Match (3 page)

Why is it best to make her orange and so hourglassed
she’s abstract – a Matisse nude composed of Goodyear blimps
in formation?

If what I’ve evolved to crave is Fanta’s antigravity,
sickle edge of sundown, the colour of night vision,
marshmallow-broil. If what I’ve evolved to lift
is the weightless barbell of a cartoon circus.

Wearing orange jeans, teens out at dusk
blushVenus, leak their Crush sodas on pavement.
They keep their synapses
limber with self-tanner.

If living is gradual overexposure:
the teacher’s silk kerchief, a meatloaf ’s Florida sheen,
ladybug piss on a skinny wrist,
a dinner plate’s blazing Frisbee.

Moreover: that old sorrel named Bliss,
the weekly Lutheran basements
with paper walls. Where wax crayons labelled
Goldenrod
blistered as skin – what a rib shimmied into
to be more comfortable.

Fly me to the moon
, sings the hot-air balloon,
and so my makeshift drifting furnace
feeds, breathes vermillion.

She is actually the weight of one hundred and ten
one-pound bricks of butter, the manufacturer cautions,
and will weigh this anywhere I set her.
She could yawn an awning, sink a sack of pups,
plunge a roller coaster into its stone-age theme park,
swing on hunger’s hinge like a club to stun a doe.
The fossil quiet of a creek rock hearth
is her infilled ear and her infilled heart.
She’s an oak-ankled heirloom cabinet
or a fat aunt reduced over high heat.
Crate of condensed milk, sweetened,
chromium-toed, canting a balance point
in my horoscope just by standing.
Mythical and horse-like.
A crystallized set of nesting dolls.
In the huge amusement park of the world,
doing nothing but gravity.
The ground accepts its role as lap,
gets pins and needles
thinking into her lean.

What is it to be plaster-cast in the dense cream of June? Robed in a chain mail of summer afternoon, your dainties hang like bricks from a clothesline, the mouth pares its possibilities: gape or zip,

and the weed-whackers make no noise at all. So far from the mind you can’t hear its nagging, you slip into your own padded room. A diver diving with the line left off the hook. Or, in a poplar, two hatchlings are prodded to the nest-edge. One takes flight while the other falls plumb –

you have the sheer luck to be that stunned one on the ground. Now in the office of the taxidermist, gussied in a way your twin never will be: Q-tipped, unstitched on cotton. A patient two leagues under, lid of the rib cage ajar, spacecraft giving gravity the slip. If the mood lighting hits a certain temperature, and slack lip on slack lip means fainting.

*

Where there is no inside the everything. As if all the pulse and genius had washed up on shore. Stroll your fingers on the low tide of her mind’s eye, the whole wild surface of the concept. Dress her in strapless brassieres that moon through wool sweaters, undress her, loose her long hair on the pillow, repeat –

as thinkers repeat questions. What is it to be sealed in late spring like a peach in acrylics? If three buttons go pop, a cord slips…She is body, beloved. What are you?

I startle a chickadee from a rusty latch,
a pewter bloom from its bouquet.
Unlock joy like a grate
in the paper-boat highway,
or the crosshatch of a mannequin’s palm
at the fortune teller’s.

Find romance at the seaside carnival,
winter. I bob for stiff sherbet mounds
of girl in an Atlantic of comforters,
where I am lost like a quarter
cup of blizzard in a blizzard
of down I’ve whipped up
from scratch.

I tug the line that is a curtain cord
that starts an outboard motor,
pulls the pin on a boom of white birds –
so her French twist slips
into my grip like a tuft of breeze,
by roots. Where now,
o sailor, oh maroon?

In some pictures, objects come alive
and the living are objects.
Picture, for example, a slide show of a food fight.
Sliced bologna is a rare bird whirling
past people graffitied like vacant buildings.
A man turned jack-in-the-box
terrifies a peach pie into losing its lunch.
And when the cops appear like matching statues,
it is the tomatoes who confess.

So it happens that my ex-wife
is a velvet-shaded table lamp
in the hinterlands of a party.
It’s a lamp I’ve wanted back, badly,
lately attempted to replicate
by dimming the eighty-watt stare of a life-sized doll
with a lace bucket hat
and balancing the delicate contraption in my sitting room.

The doll flexes in the camera’s shutter-snap
like a twig in the mouth of a rhino.
The revolving doors of her eyes
recall an early experiment concerning flight.
A shorn second and she’ll have buckled –
but,meantime, she palms the apple of her hand
to my galloping sorrel sofa
and comes alive.

Memory throws its voice
like a master ventriloquist,
like a flashbulb shot-puts sight.

Being secret, like a leg brace from childhood.

Not having anything, to eat or worry about.

A bus transfer sailing through seven seas of air. The resting places of lost raisins.

The lobster, boiling. Surgical procedures to revive the senses of those born blind and deaf.

Common senselessness, the dripping sponge of it.

Emotions duned like ash from the work week’s smokestacks on a little side table.

A sudden wind from the patio, its fairy tale.

