St. Christopher in Exile

We decided we would make you
the Patron Saint of Atheists – the ones who lost touch sometime after
Vat Two, withdrew into memory and ritual reliving.
A ready stash of trivia and
some failing grasp on Latin. We defined you
through what we said you weren’t: the outlines of the moulds
in a Beijing metalwork’s,
little figurines on taxicab dashboards
often mistaken for Christ. This is
where your cult comes from. Transplanted loyalty and
modern aspiration. A reminder in our pockets
of what we used to think.

They said you weren’t real
enough to warrant sainthood, thanked you for your martyrdom, your
years of patient service. Someone in a silk hat
somewhere off in Italy
still counts out Euros brought in by your big name.
As an outcast, you grew bronzed and took up travel,
airplanes, every shiny
Godless wonder got your holy absent nod, your
postcard veneration.

I can buy you at a gift shop. Spread-eagle, winking. Exile
is like that, you can take it anywhere.
The bottom of the ocean or the bottom of the air. The mementos of things
shorn free from their meaning
will outlive those who depressed them into key chains, dusted them
with pocket lint or set them on their shelves.
Yours is the central
misadventure of our time. The unfair treatment
everybody wants.

The Virgin Mother Arrives in Restigouche to Carve her Face in a Potato

The bus ride in was rough.
A forty-mile journey from the terminal, packed tight
with hungover college kids on regular rotation
through the onboard bathroom to vomit. Awful.
And me in the aisle seat, some
French narcoleptic snoozing at the window, the plaintive creak
of this girl’s only hymen, tested to the max by
New Brunswick and its unchecked pothole population.
I was up all night clearing paperwork. I managed to scam permission from
the other gods of interest. The God of farming, rural optimisms.
The Patron Saint of shock marketing
and perky white trash reporter girls who learned their clean new
placeless dialects at inland business institutes that sold their
naming rights to food franchises.
I’m really not much of an artist.
Plus, I was raised to avoid the
vanity of mirrors. At the Saint John Superstore, I ducked in and stole
a pocket dedicational from checkout number three. Flipped to the
back for a reference. I know my skin
’s not half that colour, that low-grade-paper jaundiced. I’ll need to find
a patch of Yukon Gold, no Russets or Tans. I’ll need to find
the one spud that’s somehow grown
without the ground’s cold womb, all that dirt would
freckle my simplified complexion. Take
a miracle, it surely will.

Shelter

We are standing on the deck that no one stands on.

There’s evidence it’s raining
on everything but us; the metronomic filling of a beer can on the lawn, signs
of erosion, the neighbour’s Labrador backed so tight under their eaves
he looks like a spot on the wall
left unpainted.

We riff, unencumbered, eyes
to the sky – an airplane’s subtle wake
traced
through three of four more clouds
that can’t touch us.

You say my hands are warm, so I focus
on the physics of transference. My palm: your fingers.
Your fingers: my wrist. My boots,

black
in the canopy’s dye-shadow.

I once stepped ankle-deep in the ocean with these, didn’t
feel it. I thought about walking
clear off the world, thought better.

I Choose to Believe in Aachenosaur*

The creationists would love this.

Notice the bill, the leg, the cube stretching forward
from a lecture hall blackboard. Ambition. And belief – the hand
of God in a sock puppet, miming away in an improvised falsetto. Roar
goes the tree stump. Neigh goes the pommel horse. The discoverer’s wife
(also a gifted taxonomist) threw the species in the fireplace thinking it was coal.

Read the report
and lose a day assigning meaning
to the objects in your living room. Assemble a skeleton from used Q-tips
and bury it out back. Sit in the family Subaru until
you start to feel it breathing.
Evolution is essentially a series of accidents.
There is room for reverse engineering. Subaruasoar. Refridgadon.

Buy a wooden model and manipulate the bones into
unmapped utility. This humanoid used its femur as a kind of
head-mounted club. This one walked on all fours, had no rib cage but
ruled the plains with its ten-inch-long incisors.
Be creative, and patient with
the stages of mutation. Be firm when fitting the pieces into place.
All it takes is time and pressure.

And Mrs. Smets was also right.
It was a piece of coal.

*The Aachenosaur (Eh-Ken-O-Soar) is an example of a False Dinosaur, one of those palaeontological finds that proves to be incorrect after further research. Poor aachenosaur was ‘discovered’ by Gerard Smets in Belgium in 1888.