Bear Bell

It rolled out of the crumpled gift shop bag, rattling its tin voice into the softness of her lap.  He stood beaming down over her shoulder with me under his arm.  I ate a hardtack airline cookie and my mother scowled at the gift my father had brought her from his convention in a mountain resort town.

“That’s more like it, eh?” he was bawling, boasting at her, “I’d like to see you find a use for that in the kitchen.”  We all recognized the reference to his last post-convention offering, the Rocky Mountain Cook Book that made her cry right in front of all of us.

 

“Oh sure, it’s very nice.  And I’m sure all the ladies from the city offices thought it was right charming that you’ve got a little wife holed up in the north scared to death of the bears.  A great moment in feminism, that’s what it is.”

 

“Should have got you the soup ladle with a beaver on the handle.”

 

“What is this thing?” My sister had reached into Mum’s lap and fingered the chrome pate of the over-sized jingle bell sewn onto a blue nylon strap embroidered with little red maple leaves.

 

“A bear bell.”  Mum was standing up, taking the bell with her.  “It’s supposed to ring out in the woods and warn bears something’s coming so they can get scared and run away.”  She held the bell up to his face and rang it as hard as she could.

“Listen to that.  I don’t know whether to run away screaming or start singing a Christmas song.  Honestly, it’s not much better than superstition.”  She was retreating, jingling away from us down the long hall of our half million dollar, fully loaded mobile home.  “Useless.”

 

Dad dropped down in her armchair and scrubbed his face with his hands.  “I think it’s a nice present,” I told him.

 

It was spring again, months since he’d stood behind her in the kitchen holding open one of her old university textbooks – one of the really big ones we liked to use for writing desks.

 

“Ursaphobe,” he’d announced.  “Who’s that sound like, my love?” he asked me.

 

She’d sighed so loudly I could hear the breath leave her over the sound of the pasta boiling on the stove.   She’d gripped the edge of the sink with both hands and glared out the window to where the aspen and spruce trees marked the end of our boomtown civilization, rolling green and ragged past the horizon, almost unbroken all the way to the Arctic.  I knew Dad wanted me to say his fancy Latin word sounded like Mum but I couldn’t say why.

 

“Tell you what’s crazy,” she’d begun before I had to answer him.  “Prancing around in the woods with your kids like there’s nothing out there liable to kill and eat you.  That is delusional.”

 

He’d been making some sort of protest against prancing as the bedroom door closed behind her.  I stirred the steaming noodles and my sister rolled under the dinner table.

 

Ever since a snowmobiler came soaring over a berm, squashing a dog dead, and breaking both the legs of the man on the other end of the leash, we weren’t allowed to play on the fire break behind the trailers anymore – the cleared band of land where the city had graded the soil and seeded it with grass before abandoning it to nettles and lamb’s quarter.  But the strip of trampled lawn alongside our trailer was too small for much play and streets lined with diesel pickup trucks were no place for nearly invisible children.  Sometimes we’d stand on the curb and wave at the huge commuter buses threading the needle’s eye of our trailer park streets, trying to get the drivers to blow their air horns while the shift workers cursed and turned in their beds.  But Mum didn’t really like us doing that either. 

 

I risked arguing we’d be safe from the quad riders and dirt bikers in the aspen trees on the other side of the fire break.

 

“We could take the bear bell with us.”  I knew it was stupid but I said it anyway.

 

She hummed a scoff at me.  “That’s just great.  And I suppose you could always go play in the muskeg ‘til it swallowed you up too.”  She meant the dark woods, the place where the sunny aspens gave way to black spruces and twiggy armed Labrador tea floating on a soggy cloud of sphagnum moss.  Dad had walked us over there last summer, just so when we move Back Home again we’ll be able to say we’ve seen real muskeg.  He’d twisted the head off the kitchen broom and brought the long white broomstick with us.  We couldn’t go very far into the muskeg woods.  Mosquitoes rose out of the moss like a tiny unholy army of the undead, their proboscises gored with our blood, to drive us back.  Great white welts swelled on my arms and neck from the bites.

