There have been a blessed many animals with whom I have shared this house, this life of poetry and art, this dream of living gods and walking visions. Many things have scratched, stretched, and slept in the places where the sun brings warmth and light to the slats of hard, blond wood that floor my home. Some of them even slept with me, but I have banned them from my bed after one cat’s twitchy bladder woke me with a rude shock. Tiny poopers, that’s what I sometimes call them all. Little black-green nuggets can be found everywhere, under the glass cabinets in the living room, in the corners behind potted plants, in small clusters at the base of a sculpture. Tiny poos. Petit kaka. ‘Kaka,’ I say to Gabriella, pointing to the evidence of her neglect, ‘Kaka,’ though I say it with a laugh. I know that some weeks she does not even look under the furniture. ‘My tiny poopers,’ I say in the blood-red evening, and so dub them with a sweep of my hand, the hand that holds a glass of wine – no, not my first. Wine, poetry, and my sleeping small ones, these are the bare necessities of bliss.
The danger in happiness: Now everything I touch turns out to be wonderful. Now I love any fate that comes along. Who feels like being my fate?
Neitzche’s fate, of course, was to go mad and grow an absurd moustache.
In the evenings I loved Tyger the best. I would often set him upon the piano’s keys to serenade me. Tyger was a fine minimalist. His paws selected notes precisely, though within a small range. He would play nervous tone poems – very Oriental-sounding. I often recited in time with his tinkerings. You had to watch him, though, or he’d go over. One evening after an interminable book launch for two of my former students, I returned to my dark home full of darker spirits. I brought a glass of wine into the moonlit living room and sat brooding. My African-primitive paintings screamed at me. It seemed all of my small creatures were sleeping, but then I heard Tyger’s squeaking and scratching start up in the dining room, where his cage was kept. He seemed eager to play, so I brought him downstairs to the Steinway. He began a slow, rodent blues that immediately splashed joy and sorrow on my smouldering anomie. I moved around the room, dripping wine down the front of my chemise, and began incanting, sans gêne, some of my older poems. I had not thought of them in years: Trudeau’s speeches, as written by Milton; tanks in downtown Montréal; explosive rhythms and exploding mailboxes; muffled cries from a cabinet minister in the trunk. My youth expanded in my chest, filling my lungs.
What is a poet? Kierkegaard asked. An unhappy [woman] who in [her] heart harbors a deep anguish, but whose lips are so fashioned that the moans and cries which pass over them are transformed into ravishing music.
I grew lost in the remembered lines and did not notice that the piano was silent. Tyger had slipped from the keys and was lying on the floor before the pedals. He was stunned for a moment, and I held him and wept and apologized and explained to him, as I have to you many times, that I am the daughter of Milton’s Eve, full of demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy, and moon-struck madness. I began to intone the poem again, but more softly, stroking the back of his broad, furry head. He bit into my knuckle and I dropped him angrily. Scrambling on the wood floor, he disappeared under the couch and did not emerge for the rest of the evening. I locked myself in my office.
Iwish that Tyger had scarred me with that bite. The smell of him is still there in that cage in the kitchen. Guinea pee and woodchips. I sometimes ask Ross to smell the cage, after he has taken off his shoes and come glumly into the kitchen in his ludicrous, red socks. Ross is the young man who comes each week to type my poems and journals into the old computer the university bought for me after I told them it was impossible for me to come downtown two days a week just to sit in a hot office. Ross looks to me like a clean-shaven Edgar Allen Poe, or a sober John A. MacDonald. A disarmingly bright young man with a weakness for Jean-Louis Kerouac (he denies it, but I can smell it in the work shirts he wears, the state of his running shoes, his occasional grumpiness). When I am in London or Trieste, I leave Ross with the keys to the house. No matter how detailed the instructions I leave for the care of flora and fauna alike, there is yet always one plant and one animal drooping upon my return. He is at least more dependable than that thirteen-year-old girl, Jocelyn, the niece of a friend, who was reduced to shuddering tears when presented with the evidence of her own incompetence. Again, I had left pages of instructions, and yet I returned to a home littered with dried-out leaves and dyspeptic rodents.
