Yams do not exist Read online

  Yams Do Not Exist

  Yams Do Not Exist

  copyright © Garry Thomas Morse 2020

  Turnstone Press

  Artspace Building

  206-100 Arthur Street

  Winnipeg, MB

  R3B 1H3 Canada

  www.TurnstonePress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any request to photocopy any part of this book shall be directed in writing to Access Copyright, Toronto.

  Turnstone Press gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Manitoba Arts Council, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Yams do not exist / Garry Thomas Morse.

  Names: Morse, Garry Thomas, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190150785 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190150793 | ISBN 9780888016775 (softcover) | ISBN 9780888016782 (EPUB) | ISBN 9780888016799 (Kindle) | ISBN 9780888016805 (PDF)

  Classification: LCC PS8626.O774 Y36 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Contents

  Amortization of the Amatory

  Cortesia in the Centre

  Mull in the Mirage

  Master and the Mounties

  Atrocity in the Apron

  Revival at the RPL

  Cassandra on Canto X

  Appassionata on Argyle

  Porpoises in the Post

  Assignation on Armistice

  Fever After Black Friday

  A Nightmare on the Street of Elms

  Ferment/Fermata in February

  Farinata after the Flood

  Cézanne in the Clerk

  Ephemera in Etobicoke

  Billet-doux from Bunty

  Whispers around Wascana

  Visit in Victoria Square

  Intermezzo in the Air

  Mädchen among the Mennonites

  Crowley and the Cheapbook

  Flame in the Folds

  Muck in the Meadow

  Yella and the Yams

  Beaverbrook and the Bilious Attack

  Marriage in Faulkner, MB

  Realty and Reality

  Escapade in Esnesnon

  The Heart of Harkness

  Horror at Chez Horowitz

  Farinata on the Frontier

  Ashes in Assiniboine Forest

  Acknowledgments

  Yams Do Not Exist

  Garry Thomas Morse

  Yams Do Not Exist

  Amortization of the Amatory

  Farinata1 clung to the darkling plain2 with all his might. He showed great determination not to be the highest wet point for a sliver of lightning. Supine and stricken with fright, he was amazed not to see a whit of life flash before his eyes. More of a blankety-blank. Whatever had happened before his move to the “Land of Living Skies” was incredibly obscure, as was his translation next door to the friendliest province in recent memory. There, a prairie storm was in the offing, and he was nervous about more than just its metaphoric content. Yes, his fear of a fatal bolt from on high was matched only by a fear that his creative powers would fail him, should he try to recount his life.

  To this end, Farinata pictured two pupae that were (securely or precariously) suspended from the top of a fence that had a stony finish. Inside were the women, wriggling with anticipation. Was it a common male fantasy, to bind them in leafy shells like that, hanging from a silken hook? No, nature abhors nothing. The satin bowerbird spares no other bird when collecting feathers and other blue objects with which to adorn the entrance to his bower, cleverly designed to dazzle the azure eye of his prospective mate, she who promptly dispatches him to gather more blue buttons or bottle caps. Farinata suffered countless outbreaks of shame over the fact that there were two of them, dividing the highest caste of beauties. To the best of his knowledge, Muses were single-spined, or went around in nines. Thus, his personal fortitude—his virtù—was called into question. Might as well cover them from head to heel, and protect himself from himself.

  Yet these two ladies gave him pause for thought, wrapped in delicious colours that mimicked the dominant shades of the substrate with an air of Pre-Raphaelite grace. Naturally, there had been other scrapes with a chorale of capable women he had been obliged to categorize under the rubric of fleshly pursuits. As for these two delicious misses, neither would be caught dead wriggling in a chrysalis. One morning, they had broken free of those chitinous husks and had dried their sopping wings until they were ready to take flight for parts unknown. Poetic usage aside, one Muse was getting on with her decorous life in Queen City. The other, still waving in the foreground, was well on her way to a solid vocation, and had abandoned her former friends to the social milieu in which they still flounder to this day. Look, there is no need to exaggerate. Just a second ago, she had not actually waved, or for that matter, walked arm in arm with her usual chaperone, their steps keeping in perfect time with one of Schubert’s dances (D.783 no. 7). Nor had she lorded it over him on a minimalist-chic Scrooser, although that is how he always envisioned her. No, she had mouthed a “hello” meaty enough to feed almost half of Paradiso, with a display of friendliness that was already guaranteed on every provincial license plate.

