High Horse

“Dream Deferral”, by Mark Bradford. 2009

KNOCKED HARD 				


I heard you whimper, went in, wardrobe thick with vapour. 
Guard hair erect, you sniffed-at, separated,
my saliva, sweat, breath, outdraft of human predicament. 
Three-inch gash on your foreleg, body
shrunk in packed corners where cooking sherry used to be 
under a stalactite threaded with picked flowers.
Crumpled dog harness within damp tulle, 
shoes, where branches tugged and twitched. 
Was I inside outside, or outside inside?
Approaching a sink where a woman like my mother, faceless
infill blur, rubbed and splashed. 
The tap’s controlled exit a throat-clearing exposure to light.
Arias. Strikes. Various unsafe intersections. As if, nevertheless,
I reached, like for toast from an oven. You, 
attentive to a spongy weeping of our walls. Strength 
in your paw’s placement, parallel to constricting tendrils, 
dragged across urges to recoil or wince or squeal. 
We were, to our pits, a woodpile appraising a dense axe-head.    
A falsely serene material barrenness
scaffolded us on ladders and wheels: our ankles glassy extensions.
I felt vibrissae soft at my ear
sensitive to this emergency’s springlike force. 
You’re dreaming, you said. White teeth. Lips pulled. Tongue,
really Pomeranian, I like to think smiling. Round eyes 
tracking my mother’s chiffon flow and ethanol odour, 
tracking her limbs.









CHILD PAINTING


Disc of purple. Square of brown. Hint, as of pinpricks,
swelled a numb interior. Wider mash of black 
swivelled in place from which a downpour hatched.

Here, belt-buckle grey. There,
overfill, a ripple, like a jacket, a man’s work-dulled
jacket. Knuckled-up, unrelaxed, overcast across a canvas. 

Boy struggled, balanced brighter streaks, 
but a trap: rustle of a ribbon-tied bit of flowers over here. 
Boy tried detergent, expunging it. But no.

A woman’s face wobbled on a yellow track 
as Bulk, bearded, with near empty 
mason-jar of gin, dragged concession from that face. 

Bulk, whose gluey columns convulsed,
whose hot breath bulled—whose tab was all paid up.

Boy, lax as an eyelash, hugged
a rumpled shine. It
lay slack. He tugged at the arm in the basin. It hung on.

Overlapping allocations ran lifelike by the minute 
where the brush beat down 
one colour or extremity to the next.

He offered overflow from his future. 
Blotted strained paper, 
eyes shut, as centres flaked apart. 

Elsewhere, swatting flies, Bulk asleep.

Tell us more, said

There isn’t any, said

Thirty years and all assortment
and debris
are forgotten, says an observer close to the family.








COUNTERVAIL


i.

Bent, eating biscuits in closets, I overheard talking —
not the point, futureless, 
non-demanding — obedient to it. Self-altering, intersected 

tunnels, cylindric light 
a sort of wall falling forward: I could not crawl into. 

Right or left, ascetic aspen, 
                                                      bladed white, chillingly shawled up. 

Mother, in the back seat, or not 
in the back seat, 
ahead of the glare or behind it. 

Whoever steered did so,
eyes bordered on, how to say it, no eyes, 
rigidity, in the man’s back. 

Later I pulled at marginalia; 
                          leaves, turnkeys, or matchboxes; 
compass or scalpel; a shoe, 
a book, of training a dog, 
a toy, a cigarette, 

could taste, a running faucet for rubbing out taste; 

a small container’s smaller container, 
tender 
camphorwood at the latch, 
                                                                              that sprung 
sense of a continent’s 
human weight. 
 


ii.

How near we were,
waiting for Winter’s end, 
                                        headed to or from Events, retrospection 
or narcotic 
routine, No-use, it’s-no-use. 
 


iii.

Haircracked in plaster, 
this tunnel’s accretions, my boyish
facsimile exposed in grease. How it came there,
excessive
in bulk, I can’t guess. It struggled, 
in quantity. Swung 
a hypertrophied jaw. As the ears aggregated
or chins
penetrated, it spoke 
in chunky liquid, puss-plugs 
re-consumed, tooth-
squeak of hot, over-pressured burps. 
					                                  On truncated tongue, 
attached at the stub like a tongue-eating louse, 
my mother’s hard likeness. I shrank 
from stacked rancour and resemblance. 
                                                                      Inside her, 
speckling, my grandfather, bulb-like, as if hungover,
canes of colour inside a marble, 
of crudity and predation — dissection, discharge,
crowding out the mouth. 
                                              This 
is yours, plenitude foretold, Insinuate or snort, or drink 
into wretchedness, 
or scream, or push some intimate up against a wall. 
                                                                                    I emerge
obliged by hundred-year-old 
disputes, tongued over, nothing new.
 


iv.

Who’s to say what occurred 
or what I saw or heard 
said, face or name, or metallic timbre of a handgun. 
Visualizations, 
                          light draining or filling 
a roadside swathe of muskeg, 
stunted tamarack or black spruce, 

                                                                   outflung gaps, 
outright dissolves 
                                       defocused 

palsied forms that list, list terribly. 
                                                                   Tomorrow, 
a boy gambolling high-gaited,
pant-leg rolled up among cinquefoil, 
a gaiety 
under killdeer, as eared grebes jerk the shallows. 

Forgetting… have my head done… tasting a cigarette. 

Today, heel-thump upstairs. The boy,
red-eyed, 
stroked at a doll with a floppy head. 

I mend a shirt, a flooded luxuriance, to be precise.

Even now it was
incomprehension, open ended,
 
the cutting down that didn’t happen the cutting down that did.

Garth Martens is the author of Prologue for the Age of Consequence and Who Else in the Dark Headed There. For his first book, he was a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry. He is also a past winner of the Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. His poetry appears in Dark Mountain Project, Poetry Ireland, Hazlitt, This Magazine, Vallum, Fiddlehead, and Best Canadian Poetry. He is a co-founder and producer for Palabra Flamenco, a literary flamenco ensemble that joins traditional flamenco dance and music with poetry and oral storytelling. He lives in Victoria, BC.