 

“Why do their ticks look so bad?” he called out to Mum where she stood on the rim of the fire break.  “No one in my family flares up like that for a little bug.”

 

She laughed at him but she seemed anxious as ever, holding my sister’s hand, squinting into the spruces from the rough clay edge of the fire break.   I wanted to see her calm in the muskeg woods.  Everyone knows big animals – bears, moose, deer – they hate muskeg.  They sink into it, crash through the moss canopy with their thin legs, spooked in some eerie animal way by their ancestors’ memories of its hunger for them.  We saw some pictures on the Internet of whole bull dozers almost completely submerged in muskeg bogs. 

 

“Those are faked,” Dad told us.  “Look, the shadows are all wrong.”

 

On the muskeg, Dad had walked into the marsh through the whirring haze of mosquitoes and black flies.  The skeletons of hundreds of fallen spruce trees cracked under his feet, unseen beneath the moss.  I shifted on the spot where I stood as my weight wrung the clear, cold groundwater out of the muskeg and into the canvas of my shoes.  How long could I stand in one place here before the water rose up and up, and the moss gathered around me, pulling me into some dark northern heart, making me into a bog-girl, withered and tanned and perfectly preserved, right down to my the Corn Pops in my gut?

 

“Keep moving,” he called back to us.  “It’s fine as long as you keep moving.”

 

“Where ya got to?” Mum sang out after him.

 

“Here,” he answered, and I saw the back of his red-checked shirt, radiant between the black spruces.  They weren’t tall trees.  They don’t store much water in their own hoary trunks but trust the wet muskeg coiled around their roots will always nourish them from the outside.  Maybe there’s some kind of evolutionary brilliance to it – that is, until forest fire season comes.  Dad said there are some black spruces on the islands in the Athabasca River delta growing safely where the forest fires can’t hop across the water.  They say those trees are maybe hundreds of years old and tall as smoke stacks. 

 

He bent down to drive Mum’s white broomstick handle into the centre of a low spot where a puddle of water stood on the moss.  He bore down on it, leaning against the long stick like it was a lever on a great machine, snapping through strata of buried twigs and branches. 

 

“Will you look at that,” he was calling again, crashing back into Mum’s view, waving the broomstick at us.  Most of it was wet with clear water but its bottom quarter was coated in thick, tarry peat.

 

“Very nice,” Mum was muttering, looking away from him, scanning the length of the fire break.

 

“So what’ll it be, Missus?  The bears, the break, or the bog?”

 

I pulled the broomstick toward my face, raised its black end to my nose, and sniff as hard as I could.  “Smells like a garden,” I said.

 

She snatched it out of my hands.  “That’s what it’s not.”                        

 

Soon after the gift of the bear bell, Mum took a job, answering phones at a law office downtown.  She wore a ladies’ suit jacket and grew her fingernails into shiny pink claws. 

 

“There’s no point in me going back to work if it’s just to pay for the childcare for these two,” she told Dad.

 

“You don’t need babysitting, do ya love?” he asked me.  “You gets right off the school bus with your sister, come straight home, lock the door, and Mum will be home before you’re even sick of watching cartoons.”

 

They gave me a dingy gold-coloured key to wear on a shoelace tied around my neck.  “Keep it tucked in here,” Mum said, dropping the key inside my t-shirt.  “Don’t be telling everyone you’re on your own after school.”  Her eyes were wide and shadowy.  “God help me.”

 

Mum and Dad were both at work on the warmest day we’d had all spring – sunny, and windy enough for us to be able to hear the aspen leaves crinkling like wrapping paper at a birthday party on the other side of the fire break.  All at once there I was, under the trees in the bears’ aspen woods with my little sister and the tinkling silver orb I’d stolen from the shelf at the top of my mum’s closet.  In the woods there were tire tracks all through the hardened mud trails, a beaver dam as high as my head, the biggest smashed wasps’ nest I’ve ever seen, a rusted old snowmobile chassis, and no sign of any bears.