  We need not worry that no one else will turn up. Someone often does. Incidentally, this is known as foreshadowing. While we are here, we might as well appraise his stupefaction. His eyes were screwed up because he had nearly idealized the poor dear out of existence. He clenched his teeth because her bourgeois constraints were quick to cordon off the open manhole he teetered over, namely the Void. Taking into account as many artistic purviews as our budget will allow, we must concede that the Canadian prairie has seldom been expressed as anything more than a whopping Néant,3 and that is how Farinata happened upon her. Stuck with the same old representative models, he lacked the tools to mansplain away the copious amount of desire that had repeatedly tripped him up since reaching the middle of the road of his life. In passing, he lacked enough pluck to suggest that countless exoplanets ultimately had more influence than the perpetual recession that held sway over his most heartfelt inclinations, even the most fleeting infatuation.

  Even so, the meaty “hello” of the dark-eyed one had substance, and “infatuation” was too wonderful a word to relinquish whole hog. Besides, it would be nice to leave horndoggery out of it for once. He was bound to take it personally once he was informed—he was well-informed—that she had dropped everything to serve at the sister café of one of his favourite haunts, the former below street level where tea was served with a strainer that dipped ever so shallowly within the rim of the affronted cup! Meanwhile, he was more likely to be found in the front window of the brother café that faced onto Main, where he could moon over the architecture and stare up at the faded lettering on a chimney that read CLEANS & SHINES. Never again would their paths overlap, save in a staffing emergency, and the odds were still against him. Otherwise, life lumbered on. The red squirrels were free to chase each other around belted elms, just as the black swallowtails were free to flit about and flirt among the thistle.

  Beset by impressive nether-pangs, Farinata took a page from the white-tailed deer playbook and ignored the TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED sign. He crept under a section of torn fence and wandered across the golf course in a daze. They were sedatives, if not basilisks, her
eyes. Where was the accountability for the stalwart anvil cloud or bosomy mammatus clouds hanging pertly from the base of a cumulonimbus?4 A rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning introduced a massive downpour. Let a romantic pneumonia carry him off! He flung himself upon the grass and lay there and that is how we find him. Supine, just the way we agreed, and about to take stock of his life. Fortunately, compensation for his nearsightedness came to him in the form of an otherworldly farsightedness in many an existential matter. He could savour the flavour of recent misadventures yet also taste the fuzzy logic of things to come.

  Keep in mind, when a man of letters reflects on his various comings and goings, he is bound to feel short-changed in the amatory department. Year after year, there is a depreciation of the intangible asset that is so precious to us, we can scarcely amortize it. Mostly a string of close calls, if one is telling home truths. Well, let us abide awhile with his abstruse impressions, involuntary memories,5 obstinate fetishes, and portentous meanderings, for to find profundity in the laughable—let alone split a gut over the profound—is a fair aim.

  Cortesia in the Centre

  Farinata leaned against the little bridge in Les Sherman Park, tragicomically besotted with the infamous Trish, who by all accounts—her co-worker Donna—had a murky past and more adventures than were allotted to a lady of high standing, in her humble estimation. He called it love because he could only see her stately head over the assortment of coffee machines, and if there were a glimpse of anything more, he would redden and avert his eyes at once. He called it love because he caught himself comparing the green of certain waterfowl to the green shock she gave her long black locks. He also believed that she possessed intimate knowledge of the cello. This error in judgment was the divine masterstroke for Farinata, who now heard a gavotte or a gigue whenever he passed the bank façade that stood by itself in the middle of Cornwall Centre, which might as well have been a parapet from which she lowered her hair for inspection.

