Whetstone

by Lorna Crozier

  3. A Shift in the Light

  The piebald peonies

  want to leap the fence

  want the first e

  struck from their name

  want to rip the grass

  without remorse.

  You’ll have to be wary,

  never carry secateurs or bit;

  approach them with a smile

  and an apple in your hand,

  their big teeth flashing.

  4. Karl Marx Observes the Flowers

  Bees without

  picks and pit lamps

  crawl backwards

  from the perfumed

  shafts, their miners’

  faces dusted gold.

  LATE JULY

  The crow knows what’s going to happen

  to everyone. Made large by death,

  the sky’s more watchful than before.

  Someone opens a window. Does a bird

  fly out? A boy stands among the lilac bushes,

  too late for blooms. All his mother had

  of beauty, their scent sickened the rooms.

  If he doesn’t move, nothing worse will happen.

  His mind frightens him. It’s like an axe falling

  on the chopping block, heat thickening

  with blood, the crow flying headless

  in small arcs across the yard.

  THE WEIGHT OF AUGUST

  The exhaustion of flowers, midafternoon,

  the stale sun’s spill and stutter

  across the lawn, a sprinkler lifting

  its tired arc and letting it fall. All things

  moving to an end. In the loveseat

  under the apple tree I open

  The Art of Memory and laugh

  out loud when I forget the place

  I stopped at yesterday. Soon

  I’ll go in, wake you from your nap

  and start our supper, anything

  the garden’s greens have left to give,

  lettuce and chard, that undertaste of

  bitterness. We live with who we are and not

  what we once wanted. Late August,

  its weight on my shoulders, my hand

  not on your skin. I turn back

  the page and start again,

  not sure if I’ve read

  this part before.

  NO MUSIC IN IT

  The sun takes longer to rise:

  it bears a burden it cannot carry.

  Darkness lengthens in the day

  and inside me

  until I walk on stilts of it,

  looking down on everything.

  I take no pleasure. After dawn

  a raven passes overhead.

  He takes none either. Measures

  daylight’s this and this

  on noisy wings. Blowing in

  a bone flute that has no holes.

  BIRTHDAY WITH MY MOTHER

  In Swift Current I wake in the cot

  in my mother’s sewing room, and I am fifty-two.

  She pokes her head through the door –

  You weren’t born yet. Don’t get up

  till after supper. The exact time

  she’s not sure of, but I made her miss

  the evening meal and she was hungry.

  Part of me slips inside her,

  behind her eyes now bluer since

  the cataracts were peeled away.

  How wonderful, after all this time

  to be inside my mother

  where I grew my bones, my heart.

  At eighty-two, she’s so small

  she hasn’t left me any room for sadness.

  I’m close to leaving her, late afternoon,

  when she walks between the pea vines

  in the cracked white sandals she saves

  for gardening and the John Deere cap

  my father wore, her hair now thin.

  Into a tin pail she drops pod after pod,

  the sound is heavy rain falling onto cotton.

  Two Lake Pelletier perch, their heads

  intact, gleam in the kitchen sink

  as if Dad has just come back from fishing

  and left them for our evening meal.

  She’ll serve it later than she usually does –

  peas, perch floured and fried in butter,

  red potatoes in their jackets.

  MEASURE

  The sun leaning south has a slow drawl,

  drawing out the day’s vowels,

  taking longer to say but still saying it.

  It’s the end of summer, petals closing up,

  the bones in my wrists the first to feel

  the possibility of frost.

  What I’ve read and remember pleases me

  but has little use – Solzhenitsyn’s sister

  calling cats the only true Christians

  or Aldous Huxley, impatient with the coolness

  of Virginia Woolf, her meanness to a friend,

  writing in a letter, She’s a jar of ashes.

  I wish I’d saved my father’s, sealed some

  in an egg timer and used it as a measure,

  following the sun’s slide across the windowsill,

  its slow ease into night. I’m looking more like him,

  my face getting thinner, my lips more pinched.

  Still, I love the way the sun moves

  around lobelia, anemone, geranium,

  words lasting longer on the warmth

  and thickness of its tongue.

  BELOW ZERO

  The winter boat reaches shore

  and skids onto heavy snow. Above it

  the sky migrates from east to west.

  There is foxfrost on the harbour lantern.

  Whoever beached the boat has turned

  backwards into wind, white among

  the other whiteness. The wildness

  invisible. Not even any tracks

  from here to there.

  LATE AUGUST THRENODY

  Two cats in the garden

  under different stones.

  The slow unravelling

  of wind and dahlias

  makes a quiet music that moves

  with the light low to the ground.

  I, too, lay my head

  on a cold pillow. Sometimes

  it is night, sometimes not.

  The dahlias as they dry

  and curl in the wind

  are what the cats must hear

  when all they are is a silence

  and then a listening – moonlight

  blindly entering a room.

  WIND/MIND

  Wind presses its forehead against the ground,

  against the sky. What a meeting of minds is there!

  Wind presses its forehead against the sea,

  the chestnut tree, against you walking into morning.

  What scree! What desolation!

  As if you were standing on a treeless peak

  in driving snow, the stars that once were human

  wheeling all around you, pitiless and cold.

  SMALL GESTURE

  Before she moves head down into the dark,

  the woman pauses beneath the streetlight,

  turns up her collar. Black wool coat.

  Now she is a body of pure grief.

  From the upstairs window you watch the streetlight

  flash her picture, one of several slides

  you’ll save on the wheel of winter,

  this one called

  Small Gesture Against the Cold.

  BLIZZARD

  Walking into wind, I lean into my mother’s muskrat coat;

  around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.

  If we stood still we’d disappear. There’s no up or down,

  no houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind

  and what’s inside us. When we get home my father

  will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.

  I could lie down and st
ay right here where snow is all

  that happens, and silence isn’t loneliness just cold

  not talking. My mother tugs at me and won’t let go.

  Then stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars

  we don’t know if anyone will understand

  the tongue we speak, so far we are from home.

  THE END OF THE CENTURY

  Under the bridge the dead are gathering.

  What happened to the ferryman,

  his bag of coins, his pity? In all this traffic

  how can they cross these girders of steel

  and starlight? One of them hears a creaking.

  It is you in your father’s rowboat,

  newly painted. Your lunch beside you

  on the seat, in the bow that singer

  who died young. He has spelled you

  on this journey but now he begins

  in Mandarin the version of Red River

  he learned in exile in the fields

  far from Beijing. Under the bridge,

  hearing him, the dead, too, start singing

  We will miss your bright eyes

  and sweet smile, in at least

  a dozen different tongues.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The title “Hoping to Fix Up, a Little, This World” is a line from the poet Larry Leavis.

  Some of these poems were published in Grain, Event, The Windsor Review, Descant, Border Crossings, Southern Review, Nimrod, Tieferet, CVII, Prairie Fire, and the anthology Poetry International, 7/8.

  My heartfelt appreciation goes to the editor of this collection, Jan Zwicky, for her quick poetic intelligence, to Heather Sangster for her sharp eye, and to Patrick Lane, who always reads my new work before anyone else and who keeps me going. This book would not have been written without the research support of the University of Victoria and without the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s Writer/Artist Colony where I continue to write most of my early drafts.