 

The neighbour lady saw us coming back to our yard before we’d reached the open gate.  She stood on the porch outside her trailer door, calling to us over the fence, smoking into the wind which, as we all know, is healthier.  “There you are,” she drawled in her Alberta accent, crushing the butt of a cigarette into a coffee can.  “Looks like you’ve really given your mom a scare.”

 

“She’s back?”  I felt my blood turn to saline.

 

“Not anymore.  She came in, ran through the trailer yelling for you, and then took off out the door and out the gate.  I think someone’s in trouble.”

 

“Running?  In her work shoes?”

 

The neighbour lady shrugged.  “I didn’t get a good look.  But she headed out that way.”  She pointed toward the muskeg woods.

 

I ran, careening over the tender spring weeds on the fire break, away from the bears’ woods in the west toward to muskeg.  My sister came along behind me, running and tangling our high girl voices together in a shrill alarm.    The neighbour lady might have been calling something after us but neither of us turned back.  There on the clay ground was one black, high-heeled shoe, and then another.  I screamed, clambering onto the spongy green landscape before me.

 

“Mum!”

 

A white face turned to look out through the trees.  But I saw her first as she stood on moss, barefoot but for her black panty hose, her back bent over the white broomstick as she forced it down into the peat layer, over and over, sounding the depths – searching for the bog-girls far, far below.  When she saw me she yanked the broomstick out of the muskeg and threw it down.  She staggered toward me on the soft ground, windmilling her arms until the Velcro ends of the bear bell’s strap were tearing apart around my wrist.  Maybe she was falling or maybe she was leaning back on purpose, like a baseball pitcher.  The bear bell was rolling off the tips of her fingers, hurtling away from me, spinning over the low tops of the scraggly spruces, its arc falling, curving back into the bog.  I heard the bear bell’s inner ball clink against its shell somewhere unseen, farther into the muskeg woods than any of us would ever be able to penetrate ourselves.

Boy

sucks his spine,
a convex bow,
back and away,
knob by knob,
vertebrae like fossils
out of rock.

Shrinking
nearer to where
my vision slips into his nostrils
up through the cribriform plate to the newly seared crotex.

And he knows and says,
“Just call me by my real name.”
Whispered
low in the hospital
so the nurses wouldn’t hear,
clawing down the curtains,
baring the pretender,

her breasts packed hard with pebbles.

 

[Irreantum, 2006]

Bubbly

The infant blowing bubbles on her bare arm
–slick, cottage cheese saliva –
breaks suction, sneers at her two fingers,
still typing as if nothing ever happened.

The thinnest skin of her hand
tears under tiny crescent moons.
Cursing in the baby tongue,
he coughs curdled breastmilk onto his shirtfront.

“Idiot,” he calls,
catching and stretching her scalp by hairy reins,
“I am the word.”

 

[Irreantum, 2005]

Lehi

Came back slow,
shot full of metal splinters,
How can the steel be broken?

And you, scoffing,
“It’s proved — there can be no steel here.”
Brass needles spinning,
Egyptian stickmen in leapfrog
– eyes and birds and ankhs forming and reforming –
in and out of squares.

Civilization starving
for three bows
never meant to feed us all.

The curve at last remembered,
green wood bowed to almost breaking,
wondering — string bites fingers –
how there can ever be a heaven for me now.

 

[Irreantum, 2005]

Gently Flashing Back

What did you tell her when she asked you how I looked?  I know she asked.  You’ve never been a very diplomatic man but you probably managed a careless hum as you said, “Uh, you know – older.”  I bet she wanted to know if I got fat.  I haven’t.  Was she disappointed to hear it? 

