Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
A Prologue
BIRDS APPEARING IN A DREAM
HOW SNOW ARRIVES
THE WATCH
ABOUT THE MOTH
CONFESSIONAL
SUMMER ANNIVERSARY
BIRD CRASHING INTO WINDOW
HOW DID IT GET INSIDE?
TO THE MORTICIAN'S SON
BOUGAINVILLEA
SNOW DAY
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
THE MISSING MOUNTAIN
SINGING, 5 A.M.
OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH
THEIR WEIGHT
MINE OWN JOHN CLARE
ELEGY FOR A LONG-DEAD FRIEND
A WINTER FEEDING
SPELUNKER
THE MESSENGER
A LINE FROM ROBERT DESNOS USED TO COMMEMORATE GEORGE "SONNY" TOOK-THE-SHIELD, FORT BELKNAP, MONTANA
BIGGAR, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1976
MEDEA'S OLDEST SON
LOST HORIZON
AUBADE
BOAT RENTAL
COMMON FLICKER
INVOCATION TO THE HEART
A NIGHT AT THE WINDOW
THE LIFT
TO A CHAMELEON
NIGHT STORY
TURKEY VULTURES
IN MAY
SHELLEY'S GUITAR
BARDO
THE NEXT NIGHT
Notes
Acknowledgments
About The Author
Copyright © 2006 by Michael Collier
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collier, Michael, date.
Dark wild realm / Michael Collier.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-58222-8
ISBN-10: 0-618-58222-3
1. Birds—Poetry. 2. Human-animal
relationships—Poetry. I.Title.
PS3553.0474645D37 2006
811'.54—dc22 2005024759
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
WOZ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Katherine
A Prologue
The mind shapes bodies
that take on other shapes,
changes no one but gods should make.
And so I ask the gods
to let this song lead deftly,
back and forth through time,
until it finds the shape
of the world's beginning.
BIRDS APPEARING IN A DREAM
One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,
another a tail of color-coded wires.
One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,
another a flicker with a wounded head.
All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,
bright, circulating in burning air,
and all returned when the air cleared.
One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,
deep in the ground, miles from water.
Everything is real and everything isn't.
Some had names and some didn't.
Named and nameless shapes of birds,
at night my hand can touch your feathers
and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,
you who have made bright things from shadows,
you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.
HOW SNOW ARRIVES
The pine trees stood without snow,
though snow was in the air,
a day or two away, forming in the place
where singing forms the air.
"Mother?" is what I heard my mother say,
said in such a way she knew her mother
didn't know her, as if they stood
beneath the trees and breathed the singing air.
How frail the weather when its face
is blank or, startled, turns to find
its startled self in a child's voice,
flake by flake of the arriving snow.
"Mother?" is what I say, as if
I didn't know her, standing blank
and startled where she stands beneath
the trees amid the singing air.
THE WATCH
Three days after our friend died,
having dropped to his knees
at the feet of his teammates,
we are sitting in a long,
narrow, windowless chapel,
staring at his casket
that runs parallel to the pews.
It's like a balance beam
or a bench you could sit on—
floral sprays around it,
a wooden lectern behind,
and a priest nobody knew,
a man I'd seen in the parking lot,
pulling on a beret and stamping out
a cigarette, all in one move,
as he emerged from his car,
holding a black book.
And now he is reassuring us
that our friend is in
a better place, that God,
too soon, has called him home,
a mystery faith endures.
Occasionally he looks down
to check his watch, the habit
of a man who always has
a next place to be, which must be why
he barely stays to finish the job.
Our friend
had the most beautiful voice
and his guitar was as cool
and smart, soulful
in its registers. When he played,
he gave his body to the music,
his eyes closed sometimes and his head bent,
sheltering what he made of himself,
his fingers knowing the next place
and the next—his voice, too—
taking each of us with him.
ABOUT THE MOTH
If you think the dead understand silence,
then why do they light their hems
and burn in dresses? Why do they fan their wings
against screens and windows as if they wanted in?
Why do they show their wiry contraptions
dusty with age and almost useless?
They only want to wake us with their light
unraveled from upper darkness.
They only want to hear us speak our reassurances.
Love will conquer, the heart endures.
And when they've left—flames, dust—
and frantic—we want them back,
not the friends and parents they once had been
but their new presences, sharp, unequivocal,
buoyant in their crossing back and forth,
inhabiting the condition they've become.
CONFESSIONAL
I was waiting for the frequency of my attention
to be tuned to an inner station—all mind but trivial matter,
wavelengths modulated like topiary swans on a topiary sea,
and not quite knowing where the tide would take me.
In the darkness where I kneeled, I heard whispering,
like dry leaves. It had a smell—beeswax, smoke;
a color—black; and a shape like a thumb.
That's when the door slid open and the light that years ago
spoke to me, spoke again, and through the veil,
an arm, like a hand-headed snake, worked through,
seven-fingered, each tipped with sin. What the snake c
ouldn't see,
I saw, even as it felt what I felt or heard what I said.
Then along my arms boils and welts rose, on my back
scourge marks burned. I counted nails, thorns.
In my mind, inside my own death's head, I could hear: "Please,
forgive me. Do not punish me for what I cannot be."
SUMMER ANNIVERSARY
It was the night before the anniversary
of your death, and the dream I had
was not of you but of a neighbor
who the day before had undergone some tests.
He stood in his yard holding a rake
the size of a palm frond.
The grass was brown and the leaves
on all the trees hung as they do in summer,
patiently, not concerned they'll fall.
