Vancouver for Beginners

Alex Leslie

• Publisher: Book*hug Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781771665346
• eBook ISBN: 9781771665353
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner of the 2020 Western Canada Jewish Book Awards, The Lohn Foundation Prize for Poetry

In Vancouver for Beginners, the nostalgia of place is dissected through the mapping of a city where readers are led past surrealist development proposals, post-apocalyptic postcards, childhood landmarks long gone and a developer who paces at the city's edge, shoring it up with aquariums.

In these poems you will traverse a city lined with rivers, not streets. Memory traps and tourist traps reveal themselves, and the ocean glints, elusive, in the background. Here there are many Vancouvers and no Vancouver, a city meant for elsewhere after the flood has swept through. This place of the living and the dead has been rewritten: forests are subsumed by parks, buildings sink and morph, and the climate has changed.

Vancouver for Beginners is a ghost story, an elegy, a love song for a city that is both indecipherable and a microcosm of a world on fire.

1.
Enter by the rivers or inlet

rainforest paradise

Now that there is no weather there are only trends. Roots knit an urban basket. This was all forest way back when. Old-growth towers, glass swan spines. Public parks in buckets line the curbs for pickup. Recycling mecca, whose residents eat compost with full cream and push the poor from rooftop gardens into moss that flows from the lips of dumpsters, ocean dreaming in the background, mountains offering shadows to lean into, a sheltered city pillaged for bed frames. The forest’s understory inhales, creeks shout from the manholes, on public transit a wavesounds meditation CD has been playing on loop for 180 years. Born into this misty static, residents swing axes at each other’s ankles and fall like saplings into Taiwan-bound barges and post-industrial wet dreams, into hammocks knit from track-marked cedar branches. Hydroponic lovers nest in shore phone booths, a bulldozer uncurls its sleepy head and splits the street open with an egg tooth. At night raccoons patrol the valleys and alleyways with the cops, obligatory ravens wing-to-wing down the wires, and a man pushes a shopping cart full of huckleberry plants, salal, and prehistoric ferns toward the bottle depot. On his off-nights he is a flamethrower.

mouth of the fraser river

Because our thirst is never satisfied, a pipeline runs through us. The ex-river widened for your use. Riverbed, sidewalk, gutterpath. Land deveined of creeks with one swift tug. Old flow, a long tear down the surface visible only from the bridge. The ex-river runs a path dug by moonlight. Marine Drive, spook of delta. At the mouth of the ex-river, where it empties and spreads, a gate installed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. The ex-river slips through iron grates, slithers among pipes under bedrooms and kitchens. Do not try to take care of the river. Take care of what is around the river and the river will take of itself, instructs the pamphlet released by the city. A manhole gargles, coughs uphill from the water table. A dog lumbers the blackberry path, pants sugary heat. A city engineer crawls, green aluminum fins pinned to his ankles, rubs his belly on the pavement, a compass in his teeth. A salmon with small dark stones for eyes hurtles forward to her home above the reservoir, to the second Vancouver trapped in the clouds. Inside the ex-river, glass fishing floats whirl, each one an eye closing. Autumn is eternal. The ex-river skin slick with crimson handprints. Vancouver opens its mouth and words come out. When you drink from the river, you forget.

forest fire season

Today the city lies on its back, its stomach bled out.

Buildings hang upside down. Windows plate the harbour.

Trees send roots upward thirsting for chemical reservoir.

Bridges dangle from the inlet’s dark wrists.

This morning the city tilts its head in a heat dream blown in from the other side.

Crazy-eye sun bores a hole through orange fog.

The city lies on its back on a new bed this morning.

Dreams itself in the bay lit up with pickled afterbirth.

Every sunset colour in the new alien dust-clouds descends.

The city lies on its back on the old, thinking cool of the channel.

What’s underneath is forced upward and flips.

Houses inverted under the nuclear lid.

A lung suspended in a yellow cloud chamber.

Yellow so listless you could stare into it forever and not go blind.

barter

In the news today: Vancouver is tearing down the art gallery that used to be the land registry. The barge that unloads the hybrid cars leaves full of cedar, fat roots like fingers in the oil slick due north. The trawler’s hold unloads flash-frozen salmon, departs full of clouds and tickets. The beach sealed with a wall had its lip peeled back, and a new shore named Water Street installed. The courthouse converted into a killing bazaar where bear furs are exchanged for oil paintings of possessed trees rebelling within a glass house, seizuring apparitions the shades of a coastal storm. This fentanyl can be traded for eclipse. People do not come here to buy and sell but for miraculous business. Once a week crowds gather on the street and make their offerings: a van full of mixed wire; a Bible with half the words blacked out, extra charge for the editing. Forest of pipes traded for a river. First city bartered for a struck match. An inlet for a swimming pool named prosperity, dosing fentanyl into the veins of a chemical dawn. And somewhere back there, the past was traded for a different past. Vancouver releases its plan for the new art gallery: it will be built near the old viaduct, a fresh bamboo temple where wood was traded for blood.

inlet echocardiogram

Inside acoustics. Ocean on shuffle

drained nightly, a new tide

spelled on the city’s burnt edge.

Horizon control

soundbox, throats buffer

names, crossfade to

the flesh. Score

wiped again and swimming out

into blind tidal wiring. Wrists

bound and kelp.

In the dark, echoes sensormurmur

homing sign...

Table of contents

• Copyright
• Epigraph
• 1. Enter by the rivers or inlet
• 2. Development application
• 3. Pacific Standard Time
• 4. Invisible city
• 5. Alias
• About the Author