Then the director said, Show me Ariel.
The others in the cast stayed
in their feet and thighs while he
made instantly of his body a lightness
that flitted and swooped through the wings
though he stood –
what we would have called –
perfectly still.
WHETSTONE
The stone that sharpens stars,
their slow slice across the sky.
Flat, black, and shot with mica. For twenty years
it must have mingled with the gravel
on the road I run. Now its light
has reached my eyes.
What does it want from me?
To be moved into another
galaxy of knives? To be looked upon and left
where it has found me? Maybe it’s just a stone
among other stones, desireless
and unafflicted.
The only colour black can be
yet it is star-sparked, sun-salted.
Does it know I am
dulled by God?
His negligence,
his under-use.
THREE MOVEMENTS FOR THE WIND
Without a mother, without a father,
wind carries no resemblance anywhere it goes.
One barb on the wire catches a tuft of wind.
This is the only thing that happens for miles.
Chime, sock, mill, flower: hook a word
to the wind and it will move.
WHAT COMES AFTER
I am my own big dog.
Walk, and I’m at the door,
eat, and I take what I offer,
lie down, and I curl on the floor,
my heavy head between my paws.
I don’t need anything but this,
I don’t think of what comes after.
I sing the way a dog sings,
I weep the way a dog weeps.
Every night at my feet
I am a big sack of sleep
stinking of me.
DROUGHT
Water is suddenly old.
It feels a stiffness,
a lessening deep down.
Now if you row past the reeds,
drop a bucket on a rope
and pull it up,
water won’t have
the strength to turn
that darkness into light.
THE LIGHT IN MY MOTHER’S KITCHEN
Three green tomatoes on the windowsill,
offerings the household gods will not refuse.
My mother isn’t here, but the bulb glows
in the small house of the oven
where something firm and golden
pushes against the tin walls of a pan.
If my father were alive he’d be asking
What’s for supper? He’d be sitting
at the table with a beer and cigarette,
his hard heels on the rung of a chair,
my mother with her back to him,
as if he’d spoken out of turn,
as if he’d asked too much again.
The smell of yeast, and no one talking.
The sound of the fridge saving everything
that can be saved. As the sun disappears
the oven casts its light on what will feed us.
Cigarette smoke rises, the dark breath
of my father filling my mouth.
TO SEE CLEARLY
“See how many ends this stick has!”
– Montaigne
The strawlike strands of grass are frosted
only on one side, but the thorn
of the wild rose is feathered all around,
even on its tip, a soft flared tuft.
The task: to see clearly
so that even the ear becomes a kind of eye
taking you beyond the small circle
of your sight – even the mouth –
magpie, magpie over the southern hill.
In the grove, birches move in and out of snow
as if the wind were made of wheels and pulleys,
trees dropping from the sky so suddenly
you gasp and fog your glasses.
Instead of shadows there are streaks of gold!
Don’t think the snow can’t see you
reeling in the light.
ICE-FOG
The air annunciates. It breathes a frosty haze
on my pants and jacket as if I’m growing fur.
Immeasurable, indifferent, now it can be touched
and tasted. It can be seen. Have I fallen through
to the other side of morning or risen above clouds?
This weight, this stillness: splendour thickening.
Down the road a dog barks. Someone walks toward me,
head and shoulders plumed with white. Father?
Lord of Winter? O Death! When his lips touch mine
they will be feathers. I don’t know what to do.
I pray for wind, for sun, I pray for my father to speak
before he turns to crystals as he turned to ash.
In the visible around me hoarfrost
hallucinates a thousand shards of bone.
DROUGHT
In such a time rain could have anything
it wanted: a roofless house,
days without worry, goatskin gloves
to warm its long grey fingers.
The farmers would even sacrifice
a daughter, one who’d never
seen in seven years
the bare branch blossom.
With a veil of rain, a thread of rain,
she’d walk into rain’s labyrinth;
outside her parents’ house the trees
turning green with grief.
