Listen for the Animals
by Gillian Jerome

This morning I wake to the steady muffle of piss
against the clapboard shack.
I flip a corner of the garbage bag
rigged along the window with fishing line
to shut out the sun.

From a small triangle of light, I watch him
head bent in concentration,
holding the pink flap of his cock
the size of a grayling he'd throw back
to the water.

Kneeling up to the window
I find his smell on my fingers,
spread my hands against the wall
as they were when he entered me from behind,
my nipples two grey stones.

Behind me, the soft gaze of the animals
nailed to the wall. The sixty-pound trout
and hanging from its mouth,
the red lure used to land it.
The rack of antlers from the caribou
I spotted from the kitchen window
chewing fireweed, nuzzling its nose in gooseberries.
Draped above the corner bed
the grizzly who stamped his fists into the granary
trying to get at the canned food.

Into a pouch of Drum tobacco
he dips his fingers
stiff and cracked from the morning cold.
He sits on an empty oil barrel
as if waiting for the soft brain of the doe.

I imagine him close enough to trace
the tails of curls up his neck
the cuts in his hands
from slitting skins off dozens of fish
hauled from the icy lakewater --
walleye, Dolly Vardens, ciscoes, inconnu --
chopping heads and tails into a bucket,
carving filet from liver, spleen, slivered bones.
The hands he seals with the sludge of bag balm.
The hands he slips inside me at night
with shut eyes, reaching into the lake water
of his memory.

Tonight he will come back to me
sun-scorched, covered in slime,
his fingers reeking of fish.
A forty-pounder with pink speckles, he'll say,
I nearly had her. She was so big, the line snapped.

While I sleep my skin will turn silver,
slippery under his hold.

Two nights gone

"Your body's a small word with many meanings
Love.Yes. If. But. Death."
- Alden Nowlan

You lie here in the cabin in darkness,
smelling like a red fox caught in a trap
leftover from the winter hunt. Your tongue
stale with thirst for lake water. Every pore
reeking with fear, the smell of an onion skinned to its heart.
Two nights since the radio phone, your father's words
a steel wool scratching the receiver,
the static from the storm making it hard to hear.
She's gone, that's all you said, turning to the wall
with your jaw clenched, your arms crossed.
From the end of the mattress, I knead each foot,
each ankle bone, feeling helpless, full,
quiet somewhere between desire and fear,
every copper leg hair electric on my palm.
Naked, sick, silent. There is no camoflouage
here in tundra land, no way out except by plane
once the storm quits and the water turns back to blue.
Even the bed betrays, the sheets grey and twisted in on themselves.

Third Night

You say you've decided nothing about loss.
The sun thinks it is day all night long.
The mother grizzly leaves her spoor
circled in the sand around the cabin.
Outside people get by collecting firewood, singing.
What do we do with these hours? Three a.m.,
the Snowy Owl alone in the black spruce
poor with the endlessness of desire, your pale limbs
sore and grim when I take you
into the soft woods of my mouth
your salted life filling me up
with whatever hope we own, a milky trickle
down the throat as if I'm beginning again
while you're as close to leaving as I'll ever know.
                Why do we start with fear,
desire, both, knotted, here in this black cabin,
your blood cells furious with each other,
teaching the body's limit. Here where the earth stays frozen,
where all we have is what little we know.
                The owl yields to summer light.
In the bog outside the bark on the black spruce
fattens. The grizzly mother has no words for sorrow,
her cubs waiting by the spruce with open mouths.

The taste of trout

My body moves towards the warm
groove in the mattress,
the smell of tobacco and fish
on the pillow, grains of sand
scattered from the pads of my feet.

Last night I dreamt he came to me
wearing camouflage, eyes wide open,
cheeks white with the kind of fear
taught only by water.
His cracked and bloodied hands
held a trout the size of a child
dragged from the Great Sahtu,
shimmering in its own dark blood.

Eat it, he urged, holding it up to me,
and I, asleep, dreaming of animals --

not the caribou carrying miles of lichen
in paws sticky with pine gum,

not the mother grizzly stopped to feed her cubs
by the incinerator, raspberries
growing wild around them,

but the one who scrapes his muddy paws
down my belly, his claws pale treads
along my hips. He waits until I sleep to slip
an eye tooth under my pillow.
Out into the sun he goes, hungry.

Eat it, he says, pressing its mucous skin to my lips.

Gillian Jerome lives in Victoria, but she is not staying.