He brought her to that lead of night, the moon
like butter in a dish spreading
the news of Momotarô, that peach-boy, who leapt

from the river of a picture book, buck naked, into the muddy
palms of her mind and started a revolution mukashi, mukashi aru tokoro ni
miles away from fairy tale

that now distant haru  - spring - in Nigawa
when she awoke
to her body, put her lips to the bone

and sucked out adventure, in full possession
of all the dips and tribulations
slipping like hills under the skin.

Oh, the roller-coaster ride before her.
The idea of future. Glorious
as a pair of breasts.
 


                                                n.b.: mukashi, mukashi... Japanese for "once upon a time"
                                             
II (Gesso)


A decade later it was the Champagne of Ontario, its parking
lots fine-toothed, fearless as horseflies; Belleville
schools and supermarkets spreadeagled on the banks of virgin

forests, teaching her the western pace
of music, the poverty
of coffee and the drowning

in the puddle of one's own four walls
in which everything turns small again
before the dark returns

to slap its red on the restless thigh
of grief, like a painter. The brushstroke so angular
its sharp shadow

ripped apart her throat. At twenty, she found herself
in a one-room flat, gnawing
at her body, pouring smoke down its corridors

to get at its fat insulting ways, multifarious  
as hollyhocks
in which the bee finds its kettle, and night

its history.
Lust like a greenhouse-jungle of tomatoes.
The brazen clanging of wind

she did not dare to wake to.
Sated, as she was, on the taste of her image.
Between her and fiction

a cacophony of lovers. Everything else
blurred. Even the great falls
translated into blue trinkets of energy

that pinpricked the land, east and west
of  Toronto, Wawa-ing its way up north
smelling of another life, another possibility  

framed as in a mirror. Each crack so precise,
its veins littering her shores
with a stir of loins

and corsairs. Until she lost track
of her own hand lying on a table, ochre
and newly greased, a monochrome. A tulip

that would not bend. Only a quick stroke would get it
to move back into the picture
of her at the window above a street, surly

with slush and sunrise, pointing its arrow
left and right, to the borders of its existence.
Both of which beckoned, their great elms

skeletal as a young adulthood uprooted.
She wiped her palms on her face
like an artist his brushes

after catching the sound of a car on canvas
-  but nothing
had prepared her for…



III (Le Blanc de Céruse)


Europe either, a variegated space
reduced to ordinary parks and benches, pots and pans

oblatory at midday, a-putty with beans.
Clouds fell over her face, boulevards lined her days.

smeared across her late afternoons
in cities where she had no truck, no turf.                                                

Near the rue de la Madone, houles
of light would sweep into her room, rub her panes

raw enough to bleed into. Mornings invaded
her hope, circled her eyes like rooks.

Trains rolled in and out of her life, technology
colonized her mind, its force imperial. A wall crumbled

on prime-time - and wars, too, returned
glittering like the scales of a fish long past death.

But what it boiled down to was this: the fiction
of France, Holland and Germany breaking like laughter

in the murky shallows of a bar rapidly filling up
at high tide, thoughts swirling in a cup of black wine

held up against the bone of a lamp suspended from the ceiling.
A dreg

of rust cradled in the depths before setting like the sun
in her avid mouth running on and on

about Gott und die Welt - God and the world - amid a slope
of shoulders until even that spectre turned godverdomme goddamn dim

as the belief of her uncle scuttling
his Momotarô-pink faith up under her shirt.

His voice, harelipped, chalk-green, smelling of salt.
And her fear crouching in a corner, ready to wander

the forests of any country, each
and every sanitary facility

        in search of cadmium-yellow or prussian
brown to assassinate

that moment priapic with meaning, still
screaming like a sick child.

That moment she whored herself - because it was easier
to whore than to speak

out. Incredible the topiary in which she found herself, suddenly.
Each gesture premeditated.

She flirted with anything first-degree.
Primordial or green. To get rid of that interior stain

transmogrified into a stench. But
the rye- and wheatfields

kept ranting their rhetoric, cows chewing their cud
under broken windmills, under the white slash of a bridge

cutting into the reality
of a bad marriage fanned by the disheveled hair

of weeping willows on the banks
of a vision not large enough for two. At the edge



IV (Vermilion & Cobalt)


of this painting, she placed a squeak of bliss
contained like a gnat

in a jar of friendship, no hard feelings and all
that jazz - which meant no more, no less

than a change of weather after a summer torrent.
She'd never been greatly blessed

with the ability to forget or forgive those dingy colours
that work side by side without questioning

the hues and daubs of memory.
Abel Gances J'accuse spoke to her, each face                                        

a sketch completed by the comings
and goings of a landlord in Amsterdam

devoted to the routine
of being or not being

in a place where shit on the balcony could chart the spot
where someone else had flown higher

than anticipated. Without the convenience
of a roach-less toilet bowl. A fact substantiated

by a neighbours nightly he-ll-o-o-s, a cuirasse
on mosquito-humid nights across the milk-

weed frenzy of an inner courtyard
reeking of wet hemp, and

warped by a topography
of neglect.

So the uncle had been smitten
with the pencil-thin words

of her 11-year-old body -- so he had felt her up, touched
and prodded, painted her blank, big deal, eh? but hed taken




V (Siccative)


nothing of her into his grave
as her mother would soon learn to say. "So stop
acting like a spoiled bitch,‛ώρε. After all
the eyes of a woman are the dagger
that brighten the brush."


                                                                        
VI (Pigment & Poppyseed Oil)





But back in mukashi, mukashi, how she'd watch him, that Momotarô of hers.
Her dagger stashed away
like a toothbrush, an impediment,

while gossip occupied the family, her father's arse
a question mark on a cushion, eyes glued on food.
Her uncle versed in the game

of eating, drinking, being merry.
His slab of a smile
written across his face like four bars of music.

While upstairs, she lay in bed with her little sister.
Teaching her what shed learned
to endure

        on sheets flecked with flowers.
        Eye for eye, knife for knife
between the sloping wings of thighs, shy as ladders.

And from downstairs, the mother-call, "Girls, dont
you want any cake?" Like a tune
they could not shake

from the fear of being caught, red-handed,
souls damp-soaked.
Without an excuse


punched like a fist in the rice-paper of that evening.

A calligraphy, both sweet and sour,

of a wound brown with innocence

all the green of the world could not fix.

Her Tulipes du mal bleeding into her canvases, into the hole in her heart.

The oils and pigments thick and unwieldy

as the desire of an eleven-year-old to be loved.



VII (Tulips)


Their ills clotting all the lanes and avenues

of escape. Painted, as they were, in kitchens or bathrooms,

beside washing machines humming like gas.

The smell of bleach blossoming from her brushes, iridescent

as that knob of pleasure once tickled alive by the story of Peach-Boy

leaping free of the milk-pink flesh of a fruit

on the shore of her bed, his fingers laced with fishermens Tabac.

After-Shave. Lips clawing her skin, his beard

commas scratched onto the cold, terrified page

of a cheek traced quickly on paper - arms, legs, the promontory

emerging where the bilabiate calyx ends

at the edge of what could be memory  

going a slow dark-white on the wall above her desk, storeys

above the clickety-clack of heels, smattering of Dutch "bye-bye's"

- doei-i-i-i -

filling the sepulchral palette of trees, the clunk

of a bicycle chain opening

on nothing more alarming than another picture of tulips, blue-

brailled,  almost human.