Otolith Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Emily Nilsen.

  All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call 1-800-893-5777.

  Edited by Karen Solie.

  Cover and page design by Julie Scriver.

  Cover image: Boba Fett, the Driven, copyright © 2015 by Ilja Herb, www.iljaherb.com.

  Ebook by Bright Wing Books, www.brightwing.ca.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Nilsen, Emily, author

  Otolith / Emily Nilsen.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-0-86492-962-4 (paperback).

  ISBN 978-0-86492-952-5 (epub).

  ISBN 978-0-86492-953-2 (mobi).

  I. Title.

  PS8627.I55O86 2017 C811’.6 C2016-907041-7

  C2016-907042-5

  We acknowledge the generous support of the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Government of New Brunswick.

  Goose Lane Editions

  500 Beaverbrook Court, Suite 330

  Fredericton, New Brunswick

  CANADA E3B 5X4

  www.gooselane.com

  For my parents,

  and their parents.

  Contents

  Fog Pre-dawn Walk

  In the Forest I Found an Organ

  Directions to Crabapples

  Float House b. 1919

  Fog

  Float House

  A Geologist Conducts an Aerial Survey of the British Columbia Coastline, 1995

  Float House

  Float House

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  Cabin Fever

  Otolith

  In Order to Say It Exists We Must

  Meanwhile Meanwhile, You and I in the Endless

  Meanwhile, Earl Grey in Port Hardy

  Meanwhile, I Take a Glass of Scotch to Bed

  At the Surprise Birthday Party

  Meanwhile, in His Dreams

  Meanwhile, I Have Started to Fold Things

  My Lip Sits in a Petri Dish, Meanwhile

  Intertidal Pre-dawn Walk

  Pre-dawn Walk

  Fragile Morning of the Landlady

  Fragile Mornings of the Couple Moored to the Dock Next Door

  Fragile Morning of the Farmhand Who Longs to Leave

  Fragile Evenings of the Man in His Trawler

  Fragile Night of the Hitchhiker from Up Island

  Fragile Hour of Dementia

  An Address to Dusk

  An Address to Dusk

  An Address to Dusk

  Screef

  Meanwhile On Day Eight We Cross the Arctic Circle

  Midnight Sun

  Little Stick Man with a Knife

  Mouth of a River in Greenland

  Meanwhile, I Wait for You in Arrivals

  In the Cornfield with a Horse

  Meanwhile

  Fog Return to the Coast

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  And What of the Fog?

  Burdwood Islands, Ten Years Later

  Directions to the Burdwoods Fish Farm*

  Otolith

  Meanwhile, the Anchorage

  And What of the Fog?

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Fog

  Pre-dawn Walk

  Who walks

  behind you, wringing

  your shadow over the marsh?

  First frost and beneath the bridge

  water slows into ice whorls.

  An otter chews through

  a trout, chews the gnawing

  winter, thins the world around you.

  Who skulks through the valley, trapping

  your sleep in invisible snares?

  You step nearer

  the river as morning mist lifts

  the drowned night

  onto shore.

  In the Forest I Found an Organ

  My amateur forensics

  reckon it was dumped last spring.

  Recent rain lends it the sheen

  of a displaced liver, fresh out

  not yet belonging to the moss

  it sits on. I distrust spring: the showy

  promises. Some things just end.

  We keel over from abundance

  of hope. Lifelong deflation,

  withering like a balloon spiralling

  from the sky. I prefer a fall-time forest

  when the aspen thin, their heart-shaped leaves

  in smithereens. The brittle

  keep us honest. Spring forward —

  fall back. Today I wear a tool belt

  from which dangle a small frying pan

  and two rabbit pelts. Over my shoulder

  the city scuttles like crabs under a rock, blindly

  tinkering ahead. I approach the organ

  with caution, inflate the bellows, to play

  a minor chord. It wheezes off-key.

  Eight dozen nights outside, sponging up

  fog, would do that to anyone. This is the sound

  I, too, will make one day.

  Directions to Crabapples

  Rogers, Scott. Personal Communication.

  Keep Baxter Shoal left as you pass

  Pym Rocks. Head north

  across the east entrance of Fife Sound

  and northward up Raleigh Passage, between

  the Burdwoods and Pearse Peninsula

  of Broughton Island. Hook a left at Trivett

  westbound up Penphrase Passage.

  Pass Sir Edmund Bay

  on your left. Turn northwards

  towards Shawl Bay then through

  the nameless tight passage

  into Moore Bay —

  don’t run into Thief Rocks.

