Rosaceae ⧸ The Physics of Friction ⧸ Mackerel Skies & Mare’s Tails ⧸ The Witching Hour ⧸ Something About Nothing ⧸ A Hydrograph ⧸ Tall Poppy, A Botanical Rendering ⧸ Marrow of the Sublime ⧸ Chainlink Elegy / Baudelaire’s Birds
allegorical prose poems
To Make Pygmalion Proud / In the Waiting
Rosaceae
The earliest record of the peach is from the late Pliocene, some 2.6 million years ago. Its family name is Rosaceae. Not to be confused with rosacea, which is the sudden warmth that now reddens my skin a deep crimson velvet, all because of a peaches-and-cream complexion that made me prone to blushing as a girl. At its fullest flush, a peach is so strong it can protect its soft, juicy flesh even as it falls from the highest tree. But once fully ripened, it bruises from the slightest touch. I wonder if this means that I, too, am fully ripened, my delicate insides turned to mush from just a withering look, an uneasy sigh, an absent-minded kiss. It’s probably for the best I never did learn to climb trees.
The Physics of Friction
We all fear the live wire but laugh at the static shock. This, despite the fact they both seek the same end. Vampiric currents that travel straight through you, a necessary vessel, as they reach into the ground and set off the kind of sparks you can see. I suppose one can kill you while the other is just—what, harmless release? Some unforeseen friction from getting a little too close. Not enough to do any real harm, a little chagrin perhaps. But the live wire, with its infinite destructive power, generates fear and demands respect. No one laughs at the live wire, do they? As someone who never sets off more than a slight blush, I guess I can see the appeal.
Mackerel Skies & Mare’s Tails
The red sky rises in the morning as the crows lay flat in the field and the bones of oxen and turtles are scattered on the cobblestones nearby. Or, so it was foretold. But the time-traveller might use the rusted-out gears and chains on Kelvin’s brass instrument though oft in need of repair—or travel perhaps to the time of Merryweather and his bottles of agitated leeches that tripped the whalebone and the ringing bell, and were unironically found in the age just outside of reason. The esteemed gentlemen of the high renaissance eschewed the bronze balls dropped into the frog’s basin and preferred to measure it by the strand of a human hair. But I always believed it was the blacked-out eyes that didn’t blink and the sound of heavy footsteps coming from the other room. I never thought to look for the mackerel sky or the mare’s tail of a cirrus cloud. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. I always carried my sails pretty low anyways.
The Witching Hour
Nestled in a warm fleece hug, cortisol caught in small veins, an ambient glow casts its theatre of shadow and shade. Closing your eyes won’t make time stand still. I would argue it does, but the old ticking clock disagrees. A cacophony now, as orchestral winds hiss through a fiery maze and the percussion rattles on cold doors inside rickety frames. Fairy tale demons morph into full-grown frights. And while the lamplight holds the behemoths at bay, it unravels the nucleus of time. Pinwheels of swirling dyes eclipse the stars while a flock of angry, tired sheep refuses to do the accounting at all. The eternal black nothingness taunts and torments. The witching hour has come and gone.
Something About Nothing:
Writing the “New Prose Poem”
I sat down to write something about nothing / if I want it to mean something it has to be about nothing / but it needs to be about something in the end / it just needs to feel like it’s about nothing / so it can’t really make any sense / and the sentences shouldn’t feel connected / but they do need to sound amazing / like really amazing / like genuine-works-of-art kind of amazing / but just not make any sense / because it has to be about nothing / well, no, it does need to be about something / it just needs to feel like it’s about nothing / that becomes something / in the end /
A Hydrograph
A healing wound. Or dying compost. The whistling radiator in the old farmhouse where I slept, my first night away from home. Sacred cups that runneth over. The maize-coloured stalks of wheat that paint the rolling hills of Saskatchewan. Methuselah. The saltwater lake I feel certain I swam in, but that everyone tells me cannot be real. A metaphorical desert. The literal ones, too. A meandering sea of red poppies I saw in a photograph once. Immaculately maintained green lawns in sprawling suburbia. Fishing holes. The twisty, winding slides I rode at the waterpark with my brothers every week during the drought of ‘87. It’s been torn down now, just another empty cement wasteland. A dry birdbath. The steam engine. Nuclear reactors that threaten the apocalypse. Dusty dirt roads. A house that is set on fire and the hose that stamps it out. Concrete sidewalks curing in the sun. The flowers I never put next to my father’s grave. An angry swarm of bees. Every kind of love there is.
