eiko kawano

She was born a so-so girl
Called out twice, once, maybe never

Little children use fishing rods like swords
One of them is hungry, he’ll tell her so
She’ll close the door and wonder at the descent to the street,
That dizzying pause at the top.

In the hospital room she bemoans the workaday world
The stings every day world
The scrubs that don’t fit so well anymore.

She dabs at wounds, arranges meals for soft mouths.
The man holds up his missing fingers.

She places the fork in his other hand.
Flips the channels, thumbing at miniature keys
Wipes tomato sauce, streak of red
Herself quivers
Something like envy.

There’s a fire behind the boathouse.
Plastic grass twisting in the heat, now blackening, now slinking into the ground
As if it did something wrong when it burned
Shamed by the long straight line of the army
Flames marching in time with the drums

If I turn away right now, if I run because I’m scared,
Will you forgive me?

Next to the old barbecue is a propane tank,
Not quite empty.
No one knows what kind of damage it can do if it explodes,
But here: picture it, how high it might fly
This happened in Thailand a few years ago.

Right around the time you took me on the water
Said I love you while you held my head under
Wondering what it would take to make me breathe

The smell of wood now from the back of the building
This is our curtain call, the last encore
Red fingers pull apart the stage,
Race for the door

In your beach chair you crack another beer
Check your phone, scratch your head
Pick up the paper, turn to all the numbers
Count them one by one, tapping in time with the burn.

Upstairs in a treasure chest:
One of his sweaters, burgundy.
That cheek-rub feeling of wool.
You can smell that little bit of scotch he sometimes had before dinner.
You can hear 7-Up pouring over ice,
The handing over of thick glass,
Sitting in the living room:
Teak chairs, stacking tables, a bookshelf with The Hardy Boys.

Each grandchild got a sweater.
An apron, too, floral-patterned,
faded from so much washing.
You can see her in the green one: pulled tightly around a fancy blouse and skirt.
She was the best dresser, we said:

Afterwards,
Afterwards.
Upstairs in the hallway closet,
Going through her things, two mothers and five grandchildren,
Holding up a dress she wore when she was twenty.
“Wasn’t her waist so tiny?”

Laughing, crying a little
Holding on to bits of cloth.
Trying to remember
Trying to savour
That disappearing smell on their clothes.

After being pulled he snapped right back.
We lined up and marched,
Marched so straight our feet hurt.
And stood, and gazed.
Three-foot boy with a fake moustache come running, come running down the line,
Past that man selling hot dogs on a stick,
The man who charges extra for napkins.
Painted faces throw wax-wrapped toffee, throw so hard their shoulders hurt.
Scrambling on the ground you get a look at those slippery flowers
The art, from a distance, of some dreary man-made dream.
Air-filled circles stream forward and then up, swim high until they disappear from popping.

We who stood there watching
For some moments held our hearts out
Imagined it, her:
Gliding without wheels atop those cakes, those swans, that giant plastic squirrel
She is that one waving,
That one on the loudspeaker,
Those three dancing can-can girls, all those practiced moves.

On the walk home we went out of step
Cleared candy from our teeth
Dislodging sticky bits of a forgotten parade
Checked for evidence of pickpockets.

We have no heroes anymore.
Even Superman is dead,
And you’re too young to have known JFK.

You tell me Obama and I show you a Black man
Around the curve they ride momentum,
Balls to the asphalt, screaming around the corners
Six million hands in the air
Shoulders hunched into the last stretch
Right into a wall.

You tell me Obama and I say you’re naive.
You name an actor and I send you a mugshot
You don’t bother with that novelist who wrote that one book.

Wave those hands at your pretty little condo
Drip sugar on your view of the ocean
White tips of fingernails and skin how it gleams
That tan, the colour of sand.