  Continue northwards up Kingcome Inlet

  and head NNW where the Inlet diverges

  into Wakeman Sound between Upton Point

  and Philadelphia Point. Continue northwards

  to the Wakeman estuary:

  Ha-xwa-mis

  Alalco.

  Float House b. 1919

  I heard cupboard doors open

  and close. A trap snapped

  without a mouse. I saw a pack

  of cannery workers, huddled at the table eating

  pork and beans out of the tin. Didn’t I?

  Did I? Sorted postage and stamped letters

  in my sleep.

  Sewed a new pinafore, one wrote.

  Waiting out the long winter, one replied.

  Have you seen the ghost? Billy asks.

  Fog

  Eight-headed fog, plate rattling

  fog, dirt under the nails fog, fog

  of unseen trees where the blind

  follow creeks, fog fattened

  by memory, flip-sided fog

  and swimming on land fog,

  throat-bellied fog of the broken

  hearted, night fog that slipknots

  three moons to the dock

  and knee-buckling fog with spittle

  on its chin, fog rotting in the cupboards

  and a shelf of pickled fog in jars, shaking

  your limbs as you sleep fog, that curls tails

  of foxes and wets moth wings to

  uselessness, clique forming fog

  of kitchen gossip, and
thirsty for rain

  fog that taps us instead, fog of the floating

  house, unknown to undersea fog, fish milt

  fog, slap-in-the-face fog, fog that smells

  of a logger’s boot, untying its apron fog,

  rhododendron fog, thick as algae bloom

  fog, a pond of bulging frog eyes fog,

  that drops poems in your lap and sinks

  pebbles in your pocket, thick as gravy

  fog, fog to grow old in, bearded

  fog, running its hand through

  a patch of thinning hair fog,

  bacon fat fog, arteriosclerosis

  fog, fog staggering half-cut

  along the rocks, bottom of the bottle

  fog, hooked to the disappearing

  dragnet, fog adrift, a bundle

  of yellowed love letters washed

  ashore, waiting

  to be read.

  Float House

  She holds the damp like a duck down pillow.

  Damp as a waterlogged fir. Buckets she hauls in

  ache when spilled (sound of oars)

  seawater wets my shivering feet.

  I mop up sorrow with a dry-wood fire

  and wait for the berries to shrivel

  before trying again. This house contains both

  land and sea, its floorboards tickled

  by stickleback and herring, chirp of an otter

  beneath the bed. Now, all gone to grass.

  Have you seen the ghost? Billy asks.

  A Geologist Conducts an Aerial Survey of the British Columbia Coastline, 1995

  While flying at 200 feet he found a large number of simple curving rock walls along the low tide line of more than 350 beaches in a concentrated area.

  Tide lowers, he circles back.

  The sanded underside overturns, lets out

  a gull-like mew. At forest edge, a woman

  scrapes a bear hide, clouded fat gathers.

  Her eyes are set deeper than the sound

  of pebbles dropped down a well.

  Can we measure

  the depth?

  We cannot.

  Float House

  In the bunkroom a presence catches,

  quick whiff of propane, a metallic tinge

  hits the roof of your nose. Watch the window —

  hummingbirds land midair. Spook

  the black bears. Ring the gut hammer.

  Have you seen the ghost? Billy asks.

  Float House

  Night mice. Their nibbling a distraction

  from sleeplessness. If mice live on average

  two years, these are 48th generation,

  a moving insulation keeping the building

  upright. Great- and great-great-grandparents

  are nocturnal. My eyelids both open and closed,

  it’s that dark. Latin for little mouse also means

  muscle. Another translation for musculus

  is mussel. A mischief of mice, their eyes,

  all pupil, wink like wetted shells.

  Have you seen the ghost? Billy asks.

  And What of the Fog?

  Caligo nebula. An extinct species of marine bird

  used fog to navigate. Even their tongues were white.

  They built nests in the mist and laid round eggs that bobbed

  above tree-tops. Without fog, these birds were grounded. Their feathers

  useless. Protruding like miniature telescopes their eyes, the colour of clotted

  cream, swung towards magnetic north. The thicker the fog, the more certain

  the direction. This function made them susceptible to capture by those lost

  at sea. The last mating pair poached in 1904 by two fishermen, presumed dead,

  while only fifty metres from shore.

  And What of the Fog?

  It arrives with evening

  rainfall like an eclipse

  of hungry moths.

  Sleep well amidst its patter

  on the windowpanes.

  And What of the Fog?

  No use laying traps.

  It will find a way in

  and out.

  And What of the Fog?

  It brings amnesia, blind spots.

  Recognize this offering.