FORM
The chickadee
drops
to the middle
of the lily pad
makes it dip a little
just enough water
slips over the edge
for the bird
to bathe.
SHADOW
To lie on one side of a tree
then another, over rough or smooth.
To feel cool along one’s whole body
lengthening without intent,
nothing getting in the way.
To give up on meaning.
To never wear out or mar.
To move by increments like
a beautiful equation, like the moon
ripening above the golden city.
To be doppelganger,
the soft underside of wings,
the part of cumulus that slides
thin promises of rain across the wheat.
To disappear. To be blue
simply because snow has fallen
and it’s the blue hour of the day.
THE SILENCE OF CREATION
After Adam did what he was told
and named the animals,
God created the unnamable.
Lean and sinewy like something old;
a small afterthought, it seemed back then,
the crucial work all done.
But soon the names of things began
to disappear, and then the things themselves,
muteness moving in, slowly at first,
like numbness at the ends of fingers.
Far from the dream that is Eden,
it is hard for us now to believe
in the fluent blooms of Paradise
where the blood of Adam’s naming
stepped, finned and fluttered
into the greening of the light.
Was it envy? Was it loneliness –
the no one God could talk to –
that made Him say, “Let there be silence,”
just as the world began to sing?
THE PHYSICS OF THE ROSE
“ ‘The electron,’ the professor said, ‘lives in a different space from
the one we live in.’ ”
<
br /> – Amir D. Aczel, God’s Equation
Each petal an eyelid, blood-fused, over what
invisible eyes! How it inhabits now,
how it occupies the whole house of your seeing.
Fold after fold, its silence so enclosed
it seems a kind of speaking, light’s muted
hallelujah brought inside.
Shocking as a heart cut out and set in glass,
it makes the room spin around it.
The antithesis of absence,
of stillness, its red fist unfurling
this, this and this, a daring to be open
so immoderate you want to say outrageous,
you want to say ridiculous, but can’t.
Clothed or not, you stand naked in its eyes.
Small and unadorned,
without a lover.
LAZARUS
Said nothing day after day.
The scribes and priests who waited
for something to write down, returned
to their temples, mouths and pockets
empty. But for fear of the messiah,
they would’ve beaten him with sticks,
they would have burned his tongue
until he spoke in ashes.
Even his two sisters grew sick of him:
that dry cough, his constant weeping,
the way his feet shuffled in the dust
as if he’d never left it.
Revulsion of their flesh, they said,
that’s what made him spend the nights
far from the house, alone in the dark.
How could they know it was their hair
that drove him to the fields?
The sound of it growing
in their sleep.
IT IS NIGHT
Wind turns back the sheets of the field.
What needs to sleep, sleeps there.
What needs to rest.
The door has fallen from the moon.
It floats in the slough, all knob and hinges.
Now the moon’s so open
anything could walk right through.
Only the fox is travelling.
One minute he’s a cat, the next a coyote.
Enough light to see by
yet my mouth lies in darkness.
What needs to sleep, sleeps there.
What needs to rest.
Outside my mind, the wind is reckoning.
Always there is something
to figure out.
ANONYMITY
The country of the dead keeps growing.
Is my father lost there, too? Nameless,
without schooling or belief, our love for him
worn thin. Do the animals he killed remember him?
The horses his neighbours couldn’t shoot,
the dog who dragged her sack of guts
studded with gravel from the road to our door.
So many times, outside the house,
I refused to know him.
I’d turn my back on the slant-six Fairlane,
black and white, the muffler he installed
illegal even then, the roar in the street
not a teenage pal, but my Dad.
Now I want him behind the wheel again,
his colour back. Seventy-three and thundering
past the tall white houses of the dead,
louder than their strings and benedictions,
so they’ll have to notice him, so they’ll say out loud,
There he goes, and have to name him:
Emerson Crozier in his souped-up Ford.
