My boat has delicate grey ankles Weeds stick in its hair, tangling in knots It clings to the sea with iron clamps On the water it is a raptor digging in its downy talons Its motor two women escaping in a blue convertible Red lipstick, revolvers, tired old men, and the desert Its floorboards are polished mussel Its cabins lit with rush-lights pulled from some ancient swamp Its rudder granite and concrete Its wake ripe with lichen My boat steers by polar spirits Propels itself like an ant searching for crumbs Moves like a knife slashing a throat Exhaust feathers and diamonds Its privy glitters like a forest above a lake With a wooden staircase descending into the water Its keel is as smooth as an oyster Its paint the colour of rot On the horizon it may be a fly or volcano A mountain, or tree, or god
What does it mean to be so far off to cycle between phases, to shift so dramatically over the course of a month? I am the moon, and the moon is somewhere else and in that place where the moon is, there is nothing: footsteps and craters, visible impacts that disappear when it is new. To get to the moon would take a long time—it takes so long to drive to. So long to get your car up into the air. So many little pit stops along the way. Some say that what is lost on earth finds its home out there. I have always believed this. But what is there isn’t lost. It is simply somewhere else.
On August 25, 2021, at two in the afternoon. An overcast day, but still swollen with heat. While his parents were eating lunch. On the corner of Bathurst and Dundas a truck took a turn through a red, and he was crushed running for the streetcar parked on the south side of the intersection. Two men in blue oxfords watched as his body splished in several directions. One of the men had been on the point of shouting a warning, the other, thinking that he would stop, had been ready to say “Close call,” in an ironic or detached tone of voice. André had recently become very good at filling in holes between baseboards and floorboards, kneeling and letting the latex seal in the gaps as he pressed it at a forty-five degree angle. There were more still to fill. He had a dream in which he stood outside his own window, begging himself to be let in. “Don’t you recognize me?” he would ask. As a child he would stand out by the compost heap and listen to the coyotes howling in the trees. He was never really a child. Dreams where he ran from something but never quite escaped, dreams where he approached monuments forever distant, etc. Never slept on his back except when held in the “koala position,” a terminology he was ultimately unsure if he had invented. It will take years to vacuum out the weight of him from his apartment, leaning and heaving with his dead life. Survived by his parents, two or three provinces away, his three siblings, scattered in various directions, a niece, and the stains made on the two blue oxfords, which will never come out.
Staying in a beaver’s studio—logs, half-chewed, piled up over the unused campsite. We didn’t leave until ten the next morning, and then were late that evening, scrambling in choppy water to find a place to stay, as the sun made its descent. But that first night was getting used to the sounds outside our thin nylon walls. Stefan said it sounded like something descended a tree right next to us after we had gone to bed, then paused, as if registering our presence for the first time. We saw the beaver do a sweep as we waited for our potatoes to cook, looking towards the campfire with disappointment, acknowledging that its worksite would be transformed. I woke up in the middle of the night to a loon calling in the night, from the little bay behind us which we would cross the next morning en route to the portage. For fifteen minutes it made one eerie call after another, sounding either like frantic grieving or harried madness. Only in the morning, after I asked and no one else had heard it, did I wonder if it was Tom Thomson’s ghost. We were on his lake and had passed his cairn the previous afternoon. In the choppy water early next evening we resolved finally to take shelter on the first open site—landed on the bald back face of an island, clinging to it as the wind rocked our boats. We brought them up the hill and then discovered that the campsite on the other end was empty and that there were trails running to either side. An ideal spot, except for two little plastic flutes that someone had left by the tents, one white, one blue. Superstitiously, we did not touch them. I had recently watched a movie where doing so brings bad luck. That night, after the bros across the way went to bed, I heard a wolf howling: first far away, then close to their campsite, directly across the water. And in the morning it was choppy again, but it didn’t matter—we were staying put. I had tore something in my shoulder the previous evening, so when we left the day after, when the water settled again, fire burned hot in my arm whenever I dipped in the oar.
