Read The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out Online
Authors: Karen Solie
The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (2 page)
to keep us from killing each other or falling in love
with our respective essential mysteries.
We can acknowledge the tulip's beauty without eating
its poisonous bulb, admire the geometry
of the dodecahedron and not waste our lives
in a rec room at role-playing games.
It's said when septic medicines, surgical and caustic procedures
were applied to Pyrrho's wounds, he didn't so much as
frown. Let us not agree carelessly about important matters.
The death of your cockatiel and the shearing
of an Antarctic glacier the size of Manhattan are events
differing only in kind. For those who pledge definitively
and confidently, a curse inevitably ensues. Sometimes
when I've thought I've hurt you,
you haven't even noticed I'm around. I admire that.
It's something one might work toward one's whole life.
Has the past not pursued me with its face
and haven't I turned away?
Can a thing made once not be made again?
Hasn't the rider returned to her horse,
the dog to his master? Isn't this the lesson
of our popular literature?
And was the trash not collected
this morning, signalling no disruption
to the civic schedule?
Isn't the gesture, the act, inarguable?
And don't we live a parallel life in thought,
an attentiveness not unlike
a natural prayer of the mind and not-mind?
The shadow cast between them.
Where an unlight burns.
Won't nighttime reawaken and won't it be familiar?
Unequivocal through Carolinian forests
which have not wholly disappeared,
and equally among rows
of wrecked cars in the junkyards,
hoods open like a choir?
Sad storm of objects becoming things,
the objective correlative, tired of me
as I am of it. I embody everything it hates
about itself. People don't stand in for each other
the way things do. Someone
for whom Wednesday means groceries
might animate Wednesday with, among other
realities, the inability to possess it,
as one might a derelict potato chip factory
co-opted to ventriloquize one's state
of mind. It's impossible to know, entirely,
what a trip to the Real Canadian Superstore
suggests to someone else. Even animals,
notoriously difficult to work with,
whose very mention in this context invites
derision, illuminate a failure of perception
no less uninformative for being true.
It does not satisfy. Dear being, how might I
responsibly interpret your incomprehensible
behaviour? Where am I in it?
The imagination, whole yet incomplete,
feels its edges. Gestures from its windows
as if into a city whose language no one speaks.
A dilemma unresolvable, but mutual.
When I learned I could own a piece of The World
I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those
who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it.
As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary
decor of our professionally designed apartments,
private verandahs before which the globe, endlessly
and effortlessly circumnavigated, slips by, allowing residents
no end of exotic ports, a new destination every few days
to explore with a depth we hadn't thought possible.
It's not how things are on The World that is mystical,
not the market and deli, proximity of masseuse
and sommelier, not the gym, our favourite restaurant,
our other favourite restaurant, the yacht club, the library,
the golf pro, the pool, but that it exists at all, a limited
whole, a logic and a feeling. What looks like freedom
is, in fact, the perfection of a plan, and property
a stocktaking laid against us in a measure. The difference
between a thing thought, and done. One can ignore neither
the practical applications nor the philosophical significance
of our onboard jewelry emporium, its $12 million inventory,
natural yellow diamonds from South Africa no one needs,
thus satisfying the criteria for beauty. Without which
there is no life of the mind. What we share, though, transcends
ownership, our self-improvement guaranteed
by the itineraries, licensed experts who prepare us
for each new harbour and beyond, deliver us into the hands
of native companions on The World's perpetual course.
The visual field has no limits. And the eyeâ
the eye devours. Polar bears, musk oxen, rare thick-billed
murre. We golfed on the tundra and from The World
were airlifted to pristine snowfields, clifftops where we dined
alfresco above frozen seas. The World is the entirety.
The largest ship ever to traverse the Northwest Passage.
How the silent energy coursed between us. Fundamental rules
had changed. Except, with time, it seems a sort of accidentâ
natural objects combined in states of affairs, their internal
properties. Accusatory randomness and proliferation
of types, brutal quantity literally brought to our doors.
Or past them, as if on the OLED high-def screen
of our circumstances, which hides more than it reveals.
For what we see could be other than it is.
Whatever we're able to describe at all could be other
than it is. Such assaults on our finer feelings require an appeal
to order, to the exercise of discipline a private Jacuzzi represents,
from which one might peacefully enjoy the singular euphoria
of the Panama Canal or long-awaited departure
from fetid Venice. There is some truth in solipsism, but I fear
I'm doing it wrong, standing at the rail for ceremonial cast-offs
thunderously accessorized with Vangelis or “Non, je ne regrette rien,”
made irritable by appreciative comments about the light.
In ReykjavÃk or Cape Town, it's the same. Familiarity
without intimacy is the cost of privacy, security
of a thread count so extravagant its extent can no longer
be detected. Even at capacity, The World is eerily empty:
its crew of highly trained specialists in housekeeping,
maintenance, beauty, and cuisineâthe heart and soul
of the endeavourâare largely unseen and likely where the fun is.
We sit at the captain's table but don't know him. He's Italian.
I think on my Clarksville boyhood long before EPS, ROEâ
retractable clothesline sunk in concrete, modest backyard
a staging ground for potential we felt infinite to the degree
our parents knew it wasn't. The unknown is where we played.