RAPTURE
Will Jesus come to the small towns first?
Folks lined up in lawn chairs along the street
as if waiting for a late parade: the Lord in hat
and snakeskin boots on a chestnut mare, or leading
the Lions’ band, light around him brighter
than the sun bouncing off the mayor’s tuba.
Or will he descend to the city?
Down to the deepest part, the underground
mechanics of moving people from dark to dark
one of his delights, the fervour of getting on
and off, the signs – their good direction.
I want him to come where I am now
among the chickadees on the grid I walk,
small chatty angels lighting on his palms,
black feet singed, or yellow warblers circling
above his head, flicking like sparks
from an old-fashioned Zippo with a flint
that needs replacing.
At the line of washing in the farmyard,
though they’ve gone electric, the woman
will suddenly drift higher than the sheets,
her arms flapping, the collie wagging
at the awkward, fleshy soul she is,
what never sang before now singing
as the subway six hundred miles east
spills its travellers, no matter what the stop,
onto rising silver stairs and they are lifted
to the glass doors of the burning city, oh,
their blistered eyes.
BRUSHES MADE FROM ANIMAL HAIR
The badger clamped the broken branch
between his teeth.
The boy gripped the other end,
afraid to let go, for hours in the field
dragged that fierceness
backwards – a step or two
then a standoff a stutter forward,
back again – the half mile
to the shelterbelt around the farm.
This is the pull
the painter feels in the brush.
What happened when the boy made it, almost home?
What happened when his arms gave out?
What is the source of light?
FOUR COWS IN MOONLIGHT
Just before the evening milking,
the moon so big and golden,
the cows in the pasture are watching it rise,
two Holsteins standing, two reclining,
udders swung to one side.
On his master’s whistle a border collie
switches through the grass
to bring them home. He, too, stopping,
sensing something, looking up.
When I’m near, the cows don’t startle
or glance my way. White patches flare
on their foreheads, backs, and hips;
udders flush a deeper pink,
the milk inside them also moonspill.
How can we call cows stupid?
I was the one walking past that brightness,
my mind on lesser things,
until I saw their faces lifted,
their blazed, moon-baffled eyes.
MELANOMA
The sea keeps coming in,
no one talking. I have to
sit down with the word
for a while. The waves
leave nothing here,
just an upper lip
pinched in the sand
at the highest point.
It keeps on changing.
Many-boned
and maculate, my feet,
one with a scar –
that’s what I wanted
to come to –
one with a scar
shaped like a willow leaf.
It glows in the absence
of any light, that other tide
– the dark one –
rolling in.
LETTER HOME: TOO MUCH, TOO LITTLE
With autumn’s lessening comes
a fullness. When I arrived late summer
only random geese flew above the lake
as if the one who gets them ready
waited for a shipment of new hinges
to make the intricate connection between
the heart and the beating of the wings.
Now, two weeks later, countless flocks cross
the great st
ar-bear, refiguring the constellations.
Soon they’ll be beyond my hearing.
The swimmers gone, water makes more noise
because there’s nothing to distract it.
A loon does not reply. Too much solitude
has made me thin but I’m getting better
at saying what I mean. Nothing’s wasted.
Yesterday the woman who sold me milk
and stamped my letter
placed two fingers over the hole in her throat
so she could speak.
POEM FOR A HARD TIME
Chickens
in a shed with screens to let in air,
a small door for them
to step in and out, not an inch
to spare. All things
in their place, particular,
the proper attention paid
so that around them
there seems a kinder light.
And then the eggs to gather,
one by one, warm in your palm.
Each tiny sun contained,
unbroken, no need for it to rise
or fall, no need for anything
to harm you.
WHAT REFUSES FORM
She can’t lie down or sit upright
but reclines in the Lazy-Boy night and day,
feet raised, the tumour at the base of her spine
demanding this in-between, halfway state
though sunlight from the window falls
without cleaving on the wooden floor.
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