Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain
Page 2
while the elsewhere brings rain, pours bright
ore into our always darkening day.
Lead
Don’t kill me, father!
—Euripides, Herakles
Freshly cut, it is bluish white.
It tarnishes in the moistness
of air to grey. The grey allows
the black to show through. The first dose
drowns the original anger
in bright bliss. The next doses take
the anger, hide it, increase it,
make it indistinguishable
from what is now the dark; is now
the brother of need. No way back
to try to stand and see that change.
Or imagine I will save you,
my father, before or after
you are like a man whose eyes roll
in his head and who releases
lead-tipped arrows into his sons.
Those sons move like slow birds and fall.
The sky they look out at narrows
and then there is no sky. No way
back to where I see clear, intact,
even my memory of you.
I am neither cursed nor favoured.
I drink what you drank in my heart
that drinks blood and time, while it stays
lodged in me, lustreless metal,
hate not mine and mine, resisting
corrosion, conducting nothing,
and I carry the weight of it.
I simply carry it, with eyes
that carry light. I carry it.
The Envelope
The thrilled, cold arm flying. It finds the slid-
open living room window. The hand takes hold
of the set of blinds and bangs the metal
again and again against the main pane and sill.
It is my father. He has not visited me in years.
He brings horizontal rain, numerous blades
that he allows to snick and swipe and flash.
Whatever I think years are for, years swerve
through on the entering wind he brings. Whatever
my hearing is for, I hear nothing but wind.
He has gotten into the building and is in the corridor.
All night, he knocks and bangs on the door. Father,
I hear myself say, I am now a middle-aged man,
with young children in my care, and it is too late
for me to answer. And father, if I let you in,
I would crush your skull the way some men will
an intruder’s, some an enemy’s, some a boy’s.
The blinds, the wind and rain, are actual
banging blinds and wind and rain—before I fall
more asleep, I know it. Still, I want with all my heart,
whatever my heart is, to go to the door,
and am laid out and paralyzed. The knocking stops.
He slips an envelope under the door and is gone.
It stays in my dream, and stays unopened.
The Work of the Creek
The rain falls delicate, cold. It touches to the creek—
twinklings swaying out across water
as if rays have arrived from a womanly star.
There in the creek depths, in the runoff
that has crushed itself into a clear, calm flow—
dark, wavering reflections, bough on bough.
Now I know how, if I have been anywhere,
I have been full of another—that person
and no other. It is a place and is an instant
pouring with a perpetual prophecy—
two people may meet their twin essences
in each other, terrible, tender ones,
who turn together in the deep green beds
at the end of all that separates them,
and are the mirror in front of which they disappear.
The sound of the rain falling meets the sound
of a prayer unfamiliar to me rising
within my spine into my skull. I touch my brow
to the trunk of a fir. The prayer leaves me
and is the stand of bright, black creek-bank trees.
The quickening creek mist moves over my face.
I watch the water slide past, something in it
of every love that has ever been—
the creek a raindrop the creek counts, forgets,
counts, forgets again. What two people know
to be all there is, is what they cannot know.
My eyes are the bandages of my eyes.
Triangle
My child points and points, and makes her baby sounds.
Her first cry rang the hospital room air
and entered my skull and stayed there, echoing.
I lie in bed and feel my chest seize up, besieged
by time, my senses multiply and my memories
leave me as if I have become one of my dead.
The apartment is a raft. There is limitless wind,
directionless vast rising and collapsing waves,
and enough to eat and drink but no arrival
at any shore. I hear my child cry and I turn
to listen for her first Daddy as if that word
could comfort both of us. A gull cries, my child points
out the window glass into the dark, her cry joins the wind,
and she turns to me the crushed clear quartz of her eyes.
The gull and me and herself, she makes this her triangle.
For me there is her, the world, and my dead
among the dead, and this is my triangle. Her cry
rings it like the musical instrument but invisible.
And some of the dead will sing and not be heard
except as gull cries. And some of the living
will lose the way to their own pain, forget it,
know as if for the first time the pains in the world
in the midst of its appetite and slaughter, know
the child’s name they say points to all they see.
North Vancouver Snow
Out the window the grey-blue air. Elation in the sheen.
