Whetstone

by Lorna Crozier

  Every time he comes inside he brings in panic

  with the cold, on the doormat snow puddling

  around his boots. If this were a place of miracles

  he could say the boots were weeping;

  he could say immaculate heart. The pain, too,

  is without form or edges. It slurs across her face,

  a dark smudge coming from far off, that smell

  in the air before rain, but the smell here

  is more corporeal, marshlike, smeared

  with flickers that sink, divide, and rot.

  What good is he? Her silence, her refusal

  to be wise makes him awkward, a tourist

  without language, bargaining for something

  he doesn’t want to own. The only thing

  he knows is the heaviness around her

  he can’t split or lighten, the air itself thickening

  silently, unseen. Though she cannot ease

  his burden, he can sense she’s drifting from him.

  Beside her chair he feels himself grow smaller

  and almost lifts a hand to wave. Pain moves

  out from her like a wake across the water –

  the sharp liquid V that is also the flight of birds.

  SETTING

  Light dozes into autumn and late afternoon.

  The good dishes clean, the table set.

  One place missing a spoon.

  The crow’s flown off with it.

  He’s laying his own meal on a black cloth.

  Something you can chew on,

  something you can spit out,

  something you can share

  with that part of you

  you’ve given nothing to

  all your life.

  SOLITUDE

  Sometimes the dark’s so dark

  nothing can move through it.

  Even the wind, even the geese

  who just an hour ago

  charcoaled their journey from star to star.

  You love the lake at night

  because water keeps its distance

  yet carries sound, crackled and clear,

  from the farthest shore. Sometimes

  the hard notes of a party

  drift through the screen from cabins

  on the southern spit. You said

  nothing moves through this dark.

  But music does, and voices,

  and you go on.

  PAST THE MIDDLE OF MY LIFE

  Ripple after ripple of lake-light

  breaks on the sand and stays there.

  The faraway has just passed through.

  The day is small but it begins with so much

  beauty, I am poured out like water.

  A red squirrel stands upright on the woodpile,

  clenches his paws on his chest and stares,

  wanting me to choose. Maybe it was Jesus on the lake

  in his fishing boat, the disciples pulling up their nets,

  light from their faces and hands – his face, his hands –

  what water carries to the shore, the hard gleam of heaven.

  There should be music. Harps in the birches,

  psalters and a drum. I dance on the sand,

  twirl one way, then the other. The fire begins in my feet.

  There should be baskets for the fish, there should be

  hunger. That I can give you. I used to shine.

  REBUTTAL TO THE HIGHER POWER

  Think of all the names the unnamed could borrow –

  blue-eyed, fescue, little quaking –

  if it had a mind to.

  You lie down in the pasture,

  the back of your head

  pressing into green like a fieldstone

  that’s stayed in the same place

  since muscles of ice heaved it to the sun.

  Beneath you grass stretches its roots

  farther than an arm and hand

  can reach into water. They douse for darkness,

  draw it up to meet the light, or is it light

  the dark becomes on this other side

  where footsteps fall?

  Through hollow stems, grass siphons

  the can’t-be-seen

  and sends it out ignited.

  It’s what gives the shine to everything

  that roots, inclines, or rises only inches.

  Dirt, lichen, stone, their telluric under-glitter.

  It’s the gloriole of wild oats

  in all the ditches, the nodding seedheads.

  The same nod as the birch bough’s,

  the rowboat on its tether,

  the same nod –

  no – slightly different

  as the crow’s, as he hops stiff-kneed around

  the roadkill. As if everything but you

  knows the body’s way of saying yes,

  all afternoon

  the grass replying

  when the invisible asks.

  DROUGHT

  Dirt hems your jeans and the long dress

  you wore when spring got hitched to summer,

  gravel pinging like rice on a Chevy hood, so hot

  your hand burns when you touch it.

  Someone’s nailed a foreclosure sign

  on the barley field. You begin to hate

  the colour blue even in delphiniums,

  even in the slough made bluer by its lips of salt.

  So many auctions in the country:

  that mad roll of syllables blowing in

  from all directions, the heart’s true music

  plaintive and crude, gone to the man

  in the red cap, two bits once,

  two bits twice, and sold.

  High above the heat, clouds aren’t good

  for anything but adding up the losses,

  carry the one, carry the one,

  when you want the one to fall.

