Pathology of the Senses Poem by Karen Solie

July 2005

Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat
an inanimate slur, a wool gathering, hanging
like a bad suit. Suspended fine particulate

matter. And an eight-million-dollar ferry shoves off
for Rochester with no souls aboard. I see you,
you know, idling like a limousine through the old

neighbourhoods, your tinted windows. In what
they call "the mind's eye." Catch me here
in real time, if that's the term for it. We're working

our drinks under threat of a general brownout.
Phospholipase: bitter stimuli activate it.
Back home, we call this a beer parlour.

I washed my hair at 4 a.m., he says. The full moon,
it was whack. He can't sleep. The woman
who says pardon my French, over and over,

can't sleep. They are drunk as young corn. Sweet,
white, freestone peaches. A bit stepped-on.
You said we'd have fun. Do I look happy?

Our fingers, our ankles, swelling in unison. Word
spreads quickly. "Toronto", in Huron, means
"place of meetings." Even now, you may be

darkening my door. On my bike, she says, I dress
all reflective. Even now, you're troubling
my windbreak. The vertebrate heart muscle

does not fatigue and is under the regulation
of nerves. I'll wait. First it is unlike evening.
Then it is unlike night. Thirty degrees in a false

high noon, no shade to be found when all things
lie in shadow. The lake is a larger mind
with pressures brought to bear, a wet hot headache


in the hind brain. Above it, cloud racks up.
A mean idea it's taking to, breathing
through its mouth. In this year of Our Lord

your approach shoulders in like the onset
of a chronic understanding. There are rivers
underfoot, paved over. The Humber, Taddle Creek.

Just the way they sound. To be abyssal
is to inhabit deep water roughly below 1,000 feet.
I need a good costume, he says, but don't know

what that entails. Walk the districts. There,
the misery of historic buildings. Here,
the superheated rooms of the poor. Sorry,

cooling station closed. Lack of funding. I like
my feet covered up at night, doesn't everyone.
Blinking, we lie naked atop our sheets.

Spare a dollar for a half-hour in an air-conditioned
cyber-cafe? Okay. Now get lost. My mood
this day is palpable and uncertain. Our smoke

rises but does not disperse. The air hairy as a fly.
In fly weather. Tight under the arms.
It also depletes your spinal fluid. In your spine.

The aesthetic injury level is the degree
of pest abundance above which control measures
should be taken. God, what she's wearing.

I'm tolerably certain you know the way. The red
tide of the sidewalks. Pass the dry cleaners
and Wigs, Wigs, Wigs! It used to be called

100% Human Hair! That's right. "Ontario"
is a Iroquois word meaning "sparkling waters."
Like doleful seaweed, our predilections undulate.

Rats come out to sniff the garbage blooms
in rat weather. Heavy cloud the colour of slag
and tailings, a green light gathering inside

like a angry jelly. Pardon my French. And the city
on its rails, grinding toward a wreck the lake
cooks up. Its lake effect. When you arrive you may

be soaked to the skin. A tall drink of water. Darken
my door. All of my organs are fully involved.
He is a little freshet breeze. We are as any microbes

inhabiting an extreme environment, surviving
in the free-living or parasitic mode. Chins above
the germ line. Is it true a rat can spring a latch.

Is it true all creatures love their children. Raccoons
and skunks smell society in decline. That sag
at the middle. In rat weather. Fly weather. A certain

absence of tenderness. Who will you believe.
Bear me away to a motel by the highway. I like
a nice motel by the highway. An in-ground pool.

It's a take it or leave it type deal. Eutrophic: of lakes
and rivers. See now, she says, that's the whole reason
you can't sit up on the railing. So you don't

fall over. Freon, exhaust, the iron motes of a dry
lightning. Getting pushed, he says, is not
falling. Jangling metal in your pockets

you walk balanced in your noise, breath
like a beam. I harbour ill will in my heart.
By this shall you know me. Caducous:

not persistent. Of sepals, falling off
as a flower opens. Of stipules, falling off as leaves
unfold. Speak of the devil and the devil appears.