The mountains and new-made clouds gather and gather.
The baby being born pauses. The sky casts itself
in precise quietness. Four in the afternoon. Five.
The hour is tracing itself back through the whorls
of the fetus fingertips to all hours. Finally he’s here,
making the voices in the hospital room rhyme
in his presence, bringing with him the clue that finds us,
the dark blue metal of his eyes. The fine cold
is organizing the water within the clouds. His eyes
are half-designing the sight of what is now out the window,
though he can see only the blur of the close faces,
the day’s late light circling through the metal
and searching through the invisible forge of the air
and finding the falling flakes of the year’s first snow.
January 14, 2012
II
Rain Wolf, West Coast Trail
It is standing at the edge
of a clearing, pale glacial
eyes narrow and lined in black,
the wolf’s kohl. The entire wolf
the thick kohl of my own eyes,
it brings jagged grey trees, stones
lying alive on the ground, rain
like a bead-curtained doorway,
steel wool cloud and the dark’s sheen
sharp into my eyes. Without
any flaw in its fury,
a wolf of antimony,
eater of impurities,
it eats the decrepit king
of my eyes and a reborn
king emerges from a fire,
the burned wolf hissing like rain
and shaking away the ash.
The trees have burned up, the wolf
lifts its nose to smoke,
charcoal,
and licks the visible clean,
leaving the two pinpoint lights
of its eyes in the dawn air.
Palomino
Light angles in through a block of bramble
and the small horizontal rectangle
ground-level window. Rough rock to the glass,
rock ledge layered in dust. I work here
in the dimness at a bench with a six-
by-three-inch stray piece of half-inch-thick steel
and a plastic toy horse in mid-high stride.
Glue the hooves to the pedestal. Paint black
the entire body, let it dry, paint on
metallic silver patches. Then the rays
entering the basement slender and pale
halt, gather in the animal outline,
grow brilliant, and complete a first horse,
its colouring and proportions exact.
When we were with my father, I would take
down his encyclopedia volume
and find colour plates of horses. Trace them,
pencil crayon in the palominos’
tawny patches. I descend now to hunch
like an old man half-ghost and see a horse
hardly ever visible in the sky
appear in front of me, an offspring foal
flashing as distinct and bright a silver
as the stars that show winged Pegasus
the father in flight. See the horse, the hide
the black of space, harnessed only in light
decorating it wildly with splashes,
take the new gift of itself to the sire,
to the farthest away reaches of life,
and appear again, a painted plaything
held in a workbench vice. The air the bit
of death in its mouth, that Equuleus,
that little horse of the constellations,
flits with the rays into the basement dark,
dust falling deep over the long roads home.
Andean Flute
The breath of light in my bones when I write the word earth.
—Alejandra Pizarnik, “In a Copy of Les Chants de Maldoror”
The same way small winds come,
new air out of the dark, discoverers,
voices of first ones, chirpers,
only through the dense core, mantle, crust,
only through the bulks of animals
and their roars and cries, through
the circle of mountains rising
to Machu Picchu, only through
these could they have come—
the birds beyond our sight in the sun,
singing for no reason but to sing,
the singing a travelling of a song
with no beginning and no end.
Only through our falling lives
could they have come, our lives made
of the words we most want to say,
and the words made of the knowing
that there is more love in matter
than we can utter, only through
the bones within us writing the word earth
to no one, nothing, but the earth,
only through these could they have come—
birds arriving and departing
and arriving and departing, wing beats
keeping time with heartbeats, the pause
between heartbeats the breath of light
that stays and is the earth and is the flute.
River Rainbow
My two-year-old is standing on the swath
of pebbles piled alongside the pale green
and the bright white of the river that rides
down out of the canyon to run level
and free to the inlet. She’s throwing stones
into stray pools and eddies. Looking up,
saying to the air boohewun, boohewun
for the dozens of gulls. Dipping her hand
into the cold water for coloured stones,
throwing them, watching them splash. Then saying
again, boohewun. Looking up at me
with the grey-blue of the river heron,
one of its feathers fallen into her eyes.
She looks back to the water. Throws a stone
and adds circles within widening circles.