Tall Poppy, A Botanical Rendering
The photograph is captioned un périple fleuri en Provence, or a flowery road trip. A beautiful sea of cup-shaped petals folds into themselves, their paper-thin red blooms glowing orange in the light, the stillness of the scene captured precisely within the borders of its uncropped 4:3 frame. Among them, one stands tall and unparalleled, nonpareil. Her silky petals iridescent in the sun as she grazes the sky and drinks from her own sudor, a saltless brine that leaves a gentle crust on the tips of her lightly notched leaves. She is almost perfect in her exaltation. I feel a sudden urge to warn her, to protect her from the envie she cannot see. How quickly the soil might turn hostile and allélopathique, launching a bitter assault against her delicate strata, its toxic bane seeping through her veins and abscising her from root to stem, vitriol bruising her crimson petals ashen white before they fall blackened to the ground and she is swallowed by the lea and entombed there, enterré—a sea of beautiful, serene poppies waving in a field, their cup-shaped petals folding into themselves.
Marrow of the Sublime
She is fat like the anointed Earth of the Old Testament, engorged on yellow-spined stalks of wheat that stain the field and meadow, its delicious marrow the source of life. She is fat like Cornucopia, her divinity overflowing with abundance, her body a speculum of the rolling hills that are swollen and heavy-bottomed from the storm. She is fat like Gargantua, insatiable and gluttonous, her unbridled appetite feasting upon food, wine, books, language, and love. She is fat like Falstaff, defiant—her cascading rolls of flesh a phalanx against the assault of restraint and a celebration of the sublime.
Chainlink Elegy
The wave of birds clings single-file to the chainlink fence awaiting their turn to grapple with the shiny bronzed feeder. They ignore the bright red berries offered up by the chokecherry trees that grow there that have skirted the wetland for thousands of years whilst they glut on black seed and suet. Their new devotion a distant echo of the unleashed fury of foraging on the wing their lean bodies hurled like bombers into untold understories torqued wings beating back the air as their beaks shear flesh from fruit bloodred nectar dripping from their bills in a frenzied feral hunger driven by survival or delirium. The line disperses as the feeder empties and they drop from the fence to scavenge the spat-out shells that have fallen to the ground their wings tucked close to their bodies as they walk on unsteady feet.
Baudelaire’s Birds
It must always be in forward movement, they chide—reaching, surging, marching on, the clickety-clack of the well-horned heel striding in perfect form. But what if the lines do not strut and dance and stomp across the page for me? Or if Baudelaire’s birds are drunk no more and Lowell’s sidewalks stop whoop, whoop, whooping? Suppose the ecstatic staccato of Rimbaud’s breathless cadence gives way. Am I still bound to the standard that sets the meter, the propulsion that fails to pause?
To Make Pygmalion Proud
I succumbed to the softness, and mistook his curiosity for care. I cautiously beckoned him into the murky depths, and bid him to see the poetry inside the madness. So when he did not waver and his gentle hands began to mold me, I willingly set my flesh to clay. I wanted to be his ideal, his paragon—indeed, his galatea—to be worthy of his august gaze. But with each new score, the clay would not reset; instead, it cleaved to its raw cast, an unexpected demurral, even refusal, to resculpt itself for him. No longer the great pygmalion, he became the doomed and frustrated sisyphus, watching as his work came undone again and again and again. With clenched fingers, I took the chisel to myself. I cut and chipped away at my unyielding flesh, willing it to bend. Too late, I realized I had been set in stone long before my benevolent sculptor found me. I watched as he at last set his unfinished cast aside, knowing I had utterly failed to make pygmalion proud. The ossified strength that should offer comfort only chafes. Rather, I long for the unseeing and the unknowing and the undoing so that I might become a wedge of untouched clay upon which he laid his gentle, guiding hands once more.
In The Waiting
It is almost always in the waiting—the passing calm that fills you most with dread. Because you know the storm is coming; you’ve been caught in its fury before. Rudderless, your mind lulls you into believing that if you can just learn to predict its pattern, if you can track the rising backwind or learn to read the tails of the cirrus cloud, you will be able to avert its shifting path. So it is that every sound, every nuance, every insignificant alteration no matter how small becomes a sign of impending threat, a fractured barometer of what lies ahead. And it is here in the waiting that you will lose yourself.
