OTHER BOOKS BY RUSSELL THORNTON
The Fifth Window (2000)
A Tunisian Notebook (2002)
House Built of Rain (2003)
The Human Shore (2006)
Russell Thornton
Copyright © 2013 Russell Thornton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
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Edited by Silas White
Cover art by Golya Mirderikvand
Cover design by Angela Caravan
Print edition text design by Mary White
Printed and bound in Canada
Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thornton, Russell
Birds, metals, stones and rain / Russell Thornton.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55017-601-8 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-55017-657-5 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8589.H565B57 2013 C811'.54 C2013-900212-X
Birds, metals, stones and rain
are mother, father, daughter, son,
birth, death, heaven, hell,
prison, rescue, blindness, sight,
the only time, the only place,
birds, metals, stones and rain.
I
Squall
The clinking becomes a ringing,
solid and clean. The spikes go straight
into the wide earth, the four poles
into the sky. The canvas bells
and flaps, and stays taut in the wind.
That is the tent in a lost camp.
The drumming deepens and quickens.
Wild and intricate, it allows
a melody to break from it,
a mist to lift off it and through.
That is the wet ghost that will ride
along the edges of the flesh.
The plane surface stands brilliant
within the vastness of metal,
and a winged drop of a small bird
flies chirping out of a keyhole.
That is the newborn that unlocks
the clear mirror door of the rain.
The Oldest Rock in the World
A news item: Oldest rocks in the world found on barren Quebec shore
And brought my hand down on the butterfly
And felt the rock move beneath my hand.
—Irving Layton, “Butterfly on Rock”
In memory of Irving Layton
They look as if they are in mid-tumble
out of the bare and windswept swathe
of outcropping bedrock on Hudson Bay’s
eastern shore a one-hour canoe trip
south of Inukjuak. These boulders
of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt—
four and a third billion years old,
dating back to a mere three hundred
million years after the globe formed
out of a cloud of cosmic debris and dust.
When the planet was being pummelled
by meteors, comets and asteroids,
microbes interacted with iron
in the primordial seas and emerged
as Earth’s very earliest life,
and nestled in sediment and wrote
their bio signature in the rust that fills
these boulders’ creases. Now beyond
the treeline, beyond houses, the boulders
have sat longer than the combined lifespans
of countless generations of animals—
far longer than human history
and any dreaming of the way within rock
or of a dying back to when only rock
framed what would be wind for human breath.
Now the microbe might bless us. Allow
us to stand trembling in bright, bright light.
Witness our core, the one annunciation.
Hear us: from out of the depths have we
called thee, from out of our will and wonder—
the doors in us so closed, we think the door
to rock is shut. We cannot die or love enough—
and love, though it brings us to its door
and unlocks it for us, will not follow—
and our signatures nestle in time and we
forget them. Wind is in a hand of force
that wraps around wind, and the rock has moved
and taken our hand, our hand made of nothing
other than what the rock is made of—
in death we lose nothing that is not
of the death and life of this rock. The wind
moves endlessly, and the rock moves around
the wind, and the planet moves around
the wind and around the sun, and around
everlasting cosmic debris and dust.
Wind is rushing through the oldest place
we have named. The song it sings is learning
itself, beginning and ending with Earth.
More names than we can know are rushing through,
and within the names the rock is opening.
Burrard Inlet Ships
At a window overlooking water—container ships
and bulk carrier ships lying at anchor
framed in front of us. They’re always there,
I hear a voice say. As if the ships were the same ships
that sat there twenty-four or forty-eight hours ago.
As if, in the middle of the night, the ships did not
arrive and drop anchor at exact latitudes and longitudes.
And tugboats did not come and bring the ships to dock,
and other ships not arrive and take the first ships’ places—
in the middle of the night. As if the ships were not
emptied of what they brought here and loaded up again
while the ships’ sailors took their hours’ shore leave
to go to a bank, visit a doctor, talk with a priest,
buy a blouse or bracelet for a woman back home.
As if, between sundown and dawn, the ships did not depart.
And every two or three days, a new ship and new crew
did not sit at each terminal wharf. As if it was not
now a new ship visible outside the window.
All night, out on the water, the ships’ horns send out
sound signals for their arrivals and departures,
and all night, in inlet-filling fog, the ships’ horns
send out long blasts, long repeating notes—accompaniment
to the circuit of sleep in the houses along the shore.
New ships and crews come, new products are brought
from faraway locales, and new loads of coal, sulphur,
lumber and wheat are taken to faraway locales.
All night, when gulls come up from the inlet
through cloud and rain, gull after gull takes up
the same insane-sounding cry of unfathomable
emergency in a wilderness of water, and circles with the same
single message that seems wound and unwound
as on a wire anchored somewhere unknown to any
gull
in the inlet circling and circling through its tides.
All night, the outsized ships come and go—all night.
As if they were not, each of them, the same ship powering
over the glowing deep blue water-globe. As if the voice
at this window had not been with me all along,
waiting inside my hearing. As if it was not
the voice of one more myself than I can know.
As if this one’s home had not always been here
where he could see an anchor-place and hear gulls.
Nest of the Swan’s Bones
She will build a nest of the swan’s bones...
—Robinson Jeffers, “Shiva”
High in the blue air above the dumpster in the back lane,
between the mountains and the tidal flats,
on the thermals and updrafts a summer hawk does slow turns.
The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught
trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive,
their eyes popping out as sea lice feed inside their heads.
