Interception by Gillian Jerome To the hills and the mountains under sky I'm so sorry I hurt you. It's a fresh breeze they call the rainy season and I've my head for too long under light. There are the salmon when you really need them. When the elm has a question it bows its earnest brain for the duration of a minute. So ocean, so rusted out from its original intention---   Soft intermezzo of upside-down kissing; time moors, expands...                                      touch, a sudden start private histories slip beneath. Can you hear the ping! of loneliness. Poor zoo animals. Poor human spectators. People look blue behind store windows. (Here is the sign: the somewhere, the water falling in a line. I watch a woman feeding peanuts to her dog.)   Awkwardly, swimmingly, we make way through the streets of stoned ideographs bowls of pennies lined up along the curb. Too soon the sky, too soon darkness & kites meant for dreaming push us past. It is you I'm taught to lose again & again in the rain spray.   The ravens peck at the bus window & we question the litany of city traffic what's after the end of faith, the ass-end of aftermath. Can you feel me flying as you did one chilly autumn buried in piles of sirens... Count with me the curved curbs backward. This paper plane, this mosquito net.   When you entered there was effervescence, I forgot---the edge of your face like a butterfly-- to say what I wanted, so instead I found a bed of red leaves to walk in. You see the animal chooses a simile, something natural. Could you touch the curve of my tenses under that faulty light on Patricia's porch? This place said, what I first said, I don't know.   Traffic lights the tracks & the wrought iron. What if we'd had Vancouver in another decade & decisions made of pearls? All the tenderness, its landscapes: lichens, ocean, a slender form, the focus out of self portraits... For lunch by the ocean we eat pasta, you turn expectantly toward a couple walking their poodle-   At the beginning, remember, we painted the kitchen blue so the neighbours would leave us. Do you hear him? The Italian soprano and his canteloupes. You could be taken to ice cream stores, to coyotes. Policemen came next door, and now can I say what I saw? I wonder why we love at all. I wonder why the trees are taking their clothes off.   It's a part of the city you know well, the cop raids, your impressario: hulled faces in the glow of Hastings backstreets lit up by the teeth. You hold a page in your hand full of nouns & formal energy. This is what the language thought of you, its pulse under plastic stars.   Sexy in the City & a Sing Tao beer keeps my ears awake. At Wong Kee's for sweet & sour soup Candace Bushnell's face is made of pixels: Candace the Bush, Candace the Daffodil argues the one true death is poetry. The poet sitting beside her doesn't gesticulate agressively, though he wants to. She pays the bill.     Every season is wet on West Pender. Your office where the fairies play chess in a vault. In the back room mould grows into a mattress with flashy thoughts. Desire's red suit & boots with tassles...It's the city, it's midnight and somewhere a cell is a cell with a mind of its own. Time warp and proliferation. Turn here, toward me.     In this cold country, a town of mountains & high-density traffic: the ski lifts, the eastside precincts with speaker phones. Are you a new dialect or a photograph of a busy city centre? Entertainment by the box office is free for long time residents and Friends of the Foundation. I hold my hand out for a hot dog, a municipal project, a 62-ounce cup of Coke.     We stay up all night at The Sylvia watching re-runs of Russian war films-- I've always adored your idea of romance. Take my temperature, quick. You order in and the room smells of lemon again, of beginning, all the towels and charms. Outside, the troops imagine "Mary Ann", they think of "Budweiser", and"home". Our dreams are eggs, our legs wrapped in rebar.   Slivers of the same women walking past drawn up by a mechanical claw from gravel text underground, under muzzle. That the body is responsible for actions we share with brutes. On the other side of the city a row of bellies plump with dreams of chocolate stars & boyfriends in blue suits.   The baby is blinking at us from the traffic light--- o, the world alive with remembered phrases... "Nothing will change," says a big tongue in the gong of denial, but you said it over & over. (How do I make him shut up?) The body, a fish tank, the brain flailing in the wave of monsoon, umbilical, cervical--look, there--- a 100-watt light bulb in the snow.   These days I say "desert" these days I say "depleted uranium" and in every news box a special offer for a new pen. "O, private citizen," Daycares sleep from noon to three... In the centre of town some palm trees, a people play college on the front lawn. There is a story & a dream, it's wearing a very revealing t-shirt.   In Meinhardt's by the deli counter Goldie Hawn is ordering potato salad. Nobody does anything. This is Vancouver & the plush blue seats on buses. It's Friday, the man in line behind me buys sunflowers & Chardonnay. I go home toward a bedroom floor made messy by paper dresses.   This is the green tea ice cream, this is what I'd do for a pound of rain and raw fish. "Go sleepy" I say to a tender blonde head to toes, to small handprints on the glass. Here we have missiles. Here we have "real life" and here we have Alice in Wonderland--- down a long hole she goes as big as a tulip. You and I & the blood in her cuticles.   Water molecules lift like balloons through buttons, through every cell of the body and the UBC gardens...like hydrangeas, like the brains of lilacs. Can you be here in the velvet, in the gone & elated, for it is true that blue angels lick the threads of our loveliness into a very special shape. A soft date is a way to pass a message mouth to mouth. More supple than resuscitation.   So many days we say goodbye out the window of a Toyota at the doors of airports, in separate cities in the dark. What does it say of those who choose a shape to stay close to... Here in the storm beetles bounce from the glass doors I'm startled by the sound of keys.   In the black box of a night in Vancouver a bathtub and a nude reclining. You've made a mural of tea lights and somewhere someone's sipping gin. A head is lifted to remember how long a goodbye is, how hard a syllable partially buried wants to be heard. A car turns into the alley by surprise. You'll be hearing from Gillian Jerome again.

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