Don’t be less of a flower but, could you be more of a stone at the same time?

—Mary Ruefle 

The first philosopher rubbed fur against amber, which then
drew feathers and hair to it like a magnet.
This was evidence of the stone’s soul he said.
Now we know you can get the same effect by rubbing balloons
on your head.

cast about loss for anything else stone could be

My parents bought their cemetery plot and headstone 30 years
ago, all that’s left for them is to die, dig and chisel.
On All Saints Day we place flowers at stones for those who have
died, in the same place where my parents’ stone sits.

wait for loss and stone to flower

A pensioner suffered third degree burns when a chunk of white
phosphorous he mistook for amber ignited in his pocket and
set him on fire.

A P sewn to my father’s chest barred his entry to a bunker
the eaves of which were no real shelter from phosphorous
bombs dropped in Hanover. He watched his friend die while
he survived groping in the flowers for anything loss could stone.

The Al Purdy memorial statue in Toronto // By Shaun Merritt [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Seven ways of looking at something else

The colour that glances off
from another colour
looks at something else
aslant and tangential
and may not be seen alone
only in symbiosis
–rings around necks of certain birds
to see that not-blue and not-green
requires growing an extra space
in your head to keep them safe in
—followed by this girl into a museum
standing by a mummy-case
waiting for the sun on painted queen
at that moment watching the girl
watching the queen watching the watcher
unable to break the circle
—in the Mediterranean off Famagusta
sunken bronze and filigree gold memories
have taken the sun to bed on the sea bottom
solar fires burn in mud
and the sea-moan crying in lava caves
Greek women not crying for their lovers
aching for their doodads
—take for instance
that the planet they figured out
had to be there on accounta how
the others acted because of it
like a dance with invisible partner

Give me that final mystery
the invisible woman so lovely
she is beyond my conception of her
yet only possible because of me
sweet shadow in the bedroom
my rebellious beloved satellite orbiting me
yearning to be free

By Ephraim Moshe Lilien (Biblisches Lesebuch fuer den Schulgebrauch) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Noah on the 17th Day

So Noah
600 years old
and sick of it all
is standing on his boat
his Pandemonium
three stories high
and quite literally
full of life
finally tired
of the way
his wife
catalogues
their neighbours
as the bob by
wearing a coat of ha!
to warm her body
tired of going
below decks
threatening
sheep monkeys
moose
with marinades
and the grill
just so he can
sleep
his sons
more like
hyenas
every day
tearing into
each other
over endless
games of
poker
tired of the madness
in the clouds
drunk on
galaxies
the rain
applauding
against the
roof
so he lowers
himself down
into a lifeboat
nodding on the
gray on gray
cratered by rain
soaked to the skin
floating away
and
of course
they all call out to him
growls and screams
and whistles and words
but they can’t have him
this morning Noah
is deaf
and grinning
he slices
the water
with his line
and waits
quietly
to kill a
fish that
is fat
white
and full of
cruel victories

Interview with Sheila Heti

Iain Deans is a poet living in Toronto. He was born on a Friday in the early seventies in Montreal. After graduating from Queen’s University, he worked as a copywriter for about five years (“as did Hart Crane and James Dickey,” he is quick to point out), and now he works at a college in Toronto doing marketing and communications—unlike those two men, who are dead. Literary Editor Sheila Heti interviewed Iain via email, but she says her questions were vague. In this simulation of an interview, Iain’s answers are the answers he gave, but her questions are made up.

Sheila Heti: What is your approach to writing?
Iain Deans: My approach to writing isn’t terribly unique. Most of the time a poem comes together after a period of jazzing around—taking notes, automatic writing. I work in long-hand and try to keep a schedule.
SH: What happens if you don’t write?
ID: Things start to fall apart. I become edgier, unable to handle things. It’s been like that since my early 20s. It’s my medicine, and nothing seems to act as a suitable substitute—not exercise, not love.
SH: What about the poem?
ID:” “Noah on the 17th Day” came to be while I was walking through Montreal’s “underground city” during a crowded rish hour.
SH: Do you like to walk?
ID: I am a dedicated walker. I’m willing to walk for hours, but I’m not exactly romantic about it—I’m not out here scattering wildflower seeds. Downtown Toronto at night, when it gets really quiet, is fantastic. I love walking down side streets when everything is dark blue.
SH: What about cars?
ID: I hate driving. Too paranoid. I basically think everyone else is in a big hurry to die. I don’t own a car, and I won’t until the hybrid models are in price range. Many of the vehicles I see on the road seem to have more to do with vanity and bullshit than they have to do with getting around. I don’t get too broken up when I hear about someone torching a row of SUVs.

