DOWN TO YOU

I trampled those days, a lion, believed in myself with a ferocity that has since never been the same. They were days when self-knowing became real, a dented bud of a tulip infused with its own fragility and what it might reveal. I’d discovered Great Men. This late in the century, in so vast a country, so few gay poets. On my invitation, you read for the university’s first gay pride week. The dance that night, dining tables upended, chairs stacked in corners, nervous men and women from town mixed with students. I dressed in what I hoped gay men might wear. You asked my straight friend to dance, he tried not to show how proud he was not to be an oaf, and when it was our turn, after odd late-eighties tracks and disco throw- backs: everything you held high and told yourself was true. It was my first dance with another man, my right hand awkward upon your hip. You told me it was your favourite Joni Mitchell song. We glided, slow-motion skaters, on that cafeteria’s hardwood floor, the man I would become blooming in the distance, pairs of men and pairs of women in our orbit, dim lights suspended from the old rafters above. As the days come down to you.

BOWLING PIN FIRE

The secret connections between Chinese fathers. Grocer, banker, mechanic, photographer, bowling alley proprietor. Their exchanges inexact: a carton of this season’s first mangoes, a queue-jump to settle a mortgage, a replacement muffler, professional portraiture. Quality was scrimped only when all agreed which corners to cut. The Spanish call it enchufe—a socket when filled poured more delicious currents of electricity. And flow it did from one family to another. I tried keeping track of Father’s cronies—my map remains a crayon sketch gone amok, the wax outlines losing shape. My own network is unanchored and rootless. My friends stop at random airports, fight to pay for meals. We email and skype. I seldom know where they live.

I grew up on Valley Drive sharing space with glass fishing balls, an ox-blood Ming vase, a painting of Dad’s childhood home, another of teen-aged mom, porcupine fish—inflated, dried, and hung from ceilings, Bill Reid prints, tiny baskets from far-flung tribes. Our names marking our bedrooms. The living room fireplace not often used, Vancouver winters too mild. We seldom gathered there, burnt only wood from someone’s backyard, the deconstructed frame of a neighbour’s toolshed, pinecones dipped in a crumbling chemical the texture of icing sugar with a tint of green food colouring. They glowed emerald, then pumpkin orange, tiny bombs of light.

SPIT

Traffic backed up on the Second Narrows Bridge, they’d closed our lane and made us merge, I saw the car swing up beside ours. My seven-year-old mouth cried don’t let him in. You inched forward a hand’s width, so tiny a provocation to cause such honking and shouting. The moustached man, sleek and muscled, eyes narrow, leapt out, cursing, yelling, engine running. Then you were circling each other, a dance of men. He spat on the hood of our station wagon. You tried to match his mark, spit forming at your lips, but it was not in you to. He grabbed your placid businessman’s wrist, pinned it against your belly. I don’t know who was trying to hit or defend, the man’s face crayoned with rage. He saw me and let go. Swore one last time. We shut ourselves back in, could not speak, his saliva still not dry, its separate bubbles like sad jewels or the eyes of an insect. I felt your shame, I, who had perhaps saved you, who had caused all this.