  Such was the luxury of an unemployed poet upon the little bridge—defying with a few tears6 the integrity of his pants from the Sprawlmart nearest Highway 1—to contemplate her image through flat whites and foam at the mouth of the downtown mall in Grounds for Delight. He cut such a sorry figure that out of sheer pity, a couple dismounted and paid him the courtesy of walking their bicycles across the bridge without subjecting him to any more of the bumps and shocks that flesh is heir to. Expiation came, as it surely did to the first ice age hunter-gatherer who slew a bison and grew a bird-head—or so the cave paintings show us—in the form of a few peerless tears that had no peer because they were unrivalled in their heartfelt dedication to Trish, and also because they had no peer to speak of, which is to say not a friend in the vicinity.

  Farinata was so overwrought that he might have cast himself into the shallows of the (debatably artificial) creek, had not a pelican floated into view, appearing for all the world duly satisfied with its own awkward and merry surrealism. This whimsical bird floated right under the little bridge and Farinata did not even notice the yellow cornrows or the bosom heaving through a T-shirt or the thighs swathing his crumpled sad-sack-of-a-self in the passing aura of their continual locomotion.7 The fact that she was eager for an acquaintance of roughly his length and breadth between the hours of ten and two on business days did not make itself known to him, nor that his plunge into the shallows might have afforded an opportunity for her to fish him out and dry him off over a hot toddy until the time was ripe to grant him some relief from his irksome passion, had not the happy pelican passed.

  There was still a sixty per cent chance the thunder and rain would help matters along, much as Iuppiter Pluvius helped along Aeneas at the very instant he was aching to get a leg over. But no, the sublime undulations of those buttocks in Get-A-Grip shapewear were already out of sight. Farinata clutched the bridge railing like a second mate on a sinking ship and gave himself over to a fresh stream of saline discharge and a low, woeful ejaculation that made the pelican look back with something akin to concern. Though the mourning dove appeared to be rubbing it in, ceaseless in sounding its baleful coo, all was not lost! Farinata felt around in his pocket and fingered the pearly white lid of the anonymous supplier, a superfluous token of everything that had remained unspoken between him and his beloved Trish. Indeed, her downcast eyes had instilled in that pale, plastic object an unearthly light at the time of his leave-taking, causing it to shine like a late medieval or early renaissance disc in gold leaf—superfluous because it had no practical utility and would likely as not choke some poor seabird in the near future, no matter where he disposed of it.

  Farinata headed for his thinking bench—lacking the Greek or German compound word for such a help—still fingering the Fra Angelico disc, and thought. What did he think of? When the wind had stopped pestering the poplars, he thought of the shell-ish earrings in the delicate pink lobes of Trish that softened the effect of the silver nose-ring gleaming through her right nostril. Quite the riddle, quite the koan to beat about one’s brains, especially for a sentimental autodidact who couldn’t get out the compound words he wanted. In the background, beyond the barbecue, a girl waited, baggie in hand, for her pug to do its business, although this was by no means a source of consolation to our friend. Were there ashes in the barbecue, mere remnants of once-tender things burnt to a crisp? No there were not. The pug ran amok, panting, then returned home much refreshed with a wonderful sense of vacuity.