Illustration by Jason Skinner

Say Uncle

The uncles had basement rec rooms with pool tables or plaid couches. The uncles had histories in the military that you had no idea about. The uncles distilled their own alcohol in giant jugs, which they showed off to your parents proudly. The uncles wore wide-collared shirts and flannel pants. The uncles talked cars. The uncles held slideshows. The uncles insisted on paying. The uncles toured you around, pointing out the car window and giving you historical facts about their cities. The uncles mocked their own children who, even when they became defiant, said only, “Daaaad!”

The uncles called you over to them and said, “See if you can figure this out,” always presenting you something as if it was a riddle or a challenge, and you worried from that single phrase onward that you would fail before them. The uncles were men who trimmed their nose hairs, men who carried pocket knives, stubborn men who would ask nothing of anyone, men who ate and drank too much at Christmas, men with neighbors they told stories about as if they were enemies, men with large umbrellas, men with tackle boxes, men who knew the best route and the best way to remove a loose tooth, men who argued about politics into the night until you closed your eyes and the darkness replaced their voices with the gargle of rain.

As you grew older, the uncles said sexist things, or racist things. They seemed more stubborn than before. They said things to your mother you didn’t think funny. They tried to kid with you but only turned your face purple. They liked hack writers you had never thought they would like. Their waistlines grew, and they overcame cancers and operations and heart conditions and car accidents and mishaps that you were informed of as factually as possible. “Tell me about my uncle,” you said, but the answers were always brief and uncertain.

Eventually you would be at some family party and you could see them fading out, like ghosts, growing sallow right before your eyes, melting in the rain as if they were made of chalk. “I’ll never see you again,” you thought. “The next time we all get together, one of you won’t be here,” and it was true, but it was never the one you would have figured.

The uncles were dying. Slowly, softly, they were forgetting things, and falling away into graves that were damp with rain, and you had no poetry for them, though you wished you did, no real knowledge of who they were. There was only the absence of walking down a foreign laneway in a cemetery far from your own home and wondering how long until the next cup of hot coffee and if it was wrong to bend to wipe the mud from your shoes.

But the uncles weren’t over. They were still cracking jokes. When you closed your eyes, you still saw them. The uncle with the red shirt. The uncle with the shirt as yellow-gold as his tooth. The uncle in the bow-tie at the wedding. The uncle whose hair grew straight upward, and the uncle who had no hair, and the uncle with the beard growing half down his neck, and the uncle who lost a hand a long time ago, and the uncle with the big metal belt buckle, and the intellectual uncle in Hush Puppies, and the uncle who drove like your father, slow and staring straight ahead.

There is the uncle still singing carols behind your right ear in deep baritone. There is the uncle more silent than the rest, whose voice is the color of smoke, and whose fingers are the color of smoke, and whose eyes are the color of smoke. There is the uncle whose lap you sat on, though you have no recollection of it, have only a photo of yourself there, perched, telling a secret story to him when you were so small his hand was a country. A toy you don’t remember resting on his knee as if you had set up a camp.

No, the uncles weren’t over. The uncles were still crisp, and still smelled of peppermint and tobacco, and apples and wool, and new leather, and the very old pages of very old books. Even now when you fall into sleep, they are waiting, their voices steady in another room, just there on the other side of the wall where everything is in black and white.

They are caulking windows and killing bees. They are hauling old artifacts out of a barn and saying, “You think that’s worth something?” and setting it out to the curb. They are sawing the branches off a dead tree and stacking them in piles. They are launching a boat into the water—just there, just behind the wall, in that room, a whole boat. They are caught on video and they are laughing. They are younger than you remember, those men you know and never know. They are all together, the uncles from your mother’s side and the uncles from your father’s side, and the great uncles on both sides. They are looking up at the sky for rain, and saying, “Do you think she’ll hold?”