The cryptic luck of numbers. The ulterior motives of all the objects in a room.

My little walnut of sadness through clothing. My close-bitten peach pit of glee. The texture of the legs on all the spiders in the room.

The bath of my senses like several tides around her, the shoal of it.

Certain gadgets reserved like Egyptian artifacts for later.

The island of plastic bottles in the Pacific that is a secret the size of America.

The wine stain deep in the turning lane of my Pentax-squat.

Why my better half looks so steamed in all the pictures.

In the beginning, before matter settled
on a direction to take in life,
the ice cube tray clattered
from the ice world.

Swaybacked, it let slip
a quantity of chilly beige
silk-and-corkboard bergs
into Atlantic. They swashed

like lobster traps, or mismatched
colours of the Rubik’s,
in surf that sorted them
perfectly into a continent,

crystallized their salt-licked sides
into an office of translucent barnacles.
Here people went to work as afterthoughts,
the individual consciences of molars.

Inventions were shaped
by the circumstances:
single-serve waterfalls
from heaven in the ceiling.

A shark toy the exact shape
of the interior of Junior’s drawer.
A device for transmitting sugar cubes
of sound into astronauts’ ears.

Wonderbread,
and moving crates of ottomans.
A tooth fairy
ferrying a fortune in bricks.

   
The beloved
   
lives in the head.
      – Louise Glück

What I remember is not inviting you up.
You raccooned a gap in the ceiling’s logic,
foiled the bolts with a calling card,
stole across the ocean of an inhale.

Locked out, I pitched camp on the dew-thralled lawn
while you pissed behind a bookcase
and juiced a crystal vase
to pulp and crumbs.
The gutters ran with light.

I watched you keep the midnight house –
silhouette celebrity propped on one elbow
in the lumbar region of a synapse.

You turned out the resident swallows
and invited new ones in
as the leaves on a tree near the window turned
to paparazzi.

Your feather duster was a dove you disoriented.

The morning you upset the shoebox
of shrunken heads from seventh grade,
the season careened its bend –
you, snug in the wool place, beading a necklace,
and I without a coat.

*

People at work began to notice
my smell of must and rumpled lilac,
how my eyes were tumblers where trapped goldfish paced.
The chronic tinnitus of your shower opera
was embarrassingly loud in public places.

But when I called the city to get a permit for your removal,
they told me you’d been designated a World Heritage Site.

The tourists came with cameras, prams, ham-sandwich luncheons,
first editions of certain folk tales for signing.
Their kids playing chicken in the intermittent drip
of mood light from the windows.

I took work in maintenance –
sank my pincers into litter,
mowed the acreage with a ride-on
while you let out a feral howl
in perfect pitch with my petroleum drone.
The children flocked and scattered.

It was not long before I turned into a cat
and you flicked paper mice between the shutter slats
on fly-rods. You knit your golden hair in windsocks,
I ran into a paper bag.

*

To grasp it – a hint of the flu, a bell receding
on a length of yarn. Tuck it gingerly behind my teeth,
which would become a string of paper lanterns.

To haul you out and fit you back
into the limp glove of yourself
on the landing.

Or climb a lattice and join you in hiding.

Catalogue the various conditions:
When you wear velvet, I grow muffled as a trumpet case.
When you shiver your fork, I flinch silver.

The imagination has no bottom line. So here girls sing,
flag their long legs in procession – a wind-up music-box
Girl Machine with whirling gears of crinoline. Let there be
an infinite number in the ladders and pagodas of thinking.

And a whiteout of lights
where the tunnel of the wings empties
like the snout of a bloom.
Where an audience waits, swollen as an artifact,
to be released from its ice age of watching.

The song in her nook is the song on my lips.

The white ankle socks I’ve bought fit her perfectly.

White noise means agreement, an entente of politics and weather and the thermostat’s freewheeling.

It doesn’t matter that the awnings are carnivorous with icicles, that people go blindly through doorways.

The parade float of her skin parks here. Each molecule’s measured trumpeting.

I stake my quiet claim between two steamed panes.

My ex-lovers are kindling and the colour burgundy, and they wish me well and have come to dine.

We clear a glass table to watch – as if it were on television – our shins debate the meaning of the signs.

The material – a swathe of chiffon – lies at the root of all philosophy.

The records can reach their crotches with their mouths.

One root of philosophy is
love
.

Oxygen is thrilled by my antics. I light beeswax, wing the unbuttoned fronts of my shirt.

I am a groundling before the shadow theatre of my wall: two people stencilled on the verge of a room.

We could write to the ones responsible – in the factories and thought factories in the sky, if any are there – for sending wood and flesh and metal and cast-off Fruits of the Loom by milkman to my door.

Dear Angela,
This pseudonym you use
to answer the factory phones
brings to mind an angel
making copies of herself
on a conveyor belt,
a kind of statistical paradise.

The way those selves lie parallel
under invisible buffet covers
is the way two people fall asleep
in separate cocoons
to dream or not dream,
sneeze-guarded.