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ОглавлениеTransmitter and Receiver
Copyright © Raoul Fernandes, 2015
all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, info@accesscopyright.ca.
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typography & design: Carleton Wilson
Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.
This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.
Printed and bound in Canada.
library and archives canada cataloguing in publication
Fernandes, Raoul, 1978-, author
Transmitter and receiver : poems / by Raoul Fernandes.
Poems.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-0-88971-309-3 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-0-88971-046-7 (html)
I. Title.
PS8611.E749T73 2015 C811’.6 C2015-901128-0
C2015-901129-9
For Megan
By Way of Explanation
You have this thing you can only explain
by driving me out to the port at night
to watch the towering cranes moving containers
from ship to train. Or we go skipping stones
across the mirror of the lake, a ghost ship
in a bottle of blue Bombay gin by your side.
I have this thing I can only explain to you
by showing you a pile of computer hardware
chucked into the ravine. We hike down there
and blackberry vines grab our clothes as if to say,
Stop, wait, I want to tell you something too.
You have an old photograph you keep in your
bedside drawer. I have this song I learned
on my guitar. By way of clarification, you send
me a YouTube video of a tornado filmed up close
from a parked car. Or a live-stream from a public
camera whose view is obscured by red leaves.
I cut you a key to this room, this door.
There’s this thing. A dictionary being consumed
by fire. The two of us standing in front of a Rothko
until time starts again. A mixtape that is primarily
about the clicks and hums between songs. What if
we walk there instead of driving? What if we just drive,
without a destination? There’s this thing I’ve always
wanted to talk about with someone. Now
with you here, with you listening, with all
the antennae raised, I no longer have to.
The Goodnight Skirt
Permission to use that snowball
you’ve been keeping in the freezer
since 1998. For a poem? she asks.
What else? I say. I’ll trade you, she says
for that thing your mom said
at the park. What was it?
“God, that mallard’s being a real douchebag”?
Yes, that one. Deal, I say. Okay, how about
the Korean boy who walks past
our house late at night, singing
“Moon River”? Oh, you can use that, I say,
I wouldn’t even know what
to do with it. But there is something else.
I’ve been wanting to write about
the black skirt we’ve been using to cover
the lovebird’s cage. The goodnight skirt.
In exchange, I’ll let you have
our drunken mailman, the tailless tabby,
and I’ll throw in the broken grandfather clock
we found in the forest. One more, she says.
Last night, I say. The whole night.
She considers for a while, then,
Okay, that’s fair. But I really had something going
with that lovebird. All right, I say, write it
anyway. If it’s more beautiful than mine,
it’s yours.
Bioluminescence
Walking through the sensor gate at the public library
after a heavy reading, you fear the alarm
will go off from what is held in your mind.
You reassure yourself with the thought that no matter
how fuzzy it gets in the wire-tangled AV room,
you are still lunch, with possible leftovers,
for that wolf and her cubs. You have to imagine
the wolf and her cubs, obviously, but it helps.
When it comes down to it, it’s completely dark
just a few millimetres beneath the skin, no matter
how real the flickers on your nerve endings feel,
what with this strong coffee, this pulsing sky. You remind
yourself deep-sea life forms have evolved bioluminescence
for practical, not spiritual, reasons. Lunch, leftovers, etc.
Wooden chairs are real and tangible,
which is why philosophers and poets are always
referring to them, holding onto them, when hovering
around their rooms. Sometimes you catch yourself
singing without knowing you are singing
and sometimes you don’t even catch yourself.
Worn Book
The spine’s threads and glue coming apart
from frequent shelving, being shoved into backpacks,
tossed across rooms; the cover tarnished,
water/coffee/wine damage,
dog ears, rippled pages, stains from a petal
pressed between pages 26 and 27,
tiny crushed insects like misplaced punctuation,
damage from the book louse’s
feeding on the mould in the paper,
the mould too, of course, scribbled notes,
shards of highlighter, the slow fading
from light itself. Our fingerprints,
the oil of our hands, the oil and sweat
of our shaking, paper-cut hands.
Dear Liza
You need a flashlight to find the flashlight.
A cup of coffee to muster the energy
to get to the coffee maker. Call
the phone-repair man with your smashed
phone. Decipher the patterns in the ceiling.
The pill that takes away your fear of heights
is at the top of the ladder. I gave up everything for you,
he says. Everything that I wanted you to keep,
she says. Signing up for the fire-juggling course
requires that you have already taken
the fire-juggling course. Your face hovering
above the puzzle is an unfinished puzzle. Scattered
sky-blue pieces. A frown is a frozen ripple.
