Two Poems from Missing Mapledown Love Parkette
Sirens
Sometimes a siren is a faraway band saw
sometimes a screaming baby
Sometimes a siren is a runaway box
equipped with a pair of medics
Sometimes a siren is a clanking hook-and-ladder
heaving downtown around corners
Sometimes a siren – indeed the most famous of all sirens –
is a trick a sort of beautiful come-on
(if birds could sing, place their song here . . .)
Sometimes a siren’s just a bird singing like a faraway
band saw or a screaming baby
Sometimes a siren copying a cop car
is a bird with a really good ear
A siren late at night portends a murder on TV
and if the show’s a certain vintage then a smoke
Sometimes a TV siren punctuates the eleven o’clock news
and all the evening’s programs leading in
Sometimes a sparkly lit siren on a late summer night sings
at the edge of the star-glinting lake
Sometimes a siren’s a calling to arms
sometimes a call to hide underground
No Puny Masterpiece
Wish I had a better lawn back there.
This year. Lawn of the Year.
I gotta try something. The patches are bad.
Tony’s got a decent lawn.
It’s like a single perfect cemetery plot, his front lawn
– three by six –
no gravestone, just a lush five-foot tree
wearing an oversize Beatles wig,
looks like one of those dreadlocked dogs crowning his lawn.
I carried ten rolls through the living room and kitchen
to get my ten by ten on the ground out back
and did it take?
*
In the yard behind the house
in the corner by the shed
where the grass has never grown, trying to find out why
I dug a spade into the soil and plunk
struck concrete six inches under.
A bunker no doubt
financed in part by a government grant in 1959 –
a crypt born out of the fear of an earlier apocalypse
and dug no doubt in the flip Beat spirit
of some groovy impenetrable underground scene
(Still holding out for an invite to descend
into a Bucket of Blood coffeehouse
to read a poem in a turtleneck down there)
Up above we live in hope and wonder.
What size trunk of Heinz Baked Beans would one need
to survive in a backyard bunker from 1959 to today?
(Which some evenings might explain the fumes back there.)
But I digrass.
*
Tony’s lawn is a puny masterpiece.
If only I knew how to say “puny frickin’ masterpiece”
in Portuguese.
And “Is April too early for a resod?”
How does a guy spend forty years at Toronto Works
and only learn the curse words in English?
This year I monitor the situation.
I copy Tony – his lawn game.
He seeds. I seed.
He waters. I water.
Quit my job to spy on my neighbour all day for lawn tips.
Should really just learn Portuguese.
Chris Chambers is the author of Thrillows & Despairos, Lake Where No One Swims and the carnival book Wild Mouse (with Derek McCormack). He lives in Toronto within dog-walking distance of Trinity Bellwoods Park.
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