The world is burning
You hear Egypt, Syria, you hear earthquakes in China
Somewhere some people some hole in the ground

At 715 the alarm clock rings
At 430 you claw out from your 9 to 5
You strap on your jersey
Did you know you can buy them online?
With mouth stretched, eyelids pinned, fingers crusted with dirt
You with three million hands in the air.
You with suspended indifference,
You with hope.

And when everything is over,
You look to the sky,
You look to the bottle
You look at each other.

And come away rage.

This one summer,
The days were so hot.
To get to town I drove a stovetop steering wheel
Burnt to the touch.

But at night, at night.
Thirty minutes in the car
Euro pop on the cassette player
Windows open to desert air 
I could drive and drive.

In fast food parking lots, or
By the water
Down where tourists climbed a big green snake,
I met you in my ratty blue sweater 
And we’d go, we’d run and run

I’d go anywhere back then.

Eighteen and the boat was always trembling
Unsteady for the waves
Couldn’t take a step without falling
But still.

For that blue sweater
For the wagon with its broken door
For that half hour drive into town
Scanning crowds in a nighttime parking lot,
Harvey Avenue, 1993.
What I wouldn’t give.

the bugs were getting in again.
three of them she saw last week
she thought: But I have kept everything
awfully clean.

those bugs, their wingless wings
heads without faces
legs that would not crawl
torsos black, invisible

one time in a hotel room,
she writhed as a body snaked across the floor.
finally around midnight, phoned the front desk
asked when the locks had last been changed

and when she counted, it was all the ways to patch the cracks
the windows, floors, the vents,
the every bit of skinless skin
where something might come in.

“Here, kitty kitty”
Sky is sullen like the end of a bad nap
Somewhere a door windslams,
Could be near the intersection where last week he saw a rat
Silver and bloated, fur matted like a possum.
Where once lay three pink justborn things,
Dead by whatever wanted them to die.

Sky tries to get yellow like grasping at intentions
Guitar crawls up the vents, across the floor to stare a song at him
A loop so familiar it could be in his head
Something below is itching out a song.

He scratches his neck, the tops of his shoulders, first one and now the other
Touches the pinky toenail that fell off that time he ran so far with Caroline,
Trying not to drag by her loosebone wrist
Down for the water where he would press his forehead to the sand,
Scrape off all that wetness emerging from his head.

The father said
They connect like this:
Blue to blue, edge to edge, see how that curve fits that piece and that other one, how it wraps around.
You can start with four corners
Work your way in
Look how I’ve made a bit of sky.

The boy nodded his head.
And began to understand,
Saw sand and water and a seagull flying into the sun

The father said
You go ahead now
I have other things to do.

And the boy prepared to work
And between his fingers the weight of cardboard
And in his eyes lines connecting,
In ears the whispering click
The coming perfection of shape meeting shape

You might imagine it spread out before you
The chaos of some perfect pattern
And reaching out you push sand into water
Drag water into sky
Take up all the air
Drown the seagull as it burns.

The boy heard the front door close
Heard the noise go too.
Held in each trembling hand a piece of the puzzle
Eyes closed, head tucked like a bird
Cheek to water
Waiting to drown.

Lila stands in the middle of the corridor, rubs at the skin on the tenderest part of her thumb, contemplates the length of people pushing past her and with steady hands drives it like a spear into her stomach: now sliding in, now out, flesh heaving like taking a deep breath. The noise rises above the smell of new books and sugar from the fudge stand, stale coffee and some chemical thing like peeling off the plastic from a new phone.

Lila thinks, It’s like the first day of school. She pulls the sleeves of her new favourite sweater down over both hands, nervous of the heat rushing to her face.

In the outside sunlight are groups of five and six and seven people, the perfect number to pierce at your heart, too big to be a lonely pair and small enough to have formed by choice. Lila remembers that blood only congeals when the body’s still alive. She approaches the window, shades her eyes, peers out for a moment as if there’s someone she might recognize, knowing she’s only playing pretend. Here are legs crossed on the ground, here long braids of hair, here wide mouths laughing, sucking at the air. The clock moves and they head toward her now, like tribes. Lila flees.

