Match Read Free

city square
for a portrait by Spencer Tunick, casual as landscape
or an outsized chenille throw. The drape-moss
of our nose hairs. Sparse, tired down
of underarms, inner elbows quite comforting
to drape around yourself come winter.
The slow dance of our voices a scattered,
slow murmur like forest wind.
    It is obscene, an absurdity, how you
are permitted this June day to stroll
in our company and breathe
what we exhale as you remove all of your clothes
and mark with a felt-tipped pen
the outposts you too will eventually abandon.
    Alone , you say, and the word resonates
as if in a flock. Dandelions. Turning, a smell
like lichens winged out in a window frame to spore.

PINCH-HITTERS
    i
    When the ceiling sprang a leak,
I stepped aside and dialled a number.
Miraculously, someone else stepped in.
    A bum double substitutes the movie star
in the love scenes, but about this understudy
we know next to nothing –
what does he like to eat for breakfast?
    The way we have no idea whether the catsuited woman
who back-flips off cliffs in action flicks
is skilled at turning flapjacks sans spatula.
    Most cells in the human body are not human
but bacterial, and even these crawlies
may be swapped for a variable
in the mathematical model.
    At the bus stop in my dream:
Pinch me , requests a stranger.

ii
    Once, I stood by
as a Heimlich-trained schoolteacher
pressed a grape from my dinner guest’s windpipe
using factory-grade forearms
suitable for modern winemaking.
    Her real arms so flimsy
they sat the round out,
like wimps in gym class,
without anyone noticing.
    I’ve never choked,
but was once caught swallowing
the last of the expensive cheese.
The wince of my esophagus, my sheepishness
(that urge to pass the buck
one species to the left),
    is the nearest experience I can call on
to understand the victim’s bottleneck.
He likes to claim he wasn’t present.
    Very few people go to parties.

iii
    In hindsight, I’m MIA.
Where I should be, cakeside,
in birthday photographs,
    there’s a puffer fish, blowhard
oohing at trick candles
that reignite at one-year intervals.
    Looking ahead, in waiting rooms
where patients play musical chairs,
I glimpse a man whose face is
a wattle-and-daub wall of bandages
with two tiny windows.
    It’s easy to let his eyes, whose stillness
is a mystery, be x’s. Though likely he still
has exes, even lovers –
    for all I know, he spent the morning trembling
like two bowls of Jell-O atop an actress.

STORM PORTRAIT
    When the rain falls so richly
it is almost flesh-toned,
it is hard to know
what is background and what is person.
    As through the warping wall
of a shower stall, the billow of a human form
asserts its minor strengths on a watercolour landscape
before the world ends
three feet later.
    Everything tempts the appaloosa eye.
In the photo booth of the weather,
a snail falls for a tape dispenser,
a stag for a candelabra, happy as a clam
with a compact mirror.
The statue is a private encounter.
    A toy digger, bolted in playground dirt,
describes rainbows endlessly
with its T. Rex arm.
    Is it possible to become so practised
at failure in love that you can do it solo,
like an ocean voyage?
    Like a fruit fly dancing spastically
along the lip of a glass of sweetness.
    Can the neighbours, caught in their own
dances, see steps of mine too?
The air is a series of windows
stippled with their thoughts.

DEAR ANGELA,
    I rarely swim, but what I crave
is Blue to Blue . Each lap lapping
the tidal mind, my letters fed to glass bottles
like miniature sharks
on their way to the moon.

STUDY IN A BATHROOM MIRROR
    Not human after all, my mug
more like a volleyball, more like a waning,
swamp tuber dug from peat, scrubbed
and peeled. Little serpent of a lip, pothole eye,
lone pore with a hair pushing up, road-kill nostril.
    Signs point to slow-mo crisis or
slow-mo recovery. Erratic on a hillside, glacial sluice
in the valleys, fine lines like skid marks through cream.
Fifty-one: birthday party for a meteorite, pop-bottle