Throws another stone and her irises
halo the river flow. Throws another
and in her pupils the heron opens
its wings and lifts to arc through the blackness
lit blue. Now airborne over the water,
draws the halo out into a rainbow.
The gulls hosanna with their shrieks. She throws
a new stone, a new rainbow, a wild iris
of continuous colours. Any name
she utters is a rainbow, any bird
she sees is a boohewun, a messenger
carrying to her a name for a rainbow,
a heron, and bringing her a heron’s blue.
When the Big Hand Is on the Starfish
When the big hand is on the starfish
and the little hand is on the crab, you’re looking up
at the lobby clock. It’s six o’clock. Now a flock
of sea-green Canada geese, the sun’s rays
blazing over it, flies past a mass of sea life—
lobsters, turtles, sea snails, skate, make their way
through forests of seaweed. This is outside,
within the arched entranceway. Seahorses, pufferfish,
traced in terracotta, swim the front wall face
as they would along inlet shore rock. The same biplane
flies by twice, three times, then the same Zeppelin—
here, it is and always will be 1930,
when this was the tallest edifice in the entire
British Commonwealth. When the big hand
is on the starfish and the little hand
is on the lobster, it’s three o’clock. Boats and ships
go by—the Resolution, the Golden Hind,
the HMS Egeria, the Sonora, the Empress of Japan.
Inside again, at the five brass elevator doors,
above which sailing vessels burst out of waves
with lighting in their prows, stand five female
elevator operators, chosen for their beauty,
wearing sailor uniforms, female usherers
into hardwood interiors like ships’ cabins—
1930 is also 2009, and now they’re the flowing light
that chooses the lobby’s stained glass windows
for their beauty, and the zodiac pictured
on the polished marble floor. When the big hand
is on the starfish and the little hand
is on the turtle, it’s two o’clock. Terracotta
Canada geese fly along the building’s sides
to meet above the brass-framed main glass doors.
This is the Marine Building, address 355
on a street named for Sir Harry Burrard,
ex-shipmate of the captain who, at the behest
of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, sailed here
to find a mysterious sea route, and failed,
yet mapped the area’s every intricate coastal mile.
When the big hand is on the starfish
and the little hand is on the sea snail, it’s nine o’clock,
and I’m nine, or is it seven, years old, turning
the page in Haig-Brown’s Captain of the Discovery
where the captain and a dozen of his crew
sail in the ship’s yawl through the tree-branch-
overhung narrows into the inlet. People
from the nation whose home is the north shore
put off in canoes to greet them and offer
freshly cooked smelts. The Englishman at once
orders his men to shorten sail and allow
the canoes to keep pace. Now he looks out
across the inl
et—which he will name for Sir Harry.
The geese that fly across his sails, and past
the bright brass buttons on George Vancouver’s
blue naval coat, fly now through the brass rays
brightening the Marine Building entranceway
and framing a Discovery. When the big hand
is on the starfish and the little hand is on the crab,
it’s six o’clock again. For an instant,
or is it a lifetime, terracotta geese pass
into living geese and back again—art deco.
They pass through where illustrious ships
sail by and famous buildings stand. They pass
through to living geese like the seahorses pass
through to living seahorses, like the starfishes
to those with feet fastening onto rock,
purple arms slowly decorating time.
The Young Ravens that Cry
The trees here twist the ocean up through the night of their roots
and let it burn away out of their arms into the day.
The raven rides the repeating croak and call
of its shining-eyed need and demand. The animal that hates
carries his old expulsion as far as he can,
and arrives at a new paradise. His God loves him
even when he lays down pipelines, launches tankers,
exudes sadness and shame. His God keeps in sight
the huddled fledglings, touches the slenderest hair,
while the raven turns its young early out of its high nest,
and the young call for food from a mother that does not exist,
vanished into the blackness of their wings.
The raven’s other call, a rainforest’s soft, rhythmic bell,
Elijah heard when the flock fed him near a brook.
Tales retell themselves like returning waves—
here tiny-skulled shore birds wander bitumen-slicked.
The heirs of eternity eat royal food, cry
thinking the Holy Spirit is speaking in them. Unclean