SUBJECT>final draft (2) POSTER>Boj EMAIL> DATE>1111288008 IP_ADDRESS>dbwlib02.weldon.lib.uwo.ca PREVIOUS>85068 NEXT> 85104 IMAGE> LINKNAME> LINKURL>

China Town

Yes, there was consolidation in winter--Canadian winter, perhaps.
Yes, we are in a place that is arctic white, snow mobiling, perhaps--
along side driveways in a roiling cloud of exhaust: Dundas steet.
The snow plow hasn't come alongside the lonely snow man and the cleaver.
Ha. The shrunken pashmina scarf on the edge of a driveway blown off
by the child's breath already her breath is an iguana with red red cheeks
and a cherry for a nose--the child, I mean my daughter.
You could almost say the child or the snowman were living in a yard
fenced in by wrought iron. She wanders on the snow of paper, plows
through a paragraph unthinking, as if to say: this is your child;
she has a cherries for cheeks. The likeness of rum
on my breath mixed with egg nog. The rain sops the snow off the spiny umbrella.
I walk through the loose wind by Lake Ontario and the absentminded landscape,
waves clambering up granite. A tug from the wind to my liking...on Dundas Street by the absent bench where I met a father. Green tea and sponge cake dipped in seaming water.
Here I can meet him again and he recites Iqbal in accents that I cannot hear.
Here is my world in an armoire in Kensington Market,
ragweed pollen for a sniffle. Here is a child grown black in the mind;
a cardinal crooked on a juniper branch. I walk backwards again
and be darned by all this rotting. Here an effeminate mind
rocks loose these mausoleums of snow; perhaps the wipers are frozen
and the gasoline is moody; I move even as the car stops--jolts forward,
buckled; this is not an E.Car painting.
Here there is bowing to the teeny bed bug that eats up a corpuscle
on the twin bed at the edge of China town. The wind buffeting the car
and an avalanche of snow around Younge Street. Here I can hang all this
on the snowman, not on the back of my old God, but here: a birch pollen
restless to be cracked like a skull of a dreaming body departed
from this world and back in a China man's street.