A shudder is you trying to be in two places at once.
But there’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza.
Try and try, give up and try again. And give up.
I cannot say sorry until you say sorry first,
they both think. The oars to your boat are floating away.
Itch in the phantom limb. Cut flowers in the vase
with all their love-me / love-me-not petals.
You first, they both think. Please. You search
your pockets outside your locked car. Where
are they? Oh, right. In the ignition.
There they are.
Automatic Teller
The fast-cash ATM wonders why
the woman looks so sad
when it prints out
pale numbers
on a small piece of paper
after she clearly pressed yes
when offered a receipt
wonders if this is some
personal narrative
it is not privy to
through its built-in camera
the ATM’s limited view
is the lower half
of a streetlight pole
a newspaper box
updated daily
a laundromat across
the road with lopsided
hanging fluorescent lights
I’d print something better
if I could
it thinks
fortune-cookie ribbons
or
the inverse
of every news headline
I’d generate some music
if I had more
than one tone
crush that little paper
it wants to say
throw it into the air
behind you
from these winter blossoms
our city will know
something better has to be
dreamed up
go along now
there is another waiting
behind you
clutching his coat
in all this
cold swirling data
dreaming something too
Suspension
Playground with interlocking tunnels. Willows worry
their reflections in the frog pond. Little gods throw spheres,
miss as often as they catch. Coins flicker in the fountain bed,
worth exactly the feeling of wishing. Leaves in circulation.
Runners in circulation. A young girl in the shade scratches
at a scratch-and-win. Grown men with dream journals in their
back pockets wander among the birch trees. Dolphin on a spring.
Rabbit on a spring. Swings used in inventive ways. Sweethearts.
A tall woman walks an oracular greyhound. A beetle-child
hums his way home from his cello lesson. Some bright flapping
memory is caught in a tree and is also an actual thing: a kite.
What happens in real life is absorbed into dream journals.
Flocks of young soccer players aligning, dispersing. A small
god pops an empty juice box under his sneaker. Another
laughs and shouts, Angel! Angel! as his dog pulls him
by the leash through a flowerbed. Frisbee-sliced air.
Pale moon on a string. A maple drops a leaf into your hair
to get your attention. Okay, sweetheart, you’ve got it.
Then more leaves drift down toward the earth.
Blackout
The storm gathers, stirs a tree, breaks
a branch, takes out a cable, cuts the power,
quiets our fridge, watches us through the window
where we sit to eat ice cream in the dark.
You strike a match, cup the flame,
touch it to the candle’s wick.
The city is already motioning to repair
but we can’t hear it for the trees. We hope
it will take its time. Who will sit
at the piano tonight? The child
given relief from her homework. A relief
for the moment. The storm
raining its applause on the roof.
Thirteen Summers for Timothy Treadwell
after the Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man
Out in Grizzly country, Timothy Treadwell films
a bumblebee sitting motionless on a stalk of fireweed,
believes the bee has expired with its head inside a flower,
its legs heavy with pollen. It’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s tragic,
he says in a breathless small-town-movie-theatre-cashier voice.
He steadies the camera on the fireweed, thinks
about that line in a song: Lord let me die
with a hammer in my hand.
I love that bee, he says.
The tapes contain hours of footage. There he is
resting his hand on some warm bear scat.
It came from inside her, he says. It was just inside her.
There he is screaming for rain during a drought,
when the salmon aren’t running and the bears
are eating their own children.
Timothy films himself
holding a bear cub’s skull.
Lord let me die
with my head inside a flower.
He looks into the holes where the cub’s eyes would be.
Looks away much too soon.
When the bee moves Tim realizes
it was just sleeping. Days later, a bear paws honey
from Tim’s chest. He is moaning, his girlfriend
screaming. The camera covers its eyes.
Love disperses like light
across the Alaskan wilderness.
You Were Depressed. There Were More Birds.
You were depressed. There were more birds
in the yard.
Rising from the chair was difficult. The yard
was overgrown.
The lawnmower was in the shed. The weeds
were flowering.
You couldn’t get to the lawnmower. The grass
was as tall as your shoulders.
You were unable to summon the strength. The yard
was audible with insects.
You touched the windowpane’s glass. The outside world
thrummed with hidden creatures.
You were depressed. There were swallows, finches,
flickers and wrens.
The Tulip Vending Machine
An artificial sun over rows of tulips,
a scheduled rain that mists
the garden.
You put a coin in a slot, a blade
curves out, lops
a flower near the base
of its stem
and sometimes
if the stems are too close
or blade slightly off
it accidentally cuts two—this
is what moves you, how the flaw
makes the machine seem organic,
