Neutrino Bay

Something had changed in the world; the hallucinatory sunsets screamed a fresh psychosis. 

There might have been a soul or two on that beach with an inkling as to what that change was exactly, but right then, at that precise moment, I didn't care. I was sprawled beside one of the many beach fires that sparked like neutrinos in a dark collider against a starfield backdrop that would make a dead man gasp. Best of all, I was sprawled beside Athena, the most charming and alluring woman I'd ever known. 

The bleached beige sand was racetrack flat and disappeared into a darkening charcoal distance, while occasional black rock promontories tumbled haphazardly into the sea. Everywhere across the gently curving bay, beachwood sparks danced and lunged in the light breeze like firefly wars. A moderate surf broke and rumbled over the sand, hissing as it ebbed, leaving grey skeins of its cool breath along the tideline.

A warm fall day had cooled quickly, some kind of belated portent, we guessed.

"They saw orcas in the harbour this week." Athena was still and her shadowed face seemed sculpted.

"Th-that's not all that unusual."

"No. But grey whales last week. Some of the guys on the boats saw walrus on the rocks. Walrus! In the sound! Yet the sockeye? So far, they're ghosts this year."

I sighed. Tried to find her eyes with mine, to see her. But she was looking down, watching the fire and its primal quantum dance.

Someone a few fires down strummed an acoustic six string, sang a gentle song I couldn't quite make out as the breeze carried it to us then whipped it away like a tease, like someone stuttering.

"Blaze, something's incredibly wrong."

Suddenly I didn't want this conversation.

The power had gone out a while back. We all knew how to live without extravagance on this sly and gentle coast—prided ourselves on it, in fact—but our carefree grid-free days had stretched well beyond the worst-case forty-eight hours we normally contended with out here in our happy isolation. Power out. Internet gone. Phones dead. Radio silent. Most of us feigned serenity, and many had generators and the disaster supplies you'd expect in earthquake and tsunami country, yet we were becoming ever more unnerved. Most of the tourists had already left—no one was coming this way, including deliveries—but a carload of our people had followed the visitors out, heading for Port Argyll, to see if they could get word of the world. 

That was nine days ago and none had returned. 

Two days after the big darkness had come, two men had taken a boat southeast down the forty kilometre spit of land on which we made our home, to the only other small settlement here, Coal Inlet. They came back with hollow eyes and told us that, aside from the odd baying dog—one of whom they'd brought along out of pity—and the slick black crows and the dream-white herring gulls lined up on the stunted coastal trees and the shit-bespattered rooftops like the precursors to some strange board game, the entire village was empty of life.

From the dark, a burgeoning silhouette against the heavenly splash of our galaxy materialized into a man, and he squatted between us. His name was William Tom, or Billy T to his friends, a Nuu-chah-nulth man who'd helped us construct our home and taken no payment but daily food and water back when we decided to drop our shallow roots into a land on which living trees—great Western red cedar, stately Sitka spruce, and solemn Douglas fir—had been mere saplings when the stubborn Nazarene was hung on a tree of his own.

"Some say it's the saltchuck," he said quietly. "She rebels. Me, I don't think so. At least, the great ocean is only a part of it, and not the full tale."

Athena nodded at him and said, "It's time we talked openly about this."

Billy T looked all up and down the great sweep of beach. "Perhaps we can't build small fires any longer, but need to draw on a greater warmth."

"Why has Klootchman not returned?" I asked, although I knew they had no answer to this. 

I saw the glint in Billy's eye and knew he smiled inside himself. When he'd first heard of Klootch, he'd looked at me as if I were teasing or pranking him. Then he'd smiled and said to me, "Klootchman means woman in the old trade language." After that, he often called Klootch "Two-Spirit," though he meant it respectfully enough. Truth be told, Klootch probably had far more than two spirits warring within his six-foot-six-inch frame. The man was a dark-skinned Viking with violently dissociative tendencies. Part grizzly bear, part killer bee, part wolverine. Cold blue eyes, sweet blond dreads, and dark mocha skin. Goddammit, I missed the fucker.

[To be continued, perhaps ...]

Elephants and Starfish

And we're in the bay, strolling on the boardwalk that juts into the bay, the haphazard jumble of townhouses and shabby greenspace and rusted wharf buildings that overhang the bay barely giving us a glance. A disinterested late summer afternoon.

The water below us is clear, hubcap-sized starfish the colour of aubergines and mandarins splayed on dark rocks. 

"There was never a moment when I believed it," you say. "But never mind, tell me something kind."

I've forgotten what we were talking about, although I love the rhythmic husk of your voice and its easy rhymes. To our left a statue of a dancer, or perhaps a yogi in one of the warrior asanas, seems to move. From the corner of my eye I see you blink, distracted. A herring gull literally screams. Loneliness steals in like a silent comet through Neptune's frigid orbit. The quiet of the air is like the sudden removal of the air and we stare at each other, contemplating panic.