So when your father walks into that room and takes his place among them, wearing a white cap he favors for golf days, you can’t help but startle. He’s not your uncle, but he is an uncle. He cups his hand against the wind and lights a cigarette, lips pulling at the paper. He lifts his eyes to the sky they are still appraising, which looks something like your grandparents’ ceiling and something like the blue stratocumulus over Lake Michigan, and says, “I think it will.”

The uncles turn to him and nod.

Illustration by Drew Shannon

Lee Marvin, at your service

There was a time, and it feels like yesterday, but really it was an era of Cold War paranoia and black dial phones and colour-TV-as-novelty, when it seemed like everywhere you went, every corner you turned, Lee Marvin was there, ready to give you a hand.

You would flood the engine of your car, and you’d sit there in your driveway, still pumping away at the pedal, and a song by Paul Revere and the Raiders would be squeaking out of your tinny radio speaker, and there’d be a knock at your window. You’d crank the window down, that’s how you did it in those days, you’d crank your window down and peer up into the sunlight, and a tall figure would blot out the sun like there was some goddamn eclipse or something. And before you could say, “Are you Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian,” the giant silhouette with a brush cut would say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And within minutes, seriously, you’d be picking up your date and you’d both go five-pin bowling.

Maybe your father would die, or no, your grandmother who lived in the family room and didn’t know any English, only spoke Russian, but she made a great snack by frying up chicken fat and onions, and the whole family would sit in front of the Marvelous Invention of Colour TV and watch Laugh-In while dipping into the greasy bowl Grandma had prepared. And now she was gone, and you’ve all just come home from the funeral, and Solly says, “We’d better cover all the windows,” and Sarah says, “No, we have to take the pillows off the bed and paint Jewish stars on all the mirrors,” and Dad says, “Everyone take off your shoes and put on slippers or flip-flops.” But really, no one had ever paid attention before to what you had to do when you were sitting shiva, because it had only ever been other people’s shivas. And then there was a knock at the door, and when Mom answered, a tall blond man with muscular front teeth would thrust his head inside and say, “Lee Marvin, at your service.” And before you knew it, you’d have all the Jewish mourning customs down pat, and Lee would be leading the minyan in the Kaddish.

Same with if you were in a bank and lining up for the teller and you were confused by how to fill out the deposit slip, or if some skinny thug was robbing the bank, or if two kids in striped shirts were yelling at each other in the schoolyard, or if you were short a few pennies when you were buying a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of cream soda, or if you had trouble making one of those cardboard pinhole viewers when there was a solar eclipse — next thing you knew, before you had even begun to panic: “Lee Marvin, at your service.” That familiar square-jawed grin, the big hand reaching out to shake your own more mortal hand — “Lee Marvin, at your service” — and then he’d do his thing, it would only take a second, and everything would be better and you’d be on your way and the grilled-cheese sandwich wouldn’t even have gotten cold yet, if there was a grilled-cheese sandwich involved in the situation.

But it’s not like Lee Marvin didn’t have his own problems. Lee Marvin had plenty. Just ask Jane Fonda, or Jean Seberg, or John Cassavetes. Or, if you don’t like people whose names begin with the same letter as Jesus, ask Angie Dickinson. Anyway, this all happened so long ago, it’s like it was another lifetime. I’ve put on weight, my hair is white now, and when I get my picture taken, it always looks like I’m lying in a coffin, like when Polly, our Ukrainian cleaning woman, showed us a photograph of her husband back in the Ukraine, and he really was lying in a coffin. We caught Polly stealing some of Mom’s jewellery, and that was the end of Polly in our home. She wasn’t very good anyway — sometimes we’d find cobwebs up near the ceiling after she left.

Our next cleaning woman was Clara, and Clara was from Argentina, and she never stole anything, not even if we deliberately left something out to test her. That’s the difference between Ukrainians and Argentinians. Also, when Clara found my Playboy collection hidden under my bed, she didn’t tell my parents. She just put the magazines in order by year and month and straightened out the stack. Bruce Jay Friedman, who is a very good writer — I’ve read four of his novels — used to always write for Playboy. I always noticed his name at the top of his articles — it was such a Jewish name. It surprised me to see people with Jewish names writing in a magazine with nudie girls. My favourite Playmate was a lady from Hoboken, New Jersey. I think she’s selling real estate now.

