BOOKS BY LORNA CROZIER
POETRY
Inside Is the Sky (1976)
Crow’s Black Joy (1979)
Humans and Other Beasts (1980)
No Longer Two People (with Patrick Lane) (1981)
The Weather (1983)
The Garden Going On Without Us (1985)
Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988)
Inventing the Hawk (1992)
Everything Arrives at the Light (1995)
A Saving Grace (1996)
What the Living Won’t Let Go (1999)
Apocrypha of Light (2002)
Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003)
Whetstone (2005)
The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems (2007)
Small Mechanics (2011)
The Wrong Cat (2015)
The Wild in You: Voices from the Forest and the Sea (2015)
What the Soul Doesn’t Want (2017)
ANTHOLOGIES
A Sudden Radiance (with Gary Hyland) (1987)
Breathing Fire (with Patrick Lane) (1995)
Desire in Seven Voices (2000)
Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (with Patrick Lane) (2001)
Breathing Fire 2 (with Patrick Lane) (2004)
The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things (2012)
NON-FICTION
Small Beneath the Sky (2009)
Copyright © 2018 Lorna Crozier
Hardcover edition published 2018
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication is available upon request
ISBN: 9780771073137
Ebook ISBN 9780771073144
Cover design by Jennifer Lum
McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
v5.3.2
a
All these words, these gods, are for Patrick.
CONTENTS
Cover
Books by Lorna Crozier
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: And God Said
BOOK I
God of Arithmetic
God of Matter
God of Stones
God of Goodbye
God of Dogs
God of Fire
God of Sex
God of Forgetting
God of Next-to-Nothing
God of Birds
God of the Moon
God of Noses
God of Last Resort
God of Wind
God of Contrariness
God of Slow
God of Hateful Things
God of Acceptance
BOOK II
Her Words
God of Shadows
God of Renaming
God of Quirks: Its More Famous Devotees
God of Grim
God of Insects
God of Water
God of Things without Merit
God of Cats
God of Balconies
God of the Disregarded
God of Putting-Back-Together
God of Anonymity
God of Pudding
God of Rats
God of the Narrow-Minded
God of Bites
God of the Mutable
God of Clichés
BOOK III
His Words
God of Astonishment
God of the Dead
God of Bitter
God of Horses 1
God of Guilt
God of the Left
God of Doubt
God of Horses 2
God of Green
God of Indifference
God of the Self-Defeating
False Gods
God of Snow
God of Public Washrooms
God of Never
God of the Gaps
God of Sloughs
God of Pain
God of Owls
Epilogue: I Know Your Works
Notes and Acknowledgements
About the Author
“Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;”
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS, “PIED BEAUTY”
“Whether or not they exist, we’re slaves to the gods.”
FERNANDO PESSOA
“When I saw the dark clouds, I wept, Oh Dark One, I wept at the dark clouds.”
MIRABAI, “THE CLOUDS”
PROLOGUE: AND GOD SAID
Who is the god who utters you? Is it the lame god who drags his foot down the road and the dust rises, fills your lungs, and makes you blind?
Is it the god who runs her tongue over the morning, and you smell her breath
like horse-chewed fescue, except it’s not that smell. It’s the scent of yourself on your fingers
after you scratch your head, the whiff of hair and scalp and your clearest thinking.
Most days, it’s surely the god of the mind who utters you. The heart and gut are another affair.
You want to hear them too, their syllables of blood and fecal matter, but that needs more of you than you can give right now
and any god can only say so much. Whichever one, her own name is what she utters when she utters you. His own name
is what he utters when he pushes you from his nothing-womb into the ruinous noun-thick world.
BOOK I
“The gods are fugitive guests of literature. They cross it with the trail of their names and are soon gone.”
ROBERTO CALASSO
God of ARITHMETIC
Most children no longer know who this god is. For one thing, he uses chalk as if time does everything but erase. In abandoned country schools, he prints columns of numbers on the blackboards. There are no pupils to add them up and call out the answers though his pockets burn with stars to give away. His worshippers, in danger of dying out, recite the time tables like Hail Marys under their breath to prove their minds are still okay. No matter what they’ve lost—the word geranium, the birthdates of their children—they can do their sums. He wanted his only commandment to be included on the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain, but the others, bartering for space, thought it was only about arithmetic and left it out. It would have changed the world. It would have made us kinder. Thou shalt carry the one, he intones to the small desks in empty classrooms, carry the one.
God of MATTER
Resists abstractions. You throw them at her, justice, equilibrium, shame, and she bats them back. Try comely, try ugly, they’re of no concern. She puts her stick into any matter, into anything that matters, and gives it a stir. Then she asks the most important question: Does it need more salt? When she sees worry on a page she rubs it out and writes in toe. She writes snout over soul; pine cone over ego; a thousand grains of sand over sorrow. No wonder she’s the one you light a candle for in the tool shed, the root cellar, the attic full of many things. After much beseeching and your generous donations to the poor, she lets you write hope, though to temper it, you must intone under your breath one of the following: a. the peeling skin of paint under the lid of the can; b. the wishbone drying on the windowsill; c. the line a shrew draws in the dust on the floor of the cabin with his needle nose.
