Rosemont

1

I float over propane tanks, back lanes,

outhouses in pajamas, twelve, over shacks and the really more-

than-shacks, north of trolley wires and an edge of the city

forest. I drift just above the tips of elms, and am twelve. June.

People are asleep below, the milkman’s

horse waits on Connaught for the man to come through

a lilac hedge, marsupial pouch

first, empties percussing in his iron basket.

Someone, Yvonne I guess, the Pelletiers’ oldest

sets kindling going to take off the chill.

The horse is motionless above its cake-sized,

cement anchor.

The man next door comes onto his back step and lowers

a match into a pipe bowl, a perfect 1938 maroon Cheverolet

sedan parked, never driven, in his garage, then the woman, Mrs. Garvin,

farther down walks into her earliest irises and John Pelletier loads

the family wash tub on the wagon

and goes for water.

2

a wolf inside that smoke rises from

Wilfrid carried a straight razor he

shortened with a file

              to flick easier.

More operatic, chthonic device than the Hollywood

switchblade Charlie Crow, Jimmy Easts‘s psychotic cousin,

drew from an anklelength black coat,

to rob my brother of chips and a Fanta orange

outside Moon’s Confectionary. Kryptonited

by ideology, Charlie’d still slice.

But a shotgun was Wilf’s true, later wonder

instrument, his completer

of aesthetic shape. There it was

 in his hand in the 2:00 am nightclub, under the stream-surface

ball, a wakening deep in the cave. Lucky we didn’t go

to Martin, says my brother. Be in jail now.

Or out, superannuated, blinking,

our eyes fondling a range of knots.

Bob Cooke, the Gland, in the giant lobby

of the hotel, twenty-one, handgunned,

tendoned stillness hatched around him,

a single counter-tenor note held,

held, just now starting to fade, lose ground

and fade, that emotion-sound, now

cranes his neck forward and asks

the night-clerk to open the safe,

wide the door to the grotto of the safe,

ovoid hole the animal’s body made

in the mat of low bushes by passing in and out.

3

“delectable absorption”

                       St. Teresa of Avila

The Eatable world leans against us,

                                     neuronal pathways, beauty sheen,

fish clouds bulging walls,

tympanic throb of reindeer

narrowing through gorges.

I put my hand, quite a while ago, years ago

actually onto the knee of the Fish-Lord

                             and individuality appeared.

Yes, I did it. There was no pain.

Those days when I sat in that room

in Osprey Cabins, rain chipping

the window, I would rise

to kneel and set my ear to the floor.

I heard most of what occurred.

Those days left almost all of their firepits in me.

                                                            I say hello.

The gorgeous wave,

metaphysics chrismed with chlorophyll and skin,

lifts midway through the body, near the waist, and rolls

                                                                through.

4

I am asleep still and drift over the neighbourhood,

grazing carragana leaves, elm leaves, summer still.

There’s the creek, two miles away, then beyond

behind cattails, the RCMP Training Depot and almost

beneath me now that I’ve crossed over

Dewdney Ave., the turret and chimneys

of the Lieutenant Governor’s residence now empty,

except for breath or soul carapaces

of dead people we can see clearly through dusty groundfloor windows.

A muskrat’s splitting the surface of the creek and John,

returning, sheds rim splashes,

on the sidewalk. Behind him,

now that he’s turned into Connaught

and has the wagon at the back door, water swaying,

the first trolley bus sparks and rattles toward downtown

and I am settling, descended through the scorch

from overhead wires, unseen, barefoot,

upright, on my parents’ lawn.