puddles, bodies anomalous and wild on a tour boat confronted with white caps. The raft’s buoyancy held, but minds raced with the pontoon effect as puny swells dampened ankles. Turbid water phobias swallowed down as it struck - the impact; the sudden cushion of coast stirred plumes of algae as bottom cylinders slid up muted ground. Shore, a retreat from the nasal memory of lake air. Heads fume-fuzzy, bodies dizzy from wake, the natural rise and fall retained in restive guts. Evening licks coolness into landlocked homes and lower temperatures bring friction under blankets: tides embodied as a couch-hull creaks, pitching waves of nausea. Through a substantial window, a crepe sky hangs stiff over child blocks of three-story buildings; boaters cease their heaving, eyes to the moon, while a high church spire lances the boil of a cloud.

78 Apoptosis

The 401 blurring its snake body around a platform of trees shading tourist paddocks; school trip banana buses line up for kids to stretch freckled arms out to horses, freshly picked grass in lieu of hay. Open sky, a busted tractor with a scarecrow three autumns old tied to the wheel.

Houses weren’t built around antique dealers or to flank the wailing degranulating sideroad shoulders.

This point’s become an arboretum, a falling away from wild. Snubbing visitor’s desires for recognition, the thickness of bramble pushes them in a sou’west direction.

Maps become just paper layered over leaves and impressed with charcoal veins.

79 Bonnechere Caves

Covered in plaster we sat against a malformed wall. In the renovation house our day’s work crumbed, piled on the floor, so we rested, insulation pushing against our spines. A former tenant’s cheap chandelier swung low, fixed together with white glue and pliers.

With caulked cuticles we remembered stalactites sagging down to the crowns of our heads. Inside a rock chamber we slipped toes into dark pits, water dripped from god-knows-where onto temples, muddied knees; a cold wet shock on forearm.

You weren’t milked from this land, you were formed amid cranes and steel, welded around elevators and bus shelter glass. I led you to the country: acres of trilliums and brush fences; to where coyotes may pluck chickens from their roosts.

In that cave we warbled but there was no place for sound and so crashed out, crawling towards sun, our torsos streaked with clay. Fixing the corkboard room we nestled in a sheltered spot, but an image still dissembled: you, revolted by soil.

80 True Bristletail

Knuckles clenched, rising white like dough as I imagine a sleeping pet, tail ticking in house-made dust, a furred back swarming with centipedal creatures — the devil’s fallen eyelashes.

A gift to have such tenderness in a predator. That, and the stiff hair that figures its body’s dimension.

I’d like to writhe, divvy up into segments, but not rush towards dusty cracks in walls, feasting on smaller cousins, instead, into a yawning mouth to manipulate a tongue to soothing, to be swaddled in vibratory purr.

81 Erin’s Well

Lilac blossoms fall over themselves landing on a stone ring edge, they settle like flakes of skin - escaping moisture furls them into spirals.

Cautious passersby lean to search for smiles in groundwater. A dry spell and dumb creatures can’t splash, instead, twitching at the bottom in matted leaves - the meat-smell of mushrooms filling up cement.

Later, teenage whiskey is poured down throats and into the ground and potato bugs shimmey, drunk in their plots. There’ll be no success with quenching, forgetting: a deeper grief planted in dampness.

Stale days scrub off with water pumped into homes, but there is no worry for the romance of drowning; the well has been suckled out of commission.

82 This is what I can tell you about Acton

An astronomer’s daughter who once placed bingo dabber colours through her hair, details the innate delicacy of pysanky: it’s hot wax on eggshells.

She’s afraid to mention the lunar timing, Easter dinner, a synchronicity of patterns; to think that it may be growing, feeding off her as she angles a kitska, steadies her design through layers of vermillion and lavender dyes.

As though the process of imagining could will it into being, like a nighttime face peering in a bedroom window. Outland

In your absence planners and calendars surfaced in the city. Do time zones change within one province? You, who wore an unset wristwatch, never considered numbered days; you hitched sixteen hours to play in empty campsites and embitter real workers in the real north.

Climbing hills for reception, looking for stars lost in smog and listing everything we hadn’t done yet - but would, once summer crept. Yet each date guzzled hours then, quenched, spilled over into the next.

Your shadow, moving like a sundial’s as heat stroke set in among the open clear-cuts. A hopeful terror, waiting for a marker of changing seasons: black fly cheerleaders temporarily sated with your salty blood, doing back-flips off of ears and ankles.

Letters from Baie du Tonnerre verge on mythology and a voice crackling through bad reception from a distant tree-line has words ready, but somewhere along the wires they get lost. Probably tired of climbing rock slopes and naming bag-ups, they’ve stopped to rest, retired to a flat field on some farm closer to the prairies.

84 A Dance

It mattered more to us then, what we hated, but we barely remember why. Things like listening to knuckles cracking in movie theaters or when fingers lacked finesse, creating flushed embarrassment under sheets.

Hate for memories read as grotesque nursery fables, tuned as an obscene vaudeville refrain. An oscillating jazz-hand dance between relatable tones and a glaring dearth of sound.