The hawk dances. Circles, dances. Its shadow flits
unnoticed across men, spreads over a rodent or bird
it dives to, inserts claws into, and clamps large feet on, stomping it
as if beating time. It splays flesh and flies
away with it into sunlight. The hawk takes up an owl’s hoot
and a sparrow’s last chirp, a heron’s bill-snap and a smelt’s silence
into its disinterested scream. The swan
glides in beauty in the hawk’s sight, and fills all the hawk sees
with brilliant, blinding whiteness. Moment by moment,
the men go back and forth. They search out anything they can trade
for a full bottle or syringe or pipe. In my room with the lit-up screen,
I lie and dream my dream. I feel it must also be God’s,
this dream of the person of persons. Where the dream comes through,
it punctures me, and I breathe dark air. The air thuds
into pockets like a plummeted elevator. O monster home. O
specialty wine outlet. O auto mall. The wild white swan
is dead. The hawk hunts and kills the swan for love. It will build a new
nest of the swan’s bones. It will keep this nest unseen.
I am a person. I soil the cage in which my heart flings
and flings itself against the bars. I try to own
the view of every murderer, and yet I try to sing
the way out through the hawk’s claw-holes to the repose
in the nest of fire at the tip of the hawk’s wing.
The Man Who Sleeps in Cemeteries
Refuse recyclable paper yard-bags. Refuse gloves.
Collect yard trimmings the way you know how—
I’ll do likewise. My friend, don’t hurt your head.
Afternoons, slide down the avenue. At every intersection,
karate kick crosswalk buttons. Show up mornings
a very macho character, a little threatening. Show up
fawning, a little flirtatious. Talking religion, bitches.
Going on about your lady—in the mirror, lipsticked.
Gang boy in Colombia. Gang man. You left that life.
Yes, they found you in Miami. They killed your wife,
your two kids, they threw you off a balcony. Now lay
down your head. With strands of yourself off in the trees,
running quiet and clear in the quick creek water.
With your arms wrapped around surgical scars.
With your collection of scars. Miami to Vancouver? I think
I walked. Lay down your English. Por favor! Scowl
and explain to me in Spanish that you don’t speak
Spanish anymore. Or Portuguese. Or the Quebec French
that jumps out of you. Explain to me that North Vancouver
has the most beautiful cemetery you’ve ever slept in.
No landlords, no need to pull a knife. With the different
parts of your brain in the right places, explain it.
With your jumble of words, lay down your head.
With your jumble of words. With your single joint
per day and the pain gone out of your skull. Let
the sections of your head click into a proper machined fit.
Yes, killed so many times, scattered in so many places,
you can’t say—say a loud Fuck you! in the direction
of your every past boss. Say it at your every Refugee Board
hearing, at your every income assistance interview.
Consult the cemetery’s visiting bear, coyote and deer.
Consult the community of the dead flowing in unison
beneath your head. Then make your many decisions
and rule the parts of your head. My friend, my co-worker,
here’s a coffee, a set of garden tools and plastic yard-bag.
Come do your expert work. Whistle all day the songs
that came to you in the night through the cold clean dirt.
Greenness
What am I now that I was then
—Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”
I turn to grass tufts and see unsullied
clear greenness displaying its steel. I see
what I should see, simple close-mown spring grass
like that of any suburban house lawn.
I turn again and decades disappear
and I see the dark grass all down the block—
I wake, run out of a basement and go
reeling across yard after wide yard. Here,
I unlock a gate. Swing it open. Go
to a neighbour’s front door. I knock, and ask
for help. But I am still half in the house
where I crouch, and we gaze at each other,
my mother and I, while my father holds
her so she will burn in the fireplace flames—
it is only a pretend me who asks.
Here, a woman blankets me and leaves me
in a den. The simple grass I turn to
is of the same greenness that pierces me
where I sit in a deep plush chair and hear
a man on a phone, sink and right away
begin to dream of grass. Lawns touch my bare
feet with cold dew and make me swift, shoot me
full of starlight the grass stores in its maze
of roots and make me shine bright. Here, I slip
out of the blanket, the den, and go back
outside and down the rows of blades all
waiting to take me in. What I bring,
I bring to grass to help it find its way
beyond every house. I turn to grass
that is close-mown, sunlit in the morning,
and turn to the grass that rinses my eyes
wide for the dark. When the soft spring rain flows
busy through grass, the always houseless night
helps continue this beginning. When grass
lengthens and men come to cut it, I laugh
with the laughing greenness. Unknown heaven
in its depth in the grass, once here cannot
be unmade. What I am now that I was
then can only be what is in grass—here
in what reaches breathing, reaching nowhere
but from blade to blade. It breathes and is iron
that is not cast by anyone but grows.
The Rain Bush
...and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush
was not consumed. And Moses said,
I will now turn aside,
and see this great sight...
—Exodus 3: 2–3
I heard kindlings, full flames, a furnace fire
and singing ore. I turned aside and saw
rain blowing into the branches of a bush—
the molten metal cooling, magnetic,
its memory of directions, its brilliant
dream of Earth come back. The bush stood—
living, intricate, a hollow sphere lit
in a theatre blackness with circling
mirror-drops. New wind arrived, and the array
of branches swerved on the stalk, and the bush
caught new rain, was still again, and the mirrors
continued circling, losing their silver
and becoming glass. So whatever a mirror
displayed through the air was as soon released,
whatever memory it let appear
in any image as soon disappeared—
in the mirror a rememberer could meet
himself in immediate new transparency
haloed in haze and glitter. Each mirror,
as it arrived, resolved itself in multiple
weddings of gazes, in gazes dying
into waiting gazes. The entire bush
was a changing mask, radiant with desire,
charged with identity, and turning aside
with what is given to us. The mask said:
our unremembering, when we turn aside
to what turns to us, and are nothing
of what we have been—that is the gift of all
we can desire. That is to hear our names
spoken clearly, and look and see no one.
That is to know a voice, and know the voice
is an elsewhere saying we are what is not us,
Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Page 1
