The Cinnamon Peeler Read Online Free PDF Page A

arms
    imagining the blind path of foot, underwater sun
    suddenly catching the almond coloured legs
    the torn old Adidas tennis shoes we wear
    to walk the river into Bellrock.
    What is the conversation about for three hours
    on this winding twisted evasive river to town?
    What was the conversation about all summer.
    Stan and I laughing joking going summer crazy
    as we lived against each other.
    To keep warm we submerge. Sometimes
    just our heads decapitated
    glide on the dark glass.
    There is no metaphor here.
    We are aware of the heat of the water, coldness of the rain,
    smell of mud in certain sections that farts
    when you step on it, mud never walked on
    so you can’t breathe, my god you can’t breathe this air
    and you swim fast your feet off the silt of history
    that was there when the logs went
    leaping down for the Rathburn Timber Company
    when those who stole logs had to leap
    right out of the country if caught.
    But there is no history or philosophy or metaphor with us.
    The problem is the toughness of the Adidas shoe
    its three stripes gleaming like fish decoration.
    The story is Russell’s arm waving out of the green of a field.
    The plot of the afternoon is to get to Bellrock
    through rapids, falls, stink water
    and reach the island where beer and a towel wait for us.
    That night there is not even pain in our newly used muscles
    not even the puckering of flesh
    and little to tell except you won’t
    believe
how that river winds and when you
    don’t see the feet you concentrate on the feet.
    And all the next day trying to think
    what we didn’t talk about.
    Where was the criminal conversation
    broken sentences lost in the splash in wind.
    Stan, my crazy summer friend,
    why are we both going crazy?
    Going down to Bellrock
    recognizing home by the colour of barns
    which tell us north, south, west,
    and otherwise lost in miles and miles of rain
    in the middle of this century
    following the easy fucking stupid plot to town.
PIG GLASS
    Bonjour.      This is pig glass
    a piece of cloudy sea
    nosed out of the earth by swine
    and smoothed into pebble
    run it across your cheek
    it will not cut you
    and this is my hand a language
    which was buried for years     touch it
    against your stomach
                             The pig glass
    I thought
    was the buried eye of Portland Township
    slow faded history
    waiting to be grunted up
    There is no past until you breathe
    on such green glass
                   rub it
    over your stomach and cheek
    The Meeks family used this section
    years ago to bury tin
    crockery forks dog tags
    and each morning
    pigs ease up that ocean
    redeeming it again
    into the possibilities of rust
    one morning I found a whole axle
    another day a hand crank
    but this is pig glass
    tested with narrow teeth
    and let lie. The morning’s green present.
    Portland Township jewellery.
    There is the band from the ankle of a pigeon
    a weathered bill from the Bellrock Cheese Factory
    letters in 1925 to a dead mother I
    disturbed in the room above the tractor shed.
    Journals of family love
    servitude to farm weather
    a work glove in a cardboard box
    creased flat and hard like a flower.
    A bottle thrown
    by loggers out of a wagon
    past midnight
    explodes against rock.
    This green fragment has behind it
    the
booomm
when glass
    tears free of its smoothness
    now once more smooth as knuckle
    a tooth on my tongue.
    Comfort that bites through skin
    hides in the dark afternoon of my pocket.
    Snake shade.
    Determined histories of glass.
THE HOUR OF COWDUST
    It is the hour we move small
    in the last possibilities of light
    now the sky opens its blue vault
    I thought this hour belonged to my children
    bringing cows home
    bored by duty swinging a stick,
    but this focus of dusk out of dust
    is everywhere – here by the Nile
    the boats wheeling
    like massive half-drowned birds
    and I gaze at water that dreams
    dust off my tongue,
    in