The Witch of the Inner Wood
Page 13
face among face, and then wrecked cars
started their motors and lightless drove
into the dark like stampeding herds,
car after car, like blind despair,
and the Masks ran with them and after them:
Wolf, killer, laughing like crazy man,
Raven, fire brand, who stole sky’s coal,
Sir Bear, spirit of rock hills, mad
Cedar Mask, his hanged-man’s tongue
lolling from lips like stirrup straps —
A woman rose from the wailing grass,
held out her child, humped backwards,
knotted arms splayed out: Kenora —
Then a radio blared like a trumpet;
the black clouds broke — the sky was like
a prairie: sandbagged trucks besieged
with rifle shots and tears, a steady rain
of ice.
Mist thickened from the river,
streamed to the north, towards Perseus,
became, white river, the bridge of stars
where myriad myriad dust motes leaped,
pale, useless dancers, creation’s hares . . .
and the old man stood at that milky bridge,
his feet in the soil, his dogs like towers.
It was Marianne, Corn woman, blood
on her bosom, the harvest dirt
thick on her hair, on her moccasins,
small bones like bird skulls in her lap,
she who was buried, who led across.
Behind her all the bright races massed,
the flickering tribes of the not yet born
crossing at night by the light of day
which shines in the heavens’ darkest hours
and by the angel torches of the dead.
Singing like water the nations crossed.
I could not hear what song they sang,
crossing in life to a different dream,
which I could not have.
Mankind
has a different history
than I can suppose. The Indians
a different road. My own, yet dark.
I turned and saw a rain-drenched hare
shivering in alders, a faint red dawn
fading in river water like a stain.
*
Into my sleep came the first bird songs,
whitethroat and phoebe, the spilling light
cleansing the river. The forest stirred.
The smokes are rising above the trees.
I hear a tractor in the fields
growling above the meeting house, and saws
buzzing, a whistle, and someone’s step
lightly coming the river road.
A child’s voice sings: “Molly come over” —
an Indian song I had never heard,
fiddleheading, her lover calls her canoe —
down by the log bridge, loitering there,
I wait for the singer. She will not come,
busy with other business.
Is it the scent of strawberries
anchors me here, or the river’s fish,
ghost food ghostly of paradise?
I can be nourished on anything.
Where I am no use I must let go.
Now like a tearing fish, a flower
panting against the barb, my hooked heart
drums more vitally, this gash
that bleeding at my side flutters a veil
of pulling grief, pink on the wind.
I broke it loose. I left the red flesh
hanging,
and escaped.
On the far shore
is a trail of red where a wounded deer
fled from the dogs.
It is not far.
The blood spots turn to berries at my feet.
Book Three: THE BOOK OF THE THRONES
for my brother in Christ, James Hampton, whose labour, The Thrones of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly, owned by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC, suggested this poem.
PART ONE: RUBY
I have to explain to you about the Thrones and about my sister Pearl. She was very religious. The Thrones are religious but they are too queer for a church and if Mr. Levine hadn’t got the museum to take them I don’t know what I would have done. It’s his garage. I’m not religious myself but Pearl was and the way she worked on those things you had to respect her. She’d go up there after supper and work on them sometimes past twelve and she’d still be up before six to go to work. Well she had to have something and I helped pay the rent for the garage because I figured well that was one thing I could do. And you should have seen the trouble they had getting the stuff out.
You see all those things are so big in spite of Pearl’s being a dwarf but they are mostly just cut up pieces of cardboard with boxes or chairs or pieces of tables inside them. They are junk really but all put together in little bits and pieces and covered all over with aluminum foil. You can’t think how much foil went into that. And she’s got wires and chains and tubes and painted light bulbs and things I don’t know what they are and by the time she’s got it stuck together in those shapes and covered with foil you wouldn’t know what was underneath anyway and you wouldn’t dare lean on it. And the things on the walls they all had to be in the right place. And everything with wings on even the chairs and not just two wings. And things like eyes.
And she had writings, things she made up and printed out in queer shapes, and she’d paste them up and she’d twist up cord and paint it and she’d bunch up cellophane and she’d save up gold foil and coloured foil for special things that you wouldn’t hardly notice what with the darkness in the garage and the lights on and reflected in all that foil it all just looked silver.