I once again unhook the wire structure and lift the plastic base to my nose: Tyger is there, plastic cannot defeat his lingering odour. The smell is long-since lost to the car seat from which he made his farewell tour. It is lost to the hands that held him in the fading light of his final afternoon. It is lost to the hard wood of the floor on which pooled my tears. But it is still in that cage, still in that small home that was Tyger’s sleeping quarters for two years.
Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka, said the Bhudda. Sorrow is everywhere, in man is no abiding entity, in things no abiding entity. But perhaps there is a sorrow that abides in a plastic cage?
Tyger and the others had the run of the house during the day. They all got along, most of the time. If I was working at home, I would often hear a scramble and some angry squeaking – one of the others had tread too close to Tyger, once again forgot the bare fact of his dominance. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn, the rabbit with ears like soft wings, and a kick that could silence Alberto the cat. Or perhaps Tiff, my poor, ailing puppy, who is yet with me, though he is blind, and his bark is incomprehensible. Every few months I must have Gabriella clip the matted, foul fur away from his anus. Poor Tiff took the longest to accept Tyger’s rule. “He’s so small,” his eyes would say to me, after being routed yet again. “He is only a rodent. I am a dog. I was bred to lead.” He would then find a warm spot in the kitchen and lay there, head on his paws, sighing like an old queen.
Gabriella scrubbed the cage of the dead with harsh chemicals, poisons that came too late. Gabriella, the cleaning lady whom a wicked friend once said had the soul of poetry but the body of a limerick. She wore buttercup-yellow gloves, slightly nubby along the palms and the fingers for grip. As she prepared to make sterile what was once infected with Tyger’s life, with his contagious squeak, Gabriella let me stroke the thin, textured rubber of the gloves before she dipped her fingers into the bleach. They reminded me of the French condoms my architect friend once threatened to bring me on his next visit to Canada. He used to announce his visits only a day or two before his arrival. Or he would call from the airport, looking for a ride.
My days after his visits were post-colonial. I had to learn to govern myself amid the wreck he left behind. I rebuilt the ruined infrastructure. I expunged his memory from the schools, pulled down his statues, emptied the ministries of his allies.
I must forget how the curved tusk of his cock gored me.
Yet still, says Flaubert, as soon as one abandons one’s chimera, one dies of sadness. One must cling to it tight and hope that it carries one off.
This past week I have had Ross searching through my dream journals, seeking references to ‘blood’, ‘horses,’ and ‘porcelain’. This is for a new song cycle I am preparing for Hibernacula Press. I feel the familiar joy and dread that comes with publishing a new book, with passing the world a cup of hot blood. I am readying myself for this new book with yoga and meditation. Tiff whimpers at my feet. How mad, that his mummy is a poetess! Sometimes she stays like this for a very long time, without talking or eating; then she wakes up – and comes out with marvellous things. (Flaubert again, the fat genius.) Each book is a mad spell I must cast, though the spellbound profess not to feel it. When I am in the grip of creation, the stairs of my old house slope before me. My father’s clock sends out futile ticks – time cannot touch me. Light does not enter through the clear glass windows of my hallowed rooms. Sun does not catch the clumsy smears left by Gabriella (I must speak with her again).
Tyger will not be with me when my book enters the world and recreates it. She was destroyed, like Icarus, by the sun, but the hubris was all mine.
Before Ross, it was Liam who typed out my pages. My architect friend carried his charm, even when stone sober, like a crown worn at an angle. In every situation, he gave off Mozartian insouciance. Liam, on the other hand, entered a room as if he had just been unshackelled and brought up from the cellar. He often struck me as an overgrown child. His clothes never quite fit him. That absurd knapsack. The toes of his socks drifted ahead of his actual toes like deflated balloons. He loved hockey and hated wine. I’d urge him outside into the sun, and he’d only talk about burning, like some clichéd Southern priest.
I hope to never see Liam again. I still sometimes see him and his daughter in the market, but I refuse to speak to him or look at him. Occasionally, he attempts a quiet, ‘Hi, June,’ then looks away and does not dare stop walking. If I am walking with someone, they will ask me why I do not respond.
