Camille Martin

mammals and crickets breathe tomorrow’s weather. matter-of-factly they sip their tea and absorb its little catastrophes with the calmness of a cloudy dawn observed through a clear window. slowly, glass panes weep for blooms and scorched blooms, oaths broken and kept. waves vanish into glitter while empty cups loom. tomorrow, that is.  better yet, whatever angle lurks curves dash.  on an afternoon just like this one, is the title of a book, a real page-turner ending with a cliff-hanger: a tightrope walker takes a deep breath and bravely steps onto his fleeting wire. he can still feel the breeze, and for him, too, tomorrow’s weather never dies. so he vows to balance, stick perpendicular to the wire, and matter-of-factly turns the page.             glib spice announces the news bleeding in the monochromatic distance. the short-term memory of distance flees in fear. enemies fall, money flees. falling gloom dazzles just as history taught it to. not the history of  stars made of tumbleweed nor the annals of a dust mote singing rich disaster. masoch was never so rich, or so it seems to each geological layer. no notebook records a pocket of posies between thick layers of ash. it just is, caught in a small pocket of time. “it’s time to return to star,” announces            tumbleweed on the news. the news shrinks to a speck of pollen on a posy’s anther in a pocket caught between thick layers of ash.             snow. repeat. flesh of snow, pocks in tarnished snow. snow of lust. snow of cash. blathering omega’s travesty of dust. snow breaking vows of poverty but not silence. snow of theft. sparrows buried in snow.             a deserted city. we’ll have to imagine it’s in a movie. beneath the sky, walls crumbling into backlit dust, flames on hillsides, tattered auburn fishes swarming in the autumn wind. we’ll have to imagine someone watching that movie. there’s no one to forget irrelevant seeds. twiggy stuff loses focus. glints of dying sunlight share unmoored mountains whose thoughts of home come to nothing. some left off praying to the mother of a tarnished idol presiding over a flock of angels, their symbolic breath attended by golden lice. others paused long enough to listen to dusk’s leisurely roar over the white noise of crashing waves. elsewhere, everywhere, flocks of matter dipped their pale snouts into inky ponds. photogenic dullards jazzed in the waning light. a ship’s captain fingered a pocketful of gold before staving in his ship, which sank to the bottom with him and his fungible plugs. a forgotten subject, reflected in rushing water, travelled down to deep lakes with nothing left to say. they all, every one of them, found something to swear by before it was too late, like the glow from smouldering embers in the hearth illuminating fishbones left on plates.             all day, innocent nebulae travel, outstripping clay animals preening their quivering ideas, tipped in gold. * an apothecary shifts golden abacus beads to the left and right, as if positions were the matter. * every time the prince reaches toward the singing ruby apple with golden stem, the song of the apple recedes. * an impossible moon lowers its gilded horns and charges the flux and babble of everything from iron to meat. * onto the wizard chanting a spell to restore confidence in spells, fool’s gold rains.             a simpleton inherits a kingdom after unwittingly avoiding the king’s traps of boiling oil and poisonous snakes. he wins the hand of the lovely princess, who takes her knife out of its sheath, and seeing blood on the blade, she sets about pulling weeds in the secret garden planted by the late king’s gnomes. the simpleton gives her a box of pears to console her, but the wretched girl searches in vain for cabbages. she takes her kerchief, ties a knot in it, and strikes the ground three times with it, but no wizard appears to grant her wish. driven mad by remorse, she runs and runs, chasing mice and repeating:  “here come the bird droppings! let us fly away to the seashore!” finally she travels to a secluded corner of the forest, where she dies on the bank of a river. near the river is a magnificent palace where a lovely princess lives with her doting father, who issues a challenge to all the kingdom’s bachelors.       - - - - - -

Camille Martin, a Toronto poet, is the author of Sonnets (Shearsman Books, forthcoming in 2010) and Codes of Public Sleep (BookThug, 2007). Her current work-in-progress is a poetic sequence based on her Acadian/Cajun heritage. She teaches writing and literature at Ryerson University.