Professor needs someone
to share driving
to Windsor, Ont.
over December break
The compression palms were done pushing down
on the punctured term of Kamloops, BC–
his strawflower girlfriend brings him a notecard from the university ride board
go visit, she says, we’ll be fine
And he gets in
without citizenship, heading home
a deciduous accounting professor at the wheel
his pack thrown in with the heavy cartons of her remaining hopes
She sizes him up across the countryside, avoiding the scenery
that needs to hear “look” over and over to believe its beauty
a panoramic reminder of her sickly self–
chronic deficits pounding in her foreground
Somewhere in Alberta she puts him in a cell on a spreadsheet–
“picturesque forces that can’t be overcome,
waiting for designation”
please… have a seat over there
They cross into Saskatchewan in the rain– he sits unaccounted
on a line below psychology,
a curriculum he’s recently dropped, money back
she was due
And takes his turn driving on the listing professor’s birthday
celebrating with melody along Highway 1;
time is offensive to her and
he is the singalong of her deficit accounting:
Living Family (or Guesses)
Self, 70
Age the seduction of years
taken home for the night
the total of a moist proof that unfastens
in the dangerous accounts of the beggary within
time the on-click of a lamp by the window
revenge for December in her ears,
whispers that fell unconvincingly
into a morning.
Preacher / Ex-husband #1, 82
Alive, perhaps
still repenting the doom he exploded into her soul at Bible camp
certain, they all said, to be good for her–
vows and pleas before the pretty bonfire they stared through,
the twirl of ministry heated.
Son, 54
All hellish!
his father warned
from his knees
as she drove away from them
into her eternity.
For Sure Deaths (Not in chronological order)
Mother, Aggie, 66
She was named after a marble
cirrhosis shot into her circle
drawn in the earth with a stick.
Grandmother, Dottie, 56
A lost bet with an unnamed man–
Aggie it is!
her liver already on a wheel
with morning tea.
Stepbrother, Pete, 31
She was called to the scene,
the eviction lawn of the crack house
where he was zippered near a rat couch
yes, his kin–
she cried a complicated grief.
Second husband, Stan, 47
The guilt of his heart attack
loosened… dropped to the carpeting
soaked, a Vegas pile
a high-rolling car salesman
who put her into wheels.
People She was Glad were Dead
Her father, her mother’s second husband, Sam, 41
He’d hit one, Aggie was sure,
with his thin point, call face,
their daughter his
spittin’ image–
breaking even.
Pete’s father, Clinton, her mother’s third husband, 54
A charmer
in the round
who couldn’t hold a role.
Married Men She was Stupid About
Alex, Business Department, City of Kamloops, BC
He knocked
room 3–
a sabbatical.
Asahi, Professor of Cellular Biology
Deftly revealed–
truth
glass.
Mark, Dept. of Physical Therapy
She thinned out behind the wheel
stretching up her arms
hoisting her hips
as if with ropes rounding greased pulleys
and pushed her legs hard into the floorboards
temptation shooting down her sciatic
their indulgence in traction
as he got into her Jeep
at 5 pm.
Names that were Dead
Beatrice
It was the long view,
an aspiration
her mother laid on her
at birth.
Potter
The surrendering
of children’s literature
for weed.
Bea
Abscission–
her first husband
and son.
B (Note: not dead yet.)
She signed the register as “B,”
all that was left.
In Windsor B winks at her rider, an instinct at the border with the States–
they are moving on
she empties her lungs, quite ceremoniously,
as if you could call back the pushings of air
It is the city of her abutments:
a passenger slammed up against the door of a country, the end of their ride,
then her son, braced for collision in the parking lot by a diner
maybe a coffee over a haste of keepsakes, cartons of what she had picked up, driven away–
The rider gathers up the adjustments, the restatements, zipping them into his backpack
as if they were snack bars and headphones;
she lectures, a barren professor, everything shed–
deficit accounting:
This Rivière du Détroit may unwind the yarns conceived in your night
like the tiny knit cap over sawmill blonde hair–
you will fall under her resentments
and she under your regrets
He hugs her, reaching awkwardly around sadness
and gets out at the bus stop by the bridge to Detroit,
I will see you back in Kamloops, he says, booked on a ledger hidden from customs
a passport, gone.