  HOPING TO FIX UP, A LITTLE, THIS WORLD

  The cat we’ve named Basho

  plays with the ghost cat who slips

  from bamboo to drink at the pond

  when the sun begins to fall.

  Our other cat, the shy one, climbs

  the slow branches of the pear,

  and you, my love, go to bed

  again too soon. Too much sun?

  I ask. Did you forget to wear your hat?

  Dusk gives way to darkness

  and leaves behind its watchfulness.

  The cats absorb it. They see what I am

  missing, what I can’t make out.

  At the pond I light three candles

  and float them on the water.

  Fish flare up, combustible as coals;

  they warm the lotus bud that swells

  to breaking but will not open. How long

  your sleeping makes the night.

  DRINKING IN MOONLIGHT

  “No one to drink with

  well, there’s the moon.”

  – Li Po

  Hey, the moon’s been hungover

  three nights

  after drinking with you!

  Look at it

  lying on its back, pale thing,

  the top of its head completely gone!

  It’s got one foot

  on a carpet of clouds

  but the earth’s still tilting.

  Now the tides

  won’t high and low

  when they’re supposed to.

  Don’t raise your jar to coax it down!

  Don’t sing your tavern songs!

  The tree frogs and coyotes

  have fallen mute. Cranes

  go off in the wrong direction

  and in the grass there is no dew

  to soak the lovers’ clothing –

  they pull it on too soon!

  TU FU WARNS LI PO WHEN LI PO DEPARTS AFTER A NIGHT OF CAROUSING

  Don’t fall out of your boat!

  On this shallow lake

  storms rise up without warning

&nbs
p; and the eye that sees double,

  that makes the steadfast

  wobble and bob

  doesn’t know

  if the light ahead

  is from another boat

  caught in the worst,

  or if it’s from a stove

  a woman’s lit on shore

  to fry fish for her husband,

  hoping the smell

  will lead him home.

  WHAT CAN’T BE SEEN

  After sunset I walk under spruce boughs,

  looking for the owl the others saw midday.

  Huge, they said, it took up so much being,

  so much heartspan in the air. Whoo, whoo,

  I move toward it, no moon or stars,

  my way snow-lit.

  Above the branches foxed in blacker

  than the sky, I hope to see its ears

  in silhouette, the shoulder-shrug of wings.

  Whoo, whoo, louder now, then nothing.

  It seems just in front of me and high.

  Beneath the trees, I stand inside

  my many years, inside the owl’s

  deep hearing – its hush, my hush,

  circling out and out and touching

  our grey heads. Let this be

  the what-I-don’t-see I die with,

  this feathered, thick-lapped

  listening of the night.

  AT ANNY’S STABLE

  The biggest death

  I’d ever seen, anything

  that was light, that was wind,

  gone out of him.

  The vet who put him down

  knelt by his side, removed the shoes,

  one leg resting on the other,

  back and front, and gave them

  to the woman who was weeping.

  Next morning before the backhoe

  I go out again. He’s on his back,

  mouth twisted, legs straight up

  and stiff. Flies jewel

  his chestnut head.

  Maybe this is where

  the legends start, Pegasus

  and the Horses of the Sun.

  His hooves – unnailed –

  run on cumulus and blue, wings

  sprouting first above his ankles

  where the bones wouldn’t mend.

  WINTER DAY

  All night the stars have fallen. Snow

  resurrects their light. In winter you are closer

  to heaven though you may not know it.

  Clouds lie down in white and silent fields,

  undulant, unplanted. Outside, your breath

  separates from the air around you,

  turns crystal on your brows and lashes,

  your lower lip. You lick a sweetness,

  the taste of what your body has twice-warmed.

  Stand still: you’ll hear the hands of the wind

  working, without commission,

  freeing from the nothingness of snow

  the forms it finds along the fenceline,

  the ribs of drifts climbing up the ditches,

  hollows where deer have rested for the night.

  Veined with shadows, the snow’s marmoreal.

  With a single chisel, wind sculpts your body.

  It gives you this one day.

  LEAVING THE GARDEN

  I don’t know why I threw the apple.

  The air so thick maybe I thought

  it would stall, mid-flight, the rain

  that had yet to fall smelling of rust

  as if it hung above the orchard in buckets

  made from old machines. In the shadow

  of the tallest tree there was a stranger,

  waiting. Did I throw it to frighten her?

  Did I throw it to make her see?