 

None of it is anything I wouldn’t demand to know if my husband’s first love were to come tripping, bloody and annoyed, into his workplace.  Not that blood is at all remarkable in the emergency room of the rural hospital where you are a doctor on call during long weekends.  Actually, my little son’s lovely B positive blood will have mostly clotted on its own by the time you find me and the sad little boy sitting stained but quiet on a clean gurney.  I can hear your voice through the hospital curtain before you arrive, telling the motocross daredevil with the concussion to stay off his bike for the rest of the weekend.  He makes you no promises.

 

‘Who’s the doctor today?” I ask the nurse.  She tells me your name.  She doesn’t title you “doctor” but just calls you by your first name as if you’d been her prom date too.  My husband laughs at me.  I roll my eyes.  And then I listen for my pulse, my breath, strain to sense my blood pressure, or any kind of galvanic skin response — nothing.  There is nothing out of the ordinary at work in my nervous system.  It’s thirteen years into my marriage and I am still well and truly over you.

 

The daredevil swaggers by in his boots and one-piece motocross suit on his way out of the hospital, back to the racetrack.  My boy is next in the emergency queue.  You are coming around a corner, dressed in a white lab coat that fits you about as well as a Halloween costume. Your stethoscope looks so real – still nothing.

 

One of the nice medical ladies has given my injured 2-year-old a ridiculously over-dyed purple popsicle.  He grips it as it melts into some kind of indelible ink over his hand and onto my arm.  That morning, we’d discovered an old fashioned playground in the ugly little town where we’d been visiting his great-grandmother.  The heavy, dingy 1970s playground seemed quaint – maybe even a little charming — until the centrifugal force of the old merry-go-round sent my twenty-first century boy flying into space.  As he sat up to get clear of the spinning metal wheel, it whirred against his scalp like a giant buzz-saw.  By the time I reached him, his brothers had all covered their eyes with their hands, and the back of the boy’s head was a flaccid geyser of thick, bright blood, spurting with every heartbeat.  He fought with me when I tried to press a wadded jacket to the cut like they’d told me to at the Red Cross.  Here at the hospital, the bleeding has stopped but the wound is still open and vulnerable.  And now we find you, pinching a long, curved needle, coming to seal the gash.

 

Despite the spectacular show of blood, one stitch is all the boy needs.  You, me, his father – we all agree not to bother with an anesthetic.  The freezing needle might end up hurting more than the stitching needle in the end.  My husband clamps his long, brown arms around the boy while you thread the sterile needle – my first and my last love working together at some kind of gruesome quilting bee.  The boy yips twice and it’s over.  You have healed him with blue, nylon thread and a warm, white washcloth. 

 

“Enjoy that medical popsicle,” you tell him, trying to sound jovial.  “It’s worth about $10.”

 

My son takes no notice of you at all as you speak to him.  There is nothing in your voice or mine to suggest to him how much we meant to each other when we were seventeen.  By the next weekend, my boy won’t remember his hour in your small town hospital.  When he becomes such an old man that he sheds all his hair the scar of your stitch on the back of his head will testify of your acquaintance. But you yourself will be no one to him.

 

And still you’re someone to me — even though my blood doesn’t rush to my head when I hear your voice anymore, even though it takes a medical emergency to cross our paths, even though I got rid of the letters you wrote me from Paris – not in a bitterly reverent cremation ceremony but with a quick tip into the trashcan with the banana peels and soggy tissues.  You won’t have kept my letters either – especially not the one with the Joni Mitchell lyrics scrawled on the outside of the envelope that I sent to you from the depths of a Canadian winter, begging you just to tell me that you were still out there and you still remembered… I’m not sure what I meant by that anymore. 