Liam was there on Tyger’s last day, but he has never said anything. Never said one word, except to call the next day and leave a cruel message saying he would not be able to help me any longer. His hasty, fumbled apology before the final click was a dismissal of my grief, my despair.
I had listened to his message as it was being left, while I sat on the floor of the living room. I could not answer the phone all that day, and for the next day, too. The sun sent light through the house, attempting to find me, then gave up and passed the search to the moon. I did not stir. I did not sleep. The new world without Tyger would not allow me to sleep. For hours I was dumb, insensible. Then I would moan and weep, imploring the ceiling above to drop down and crush me. Scratching at the floor to open a seam and send myself into the basement. And from every corner of the room, the new knowledge, the new truth, propped open my ears and eyes. Scattered notes and chords coalesced into a searing dirge. The awfulness of it. Pain after pain, and woe succeeding woe. I finally fell asleep in the afternoon of the second day and awoke in the dark, my legs stiff. I went to the bathroom in the dark. I could not bear to face my face. Loss must have surely torn the flesh from my skull. Nothing would darken my hair now, it must be as white as a hag’s. Vultures sat on my shoulder throughout the night, chattering and clicking their beaks. A murder of crows sat quietly in the garden. When I did at last allow the bathroom mirror to show me to myself, my face was streaked black with mascara. My tears had become ashes, pouring out from my burnt spirit. Flames still licked at the back of my mouth, and I gagged on my grief.
Though it tasted like wet sand, I forced myself to eat some food. Small strength was gained, and I prepared to do what I knew must be done. I emptied a shoebox of clippings from the Globe and Mail (dark forebodings of war, ancient bones found in ice, a pumpkin parade), then lined it with thin, blue paper I had left over from Christmas. Tyger’s tinkling ball went in, too, and some food pellets. One earring from the pair I was wearing. And then, into the living room to retrieve Tyger’s small corpse. I thought of seeking out gloves from Gabriella’s cleaning supplies, but that would have been an insult. I put him in the box, closed and kissed the lid. Morning had come. In the garden I could hear neighbourhood children playing in the alleyway. A Portuguese voice in the yard next door, behind the tall fence – an older Vasco da Gama, weary of the world and exploration, settled in the lower Annex. There were no more crows, but a solitary seagull slid overhead, making its uncharacteristically quiet way back to the lakeshore. This would have to serve as albatross to my mariner, though the animal I had killed was not fowl. With my garden spade I dug a small grave in the shade of the maple, placed the box inside, and covered it over. And so there lies Tyger: while the Loves all in a ring/ softly stroke the stiffen’d wing – or “paw.” Coleridge again, anyway. I returned to the house. A hot bath.
On my answering machine there were three messages. One was Liam, I knew. I forwarded past it. The next was only a click. The third was Antonia, to whose house I had been travelling with Tyger, on his final trip. Her voice thanked me for the bread and the flowers. She and Sam had just moved into a new house in Riverdale and she had invited me over to christen it with wine. She had offered to take copies of my books to London with her, to pass on to her UK editor, so I had packed a small box and put it in the back seat of my car. My plan had been to bring Tiff, my usual travelling companion, but he was feeling low with worms and would not leave the bedroom, so I chose to bring Tyger instead. The worms had already begun to turn for all of us! I looped the front seat seatbelt through the bars of his cage and was off. It was a hot, sunny Friday. The lunchtime traffic on Dundas was thick and irritable – office troops escaping the city early. Eliot’s crowds of the dead, out looking for life. I was stuck for the moment. I had loaned my cottage in the Kawarthas to an Italian translator with a club foot and a Québecois mistress, and would therefore have to endure summer’s worst in the dead palaces of the city. The sun wrapped its heat tight on me like a wet sari. I thought of Tyger, but he was still adjusting to the novelty of the car. When we finally crossed over the Don Valley, he had fallen asleep under a covering of woodchips. O folly, that I did not turn around immediately and return to our dark, cool home. But it did not seem then like a killing heat. I was blind to the sun’s evil intent. When fate summons, monarchs must obey.
I knew I could not carry the cage and the flowers and the bread, so I left Tyger in the car as I ran into the shops. It was damp and close in the flower shop; I felt none of the usual temptation to ogle pistils and stems. Stout tulips, and I was off. In the bakery, a moustachioed baker offered me samples of cakes and pastries, and tucked a dense marble rye under my arm. The car was dreadful and hot. Tyger had not moved – I had my first pang of worry. I could see the wood chips moving with his breath, but I felt I should hurry.
