Four Poems

Architeuthis When I finally saw the giant squid, I was like, it’s not that big. My dog pissed a heart shape on the sidewalk and it was bigger than that. I wanted the squid to go on forever, elephantine sub-spherical suckers with finely serrated rings of chitin, lively tentacles circling space and emerging in the future, waving, eyes like soulful car tires, ecstatic ink clouds enveloping birch trees and bridges. It’s true a scientist brought the eye to my house to show me how it was as large as a dinner platter and explain that only some extinct aquatic reptilian predator had ever matched the diameter of its pupil, 9 cm or 3.5 inches. Predictably, he put it on an actual dinner platter, and it looked right past me. In my own house.  Squid eye/dinner platter combo, how unfair is it that we don’t get to choose, how unfair is it that I loved you when and if you were small.   Mexico If the cargo pants hang inside out on the rooftop clothesline, baggy pockets splayed like elephant ears, does it signal to a lover not to come on Sunday? If an orange rolls down 30 feet of wet cobblestone before being crushed under the wheels of a pickup truck, is it possible the rubbered tires became briefly human to feel the sweet push of white seed against teeth? If a listless bark is lost forever, reverberating backwards in time against the current of string-bound cardboard and branded street garbage, what separates it from the selective noise endlessly circling the planet, played like a lullaby to the 100 year orbit of a doomed satellite? If you become an astronaut from the future, will the sight of sheets bound by splintering clothes pegs snapping against rust coloured walls at 9 a.m. always break your heart, or is it something that will come upon you in your late twenties? When you hear that sow-nippled dog’s 20-year-old bark cut across your radio and time, will you contemplate the universe or think of simple, plain things—teeth-marked dog toys, large hands, strands of dill caught in the sink drain?— and yes, you have to choose.   Bear Safety Tips for Semi- Regular Trips to a Cabin in Algonquin Park

[tab10]If you encounter a black bear, it is likely to react in one of four ways.[/tab10] —Algonquin Provincial Park newsletter

1 Wake to paddles slapping water. Sounds cold. Stage whispers scrape pine trees, land on Emerald ash borer-infested firewood, squeeze through dusty screens. Chipmunks rustle for attention in blueberry plants, cast black bear shadows across the rusty barbeque. Sunshine illuminates pork fat. In most cases, a bear will hear or smell you before you are aware of it. Especially if your dog has her period. Especially if you drink a mickey of Fireball and spin an antique globe really fast, watching the pastel colours blur while you yell-explain the tragic nature of the children’s book series Animorphs.   2 Yesterday, floating on my back, studying the sway of yellow birch, I was almost run over by waving German tourists in a fibreglass canoe. Habituated bears: some lose their fear of humans from frequent contact. Some people lose their desire to cook or wash their hair or leave their house. From frequent contact. From habitat.   3 I sit in the outhouse, cranking the windup flashlight. Tacked into the rough wood are yellowing Family Circus cartoons, Spider webs shot across them, lending an odd translucence. Fly carcasses dot the outer edges of newspaper like punch lines. Reacting to a defensive bear: do not climb a tree— bears are excellent climbers. Your best course of action is to stay in the outhouse forever. The image of you growing old, crying over 20-year-old comic[s] strips until your fingers blacken with newsprint and the paper dissolves into dust which in turn clings to the spider’s leg, is kind of arousing.   4 A dock spider springs from the chalky rocks enclosing the fire, dragging a filmy sac as large as her own quarter-sized body. That’s quite the quivering crystalline burden you have drooping from your thorax, my friend. I’ll feel those little spider children for weeks afterwards on my arms, and how are any of us really to know what the tickle of almost-invisible silver limbs feels like at night alone? Reacting to a fleeing Black Bear: Enjoy the fleeting sight of a wild Black Bear. Reacting to a fleeing anything: Enjoy the fleeting sight of a _________________.   Movie Review I really like the opening scene where it’s revealed the purple shawl has been hiding the pots and pans all along, as well as the part where the husband and wife approach the mousetrap tentatively in fluorescent light and discover a ball of hair writhing, braiding itself in hysteria. I didn’t like the ending because I hate when plants get their way and only robots get to have blue eyes. I thought the cinematography accurately captured the velvet texture of the donkey’s ears and the poignant loneliness of books kept apart from each other. My favourite scene was when the husband, wife, dog and purple shawl all do drugs and go to the grocery store, and the husband and wife sob uncontrollably in the condiments section, and the dog takes a picture of himself in the lobster tank with that sombrero, and they put the purple shawl in the ice cream freezer as a joke, but then they forget about it, and the purple shawl is stuck there for like five years because it’s lodged behind the maraschino cherry ice cream. I thought eight years was a bit long for a movie to run, and I didn’t like how my children had grown old and the locks had been changed on my door when I finally got back from the theatre. No, I didn’t think the final scene was that devastating if you look at it in the sense that hairballs belong in the garbage, ice cream has a finite shelf life, and velvet is subjective. That a dog shouldn’t be in a lobster tank to begin with, and jars of mustard are delicate and break so easily.