You can’t think how hard it was to get all that out of the garage and on to the truck without tearing any of the foil. And those things like pillars with the great wings and spiky tops that look as if they were holding up the ceiling and I think she would have done the ceiling too if she hadn’t died. Well those are cardboard moulds she saw somewhere Mr. Levine got for her and stood them up for her because you know I couldn’t not with the crutches I never did anything for her.
The Thrones is what she called them and they aren’t finished. Sort of like the front of a church except nothing that was human or human shaped could ever sit in those things and if you look at them for a while it gets spooky. But Pearl was the brainy one and that has something to do with it. She used to skip school just to stay home and read. And I never went back after the polio so neither of us finished high school but she was the brainy one and I was the one who went into books. I went into the book bindery and I used to run the binding machine. Back in those days they sewed them. Now I just glue them. I don’t read them. And Pearl got a maintenance job at the Hartmann Building.
They said at first that they couldn’t pay full wages to someone who wasn’t full size because she couldn’t do the full work but she showed them. But it was still just the minimum and it was hard for her. She’d come home too tired to talk but she’d still go right out after supper and work on them. She was a worker.
Even in her last days at the hospital she’d still be working. She’d lie on her back there and her hands just working away at nothing and I’d ask her what she was doing. Washing up, she’d say. Or once when she’d been frowning and working her hands finicky-like she said Making the hands of a bird.
But she meant all this to be looked at.
So that’s taken care of. But I remember Pearl with her big head knee high among the rest of the kids peering up at the paintings in the museum like a pug dog. And this is just paper and stuff. But I’ve done what’s right.
Ruby Fletcher
March 1978
PART TWO: PEARL
Morning
As mollusks sense the tide’s turn
I sense dawn. I wake before it. Here,
hovelled in different darknesse
s
the city’s night-sunk grove
beyond our window shimmers, creaks.
Ice holds it fast.
One little match,
one kitchen.
After me
the tenements
put out their coral feelers.
Warmth
drifts upward towards the turning hour,
pulse in Lazarenean rock.
Awake.
And over the ashen sea
tendrils of morning,
the sun’s
pure vein
returns —
first as a fragrance,
then as wind.
*
Wind and a white sky freshen us,
snapping the ice from the city’s wires,
signs, streaming roofs, and trees.
The grey snow smoulders.
The birds rejoice.
Rising like sparks from the chimney tops
as if tossed to the sky, they form a disk,
a wheel of feathers, of eyes, of flame.
Burning within them
the single Eye —
livid —
— that looks,
that seals
on me. . . .
And the coffee scalds,
knife in my mouth. I gag for breath.
“My Lord,” I cry. I cry, “My Lord,
send me.”
*
I leave before she rises, climb
before she finds her crutches,
every day.
I leave the kettle for her,
and recall — so long ago —
the child who leaped
from bed to tease me, pull me
from my cot, her living doll, her nuisance,
pet — I followed her. Ruby,
I was your little dog.
*
Shorter than shadow, buttock high,
I reach the bus steps out of breath,
using my hands for the iron ridge.
Each day those slippery, clammy seats
jerk under me as if the road
were choppy water, as if the bus
scrambled, itself on hands and knees
under the rocks, cranes, rusty beams.
It jolts on cobbles towards Market Slip,
pit of the city, Paradise Row.
My work begins.
*
Slime stains, food stains, corridors
of refuse dropped, kicked, blown —
where smokers innocent as dogs,
as dirty, shed.
This is not chaos
but quickening.
Something will come
from these whisperings.
Though they will not listen.
I find
their doodlings in the trash, their mazes,
their knots, constricted flowers,
secrets deformed —
but the Lord must speak.
He pushes within their fingertips.
But they clench, they fist
their minds.
*
Threaded to God is the work of dust.
I weave as if in silent dance
order around me. From this chink
extend my ladder labouring.
A kind of mercy — this empty world
I scour, I mend, I clean.
*
I was the mermaid in my dreams,
the littlest one, not beautiful,
who loved the prince of the upper world.
Crippled with labour, with queerness mute,
I sweep; I mop; the waters dance,
foam on the tiles by my pinioned feet.
Changeling, slit-tongued sparrow, speak—
stutter, as little children do,
burnt tongue whisper:
“’weep, ’weep!”
Listen, oh Lord,
and the Lord will hear.
His world’s my oyster.
I’ll not want.