The thing about selling real estate is you have to really love what you’re doing, because it’s only genuine enthusiasm that is going to compel someone to fork out the kind of money necessary to own their own house. And you have to be able to look at the bright side of things — you have to always find the rainbow in the goddamn bug-infested swamp. If you lose your excitement about selling real estate — like, if you were really good once but now there’s no challenge left — it’s time to do something. People who don’t think positively can’t be in the real estate business. Sure, they might be able to sell a ramshackle bungalow here and there, but they could never be really successful. They should go into a business they can be more passionate about, like owning a hardware store or testing makeup products on animals.

The best Bruce Jay Friedman novel, according to me, is Stern. The former Playmate from Hoboken, New Jersey, is Janet Lupo.

May I suggest that you schedule an appointment with a career counsellor? These are people who come in all shapes and sizes, and they can make a genuine difference in your life. They may not be able to guarantee you a job, but they can help steer you towards the kind of professional pursuit that you are qualified for, and that you would find meaningful. Something you can really get behind.

Some think that a meaningful job is one that affects a lot of people, such as coming up with an important and complex theory like Einstein did, or being a prime minister, or becoming a police officer in a bad neighbourhood who really connects with the young people and encourages them to get meaningful jobs instead of being hoodlums and layabouts. A meaningful job might only be meaningful to the person who has the job, but that is enough. Meaningfulness is not measured by quantity. Being a meaningful job means being meaningful to the person who holds the job: it gives them self-respect and a purpose in life. It might just be playing a particular chord on a pipe organ once a year on the same date. It might be laying pipe for the delivery of oil. It might be sitting on a porch in a pioneer village smoking a corncob pipe like you were from the 1840s.

Early in 1840, the first issue of the American magazine Electro-Magnetic Intelligencer was published. It appeared on January 18. On the same date, but in 1961, the lie detector was first employed in the Netherlands. Another interesting fact about the Netherlands is that one in three Dutch people belong to a sports club, plus approximately 300 castles in Holland are open to the public. These are “fun facts.” You will find many more “fun facts” sprinkled about in other stories that I have written.

Illustration by Jeff Kulak

1.
What on earth did she want from him? From them? Approval? She
was embarrassed by how little she knew, or would own, of her own
motivations.

She was also too hot in her heavy wool coat, and damp, wet really,
hair like feathers stuck to her brow. Add frustrated to the list. After a
decade of intense discipline she found herself suddenly wanting to
smoke, to have random sex, or at least to have distracting fantasies
about these things: she had drifted off into trysts on the airplane, at
the hotel, in the rental car below deck.

The ferry entered Active Pass, a moment of transition she always
loved, and she stepped out onto the deck. Turbulent water churned
cutlery, dinner plates, champagne glasses and bottles tossed off of
boats, tumbling and softening them so they foamed up decades later
on beaches, common as periwinkle and sand dollars.

Shorelines sliced through the fog like cream. She scratched notes in a
hand-sized journal. Tiny illuminations like the lit cabins on the treed
shores where some old part of her still longed to live.

2.
Harlequin ducks carved in Thailand or Bangladesh lined the gift
shop shelves. Local books in racks. The clink of teapots, a cash register.
Horn blast. All the old comforts laced with their irritations. She
recalled hearing Aritha Van Herk read a story set on a ferry years ago
when she was a creative writing student at the university. The local. It
was crass in fiction. Stories were supposed to be set in New York, or
London, or at the very least, in a suspended non-descript place that
resembled the interior of an Alice Munro character.

That week someone had stolen her backpack and she found it hours
later stuffed in a garbage bin on campus with nothing but a personal
letter, her diary, and a packet of photographs taken.

That was the sort of thing that happened in Victoria.

3.
There had been a pod of whales on the previous crossing. People
stared out hopefully even after they left the strait. She stood next to
a Kurt Cobain look-a-like on his way to Botanical Beach. He was a
baker he said, lighting a cigarette for her, he liked to bake scones, she
inhaled deeply, but she did not smoke and quickly felt light-headed.