And while fulfilment of a premeditated outcome
confers a nearly spiritual comfort of indifference
to the time of year, a paradise of fruits always in season,
the span of choice defines its limit, which cannot be exceeded.
The sea rolls over, props on an elbow, and now is heard
the small sound of a daydream running softly aground.
Dissatisfaction, in a Danish sense. On prevailing winds a scent
of compromise; for one tires of the spacewalk outside
what is the case. Beyond immediate luxuries
lives speculation and the tragic impression one is yet
to be born. It could be when all pursuits have been satisfied,
life's problems will remain untouched. But doubt exists only
where questions exist. The World satisfies its own conditions.
It argues for itself. Herein lies an answer.
YOUR NEWS HOUR IS NOW TWO HOURS
Gratitude toward the houseplants, shame
for what they must endure. Of particular concern,
the azalea, flowering like the gestures and cries
of someone off the trail who sees a helicopter.
A long cold night is coming on.
Is it dying or being killed?
When I'm 100 percent on what's happening,
there's still that niggling five. Too much
water, neglect, information. Decisions
made at the executive level.
Science tells us plants emit signatures and responses
on yet another frequency we cannot hear.
That's all we need. When little,
we were told our heads were in the clouds.
Now we suspect the opposite.
I
Whether I'd seen them with, so to speak, my own eyes
was not the point. I may have filed some false reports,
but I'd seen plenty. Many nights they summoned me
in their fraudulent Rapture, discriminating not between
creatures and objects lifted equally into unbelonging
and returned with forms, that is, spirits,
broken. Before the world destroys us, it confirms
our suspicions. And so I kept my incredulity at the irreparable
local disdain for storm cellars to myself, investing instead
in superstition and my firstborn birthright
of being consistently wrong. As atmospheric hydraulics
once more engaged and the home acre prepared to revolve
like a sickening restaurant, as the grain's hairs stood
on end and rope ladders descended from the gospels'
green windows, my mother, in the manner of someone
who believes wholeheartedly in God's love and its profound
uselessness, said we'd take our chances in the basement.
II
It was always morning. Premonition like iodine in water
or the smell of malathion and there they were, corrupting
our rural airspace with 1970s speculative anachronism
and the analogue synth that represented the future.
They hovered appreciatively over operational secrets
of junkpile and chickenhouse as our quorum unfolded
its debate at a clear disadvantage intelligence-wise.
If little else, we affirmed the hubris of the Slavic character,
and hoped the Russians were happy now, having broadcast
into the godforsaken interplanetary void a Morse message
like a wren flushed from the bush we were hiding under.
They weren't fitting in. Simply curious, we hoped,
even friendly, though we weren't particularly either.
We almost got used to them. Until the altered pitch
and pneumatic exposure of a new bit of gear we'd known
in our hearts was there, and the shooting started.
My dream people, real to themselves, ran screaming.
III
Presumably profiting from the same virus raising the dead
in theatres then, they were days crossing the prairie,
the old joke turned inside out, an antique pace
through pasture and crop assigned by disfigurements
and dislocations of their martyrdom: burned, flayed, minus
hands and feet, exposed to wild beasts, flung headlong from
high places, transfixed, and not in a good way. Catherine
of Alexandriaâas featured in the collectible card series
Sister Rose distributed in class to illustrate parables
proving the less-than-evident value of thinking
for the long termâheld her disagreeable head before her.
When your heart has been broken, nothing can stop you.
A touchy lot, they didn't look purified. We made an inventory
of our weapons, which is our way of keeping calm.
There seemed ample time to do what we needed to, given
virtues of the age. But here are the saints already among us,
anxious to communicate the burden of being chosen.
My husband says to set the legs of our bed
in buckets of water is to overreact.
He does not subscribe to the online bedbug registry.
Does not acknowledge on his tactical map the advance
from the Delta, the Odeon, incubation in the warm folds of the greater
film industry, in homeless shelter and the public
upholsteries. A sideboard proclaiming itself free at the curbside
is a Trojan horse. On our street,
posts from #83, then #96, where it's reported the landlady presents
with an aggressive strain of denial and poor interpersonal skills.
Not my business? They make it my business.
Often I don't recognize what I'd rather not do until I've agreed to do it.
Then I know what I want and what I want makes me weak.
I grew up comforted by coyotes in the evening, but the news
from the suburbs is be afraid.
It seems you can live your whole life with a creature
and only know it one way. The pine beetle and rusty grain beetle
don't realize the harm they do, they are only having experiences.
I didn't want to kill the house spiders but they died
in my engagement with the larger project.
The spray bottle of dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride is empty.
Once I leave the room, the job will be finished.
From the airplane, fields are an Eric Cameronâ
Reds and Yellows on Green
âa process
begun as innovation now manifest
in the monoculture. Silent Lake
from an airplane is apprehended
geographically, with visible parameters,
but is all surface, like the past. The future
is an airplane seen from an airplane.
Lorazepam's sweet fog has burned off.
Here is the present, its landing gear.
And the absence of someone
whose participation as such