God of STONES
Don’t underestimate their sagacity, even the stones you’d call dull. In steeples, in the walls of llama sheds and stupas, on gravel pathways, they’ve been meditating for quite some time. Really, all are philosopher’s stones. I think, I think, I think, they declaim with gravitas. Inside each, even those that fit inside a pocket, are two rivers, a herd of floppy-eared goats, wisdom teeth, and a clock, its metabolism so slow you can’t hear it ticking. Inside each, no matter what its mineral composition, are a dozen stars, a braid of hair, a padlock, and a holy writ you can’t decipher. When you try to read it out loud, your tongue, momentarily, turns to stone.
God of GOODBYE
That simple word god has given you has goodness at its core. Moths come to your porch to dust you with goodbye; a black beetle trundles over gravel on his way to something new. You get down on your knees and stroke his back, lightly, so he won’t stop. Every rain says adieu to the sky, snow waves a hundred handkerchiefs as it falls. When the crows left the ark no one knew they weren’t coming back. Smoke never returns to wood. The raped girl says farewell to her body. She is no more than the faint sound of a cat lapping water though the cat she remembers is buried under the white peony tree in the garden. The long-distance runner with thunder clouds on his lungs shakes hands with the city before his legs propel him past the finish line. Even trainless towns have station platforms where the dead depart.
God of DOGS
She thought she was going to be the god of gods. Her disappointment, however, didn’t last—her mortal flock ended up enchanting her. Their exuberance is like a tired fountain suddenly exploding with noisy water. She’ll always be the youngest of the immortals—Homo sapiens have it wrong: don’t multiply a pooch’s age by seven, divide your own. Somewhere, while you’re doing the math, a mountain dog is digging through a snowdrift to a muffled cry; a water dog is holding a child’s head above the waves; a mutt is hanging on to the arm of a thug who tried to strike his master. Emily Dickinson wrote in a letter, “I hope you love dogs too. It’s economical. It saves going to heaven.” She actually said, “I hope you love birds too,” but it could have been dogs, if she’d been less timid, less housebound, don’t you agree?
God of FIRE
Ungendered, faceless, it lacks a proper name. The most ecstatic, the most evangelical, it converts the inhabitants of cardboard slums and castles, banks and butcher shops; every citizen—human, four-legged, webbed, and winged—baptized by flames. Moths in Mormon suits carry embers of devotion from stoop to spire, from the edge of the city to the trees and the grass. The god of fire springs, it rolls, it punches. Nothing bounds across a river so nimbly, so fast. Only snow can purify as radically, as far. Ash Wednesday, ash all the other days too. Scrupulous scholars, their mouths and noses masked, sift through the cinders, use soot mixed with spit for their ink. They’ve been sent by the School of Devastation. You catch glimpses of their writing on scrolls of flame that roll and unroll in the infernal wind.
God of SEX
Darwin described the mad proliferation of flowers in the Cretaceous period as “an abominable mystery.” Abominable because the flowers blithely destroyed his notion that nature doesn’t make a leap. The unknown perpetrator of his distress, which lasted until his death, was the god of sex. For almost 80 million years, she obsessed over the pistils’ juicy tips, the nectar-loaded stamens. When she tired of her outrageous panoply of perfumes, forms, and colours available in every size, she bumped things up. She focused on one specific family, orchids, fine-tuning them until there were 30,000 kinds.
One bears such a creepy resemblance to a fly that horny flies buzz up and mount it. Another’s musk mimics the scent of a female bee, inexactly, because bees thrill unabashedly when the smell’s slightly off, when it’s almost familiar, forbidden. If insects are in short supply, the Chinese orchid will twist 360 degrees and pollinate itself. When she brought to life the world’s biggest flowerhead and doused it with the stink of corpses, the other gods called a halt, but not before she tweaked the titan arum so it could turn up its own heat to exaggerate its stench. The garden, once a paradise, filled with carrion beetles and carrion flies.
Fish were up next, and later humans, but really, flowers had devoured her imagination and her time. We got what we got, with little variation. Some say she let us down—our coupling’s so appalling that the human race would die out if lovers could see what they’re doing. Among this god’s worshippers, those who see with rose-coloured lenses, one is already on her way to sainthood—a forty-five-year-old Japanese artist whose chosen name, Rokudenashiko, means “no-good-girl.”
