Sue Goyette

The trick to building houses was making sure

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally

its appetite was unwieldy. It ate boats and children,

the occasional shoe. Pants. A diamond ring.

Hammers. It ate promises and rants. It snatched up

names like peanuts. We had a squadron of cooks

specifically catering to its needs. They stirred vats

of sandals and sunglasses. They peppered their soups

with pebbles and house keys. Quarts of bottled song

were used to sweeten the brew. Discussions between

preschool children and the poets were added

for nutritional value. These cooks took turns pulling

the cart to the mouth of the harbour. It would take four

of them to shoulder the vat over, tipping the peeled

promises, the baked dreams into its mouth.

And then the ocean would be calm. It would sleep. Our mistake

was thinking we were making it happy.

Some believed the ocean wasn’t alway salty but that our ancestors

had been very sad. They’d been promised a great many things

only to have the fruit drop and their breasts sag. They cried

a lot. When they looked up and bemoaned their fate,

claiming they’d done nothing to deserve all of this roadkill,

the exhaust from their undeservedness formed a talk show

of rain clouds. When they looked upon the ground

and beseeched their feral happiness to stop chewing

at their feet, their displeasure seeded gout weed and prehistoric

thorned things. In this way, our boats were the original forms

of escape and self-help. At first we floated on our ancestors’ sadness,

the waters rife with the salt of their tears, but then,

vivre l’evolution, those tears sprouted gills and tails

and small, watchful eyes. It isn’t entirely accurate to say

we ate those fish but more like accepted that which we’d inherited.

What we hadn’t anticipated was how the eyes of those original tears

would persist, how they’d keep watching.

We first invented running so we could be in two places

at one time but then understood how, with empty pockets,

we could also harvest the wind. We invented hospitality

to lure our successes home, and to get love a much-needed

drink. We invented chairs so we could rest after the chase.

We invented the chase after we invented running, and inadvertently,

robbery. We invented the suburbs after accidentally colliding

into the feud and its conniving stepsisters the argument

and the snit. Some of us needed more space.

We discovered death under the bridge

and someone insisted we take it home, that it needed

our help. That day alone we invented the handkerchief

and the whisper. When it sat up, when it looked at us

with the teeth of its appetite puddinged in its eyes, we discovered

the flapping of words trying to escape from our ears

and something hammering in the silver-shaft of our hearts.

We unearthed fear that day, our first act of real

archeology. Understand, at that point, maps charted roads

and the humble footpaths between rumours crooked

with love. The ocean took up the most room

with its tidal pull and tentacled beasts inventing

their own recipes. Some days we knew we were nothing

but ingredients; other days we felt like honoured guests.

But the day we brushed the dirt from fear’s forehead

and got a look at its hands, well, our maps changed

and the ocean got bigger, our nights, a great deal beastier.

Souls became the perfect distraction. We had to keep

their gowns clean. We had to buff their moods.

But some of us were wounded in a way that made our days

need crutches. We were invalids in the pale hospital hours

of our kitchens. No one had warned us that our children

would leave and we were bereft, holding up the bedclothes

of their childhood and breathing deep the pink lambs

of their voice. We had no choice but to seal the poets’ trap

of sugared words and meet at the ocean. Bravely, we tried

reciting them without sounding desperate. That our souls

were grazing on the hill behind us no longer mattered.

We wanted to lure our wandering children home.

The words we used had the thin syrup of our loneliness

in their veins. In this way, we learned that words also have souls,

and when the souls of our words escaped, there was a glitter

frosting the ocean, and briefly, we had managed to sugar its tide.

According to our scholars, the newly birthed Milky Way

was rhinestoned with souls, which proved the soul’s

existence. The lifeguards, when asked, said they’d tasted

the hard candy of the soul when they tried reviving

an ocean victim. But we’d always been suspicious of souls.

We knew they could escape because we often heard

their hooves, the slap of their tails. They’d wander off

at night and when we’d wake, we’d feel emptier,

our great finned souls swimming against the current

and further away. We’d cover our mouths when we laughed,

when we yawned. Once they broke out, souls were just a nuisance

to coax back. There was a trap of words the poets had sugared

and we’d take classes to learn how to enunciate without sounding

desperate. When they returned, we’d have to swallow our souls

like the pit of a plum or a vitamin. It could take several days

to feel enriched, to see the sky in the puddles again.