Did you know elephants cry salt tears? That life is so tenacious that there are electric bacteria that eat electrons? That tigers cannot purr? That sleeping on your stomach is more likely to make you dream of sex? That there are more stars in the known universe than all the grains of sand on every beach on earth? That there is a town named Okay, OK?

"I can't breathe," I say.

Your eyes are huge. Galactic centres. Amoebas. Your terror of tsunamis, I think, randomly, is almost phobic. Suddenly, more than anything else, I want to love you.  

Then there's the roar. Local airport, I think, has to be. It's a plane taking off; sometimes they catch the air currents in such a way that it sounds like the coming apocalypse, and with this head-on angle appear like rockets seeking to escape the grip of this teeming globe.

But all the other baywalkers and tourists, weedlovers and West Coast saunterers, they've all stopped in their tracks while the roar only roars more, howls more, filling up the whole dome of the world that used to have air, and we follow everyone's gaze northward. No airplane with rocket dreams. No, we see the roiling infected stems and boiled brain heads of three mushroom clouds where presumably Vancouver once stood, that new-ruined jewel, that universe of memories, that charnel city calling me blindly home while moaning its futile requiem.

Still not able to speak—for what is left to speak about?—we embrace, look out upon the water, read each other's thoughts, and together climb the railing. O starfish. I hope you're okay with unexpected company and more salt tears.

My Own Private Cannery Row

© Tracy Prescott MacGregor

Rarely do I write poetry. Even more rarely do I allow it exposure. Not entirely sure why. I revere great poetry, but I find it to be a rare species: elusive and golden, hiding in shadows or, occasionally, in plain sight.

So here's a poem, no more fanfare than that.

My Own Private Cannery Row

"Accept loss forever." — Jack Kerouac

Here I endure my own private cannery row.

It crackles and breeds in

the dark parts of

an unruly heart—corrugated sheets layered over 

smoky post-afternoons, 

heavy enough with loss

and the memory of loss

and the fear of its return

and traffic

and iron

dragging gull

flocks in slick patterns against a volcano sun.

Twenty-first century. Under a bridge,

five slow crawdaddies move

in murky shallows 

sluggishly annihilating an 

immense fish head, 

while Steinbeck sleeps

and, worse, will never again wake.

Makeshift guido, cursed on a contrary shore, 

adrift off a refugee coast, face

boasting reflected orange 

yet

this smudged collar's powder-blue and new-sewn

with my fugitive name (upset) in gold below it:

Beloved. 

Strong. 

Among.

The Woods.

Say it. Woods await those

who fear themselves

lost, and lost 

indeed

is my new locale.

I might even call it

sorrowhood.

Plus this:

Names are potent, yet

the cogent grain of twilight welcomes smut,

refracting it for such long

drawn-out breathless

prayer flag horizons.

Music, too.

Blue jazz in a wineglass, Hendrix, bluegrass,

pure smartass, rhythmic

tantric belligerence.

Hopper beckons, eyes downcast. Lonely as hell—

old, weird America, less 

permanent than it believes and now

utterly unnerved.

Primary. Planar. Endless

sunflower acres.

We've come so far.

A thick-framed window, sunlight

ambergold, pouring like

fresh-squeezed motor oil, dripping from a citrus sky, 

easing us toward some

inarticulate lie: Desolation row, go, desperation

ground, loud, discovery known, flown,

deception pass, past, passed

below, ago, just so...

We cutouts tacked as

silhouettes. Transfixed somehow

with the mundane interplay of 

pristine fonts on 

the Grocery Outlet sign, where

we value our view; our warm, fawn 

thriftstore pact.

But come, listen, lookit.

Gather the lambkins, reel in the nets,

trawl the depths and count up the lost, 

bake the bricks, haul away the lumber,

give your day the ending it awaits,

its fitting close. Stumble past those who

would erode you, layer by

sheet, skin by cover, yet

keep on walking,

stumbling aloud, 

humbled,

cowed.

Agog. Gaga.

And keep your finger on

the fuck you trigger.

Especially that. Especially that.

Let the soft burr of a charcoal evening

smear the essence of your face like an artist

learning shading, blurring, obscuring.

Rendering.

Recurring.

Sudden evening quiet. The warm preemptive air. Sacred. 

Birds play then mute and the colours pulse dark, anticipatory,

so loaded, and indeed so

goddamned holy.

Abandoned flea markets,

green shoots and street scene clarity,

murmurs, a caress of freaks,

waterfowl feeding.

Someone in a waterfront townhouse,

on some higher balcony, 

is picking a banjo; pure

vibrations in the wires

aching with backyard echoes, 

the sound a trojan horse for a

renewed assault of grief, 

while your final drama speaks 

of absent fathers, trembling hands, 

half-gleaned urges, mother throes, 

white-hot and contradictory and 

wholly lonely: these

secret 

desert

fires.