Shined with the chafings of my chores
this flat, tear-flavoured water is
my mansion, shore, my all but home.
Darkness
is only parable.
The cleaned eye overflows.
*
The mop, this wavy, sturdy shape,
when I push on its bird wing, bends
like water running along a beach,
like a ruffle of furled aluminum,
like a fringe of lace.
The lace stains rose
where my knuckles bleed,
where the wringer catches.
I looked for gloves.
I found a rainbow in the wound.
Wrong size or right,
the small grow strong —
“sheer plod” — cut hand,
sore feet or side. Shine sillion.
We earn all things.
* REJOICE *
Rejoice that the work will never be done.
In the heating plant
where the watchman throws his cigarettes,
the lights with their dangling chains for me
are the legs of birds.
They are in flight,
against the corners of the wall
a moving fire immovable
burning the eye.
Remember foil:
water breaking the ocean’s light,
or an angel’s side
quivering, tinsel or cellophane,
image for visions —
I strike my beam.
Still as a seed from its hiding place
I push, I blossom.
All things rise
in a different flesh.
All things
will rise,
perspire,
and shine.
Noon
All things are emblems of His way,
this city: map, its asphalt wharfs,
that old man of pink granite — light
flows over him like water, he reflects
no light, like Eden bland, unborn,
a kind of monk. Around him
checkered shades of things, real
and dependent, the animal griefs —
are snow spit melting upon his gloves.
His gaze is barren, crystalline,
no talent spent. Desirelessness
is perfect
and inadequate. The city must
be earned.
*
The harvests come to Market Square,
by Broad Street, Bull, by Crown and Cross.
Straight up six blocks
the talents come
from the farms, the mills, the fishing boats—
smelling of bread, of winkles, shrimp,
cusk, cod, and the bland New Brunswick cheese,
cabbage leaves browned from the truckers’ mitts,
comb honey, slush on the sloping floor.
Spending and getting they flesh Your powers.
The dirty sunlight slides like oil,
responding from the market stalls,
mirror and choir. Before me spreads
communion. At the market door
the gospel couple bounce and sing,
with their guitars and microphones,
the sweet, plump souls — they are two fruits,
two loaves of bread, two doves, two breasts —
their milky good outrushes, song
most common, Christ’s
most worldly wine, the real You loved.
They hold Your doors.
Shine out Your
married Light.
*
We work and then we work again.
The time ticks by
as if it dried upon a stem,
as if each morning withers,
as if noon
dulls as if drained.
So market wanes.
So children drag their way to school.
In the churn of the cars and the buses’ coughs
an empt
y cipher seems to roll,
rolling along the empty walks
like a carton, like trash,
like a hidden thought. . . .
*
Lovely the buildings the salt sea shreds:
turquoise, rust-red, forest green,
pale blue, dark blue, city grey.
Stair upon stair the acned rock
chafes at their cellars; the pavement cracks
and buckles below them. The brine runs down
their ravaged, sagging, crippled walls
as if the wood had tears.
The blue-green church will be taken down
for a store, Save-Easy. The pungent orange
that colours my fingers the last sad sign
of a world far off.
Oh pray for us,
this lonely, northern city, here
where windows gleam like misery,
sooty, unmended. The only stores
sell junk, lost hopes.
This mandolin
with dented sides, these scratched
enamel basins, rusted skates,
shoestrings in wads, and those oil lamps —
I pass them every working day.
Who sells?
Who buys?
A broken speech.
No one will comprehend.
On the hospital hill the mad man walks
back and forth with his picket sign:
I KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
The bottle that rolled beneath the grate,
the grey hat swimming after it —
signs, and emblems,
and secrecies:
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
Walks back and forth.
*
The noon is the sorriest time of day.
The mouth of the dumb, the desolate —
He cries aloud in the dusty streets:
I KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
No one will see it, the overlooked,
the stunted, the whisperer —
small —
“The best things come in small packages,”
Daddy used to say. Not beautiful,
oyster not pearl. A face from the earth.
“Dwarf,” they mean, for “shrunken-souled,”
“ugly,” “distorted,” — they are afraid
of a dwarf’s small hands.
My sister knows.
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
Afternoon
When the steam boils out of the dish machine,
remember, oh Zion, like shaking cups,
the washed souls tremble in His heat,
sponged, exhausted, and glistening.
Be filled; be emptied;
the Spirit comes