  Nothing marked the day

  as different, the almanac assured

  a gentle rain, no frost or early snow.

  Even now I’d do it again, throw it

  without remorse and watch her leave the garden,

  her mouth stuffed with leaves.

  No, the old story can’t be told

  again, the old song is over.

  FAMILY CUSTOM

  Just before the woman died

  her daughter cut off the buds

  of all the tulips in the house.

  My friend who works for Hospice

  tells me this. Was it ritual, family custom,

  personal request? She can’t say,

  but they were Vietnamese and Buddhist,

  and they knew exactly what to do.

  No flowers brought the season

  into my father’s hospital room

  though my mother could have snipped

  some May blooms from their garden.

  A close-up photo of a horse hung by the bed,

  his gaze turned to the side. My father’s

  face was yellow and he could not eat.

  Don’t you look good today? the ward nurse said.

  Though I wasn’t in the Buddhist house

  I can see the tulips’ hard red fists

  on a linen cloth beside a milk-glass vase.

  In my father’s room, waiting was

  the only thing we knew to do. For hours

  I wondered what the horse was looking at

  outside the frame, tried to make him

  turn his head, hold this dying in his eyes.

  Those scarlet tulips, they didn’t know

  they wouldn’t open; dense and darkening

  round the edges, they gleam where

  they have fallen. If they’d been cut off

  here, I’d have put one in my mouth.

  DIVINING

  The wind’s low listening: how it turns

  every leaf beneath the trees, swirls cilia of snow

  so the snow hears too the warm earth stirring.

  I try to listen in that way, the grace notes

  on the underside of sound, what my mother wanted

  to say, what my father wished he hadn’t,

  my brother’s teasing, how it makes me

  stumble still and think I’ll fail.

  The horizon was a line we couldn’t hear

  except when a jet traced it white across the sky

  and that was rarer then. I’d know the poplar’s

  rush and sighs outside my childhood window

  anywhere, but it’s grown taller or it’s gone.

  It comes now in a different way

  like the almost-sound of falling snow,

  or the cry of my first lover.

  They say hearing’s the last to go. After sight,

  taste, the loss of smell and touch, it’s the rustle

  of someone’s hands turning you over in a bed,

  dry wind through a screen, death’s whisper.

  The ear’s a diviner, then. It witches sounds

  like water from under clay, dipping

  its bone-wands deep into the dark.

  ALL THINGS PASSING

  “Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.”

  – James Joyce, Ulysses

  Each new day cloaks itself in mourning –

  that’s why it begins in darkness.

  Friday doesn’t know it will be dead

  by midnight too, buried with the hours

  beneath the western pine. The cows in the south pasture

  don’t know, come Saturday, they’ll be struck by lightning,

  all twelve under the tree, their hooves blown off.

  Death’s barbecue. Funeral meats after rain.

  In our garden the camellia’s brown before

  the blossom’s fully open. Designed for that:

  samsara’s flower, is, is, is, it simply says,

  unfurling what we know but startling us each time.

  The plum’s another story: even in the dark

  the bees are working, zipping back and forth

  between its petals and their waxy tombs.

  Remember the honey in the skull
, the mind

  made out of sweetness? Sunday’s come again.

  O Lord of Dailyness, give us the common

  bread and ease of each lost thing.

  COUNTING THE MAGPIE

  “Souls of poets dead and gone.”

  – Keats

  Warm-blooded

  explosion into air, breath spinning into matter,

  becoming bird, long-tailed

  exactness of black and white.

  Its feet are tar-walkers, waders into lightlessness

  precisely deep. How heavy the soul is

  in that feathered body! How it loves its weight,

  its magus head conjuring beauty

  in spilled blood and carcass, in blowfly scab.

  Death-feeder song-spoiler the stretched-like-sinew

  sound you can’t make into music – count the magpie,

  the soul’s raw cry that needs no other’s singing:

  one, and one, and one.

  SUMMER SMALL TALK

  1. After Rain

  Spiders,

  rain has given away

  your secrets:

  little death stars,

  little abattoirs

  the flies zip past.

  2. Insect Invisible to the Eye

  In tall grasses

  the click-click of small

  scissors snipping cloth.

  Tailor of the meadow,

  how he works

  while it’s still light.

  Out of the blue

  dragonflies drop in

  with their orders:

  something long and straight

  without waist or shoulders,

  something with a sheen.