Overture
by Karey Willan
By cock and bull, tooth and oxidized nail
you will whistle like Harpo Marx
while I write La Symphonie de C’est Fini.
The notes ricochet off the crags of your heart
as magnetic North guides tall ships to breech the waves,
before the topple of sails, being swallowed by endless sea.
A certain lifeline for one, it was tidily hidden
in your back pocket when we were dry-docked.
I thrash and recall old dreams of porpoises,
know why I learnt to swim at four in the cold of Blackstone Lake,
one finger touching bottom before racing towards light.
You pointed it out with a laugh, liking the linguistics,
how “lover” without the “L” becomes “over”
until it rose like an overture, a watery muffle of music
to break hardened earth, as if for gentle burial.
I replied with “Over/kill.”
Overtures are the sly, impish passes you made
when your kitchen-handy wife reached low for the meat platter,
put x-ray vision on old Harris lines in her bones hidden by a long skirt
your sour/sweet mouth twitching over a Gilbey’s gin bottle
in a live commercial your friends watched without buying
Me, having the coin to try the package and susceptible
to the subliminal encased in extraterrestrial signs,
a figurine in a snow globe floating unanchored in a styrofoam sea.
By the buffet table you motioned to me like Marcel Marceau
with your palms miming the movement up a staircase
to show me your love in a familiar but locked place
and I glimpsed funhouse distortions in the vanity mirror
before you came down to whistle like Harpo.
Through cracks there plays a scrimmage between ritual,
the scissoring open of shrink-wrapped goods from Ikea and
being stuck like a bad investor in a bear market,
until the slight push of one domino against another, as it will at 29 files,
gains enough momentum to make the Empire State Building fall.
This is physics. It is all seasons. It is the invitation of spring
flourishing with dewy buds, showcasing into summery green,
eviscerating the leaves by autumn with the last blazing colour.
When winter comes, by the barren of its snowy landscape there is no shock,
the symphony of our own construct now lapping us to sleep.
Karey Willan has been stringing words together for much of her adult life, either through working as a verbatim shorthand reporter or chasing to light a skittish muse. Karey’s fascination with psychology propels her art. She is an adventurist of the mind and BC’s mountainous terrain. Karey holds a BFA (with distinction) from UVic in Visual Arts and a professional writing diploma from Douglas College, where she was a summer intern for Event Magazine.