  Farinata said aloud that he wanted to go home but he meant go home-ish, meaning back to a micro suite, meaning part of a house that was really too small for mere mortals. He went back to the bridge and peered over the railing but the beaver8 (muskrat?) that had been chewing leaves was nowhere to be seen. Just then, a stripling paid him a whit of cortesia, lifting his skateboard and even tugging out his earbuds with an air of solemnity, leaving Farinata to mumble his greeting after that chivalric shadow in passing. One noble penumbra gave way to another, and a lanky representative of the mounted police appeared in the corner of our friend’s eye, a rotating sentinel who was inclined to tolerate the apparition of an Indigenous person9 in a sports team jersey that in logo and name might be taken for a racial epithet, a jersey upon the crumpled body of a frail paramour that might be taken for an ironic declaration of protest, just the sort of rabble-rousing certain to disturb the riparian peace, artificial or not. Farinata paused, supposing the season to be too early and the weather too mild for starlight tours with a zero point zero zero nine per cent chance of being struck by lightning. And anyway, the officer might have taken sensitivity training. In fact, this inquisitor had taken more than his fair share of sensitivity training, but Farinata had nowhere near a “casebook” profile and “looks good on paper” certainly did not apply here.

  Naturally, our hearts fly out to our friend; it was the bread and butter of the officer of the mounted police to remain circumspect, having found the crumpled individual at ten past three in an excitable state, unable to clearly articulate with any exactitude his origin story or even precisely why he had been reduced to such a pitiable condition. Farinata is a funny name for this loon with an out-of-date Status Card, thought the copper,10 although his actual commentary was a string of muffled dissyllables more along the lines of “there, there” or “uhm hm” or even “uh-oh.” Not much grilling, then, to bring about a confession. An argument had ensued, calling the handbook into question, with Trish on the side of freethinking with a trace of freebooting, revealing her rebellious streak in her proposal to reverse the order of the elements for a particular drink, to do it like this rather than that, afterwards fuming under the chastening glare of her manager. Grist for the mill and grain for the proud elevator of his love11 in a town so tiny it is the only thing visible, aside from the train rushing ahead to conclude a weepy adieu. Meanwhile, the officer of the mounted police asked him to kindly keep calm and carry himself off. Sensitivity training, indeed!

  Once on the other side of the littl
e bridge and on solid cement again, Farinata clung to the DISMOUNT sign and admitted to his crime, for he had, in a sudden fit of desperation—blamed upon very low blood sugar and/or excessive dehydration—permitted a compact bumbershoot to point through his coat, demanding of the wee-hours clerk a small bottle of water and a tired pastry partially smeared with a berry-ish filling. To his credit, they were not saskatoons, imitation or otherwise. This unfortunate incident had appeared on Crime Stoppers on a slow week, but to this day remains unsolved. Sadly, the officer of the mounted police was already well away, the collar never to be his.

  The next day found Farinata scarcely improved, save for the prospect of chicken and waffles for elevenses. The second he had seen the bright orange food truck from afar, the sleep had tumbled from his eyes and his heart had leapt towards the public square, shoved forward by the rarified discernment of his impetuous stomach. Fans of opera seria will have to forgive this slight digression from the Metastasian order of acts, scenes, and appearances by dramatic personages, because even as Farinata guarded his generous portion of fowl and honeycombed battercake from several bees, his breezy head was full of torporous airs. At the same time, his insides were so full of marvels, love, remorse, and hope that he did not even notice the flames rising about his ears on account of a conversation that was about to take place during a brief lull at Grounds for Delight. Set to harpsichord,12 the dry recitative was no mere hack work—there was a drop of pathos there!

  “Well, I see him in the square or wandering the streets.”

  “Shy dude that’s into you?”

  “Now you’re being stupid.”

  “Remember, as staff, you mustn’t fraternize—”

  “Remember, as staff, you should shut up.”

  Then the eyes of Trish darkened and the soft basso continuo pulsed through her, as faintly as the genteel recitativo accompagnato of the grasshopper that had glided into the square, only to land at Farinata’s crumb-covered feet, which is to say brogues in sore need of reparation. Birds have augury but what have these stridulating stoics with their songs of love and territorial admonition? Farinata was no wiser then, for a little bird had told him nothing. Having divested the bones of their quantity of dark meat, with sticky fingers clasped together, he vowed to the living skies that his fanciest fancy and he would be united in a world that was probably not this one, however delicious this life could be, especially right before the lunch rush.