Buis - Gatecrasher

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Invisible Publishing Halifax & Picton All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any method, without the prior written consent of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or, in the case of photocopying in Canada, a licence from Access Copyright. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Gatecrasher / Susan Buis. Names: Buis, Susan, 1955- author. Description: Poems Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190085487 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190085495 ISBN 9781988784267 (softcover) | ISBN 9781988784328 (HTML) Classification: LCC PS8603.U528 G38 2019 | DDC C811/.6dc23 Edited by Leigh Nash Cover design by Megan Fildes Invisible Publishing | Halifax & Picton We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

I acknowledge that I am a settler, visitor on unceded territories of the Nlaka'pamux and Secwpemc First Nations and am grateful to live within their traditional lands that inspire my writing. To my family, with love.

Pero yo ya no soy yo, Ni mi casa es ya mi casa. But I am no longer I, Nor is my house now my house. Federico Garca Lorca Quarry the stuff of a curtain wall, quarry the crenellation. And when a skirmish weathers, Ill lob projectiles rakes and broomsticks over firebreak stubble like dragonflies buzzing ponds they left as nymphs.

Ghastly aqua larvae. An arrowslits devoid of pane, wide enough for side-eye, too narrow for full frontal, a tenant in chamber backlit with petrochemical yellow archrival without rival. More than neural zone, the gap is open to artillery and eye both besieged and beseeching. I love the vertical strip of itmiles and miles of kind of blue, blue haze, blue train and all blues, miles of round midnight. A missile hit to curtain wall jolts the humming switch box, burns out beyond the breakers, their orange spot indicators but not a pebble shuffles.

Amid tatters of the lowest bid, a tenant posed in a higher floors ruin holds the tired arc of a story as the epilogue volleys through.

They built tower block like human, skin over conduit, rebar for sinew; nerve bundles laid under cladding, tense at the core, but swaying on impact. Anointed with perfume, a room became a home where headphones gave sanctum from earshot combat, now gone though ghosts of walls ring. Clouds of sheetrock hold as if they need not sigh over asphalt and auto, nor hush the merciless edges of tagged bins. In the lift shaft, rags bandage white PVC pipes, bones of the chariot down broken with beams of night.

We plan for shocks by fits and starts, stockpile kits: water and batteries sure to stale. Sugar for shock.

Engineers draft streets to skirt faults, line them with greens and the torpor of flowers for ease. We plan for damage, hoard patches, seals, adhesives that brittle, then neglect our stores. With repeat fractures, repairs become the thing mended: ceiling as cicatrix, massed hydrangea bracing the split fence. Before the shaking, crows screeching like metal-fatigued planes will wake us.

Dreams of smashed ampules, after the attack the drone and pellets. Confess I stalked my own child, overseer in a hot car watching a string of five-year-olds walk to the lagoon while I stewed with mistrust for their minders.

Dreams of rubble, the crushed bones of freeway and concrete city, me crawling over it like a spider, parents crawling like spiders to find their children; in the preschool yard, theyd wait, wrapped in emergency kit blankets. Hold on to your granola bars, your bottles of warm Dasani. Children in silver foil. Darling, I haunted you, believed my arms were all youd need, wished for you the pox scar, this bloom that parts us.

In the span between fourth year and four square meters of dispensary floor, I run through a stone city from nothing to nowhere, through the span of a costume change while soldierssmall gods smoking swap shirts brown as tobacco or honey, arms leaning on a gimcrack Soviet jeep. The smell of cigarette triggers the Istanbul market sweet with it, where I bartered a rug rolled small enough to hold under my arm, small enough to fit over the space I will wear away with sensible shoes for thirty years.

I wear yellow for youth, flats that slap stone, skirt as scant wrapping over a gift of hungry legs, run through the citys armature of shell calcium whittled from the coastlines chalk belt. Stolid Roman arcades brace their flat feet, piggyback Gothic arches, arms pointing to heaven as if to avert the siege that soon will smash them. In a lull before the shelling, I run through a white stone city.

Lick your pity, your buttery plate. With appetite deckle-edged from exile in a grey-stone province, bouquets of salt blooms and rot up the overcoats, you flee to slake it here with warmed glasses of light yellow as good oil, yellow as gilt and marbled ratios. A swallows-eye view holds the fortress plan, its forced perspective upswept like a blown dress showing ribs of path through green, navel a fountain.

Above, a black-eyed villa rises to a sky edged in dark disorder. Belvedere, beautiful sight, how does your garden grid? With golden means and triads of trees, the arch of their crowns set with oranges, with symmetry and the rich fruit of threes and, at night, the blossoms.

An adult hand drew the limbs, worried more meals to the haunches, more fat for the plate, contoured the cleft hoof that signifies meat-giver. But the childs hand curved a falcons eye and domestic ear, planted a heart on the forehead red as cockscomb, and painted a striped hide. For who, if given choice, would not want to be motley? Pattern old as light ribboned through stems, through eyelids that weavers dreamed looms to mimic with bands of pale horizons. An edifice so unyielding, plumbed and laid in courses as mortar fused the red-brick school and civic block. An edifice so unyielding, plumbed and laid in courses as mortar fused the red-brick school and civic block.

The new products give. Vinyl covers the brief now in the interim earwigs bicker and colonies of mildew bloom their civilization under its supple veneer. A palm to masonry makes no impression, perceives the walls burden borne though the fired weight limits height. Accused were jailed down here, spirits held cold in the cellar. The intuitive see them looping an action like hatchet or gavel reeling prayers off their own tongues. The ground pushes and eases till bonds show crazing in the zigzagwhispers of laity fill the cracks.

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