 

The emergency room will be empty for a few moments while you wait for a rogue diabetic to arrive in the ambulance.  You follow us to the forest of silk rubber trees that is the waiting area and sit down to chat with me and my fancy lawyer husband.  We count each other’s kids. I confess that I wasted myself in university and should have apprenticed as an electrician instead.  You brag about your brilliant little daughter and I counter with my 6-year-old who goes to French school.  I make sure to mention my husband’s latest promotion and you report that your wife, like most pampered ladies of this age, has a passion for digital photography. 

 

My husband is over you too.  He even leaves us alone together in the waiting room while he takes the boy to the public restroom to try to wash away the purple popsicle dye.  You talk to me without looking at me.  It’s an old, boyish habit.  Do you still do it all the time or is it reserved just for throwbacks like me?  When my husband returns with the boy (who is still purple), you invite us all to dinner.  Your wife is away and you’re lonely in your doctor house by yourself.  But we need to leave town and can’t stay. 

 

Just once at the hospital, when you were sitting and I was standing above you, holding my new baby, did I take a bit of your hair between my fingers – not like a lover would, more like how a zoologist might handle it.  I said, “Your hair’s going gray.”  I hadn’t meant to touch you.  It was natural, automatic, and yet awkward all at the same time.  “Yeah, ever since France,” you answered. 

 

I guess when my heart closed to you, years and years ago, it couldn’t help but close a little bit of you inside it.  I accidentally touched your hair because — in a lingering, tepid, involuntary way – I have kept you with me.  And maybe if all my hair was shorn away and I was examined, inch by inch, there would be a tiny scar somewhere on the back of my head, carved by the same hand that scarred my little boy.  But unlike my boy, whose red, swollen flesh puckers and smarts around a new suture, my wound is smooth and flat.  No matter how it’s poked or bashed and pulled it will not bleed again.  It never disappeared but it never hurts anymore.  It’s all that’s left with me to signify the miracle of love coming and then going away forever. 

 

Only it’s not a miracle.  It happens all the time, everywhere, to almost everyone.  Maybe it’s a delusion like the one that dupes us as we think our newborn babies are miracles.  Human reproduction is really the most common and natural thing in the world.  In the same way, I believe we can all recover from being in love.   It’s when love stays that it’s miraculous.   

 

There’s a man with purple popsicle dye on the front of his t-shirt leaving the hospital with me.  His name is lashed to my credit rating.  I’ve propped him up while he’s vomited.  I’ve seen him recreate the Napoleon Dynamite dance scene in a hospital room just so I’d smile in spite of the Inferno of childbirth.  And I’ve seen him marshal the grace to smile and exchange small talk with my first love.  There’s no cold scrap of this man scarred over and mostly forgotten inside me somewhere.  Instead, he lives and breaths, full and whole at my side.

 

Take your photographer-lover in your arms when she comes home.  Tell her you saw me.  Tell her I look old.  It’s true.  I don’t blame you.  And don’t worry about sounding trite when you tell her she’s a miracle.

The Spectre from “He Comes Without Calling”

Maybe you didn’t spend childhood Saturday mornings in the media room at a district Indian Affairs office.  That’s probably why you don’t recognize “The Spectre” from the reserve fire prevention film titled “He Comes Without Calling.”  The film changed my life and turned me into a haunted person.  Keep your fire extinguishers charged and don’t store fuel in the living room — or else…

The Spectre

Tarsand Beetle

Two finger lengths of antennae – 

black, black chitin –

sorting my hairs

like I’m spruce

fallen behind in rotting

for want of larvae.

 

You eat ash and wooden death –

not tar, not sand, not flesh —

no matter what the playground hollers.

 

And could I hate myself any more

than when I scream in my throat,

mouth closed against you,

tossing alkyd fence paint,

white into the ponytail 

I will wash in mineral spirits

when you’re dead?

 

Something different: a love-ish poem

Real

 

Invisible to you, at the first–

monkish winter coats in the street,

pinched beneath you in the chapel

as the Lois Lanes moved down the aisle.

No one likes that beginning,

but some love stories are real,

where boys prefer pretty women.

 

I’m not sorry.