  Cabin Fever

  Every Monday and Thursday, we rush to the dock to receive news of joy

  and disaster. Gossip rides on the pulsing back of an eel, enriches the village

  like vitamin C. We fend off scurvy and make-believe our way

  out of another tragedy. Told or not, stories bubble and fall

  between low fog and high tide, pressurized, carbonated

  in the indefinite weather, without a boat to board.

  People have stopped using language.

  Every sound from our mouths

  the shape of a different sorrow.

  Otolith

  Ear Stone. Annuli within vestibule.

  Age concentric, dark-light, dark-light,

  each season encased in the next.

  The centre deep-sea

  bottomless, compressed,

  an undiscovered pit of felled

  shadows, detached long ago

  from their source, stain

  of beginning where fish became.

  In Order to Say It Exists We Must

  measure the distance

  between xiphoid process

  and brain, seal in Ziplocs

  and send to a lab in Kentucky

  then subtract or divide it from

  itself. We must stalk it stealthily

  on our keen kitty haunches, and smell

  its odour, pungent, an unopened jar

  of beaver castor. In order to say it exists

  we must collect its hair, clip its fin, wing,

  earlobe, capture it with our cameras, record

  the audio, pixelate and play it forwards, backwards,

  stack it amidst layers of deep house to play

  at a harvest potluck for an upbeat woodsy feel.

  We braid it into our own hair, drop it into a bucket

  of saline and stare for hours recording

  each movement on a spreadsheet.

  We give it names like Honeysuckle,

  Walter or Specimen A. Item B. Plot C.

  Hold its greasy fish-oiled fur in our hands

  and indicate in our Rite in the Rain notebook

  that it screamed like a mountain lion

  when the sun rose.

  Meanwhile

  Meanwhile, You and I in the Endless

  Sun. Grass not yet ripe.

  How unbundled we are

  in never-ending light. No hatches

  to batten. No blue hour

  to tuck into. Two

  sheets, pinned

  on a line, fluttering

  dry

  over the untied

  hayfields.

  Meanwhile, Earl Grey in Port Hardy

  No fresh-cut flowers

  this time of year, just fistfuls

  of salal. Sure, let’s sit

  outside in the puddles

  of afternoon leftovers. Inhaling

  second-hand smoke from strangers

  is one way to feel not so

  alone. You pour a thick stream

  of canned milk into my BC Ferries mug

  and the weight anchors the cup

  to my lap. Rain

  peels carnations off

  the can’s dog-eared label.

  In the motel parking lot

  we float apart

  on plastic chairs.

  Meanwhile, I Take a Glass of Scotch to Bed

  because my grandfather, the man who knows

  things we may never, wet himself

  at the dinner table. Someone, please tell him

  he is older than most of us will ever be.

  We pad him in a life vest, draw straws

  to decide who will push, then look the other way

&nb
sp; as he heads out into the bouncing sea.

  It is not easy to watch the dying

  set adrift, harder yet to know

  we are responsible. Some of us cope

  by calculating the onset

  of extinctions, the sea turned

  equation as we seine bucketfuls

  of salmon, sea lice sucker-punched

  to scales. Copepod. Motile. Chalimus.

  Parasitic. The parameters of data

  keep hands steady as we skim over

  the single-pane of low tide. Below us,

  laissez-faire sea cucumbers softly tide-tumbled,

  cream anemones in a flop-top thicket, magenta

  starfish colonizing the bladderwrack

  bedrock, a dimpled surface of young pinks

  on their outward migration. And us,

  stagnant as a slick of boat oil

  lollygagging over slack tide. The water

  will decide where we go.

  At the Surprise Birthday Party

  I try on a baby. Someone across the room

  yells, Hey! Looks good on you! They are a drunk

  rambunctious bunch tonight. I try on

  two babies, one on each arm. Bottle me, I say

  with a pretend slur. Someone sticks a rubber nipple

  in baby one’s mouth. A dirty blonde with a true bowl cut

  talks financials and wealth management at me. I tell her

  I have no money to put anywhere, not even under

  the sofa cushions, am not yet tired of being broke.

  Thing is, she says, these things are kind of an investment too.

  Koochie koochie koo. She wiggles a finger, the baby

  wants to bite it. Bite it, baby, I whisper. Sic’m.

  The moms are in the kitchen rolling joints

  on the laminate floor, tight as a pack of hyenas

  laughing on the edge of town. So I smuggle

  their babies out to the quiet plains flickering:

  green — yellow — green —

  our secret show.

  Welcome …

  say the northern lights,

  pretending to be neon.