Bowling Pin Fire

Bowling Pin Fire

Bowling Pin Fire

The secret connections between Chinese fathers.
Grocer, banker, mechanic, photographer, bowling
alley proprietor. Their exchanges inexact: a carton
of this season’s first mangoes, a queue-jump to settle
a mortgage, a replacement muffler, professional
portraiture. Quality was scrimped only when all
agreed which corners to cut. The Spanish call it
enchufe — a socket when filled poured more
delicious currents of electricity. And flow it did
from one family to another. I tried keeping track
of Father’s cronies — my map remains a crayon sketch
gone amok, the wax outlines losing shape. My own
network is unanchored and rootless. My friends stop
at random airports, fight to pay for meals. We email
and Skype. I seldom know where they live.

I grew up on Valley Drive sharing space with glass
fishing balls, an ox-blood Ming vase, a painting
of Dad’s childhood home, another of teen-aged mom,
porcupine fish—inflated, dried, and hung from ceilings,
Bill Reid prints, tiny baskets from far-flung tribes.
Our names marking our bedrooms. The living room
fireplace not often used, Vancouver winters too
mild. We seldom gathered there, burnt only
wood from someone’s backyard, the deconstructed
frame of a neighbour’s toolshed, pinecones dipped in
a crumbling chemical the texture of icing sugar
with a tint of green food colouring. They glowed
emerald, then pumpkin orange, tiny bombs of light.

Bowling pins of fine maple burned best,
you could imagine the solid hard knocking
at the end of childhood, a perfect crack:
a punctured sphere thrown down the alley,
velocity gathering, knocking down ten stoic little men
cross-dressed in white plastic to resist
chipping and splinters, jaunty red diamonds
emblazoned on their mid-sections, a skimpy wrap.
Retired from service, they reclined in the embers.
Sensing danger in such display, I avoided
inhaling, auras bubbling off the pins, rising
in vermilion and silver heat up the chimney
the bricks climbing away, such strange kindling.