 

No one notices the firmament at first.

And would it still be a miracle

if we couldn’t point to that time,

early, when the sheet slipped off a hidden forever,

just long enough to press my head to yours –

contrite as the lover I wasn’t –

forgetting to pretend

– whether you could see me or not

 

feeling through a last-dance crowd,

your hand on my arm,

turning me into you,

warm in your white shirt,

tall as a resurrected angel,

telling and telling –

how could you be telling the truth?

 

Meta, one year later.

Rented Funeral Man

 

 

 

Rented Funeral Man

 

 

Look at the rented funeral man with his black suit, all glassy in the sun like he left the iron sitting for too long on that polyester blend.  The thing’s half melted.  Bet he saves his good suit for good families – ones who still swear they were born with handcart blisters.  Won’t need the good suit today, eh?

 

And looks, he’s thrown down this plastic-turf-junk right over Grampy’s headstone.  Who did he think would already be buried beside where we’re putting Nanny’s grave?  Here, let me show you.  Is funeral man looking?  I think my underwear might show a bit when I bend over like this.  Whatever.  We’ll just flip this plastic garbage carpet off the bones of our grandfather and — see?  There’s his government issue veteran’s gravestone, just like it was when we were kids — the lichen’s new.  No really, I like that it’s so simple.

 

So did funeral man look when I bent over?  Well, watch next time.  We’re hard to miss, eh, standing in the chinook with the wind blowing our hair straight up over our heads like stringy yellow torches.  Don’t we look like we’re on fire? 

 

Nanny’s coffin sure looks rickety out here in all this wind.  Did you hear how mad she was in the showroom when she picked it out?  They say she took this fancy, folded price tag written in calligraphy, snatched it right off the pillow inside a coffin and threw it down on the floor.  (For heck’s sake, call it a casket.  You sound like some kind of vampire, talking about “coffins.”)  She told them just to bury her in one of the crates the caskets are shipped in but everyone just pretended she was joking.  So that casket there’s the bottom of the line, just like she wanted.  Mum says when we’re not around the funeral people will call it the Pink Pauper model.  They made it pink like our skin, I guess.  Want you to see how burial in a bargain casket’s just a hair above getting thrown into the ground bare.  And they say the lid would collapse under the weight of the grave’s dirt if it weren’t for the concrete box.  “Grave liner” it’s called on funeral man’s invoice.  I think it was the cheapest thing on there.

 

After all the fuss she made over the concrete grave liner you’d better make sure you get a look at it, waiting there at the bottom of the grave for her.  I’ll try’n keep the wind out of your skirt if you want to lean in and see. 

 

The town wouldn’t let her get buried without the concrete box – afraid she might end up in the groundwater or something.  Did you ever see her madder about anything in your whole life?  I tried, you tried, we all tried to settle her down but she just kept seeing herself on the morning of the resurrection, perfect and whole and sealed up in the concrete box forever.  How’s that for eternal life?  

 

Everyone, gather around and see the concrete grave liner stronger than the Resurrection.  Yeah, sometimes she was just nutty.  She’ll find her way out of the box though, she always did. 

 

I’m gonna let go of your hand for a sec.’  I’ve got something to send her, just in case.  Watch out, I’m going all the way down on my knees this time.  Is anyone even looking?  Is funeral man running over, trying to remember what they told him in funeral school about bereaved granddaughters crawling around on the yellow grass around open graves?

 

Better hurry now, get my face into the gap below the coffin strung up in the air on these straps.  And out of my mouth — there, one ribbon of saliva.  Look, it’s already supernova-ed on the floor of the open concrete box and shot into the little pores between all that cement.  The concrete’s stained dark with my warm water and enzymes – the same ones that make the yoghurt go all watery when I eat right out of the tub.  There it is, already dissolving the tomb.  There’ll be nothing on funeral man’s invoice to show me falling fast behind her — landing with a splat and whatever faith she lacks.