It was the night before the anniversary
of your death, and my neighbor with the rake
had not yet heard the results of his tests
and so he wanted to be ready for the leaves.
He wanted to apologize as well for being
in my dream. He said, "It's not like me
to die." "You're not dying," I told him,
"you're only in my dream." Then he disappeared.
But the rake he'd held stood by itself,
and the grass, now green, grew quickly
up the rake and sculpted a creature
whose wings stretched over me to catch
the falling leaves, for all at once
it was autumn and the sky let loose
its winter fox and then its hound,
though neither moved, and so the space between them
grew, slowly at first, until it was at the speed
of the world, unseen, spinning like time itself,
pushing apart lover and beloved.
BIRD CRASHING INTO WINDOW
In cartoons they do it and then get up,
a carousel of stars, asterisks, and question marks
trapped in a caption bubble above a dizzy,
flattened head that pops back into shape.
But this one collapsed in its skirt of red feathers
and now its head hangs like a closed hinge and its beak,
a yellow dart, is stuck in the gray porch floor
and seems transformed forever—a broken gadget,
a heavy shuttlecock—and yet it's not all dead.
The breast palpitates, the bent legs scrabble,
and its eye, the one that can't turn away,
fish-egg black, stares and blinks.
Behind me, sitting in a chair, his head resting
on a pillow, a friend recites Lycidas to prove
it's not the tumor or the treatment that's wasted
what his memory captured years ago in school.
Never mind he drops more than a line
or two. It's not a lean and flashy song he sings,
though that's what he'd prefer—his hair
wispy, his head misshapen.
Beyond the window, the wind shakes down
the dogwood petals, beetles drown in sap,
and bees paint themselves with pollen. "Get up! Fly away!"
my caption urges. "Get up, if you can!"
HOW DID IT GET INSIDE?
Not a message in a bottle
but the keel and wrongs,
the lap and brightwork,
beams and thwarts, and belowdecks,
in berths, hammocks hung.
Yardarms unfurled reefed sails.
Lines zinged through tackle.
Sizing stiffened the jib.
Hemp keelhauled pilferers
of the mess. But now it rides
at anchor in a dark room
where dust occludes the mind's eye.
Even so, you can hear
the deckhand's wooden leg,
like a butter churn, thump
to the memory of his sawed-off limb,
and the one-eyed crewmen gauge
the captain's rusted hook.
Somehow the corked-up wind
still swirls, the spinnaker bursts.
Speed moves the clouds
and the clouds disperse.
And the first mate's parrot,
wired to its perch, knows—
crow's nest to storm anchor—
once you've survived
the worst, the log records:
hope first, then skill.
TO THE MORTICIAN'S SON
No choice but to be your father's son
and yet never to be him, who moved like vapor,
who stood secure as a pillar,
and yet if not for you, prodigal,
stuffed in a dark suit,
if you had not tried to hand a program
to the deceased's ex
and usher her down the aisle like any mourner,
I would not find you consoling now,
not that I found you unsettling then,
or that your slovenly discomfort would be memorable,
especially the next day
when we interred my friend,
and you, positioned above the grave,
after a while made little steps
to move our small party down the hill
toward the black cars. Consoling
because my friend would have loved
how unfit you were for the family trade
and perhaps even enjoyed
how you peeved his former wife,
though not from malice,
and made of his death some melodrama,
human and absurd.
BOUGAINVILLEA
Of its productivity—
whim of blossoming—
hope that came
of its luck, of shade
struck triumphantly:
of this, so much worry.
Of its constant failure,
travail trailing the tendering
hand, and its rise by leaf,
through eave-height and sun-cower,
the too much and too little,
of its thirst;
from that was a life's consideration,
the planted stave,
the blessed frond replaced,
and of the cul-de-sac opening—
the garden of one concern:
gaudy mirror for the hummingbird,
bright reflection of stifled
migration and the passage out.
Of this was the perfume
and suffering,
the blossom trained
over all contingencies.
SNOW DAY
It's snowing and it won't ever stop!
In order for this to happen, the eastern tropics
of the Pacific have had to cool or warm.
Now the sun's not rising and the children,
still asleep, dream of weather as a rippling
curtain of northern lights across the arctic sky.
Or the children are awake and dressed
but have turned away from breakfast—
all the radios and all the televisions are on.
And even when the snow stops we will say,
It fell all day! Who cares if the sun rose
or the wind turned the trees to glass.
That's how snow is, falling, never stopping,
promising itself to itself, changing one day
into the same day, like happiness into happiness.
Now the sun is setting and the yard is blue.
And only someone who loves cold
and isolation could live like this,
waiting at the window for disturbance,
someone who wants the world buried,
who loves the short days, the deep long nights,
and then waking up to see nothing as it was
before the snow began to fall.
TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
A lion is devouring a man.
That's how they first appear
&nb
sp; when you come upon them
in the gallery, beneath the skylight,
among many other artifacts
removed from the past.
But the lion could as well
be kissing the man. The animal mouth
engaged with the throat, a leg
behind the neck, a paw gripping
biceps, supporting him
who in his pleasure tilts back
his head and spreads his legs,
but only so far as the lion allows,
for the lover's paw pins
the human foot, crushes
the toes and sandal of the man
who is ravished but not consumed.
THE MISSING MOUNTAIN
Cars could reach the mountain's saddle,
a notch between two peaks, and there
survey the grid of lighted streets,
a bursting net of beads and sequins,
a straining movement cruising for release.
Dark Wild Realm Page 1