The sloping, sleeping streets of Riverdale tangled my course, and when I at last fitted the number Antonia had given me to a house, it was almost three o’clock. My architect would have steered me there in half the time, I know. He can barely drive a car, yet, when it is needed, he can master whatever the task at hand. He mastered and massacred my heart with ease. I still send him poems and letters, but the honesty of his replies have become blurred by disinterest. Dying love is a nursing home of the soul. He asks casual questions I have frequently answered. He mentions trips not made with me, memories not shared, gifts bought for another. Once in a while, a small spark of life, a promise of a visit. Then the transmission clouds over, and I am left in my Arctic outpost, left with my polar bears and floating peaks of ice.
Said the fly to the spider, “If you spare me, I will grant you one wish.”
Said the spider to the fly, “If I kill and eat you, then my only wish is granted.”
Antonia’s house was a marvel, a poem of glass and stone. Sam was bringing tiles in from the car, and came over to meet me. Antonia came out the front door wearing a man’s shirt and holding a paint brush. The tree-cooled air was refreshing after the car.
“‘This castle hath a pleasant seat.’”
“Is that from one of your new ones?” Sam asked.
“I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled. It’s from Macbeth, darling!”
What terrible luck: I named the play. I was as cursed as any powdered actor.
“You brought us a guinea pig?” Sam asked, looking at the cage in my hands.
“No, I brought you bread and flowers. Sam, meet Tyger. Tyger, meet Sam. Tyger, dear?”
“He’s probably boiling hot. Do you want to bring him inside? You can put him in the basement where it’s cool. I’ll lock Jammy out so she won’t try to stick her nose in the cage. Is he still breathing okay?”
“Of course he is. I can’t wait to see your garden.”
“There’s not much to it yet, June. It certainly will never rival yours. It’s actually cooler in June’s garden, Sam. You forget where you are.”
“I do that here, sometimes,” Sam said, and gave his wife a lascvicious look. The two were like fauns.
“I have been trying to grow a maple tree in the south corner to block out the view of the CN Tower,” I told them. “Then my neighbours’ voices can convince me I’m in Lisbon. Sam, there is a box of my books in the back seat. Could you bring it in?”
“I think we have most of those, don’t we June?”
“It’s for Antonia’s editor, Sam.”
“Does he even publish poetry?”
“Sam.”
“These streets and trees. Oh, I cannot live away from Kensington Market. But if I could . . . I must say hello to Jammy. Oh, Jammy! You fat dog!”
I floated through Antonia’s rooms like a spirit. Each door and hallway was a vision, a mirage. I quietly blessed each room with the words of as many creeds as I could recall. We sat in the garden while Sam piled tiles by the back door. Jammy gave chase to squirrels. Stray clouds wandered the neighbourhood’s skies. Antonia’s hair was held back by an elastic and there was paint on her face and arms, but she was as alluring as Sheba. I felt like sleeping on their mattress of grass, and I did lay down on my back in the shade for a few minutes. At last, I passed Antonia my glass. Liam would be at my house soon. Sam retrieved Tyger from the basement.
“Are you okay to drive, June? I don’t mind driving you.”
“Of course, Sam. Antonia and I were only drinking white wine. I’m fine.”
Tyger had not awoken, but for some cursed reason, this pleased me. As if he would awake when we got back, refreshed. Perhaps he would be a little disappointed at having slept through the entire trip. What sickening foolishness! But I did not pause. Back down through the winding streets and across the Don Valley, back into the grey haze of Toronto. The traffic was even thicker than earlier, and I worried I would not get home before Liam arrived. I felt part of a mass exodus. A flight from the twisted structures we ourselves had built. I longed for Trieste. For Provence. For the Mediterranean. For the Atlantic shore. For the Rockies. I felt I had bound myself to a malevolent machine, blurting black smoke and cutting into flesh and muscle. My architect says that Toronto, from above, looks like a bomb site, with a jagged crater and scattered debris. We are our own terrorists, with slower methods of destruction. The buildings fall of their own accord. And so hot in the summer. A dungeon horrible, on all sides round/ as one great furnace. (Milton.) My skin was slick, the air was hotter than melted glass.
