arctic studies

*

child with a crayon
asks how many legs
for the octopus


you say

as many that
makes it beautiful.

*

*


My little friend in army surplus clothing walking through
the parking lot, pushing a wisp of blond hair out of his face.
A walkman in the side pocket of his coat, that’s where the clips
or the grenade may have been. He walks towards me, he doesn’t
change his pace or posture, he simply comes closer, head down,
until he is already beside me. Is someone fucking with you, kid I say
who is it. He gestures vaguely around him and smiles. Tiny bees
are building hives in his ears; that is where the buzzing sound is
coming from. There is a girl’s name on the inside of his sleeve, a bad idea
he cannot shake. Sit with me, we’ll make a cloud, I want to say.
Just sit and we’ll make a cloud that we can walk through like the
Taj Mahal. Well, the fact is we’re in grey mall parking lot slowly
emptying itself of cars. We watch them follow each other
out like lambs out an open gate. My friend takes a box of matches out
of one of his many coat pockets. It has a bluebird on it and the bluebird
begins to…well, nevermind the bluebird. He takes a match out of the box,
strikes the blue tip against the rough side, cups his palm around
the flame to protect it from the wind, brings the flame up to the
tip of his cigarette and inhales. He uses all of his concentration for this,
and I, use all of mine to observe my friend, who is there, who is
really there.


*

*



LSD

the helicopter had a twisted blade so we had to follow an unusual path through the evening sky. the pilot, grinningly insisted that the blades were completely fine and that he had made them himself from the ribs of a grey whale. He explained this to me telepathically because I couldn’t differentiate between the sound of his voice and the engine. Or the engine and my memory of scribbling in black crayon on walls in elementary school. The sky was being sliced into tiny pieces of blue paper and I thought - should I rearrange these pieces to form a self portrait? I didn’t want to but I felt it crucial that i must. When we finally landed in a clearing in an alder grove, my knees, by their own will, bent down to meet the damp earth.


.


SPEED

you talked so fast so it would be hard to
see your heart but I could see your heart
by the very speed of it beating your
heart beating like a fist into the softness
of the body around it the heart beating
on whatever it could find

.


COCAINE

how I felt when you left the room was not worth you being in the room in the first place. let me rephrase; the desperation got into the couch, you don't know what hell i went through to get the smell out. a thinning memory of chewing sour-keys with widening eyes, scratching out bad math, offended by the sudden light of sunrise coming through the curtains. How I felt when you left, Sharon. The room filling up with smoke like in a magician’s trick. Not worth you being there in the first place. Or at least that’s what I tell myself when I open the mail and there is a postcard from you; you’re in Florida lying on a white sandy beach, dying perhaps - even though you don’t mention it - I can somehow tell by the unreal whiteness of the sand and the excessive optimism in your sentences.


.


MARIJUANA


A Guide to Birdwatching in British Columbia sits
on your bookshelf, the dust of your skin and house
floats through the afternoon light. You are
trying to explain something to me about
chaos theory. It is all over my head like
spinning coins, like half remembered
music. The ringing sound, and nerves singed
golden, like wild grass swaying. Something
bounds away, too fast to recognize,
and it becomes anything, etc, beautiful, furry,
and camouflaging itself inside my own thoughts.
I know we don’t get much done in our lives, my friend,
but neither does a piece of buttered toast
sitting in a small blue plate on my lap
and who here would
deny its beauty?


.

*

The sentence that runs, as if from death, exhausted and sweat-beaded, torn by blackberry thorns, bloody dust on its knees, each misspelling a shudder of breath, each comma a banana peel in a cartoon scene, how it gets up and continues through the canned laughter, ringing with all it has collected and let go of, as the old man pulling the great fish back to shore, with its guts trailing out and being eaten away by tinier fish, the ringing that continues after the meaning is unraveled and lost, the music that becomes the meaning, blessed by each space between the word, each pause and intake of breath and cursing its weak lungs, all 26 letters of its grotesque body, the trust and distrust of its map-less pathway, drunken and wholly instinctual, the sentence that runs knowing the place that it will inevitably arrive, a black spot, single poppy seed, the center of an eye, a bullet hole in brick wall, a cigarette burn in a couch, the inverse photograph of a star, the head of an ant, the sentence that arrives there, amazed that in the gathering speed of its momentum it would ever stop, in disbelief of what it once was, like the rain that doesn’t know it was once the sea, the rain that falls into the ocean at night, the last drop released, sighed out, that hits the surface and ripples outward, the sentence arriving there, back into oblivion, back to the end that had chased it so lovingly towards itself.