Me and Steve crossed the water with our improvised line using beer tabs as hooks, leftover sausage as bait—that salty shit we couldn’t finish the first night, not even Doug who threw his into the fire before everyone else, something souring when I offered him the rest of mine. I’m not your garbage disposal, he said disappearing into the bush. Someone said the box was about to go off —it might have been me. Soon we heard its echo. There he goes, I said, as it trumpeted, grinding it up. As the water rocked us Steve told me about his engagement, how Karly had posted the video on Facebook, how it had got two hundred and fifty likes. On the island next to ours a woman kicked in the water. Throw her some sausage, I said— Steve only laughed. I tried to get the canoe closer to see if we couldn’t hook some part of her, but Steve steered us away. Doug was standing out by the shore when we got closer in one of his moods. Catch anything? he asked us, over the lake. Do you seriously still have room? I asked him, still pissed that he had polished off the chips that morning. How red his face got when he lifted the rock crying that if we came any closer he’d sink us— I just made a whirring noise like a trash compactor choking on bone. Steve laughed as Doug heaved the large grey stone towards us, slipping through the air—it’s hard to dodge when you’re out on the water hard to miss the shale as it slaps into your side
Something’s gone wrong. Waiting by the door to the basement where I do my laundry is a large orange cat without tags. I nodded to him on an earlier trip as I watched him cross the street. On my way out, my hands full of clean laundry, he lets himself in to the little hallway, then meows at the basement apartment. No one comes. I knock on the door. Nothing changes. I stand there, looking down on him from the top of the stairs, and wonder if I should put him out again. He gives up meowing and settles on the floor.
I’m coming back in fifty minutes anyway, so I let him stay. In a book I’m reading I can’t read past a needle. Not immediately. I put it down and find things to do in my apartment. Nothing, really. I’m about to leave, though I’m not going anywhere. Just in a circle. It feels like there is so much on the horizon, in every direction, and I feel as if I must choose just one thing though I have time, maybe, for nothing. Though in my experience the more time I have, the less productive I seem to be, and so maybe it goes without saying that I have gotten a lot done over the last few days.
You message me and say that as soon as you got on the bike path you received a text and burst into tears, the stress maybe of it being too hot last night, tossing and turning without any hope of sleep. The stress of other things. I didn’t sleep for three hours after getting into bed, during which time I at least had the opportunity to catch up on my reading. Sometime after two am I got up and put ice packs underneath the fan and, briefly, it got cold enough to consider even getting underneath the blanket.
I kept asking what seemed real. What seems real? During the day sounds from the back of the house make me suspect that a raccoon has entered, as they used to like to do. But there is nothing inside or outside, no evidence of any tampered-with screen door. On Twitter the other day a woman claimed that she saw a stranger walk through the alley to her backyard, but that when she investigated there was only a mother deer and her fawn, no one else to be seen. It’s too much to believe, and yet I believe it, somehow. I’ll believe anything. When I go back to the laundry room the dryer is silent and the cat who was waiting in the hallway is gone. Entered or exited, I don’t know. I guess I’ll keep letting him down the stairs.
The sprinklers pop out and startle me around four pm, so I move to the centre of the field to dry off. I am done reading Lacan. It’s already the end of the day. No one wants to work, and it’s so hot. “Oh, it’s just been crazy today,” says one employee to another in the empty retail store. In the field I feel as if I have been seduced by the sun, as if it whispered in my ears to take off my clothes. It’s just my shirt. Reading the psychoanalyst made me want to cry, just as it did a few days ago, as I reported to my therapist. “Whose dissertation were you reading?” she asked me. Our wires were crossed. “It was Lacan. Lacan,” I said. I told her about the dream that I recently had, how R. and D. said I was both “seductive” and “manipulative,” in a “dangerous” way. “I don’t see what’s so funny about that,” she said. “It’s just so absurd,” I said. “That they have to work so hard, when I’m the one who was betrayed.” I could work harder. Victoria College has been transformed into a film set. Or maybe it’s the condos across the street. The street is packed with trailers, and on a table outside one of the catering trucks there is salad after salad stacked and sweating in plastic clamshells. A man with his mask around his chin, presumably in the union, is asleep on the grass. The previous night I met with Dmitry, on the Bar Neon patio. We tried Three Speed first, but it was packed. He tells me about a birthday that goes haywire. No one is used to being waited on, and it’s easy to get drunk. “He crashed his bicycle and cut up his face,” he said. As we’re crossing the street, afterwards, we notice a rat that has been flattened into a disc, a perfectly featureless circle with a fat tail. “What a rat!” we exclaim. “What a rat!”
Pain in the morning. Ask a question I never ask. The answer is delay. Wait indefinitely, I know it is saying. I know that’s the answer, too. By the afternoon the feeling has faded. A long time since I have asked that question, felt it acutely, vocalized it into the air. Looked for exits. I seem doomed to repeat this movement, over and over again, long after I thought I never would.
Watching for signs. Waiting for anything.
Never to receive what I’m sure will never come.
In windows on my way to campus I look bloated, heavy, weighed down. In a bathroom I see the size I really am—I don’t look anything like I thought. Walking through a fog. Walking in the weight of last year. On my way back this afternoon a ladybug hitched a ride on my shirt, like a bright red stain out of the corner of my eye. I wondered how long it would stay with me.
Looked up its meaning: happiness, good fortune, true love, innocence. Needing to make the right decisions.
