Vanishing Vancouver
4 poems
Poetry by Kirsten Pendreigh
New Subdivision, Cypress Mountain 2017
We came upon them on the rise:
three coyotes staring back.
At first my brain computed golden retrievers,
they were that big.
They stood unflinching
in the last of the arbutus and dry grass
just past the flagging tape
for the absentee-owner luxury homes.
It was up to us to back away
and find a different trail.
I dreamed of them for days.
one came down the mountain and rang the bell.
Her sharp coyote face peered
through the side glass, a vain petition
in her narrowed jaws.
Prime Real Estate, 2018
2 days ago
it took 79 minutes
to knock down the house
kitty-corner behind.
Her name was Marie. She was Québécoise.
He rode an exercise bike on the back porch.
It squeaked.
They cashed out.
5 months ago
I last saw Ai Chen.
She sometimes lives alone
in the Mexiterranean house
her husband bought.
It has terracotta walls, a courtyard
and a surface-level trampoline out front
no one uses.
Ai Chen is shy and has a small brown dog.
I can’t remember his name. Lucky?
I remember hers by thinking of eye and chin.
She says I’m smart —
no one else can manage it,
they just call her Ann.
Ai Chen wrote a thank you card
for the pumpkin plants I shared.
29 months ago
Joan and John got a knock on the door —
an offer they couldn’t refuse.
John used to sit on his porch
watch my young kids bounce.
“He loves to see them appear and disappear!”
said Joan, who always spoke for John
and always knew, even through the tall hedge,
when I was outside. She’d caw my name,
a vigilant magpie.
157 months ago
Joan’s apple tree stopped producing fruit.
planted back when this block was an orchard,
it still blossoms but no one’s there to prune it now.
A thousand sucker arms reach straight up through rain.
19:00, February 11th
Everything is quiet, after all the digging.
I can see straight through the empty lot
to the next street
where the stucco mansion’s red Christmas lights
shine on remote timers.
They choke the anorexic Tuscan columns
and turn off at eleven.
West Coast Cold Snap
In this strange, snowy time even killer ivy looks benign,
its lacy tendrils make intricate strangle patterns on bark.
The seagulls are confused. They can’t find the fruit leather wrappers
and chip bags under all this snow.
The soccer field is strewn with lopsided snowmen
built by West Coast kids before the recess bell.
up the Sound, sheer rock edges eerily weep ice,
white forgiveness fills the clear cuts, softens the shards.
Still, the subdivisions expand and the pipeline is coming.
Tankers and cruise ships will multiply like plastic.
Tourists will lean on railings, gawp at now-deaf humpbacks
reeling through sour waters.
They’ll sip their frappés from the on-board café,
take selfies as their straws blow away in the wind.
The children will remember the time it snowed
enough to make snowmen.
How peaceful everything was.
How the snow felt so light in their mitts.
When You Grow Up in Vancouver
In my neighbourhood, kids don’t dream
of being movie stars or singers.
Even the NHL has lost its allure —
too much work and all those early morning practices.
They want to be realtors.
Get rich quick! Your face on the side of a bus!
on the playground they ask each other
How much is your house worth?
What advice would I give them, if they could hear me
over the leaf blowers and the whine of backhoes?