The architect once told me to leave this place. Toronto is no city for a poetess! I told him he was wrong, that he could not see the humming symbols, the radical rhythms that surround me. Here was my darkest loam of meaning. Now I am not so sure – those rhythms may be the rattle of skeletons. Perhaps my poems are merely graveyard whistles.
The car moved along the alleyway behind my street like a dying rhino. Two sets of hockey goal posts were moved aside for this mournful procession. Kids stared in at me as if at a phantom. I had left the garage door open as usual, and its darkness cloaked me with welcome. For a moment, I could not move. It felt as though the garage were a ferry, transporting me back safely across Styx to the world of the living. I dozed for a moment – only a moment: the string quartet on the radio had not even changed movements! – but the lapse let the ferry-driver lose his grip on the tiller, and we drifted back to the netherworld in a red fog.
I went inside and drank a glass of mineral water, then, remembering Tyger, dashed back to the car. The seatbelt snapped like a live wire, catching my forearm. Panic froze my hands. I could not unlatch the cage. I tore at it and lifted Tyger from the damp woodchips. My fingers knew what my mind took a minute to accept. Tyger was lifeless. He sat inert in my hands. No thumping heart stirred his fur. I brought his body to my cheek. Carrying him like a baby brought out from a well, I ran to the living room and placed him gently on the floor and rolled him on his back. I knelt and bowed my face to his. My tears dropped into his fur. I would be the Prince who returned Snow White’s beauty to the world. I would be Christ, who bade Lazarus walk again. I would escort Tyger from the Inferno. I laid my mouth upon his and gave a soft breath. I could feel his teeth on my lips. His whisker brushed my nose. I gave another breath. His form expanded slightly, but refused the life I offered. Death had him in a stubborn grip.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
I was blind with tears. Each breath I gave him came back out, unprocessed. His lungs slept, his life was null. Death blew my breath back into my face with a sneer. But I would not stop. I would blow and lay my ear between his forepaws, listening for an echo of my own throbbing heart.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
I tore the compact from my purse and placed the mirror under his nose, hoping that my panic was making me oblivious to his struggling life. The mirror stayed cruelly clear. Tyger’s reflected eye had the look of taxidermy.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
I thought for a moment of dropping a tiny amount of water down his throat. Perhaps life refused to return to a desert. I attempted to moisten my lips.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
Silence.
Breath.
“Holy shit.”
“Liam! Help me! Help poor Tyger! Oh help him!”
“Did you have him in the car? I came around back and your car door was open. The cage was . . . holy shit.”
“Liam! Please! My Tyger!”
I collapsed against the couch as Liam kneeled over Tyger. His placed the flat of his palm on Tyger’s chest. He gave me a quick look, then put his ear to Tyger’s fur. Then slowly, he sat back on his heels and, with vicious sadism, wiped his hand on his jeans, as if poor Tyger’s death were a contagion.
“I’m sorry, I think he’s dead. June? I think he’s dead.”
I could only stare ahead of me. I thought of Orpheus, bringing Eurydice back from Hades, then losing her again in a moment of thoughtlessness. I though of his body torn asunder by the women of Thrace, his lyre silenced. I am both Orpheus and the killer of Orpheus.
Liam stayed for a while. Left a glass of water by the couch that I refused to touch and later discarded, allowing it to shatter in the blue recycling bin on my front step. I did not move Tyger but instead lay beside him, drawing his body against my chest. The taste of his mouth was still upon mine. I savoured our last contact.
For There! Have I drawn or no
Life to that lip?
Do my fingers dip
In a flame which again they throw
On the cheek that break a-glow?
My architect may never read this, may never know what happened. Perhaps he wouldn’t even care, but would only laugh. Maybe it was never for him, anyway. Maybe it’s all been for Tyger, my lost guinea pig. The soul of my bestiary, the spirit of my garden. Maybe, with this creation, he will forgive me for his own destruction, though I will never forgive myself.
Sabba dukkha, sabba anatta, sabba anikka.