She left the baker to a rack of younger lambs and sunk into a deep
blue chair, thinking of her stolen diary. How numb she had been. Later,
when he chastised her for being so elusive, so withholding in class,
she knew he had taken it.

As painful as it had been, that loss had been a blessing. She had not yet
understood that she had been lying to herself, even in her own diary.

4.
Gulls hung ghost-like in the air. Another horn blasted. The fog refused
to lift. A woman, tall and sweet as meringue, moved past her, so slow
and heavy that she followed her up to the observation deck. Safe up
here, she thought, six stories off the water, but the plywood-covered
window reminded what a rogue wave could do. She considered pushing
the woman against the door and biting the back of her neck, but
her cell phone rang and she was momentarily jolted back to Toronto.

5.
When she lived in Victoria those many years ago, she lived in a house
on Meares. Her flat was on the second floor, a corner unit with a
large south-facing window. She used to listen to soundtracks—The
Mission, Room With a View—far too loud, and Ellen Smythe, author of
several unpublished Harlequins that needed proofreading, was often
up to complain. She was big bosomed, sixtyish (though it occurred to
her that she was probably only 40), short, hair dyed blond, face like
powdered linen, and very, very hungry. She had been there that first,
exhilarating, day, knocking quickly.

A laugh, unexpected, set off car alarms three blocks down. Her landlady
blushed at her standing in a T-shirt and turned without asking
whatever it was she wanted to ask. She went back to her bedroom and
there they were, like hungry, doting parents, urging her back to bed.

6.
He suggests they walk to Cadboro Bay, and so they do. The air was
warm, but it was windy and they were almost sideways, against it.
Everyone talked about the weather in Victoria, but no one mentioned
the persistent wind. He loped ahead of her like a much younger man,
slipping down a trail with too many logs, round and slippery as oil
drums. She was wearing the wrong coat. The wrong shoes. Staying
upright demanded all of her attention. They had two children, he said,
rolling his eyes, and yes, he had published several books since. She
had noticed, she said, waiting for a comment on her own work. He
took his binoculars out from under his jacket.

You see, he said, the Harlequins are there. And they were, chestnut
and slate, the male a slightly off Tao. They roiled in the rockiest point
in the bay; tumbling where the waves crashed and currents shifted
quickly. They mate high in swift mountain streams, he said. They nest
in crevices. From where they stood they could not hear the squeaks
and whistles of joy as they wrenched mussels and barnacles, crabs
and crustaceans.

7.
It would have been better to meet indoors, she thought. Here it was
though he was made of rubber and feathers, drifting on stilts, absolutely
free of any memory of her body, any obligation of mind. And
yet he was the one that started it with her. He, who on one of their
post workshop outings, had slipped his hand between her legs under
the table as he regaled the class with having met Carver. She found
his audacity, his control, thrilling. You have to meet my wife, he said,
brushing her breast with his arm, she will love you.

8.
He asked how she was, and he listened and nodded. He kept his body
at an angle, an elbow between them.

She knew by then that she had been one of many. Everyone knew:
each year a new affair proceeded in a startlingly similar fashion. She
had merely been a sheet of excitement, a shimmer of lubricant they
penetrated each other through. That’s what mentorship looks like for
women, someone said.

The day, drawing to a close around them, felt as turbulent as it was
the day she left well over a decade ago. She had not told anyone she
was applying to another program and this turned out to be a great
convenience.

9.
And how is Di, she asked finally. He pointed to another cluster of
ducks as if he couldn’t quite hear her, and it occurred to her that he
hadn’t told Di that she had contacted him. Triumph is overrated, she
thought. That she had moved so far along in her career, that she had a
partner, that she was happy, successful, none of this shielded her from
the stab of this omission.

He stopped suddenly, facing her directly. Were you always a lesbian,
or did you just not know at the time?

Why, she said, would that be breaking the rules? She stopped herself
from saying something cruel about how she had never cared what he
thought of her. That it had always been about his wife. That Di was
delicious, like trying to find a single strawberry in a bowl of whipped
cream. Surely he must know that.

There will be a small gathering after the reading, he said. Come. He
walked on, binoculars at the ready, sure and quiet, as if he was leaving
a trail of crumbs.

SINA QUEYRAS is the author of MxT and Autobiography of Childhood,
both from Coach House.