In a T-shirt and baseball cap, holding a paddle, she poses for a photo in a yellow fibreglass kayak shaped like her vulva. She made it from a silicone mould and a 3-D printer. Through watching videos from Canada’s North, she’s learned to perfect her stroke. As long as she stays on water and out of jail (twice she’s been arrested), it’s going to take her where she wants to go. To welcome her, the god of sex will be waiting on whatever shore, arms full of flowers.
God of FORGETTING
Is it a blessing or a scourge, forgetting? That’s still up in the air, so much so there are two gods to ensure both arguments survive. Like a couple in a lasting, though sometimes wobbly marriage they’re meant to help each other, for they, like their petitioners, forget. So many strings tied around their fingers they’ve taken to wearing macramé mittens. A timer, similar to the one you bought from the hardware store, hangs from a cord around each of their necks. The constant tic-tic-tic they can’t escape is like an ant breaking sticks in their ears. When the alarm goes off, they may have lost track of what they were called on to help their supplicants remember. The baker’s bread about to blacken in the oven and burn the shop down; the life jackets abandoned in the trunk of the car as the man pulls the cord on the motor and heads out into the waves with his son. Usually they’re involved with less important tasks, igniting sparks in the dimness of the brain to remind you to save the ice cream you left on the car seat, to turn off the garden hose you got going the evening before. When your prayers remain unanswered, don’t take their unresponsiveness to heart. Sometimes they apply the solutions meant for you to another person though they insist they don’t forget a face. A woman unexpectedly blurts out what wasn’t on the tip of her tongue but someone else’s; a man recalls a lover he never had and sends her roses. Help these divinities if you can. Place a sticky note with your request where they’ll likely see it, perhaps beside the sausage roll you left on the kitchen counter with the sign Eat This, in case they forget to eat.
God of NEXT-TO-NOTHING
She’s an expert on exactness. In the left pan of the weigh scale, she puts next-to-nothing; in the opposite, an apostrophe, the front left leg of a midge, the millimetre mark on a wooden ruler. Even on its own, each is heavier than what she’s been chosen to watch over. She finds the soul of thieves, the soul of meanness, the soul of envy. She puts them, scrawny and brittle, one by one, on the right. With each, she’s surprised they still bear a burden—every time, there’s a drop in their direction. Finally she finds the soul of a sleepwalker. Halfway to being something else, almost done with earthly things though it guides the body down the stairs, past the open wound of ditches and wells, this soul approaches the lightness she’s been seeking. As she records her findings with a feather quill, the scale dips to one side then the other, surely on the verge of balance.
God of BIRDS
Birds eschew gods. They’re all buddhas without the belly and the smile. Who needs a smile when you can sing? How much they can teach us. Like the heron who stands on one leg if he has one leg. Like the heron who stands on one leg if he has two. If you’re bored, mimic the nuthatch who climbs the tree upside down.
In the North, ravens wait for wolves to rip the caribou carcass open. To kill time, they invent a new religion made entirely of sinews. Their feet are black because they wade into the darkness where sleep takes you every night. If you pay them enough attention, Zen-like,
you may learn to leave your body and follow their three-toed footprints into no-form at all.
God of THE MOON
In spring it’s a bowl of cherry blossoms as they open, a hint of rose turning white. You can also say it’s a bowl of maggots: when they transmogrify into flies, the moon wanes. In times of hunger the moon’s a plate of rice and fish. In fall it’s a winnowing basket of ground corn, then a tortilla patted flat by a woman’s hands. Sometimes, no matter what the season, there’s blood in it. Is it a comfort to know the moon in the sky sees nothing? That’s what keeps it distant and abstract. The moon’s beauty is past change, though of course it changes. Praise it for its self-erasure, for its cool complacency. Praise it for its equal love of flies and blossoms, for its offer to mean. The winter moon is a whale’s vertebra, turned on its side. Salt-pocked, sand-glistened. Can you say it’s also what you see when you wear bones over your eyes in the snow so you won’t go blind? Praise it for silence, for its patience with your blasphemy—the metaphors you lay on its altar like fattened living beasts.
God of NOSES
O, the marvel of her designs! The six olfactory organs on the ant’s antennae; the mandrill’s crimson proboscis, the same colour as his ass; the hound’s nose that is smarter than most eyes.
Yet some of her cronies make fun of her. They’re in charge of migration, black holes and quasars, the fate of the first-born child. One of them dares to laugh but suddenly he feels his own nose widen horrifically across his face. Then it dangles like a rubber hose he has to catch before it smacks the pearly floor.
Human beings irk her too. Think of the millions of nose jobs. And though people are willing to believe in almost anything, they don’t believe in her. She zaps them with curses. Their noses burn and blister, grow blackheads and pimples, plug up with gobs of snot. In the most inappropriate of settings—a job interview, a formal dinner, a first date in a movie theatre before the lights go out—someone’s index finger goes berserk (she’s behind this), dives into his nostril, and picks and picks.
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