God of Shadows
Page 4
God of NEVER
Poe got it right. This god’s familiar is her raven. Her celestial omen, the Dark Moon. Really, what we call “the first lunar phase” is no moon at all. Once a month, raven plucks the silver disc from the sky and tucks it in a clamshell to show earthlings what a never-moon could mean. This god’s around if you’ve never kissed a fool, never stitched a wound, never given up on searching for a theory that explains your life. She’s there when you understand happily never after. Never say never, the self-help books advise. Beware the never-dog who’s never found a home. Imagine never being done. Never being broken. Never living in a body loved so much the soul is loath to leave.
God of THE GAPS
The god of sex, the god of insects—both claim they’re the busiest but the god of the gaps doesn’t get a coffee break, a day off, a Sunday-morning snooze: this is the god invented to explain what science can’t. Think of the disparities, rifts, lacunae, that baffle PhDs; add to that the other mysteries she must watch over. Let’s consider just one—the workings of the human heart. Cardiologists have plotted its dimensions, diseases, function, but they are dumb when it comes to its devotions, to its propensity to break. Einstein, who walked in wonder, quipped, “You can’t blame gravity for falling in love.” Though it won’t do you any good, you can blame the god of the gaps.
God of SLOUGHS
You can tell he’s a western god or he’d be called the god of ponds. Sloughs are not romantic. You can’t imagine someone serenading offshore, tossing petals in the wake. One out of ten on the prairies is alkali, white crusting around the edges. He got the idea from the god of frost though alkali to its advantage survives the heat. You can’t drink from a slough, but ducks paddle in the reeds, the eggs of red-winged blackbirds balance in the swaying bulrushes, and the sky falls into it as it would into nicer water, clouds stiffening and flattening like starched handkerchiefs a laundress from long ago hangs out to dry.
God of PAIN
On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is it? How are you to know? Is 10 a decapitation or a hornet sting? Is 3 a penis rubbing the atrophied walls of an old vagina? Does the 3 drop to 1 if the woman comes? This god is the loneliest. No one wants him. You stand corrected—he created masochists, after all. At the festivals a hundred or so of the worst of them turn up to carry his effigies from cemetery to chapel. Sometimes he takes the form of a horse’s bowel tied in a knot, other times ripped rotator cuffs shown on X-rays carried like stiff flags on poles. There are clinics in his name. Big pharmaceuticals get rich. People plead with him to shift the suffering of their beloved to them. He won’t do it. What you own you own, he tells them; that’s true for pain more than any other thing. Finally agony is all that’s left, no matter who you were before it started, what good you did. This divinity moulds a new you out of burns and aches and shattering, and leaves you with it. He watches over, yes, you bet, but his eyes are cold.
God of OWLS
You want there to be a separate god for owls, for the barred, the burrowing, the saw-whet, the spotted, the great horned, the barn owl whose gaze draws you to his wide face and you see yourself, pale, uncanny. You want this god to keep these birds from harm so the night will be lavishly feathered. Their wings in flight will row through the waters of your sleep and you’ll sense the dip and rise of them, the sky riddled with eyes. You want this god to instruct them not to scoop a cat into the sky, or a family’s only chicken. You want the slow unrolling of the owls’ vowels to slip into your speaking. So much, so little they have to say. You want the owls’ silence to be this god’s silence, one that doesn’t mean there’s no one there, but a refined and honed attention, a keen listening high above you, and a steady looking down.
EPILOGUE: I KNOW YOUR WORKS
I am the first and the last.
I am the cat and the crocodile,
the manta ray and the nostrils of the newt.
I am the nipple and the hard heel of the foot.
I am the spoil that swells the belly, I am
the stone’s spasm and the death cry
of the barley field. Look for me
in the bowels of the rhinoceros,
in the hollow bones of the listing hawk.
In song, in not-song you will find me.
I am your birth and your never-waking,
your lungs sinking into clay. I am
their anguished breath, their weight
of mossy stones. I know your works.
I was there when you were fashioned
from tar and ruin and pity,
all your eyes becoming two eyes,
your hundred weary hearts
compressing into one.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The quotation italicized in “God of Sex” is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci. Found in Bluets, Maggie Nelson (Wave Books, 2009) p. 23. Lawn dolphins in “God of Renaming” is a term invented by poets Jim Bertolino and Anita K. Boyle in their attempt to rehabilitate slugs. The quotation that ends “God of the Mutable” is the traditional Ashanti way of beginning to tell a tale.
The sources of the epigraphs at the beginning of the book and in each section are as follows: Pessoa, from “A Factless Autobiography,” The Book of Disquiet (ed. & trans. Richard Zenith, Penguin, 2003) p. 26; Mirabi, from The Soul Is Here For Its Own Joy (ed. Robert Bly, Ecco, 1999) p. 191; Roberto Calasso, from Literature and the Gods (trans. Tim Parks, Knopf, 2001) p. 3; Emily Dickinson, from one of her letters (from a book I have misplaced); Stephen Dunn, from “Dostoyevsky in Wildwood” in Local Visitations (W.W. Norton & Co., 2003) p. 90; Paul Verlaine, from “Les Dieux,” as quoted in Calasso on p. 19.
Earlier versions of some of these poems appeared in The Malahat Review, The Harlequin, and In/Words. Several were featured in The Philosophical Salon of the Los Angeles Review of Books.
My thanks go to my publisher, especially Jared Bland, Anita Chong, Kelly Joseph, Jen Lum (the wonderful designer), and Heather Sangster, (my sharp-eyed copyeditor). Special thanks to Donna Bennett for her friendship and support, and her wit and wisdom as my editor. She’s been with me since 1985. I also want to thank Patrick Lane, who helps me find the holy in every day.
LORNA CROZIER is the author of sixteen previous books of poetry, including What the Soul Doesn’t Want, The Wrong Cat, Small Mechanics, The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems, and Whetstone. She is also the author of The Book of Marvels: A Compendium of Everyday Things and the memoir Small Beneath the Sky. She won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry for Inventing the Hawk and three additional collections were finalists for this prize. She has received the Canadian Authors Association Award, three Pat Lowther Memorial Awards, and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. She is a Professor Emerita at the University of Victoria and an Officer of the Order of Canada, and she has received five honorary doctorates for her contributions to Canadian Literature. She lives in British Columbia with writer Patrick Lane and two fine cats who love to garden.