i

Where we lived over on the Southside Road
our landlord and his wife both loved to garden.
Come-from-aways, as they say in Newfoundland,
neither seemed happy, and she was often gone.
She was shrill and had to get things done at once;
we guessed that she had long ago lost patience
with his absentmindedness and long silences,
suffering as he did from a growing rootlessness.
I remember one morning pulling back the drapes,
having got up from bed to investigate a noise,
and finding her bent double on the back steps,
wielding a can and a white emulsion brush,
bent so far over that her cotton dress rode up
above the backs of her knee length nylons,
high enough to show off various varicose veins
and a swatch of her Tom Kitten knickers-
did I mention that the landlord, one autumn,
tipping his hat to local practice-after forty years
of living as if he was still living in England-
ploughed into his garden a load of capelin.

ii

Late June, I watch the waves at Middle Cove
and imagine somewhere out there under fog
the capelin turn en masse toward the shore,
the shoal edge fluttering like old men’s fingers.
The beach rocks crackle, and every assault
brings another simile: a million castanets,
wind-up dentures chattering on a table top,
a wound flushed out with hydrogen peroxide.
A ridge runs down the centre of the beach,
evidence of ice and more recent violent tides.
People wait with tin and plastic buckets,
with long handled dippers, and one tall man,
in hip rubbers, paces the wash like a stork,
an egret, a casting net draped from his arm.
All week, radio broadcasts called for capelin
runs along this stretch of shore; so far not here.
Out there, Humpbacks, Fin and Minkes blow.
Away from these the capelin school explodes
like cannoned ticker tape, a brilliant silver rush,
before they stall, turn inward, spangle.

iii

Tonight I am out with a friend on the razzle.
We are two men at the end of our twenties,
one whose wife is eight months pregnant
and one who has a daughter three months old.
Old friends, we have little to say to one another
as we watch the dance floor fogged in smoke.
We are glad of the music, the glare and sparkle
of the disco ball hanging high above us.
The dance floor heaves. It smells of grass,
deodorant and sweat, and something else-
a heady brew of bass and treble notes, a smell
designed to drive a man clean out of his mind.
Now my friend takes a mouthful of beer
and sprays the air above the dance floor.
An anthropologist will see in this a signal.
I watch it fall, a fine mist; I watch it touch
the skin of that one girl in silver spandex pants,
but my reverie is interrupted by speckle,
hot breath of sardines and fricative spittle
from this whale of a man at the rail beside me.

iv

He said he wanted to kill me.
I pretended I couldn’t hear him.
He said he wanted to kill me.
I pretended I couldn’t hear him.
He said he wanted to kill me.
I pretended I couldn’t hear him
until at last he got tired
and turned to his other side.
Later, there was time
for fish and chips
and three and a half
glasses of water.