Disdain for speech that drowns in esophageal knots. What is there to do with u-tums of phrase, with ands and buts - all rotting words.

Ours were wet, each syllable dropped in violent splashes at our ears; those tumbling sputters and mumbles chugged - came to a halt.

We kept mute when I led your sister’s lame horse out to paddock - a twig snapped - it panicked with my wrist looped through the halter. It galloped in its toothless crumpled way, me dragging, sprained at its side. Or you pulling gravel out from where it wedged into my palm, washing wounds in a glacial river; the skin kelp flapping in the water.

85 Combermere

In this town, the leaky moan of a loon gets carried around like a talisman. The birds’ shyness elevates a chance encounter - but maybe it’s never been skittish. Or loons have been close too long, fluffing up their familiarity with human moods.

Chapel grounds give way to the Madawaska, the devout set alarms, stay awake to feel the presence of a lady.

Other believers built one up in bronze, to feel the gleaming liveliness found only in the inanimate, a mother’s arms cast toward children.

The unreachable feels close in an overnight adoration where listening gets dulled by insects, the noisy flashing of airplane wings, car tires creeping onto gravel.

Awe drawn from a hard bench. A shelf filled with five editions of the same book. Slow breathing. A gaze down-turned in the wakeful awareness of beds to be filled with bodies.

86 Silverman of Sudbury

i.

Having read or been told that inequities are a barrier between one and one’s chosen God, they found themselves dragged backwards: distanced from the familiar smell in Negev winds, west of a semblance of homeland.

Where to find the seeds to blend Tahini during the autumn wallowing of deciduous trees? No blood-Samaritans nearby muttering the holy language, reciting Leshon HaKodesh east to west.

Trade, a magnetic pull through prairies, left the Silvermans wilted with dolomite at a new country’s center, too far to hear the roaring crumble of mountain crags.

87 ii.

They built a golem; kept it in a cellar, underneath wooden boards. Stirring in chamomile dust, it stayed quiet with the fascination of frost lace doilies, pattemicity of rust on the broken lawn mower.

Un-strived for, simplicity isn’t always a challenge. But while the timbre of doubt doesn’t ask beyond what’s present, this faith is in the unyielding heaviness of tomorrows.

Vocal lilts shuffle nails out of hardwood, call the clay to fluid, make a hubristic walking pot spirited with scrawls wreak havoc on disquiet neighbours.

Aboveground there’s always talking, building up or stealing the Adamic force of names; words tumescent with cogency in phrases that take turns signifying nothing, to trick the monster, make live words dead.

88 For Glencolton

As it happened we failed to eat without swallowing, the source held in our cheeks, the commonplace crops softened in our mouths. Tasted the tough diversity of seeds and soil, of the raw witchcrafting of a farm.

This is about more than rotations - it’s clear like the wax on apples that cozens teeth into biting imperfect surfaces; it’s simple to depend on the intricacies of tubers, a lattice pattern of roots.

Not the short sights that contaminate fields with patent-seeds growing in grackle-pecked air.

But fields, flickering with shadows of turkey vultures. Red-headed and dizzying themselves above, they are carried by the breeze as it cascades across their feathers, rises up under wings.

The prescience of family - vagrant clothes that sag a wire, wool socks and sheets pinned awkwardly, buckling in endless creases.

The dairy cows with three teats to spare, minerals given and taken, the pull of moon

forecasting harvest in light of sun without.

89 Hagiography

i.

He shrouded himself with wool, and searched for unity nestled in pools of sand. Dug into earth for a primal root from which he said we had been cut.

He whirled, gazed into a kaleidoscope looking for communion on concrete. Drank wine, stumbled through hallways, scaled staircases marked with directions, to find clay pots and idols locked behind glass doors.

90 ii.

Their movements perfectly anonymous, lips twisted into chunks of meat vibrating the same mystic hymn and warming faces with the familiar.

The vulnerability of a singular recitation is absorbed by Sunday voices, forgotten on sore knees.

And the contour of backs sagging into peace or pain hover against wood.

A lumpy crowd complements chiseled saint-sculptures that leak light through pores:

one rescued an envenomed countryside from dragon breath, another twisted the devil’s nose with warming tongs - cathedral arches buttress plausibility.

A tedious catalogue, maybe. Chipped-paint figures are adored, their clarity fades into the curtains of incense.

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95 Curriculum Vitae

Allison LaSorda

Master of Arts, University of New Brunswick, 2011

Honours Bachelor of Arts, University of Toronto, 2009

Publications:

“How to Lubricate a City.” PRISM international 49.3 (2011).

“Waitress.” The New Quarterly 118 (2011): 66-68.

“Garbage Strike.”Contemporary Verse 33.3 2 (2011): 40.

“Musk Years” and “Loba.” The Antigonish Review 41.164 (2011): 55-57.

“In Rural Alberta.” Qwerty 25 (2010): 67.

“Fall” and “Unpacking.” Misunderstandings Magazine 12 (2009): 22-24.