When everything is over Lila will stand in the washroom, put her hands under the sink and try not to look in the mirror at herself or the two girls next to her, how determined their hands as they brush powder on skin. Without wanting to listen she will hear them say shopping and that will remind her, abruptly, like a casual slap to the jaw, that she left her sweater in the last room. She’ll try to make a decision, think about wading back there, all that distance, through bodies that pass each other, those who stop in delighted recognition, faces that stretch to make smiles before they turn to eat her alive.

Everything I see is white. The air seems made of snow, an unending assault of flakes that are born and then die on the windshield. The landscape in front of us is vast in the way only snow makes things vast: beautiful, uniform, terrifying. My mother and I are driving along a tiny, twisting highway, squinting as we try to keep hold of the road with our eyes. To my left, an occasional shrub or branch pokes through the snowy covering that blankets the hillside; a white sheet of land that extends into the sky. To my right, there is nothing. The mountainside drops away and I see nothing but an immense emptiness. There is no guard rail or barricade between us and that deep, wide space. I try not to look. The cold air sneaks into the car and I shiver, my hands grabbing whatever I can that feels hard and secure and unmovable. We inch our way along, around sharp turns and unexpected bends, and hope we will not swerve off over the edge. I try not to look at her face and instead stare ahead into the blowing snow, the snow that makes everything the same; makes the ground indistinguishable from the sky, swallowing every rock and tree and bit of road it crosses.

She said she needed to get away. She stuffed the trunk with blow-up mattresses and pots and pans and a two-man tent (or “two-woman”, as she called it, giggling). She took cassette tapes and sunglasses and bought me a new bathing suit, though the one I had was perfectly fine. She wore a big straw sun hat and the nail beds of her long, slim fingers went pink where she gripped the wheel. My mother didn’t drive much except to work and back. I was eight and had never been camping alone with her. My grandparents offered to come with us but she refused, saying it was “just for us girls.” We stopped at the store and bought penny candy and while she drove she smoked cigarettes, and when she lit one up the smell was like the smell of her hands. She put on music and sang and though I felt queasy from the sugar and the winding roads, I sang too.

She had a map, and she had been there several times as a child, so it wasn’t that she didn’t know the way. But the weather on the pass was unpredictable, the tires on the car nearly bald. Looking back I can’t believe my grandfather would have let her drive that highway, so perhaps she lied about where we were going. She must have been determined, because when we hit snow and the car started to slip around the turns, she kept going. When I said I was scared she didn’t reply but turned off the music and smoked one cigarette after the other, keeping her left hand on the wheel, and she didn’t slow down until the snow came in so heavy it was almost impossible to see. Even when we crept along so that it was like we were walking the car still fishtailed on the road and I prayed no one would come the other way. I am not sure what she thought she was doing. We were high up in the mountains and the only way we could be certain of getting down safely was to turn back. When a large truck came careening towards us, she didn’t realize she was in the middle of the road and when she pulled sharply to the right I was certain we were going to go over the edge and I closed my eyes and screamed. I pleaded with her to stop and she gave me a strange look and turned the music back on as loud as it would go. Only when the wheels and then the entire car began to slide as we fought to get up the next steep bit, only when we could not go any further and the tires refused to pull themselves along the asphalt, only then did she sigh and make a five-point turn, pointing us back down the hill. I was crying and she laughed and said, “Wasn’t that fun?”

For a brief moment the morning light comes in, retreating just as quickly as the door closes and returns the room to its orange motel glow. The outline of her moving, brush of shoes against carpet, how she pauses for a moment while I wonder what her face looks like today. When she gets into bed and pulls me close to her it doesn’t seem to matter that she’s been gone, or that she frightened me, or that she smells like alcohol and cigarettes and something else. I close my eyes and slide my hand under the pillow, feel for the bathing suit. If you press your finger against the shiny fabric just so, the grain feels like a million slivers, readying themselves for your skin.