Monthly Archives: December 2013

(one sunday in the dead of winter i found myself at the top of the peace tower. there was nowhere else to go; we had run out of escapes. at the top of the tower i wanted to swim under the ice of the ottawa river. i longed to abandon myself to the flow that followed a slope under the stillness of the ice. there was a warm invite to the movements of a river one couldn’t see; a life on the sly. i wished to kill those grey and latent times by way of long and generous impulses. la néréide des neiges, un dimanche.)

under the pale blue skies of the golden horn, i think of snow. i rarely write about snow, for every year winter puts my blood to sleep and haunts my heart with the mysterious aches of a setting sun. in the black and white of winter days and nights, skies are cut into feeble slices. everything succeeds itself in an opaque list without grounds: brittle nails, coils, distant lullabies hummed underwater, salt crystals in the hollow pools of our eyes. the only snow i ever love is the first snow, as it shushes our shivers under blankets of white.

(quiet, it’s snow. so quiet. watch it drop between us two, within our century-old walls, and our lone stairs binding. watch it drop until it stops, just like us, for a pause, and we can see our eyes. maybe you can see mine the same way i see yours, in that moment before they close in the white.)

i will be lucky if i see any snow this year. i do not miss snow, but i miss the struggle. as an expatriate i am allowing myself this febrile, open-wound nostalgia for the motherland.

she rarely took it out of her closet. she dabbled with the idea of wearing it because there was something about long, messy hair paired with a long, messy robe that appealed to her. in her mind’s eye she saw arms as pendulums swaying by salient hip bones and clavicles. if she could stand or lay under low clouds with its fabric draped over her, then all the better—anything to no longer see the sky. sadly she could only recreate part of her vision, for there was nothing straight about the sharp turn of her waist. there she stood, in her heartland. (my heartland, heartland, heartland.) shifting the body, lifting the leg, she made the nicest v’s, a feast for golden eyes, a feast of golden ratios, her bones carefully wrapped in this skin, never jutting. she heard it took time—this shape of dripping sand, endless drive, orientation divided, möbius strip—and indeed she cherished it, but she felt better in a man’s shirt. she kept the piece as both a memory and a reminder; a memory of a church basement, and a reminder of deception.

helene came over.

she brought half a bottle of white wallaroo trail wine. i cooked her perogies with basil and set them up in a circle with a dot in the middle. she tried on my winter coat and it fit her like a glove; i put on my red dress with no goal in mind. the white wallaroo trail wine came and went. i sent a message which lay in limbo, unacknowledged. she did the same. i poured her leftover huntley vineyard wine which i hadn’t yet added to the row of empty bottles on the counter. we concluded that wallaroo trails are better than monkey trails because wallaroos are considerably nicer than monkeys. we layered up and walked to the dépanneur across the 51 stop. we bought dessert—chocolate cookies, an oh henry candy bar and another bottle of wallaroo trail wine. we ate the chocolate. we drank the wine.

i burnt three sticks of incense that night (one amber, two fantasies), with a side of tobacco and carbon monoxide.

we forgot that the purpose of our meeting was for us to go shoot a video with paul until paul called us to remind us that it was over; only we didn’t really forget, we chose to forget.

i dropped gala’s resting soil all over the kitchen counter and in my study. (i cleaned it up.)

zsa zsa pouchkine knocked over helene’s glass and it shattered into a million pieces. (i cleaned that up too.)

we talked about you and you and you and you and mostly how you and you affect me and affect her and affect us. we commemorated you.

at the end of the night, helene said: “remember when we went to the dépanneur?”

and i did, i remembered—i smiled at how long ago it had been.