Omens in the Year of the Ox

by Steven Price

  too. To sip, sip, stare, to

  feel the day’s fire anew: grace

  is not the rivering of ice

  down a cold glass in summer, is not dark

  rings rising off a deck in heat,

  is nothing. Who knew turning away

  was ever your way. Doubt?

  Doubt you knew.

  IV

  In the cantled deck’s shade

  your shade conceals

  its meaning. You lean far

  out. The pine railing suffers

  in the flushed heat. Here

  its brown paint finger-divots

  soft in the grain where gripped.

  Crows cluster out on the wires.

  Utterly you imagined

  this. Utterly you thought

  stripping your life of you

  might slip you more

  fully in it. In the burning

  yellow grass below

  nothing stirs.

  V

  You lived for a time

  unfrightened in sunlight, lived

  white and searingly alone.

  Planks of light hammered the deck

  under your feet. You stood

  in it. You stood in it

  and burned.

  What good are our gifts

  if the world is going

  out regardless?

  The world is going out,

  the world is going out.

  Pass, pass, you who lived burning, in it for a time.

  Mediterranean Light

  I

  Then we stepped down out of the paintings, into our lives. It was already night on the terrace. The light from some stars is so old, our guide said, it set out before the human race had language. I was leaning over the stone balustrade and did not look up. In the paintings of Tintoretto there is a light that shines down onto the folds of fabric and a light that shines forth from it. That light, too, is much older than it appears. And somewhere it is still moving, you murmured. I was standing so close I could feel the heat coming off your skin. That was the heat of an afternoon sunlight now passed. Our guide looked at me and said: If the perspective is not right, you must change where you are standing. I watched you reach down and adjust the soft ankle strap of your heel and I could not think of where that elsewhere might be.

  II

  She stared at her feet,

  poured past him

  wearing her winter

  coat; he wanted to see

  her hips as she

  came at him but couldn’t.

  III

  In the station were so many voices, all talking at once. We gripped our bags close, fearing thieves; blinked through the iron grillwork at the great clock. A rush of warm air on our faces as each train punched past, not stopping, hurtling on into the earth. As if there were some more luminous world beyond this one. This world hurtles through space at speeds nearly unimaginable, yet our lives can remain motionless for years. When the doctor ran the cool sonogram over your belly we heard the hard fast footsteps of a second heart. That was the sound of our own new selves running towards us. On the platform a voice was shouting out destinations but we could not see where because of the crowd and because we were so much in it.

  IV

  Her wrists: a scent of split cedar in rain.

  A wash of winter traffic in the drapes;

  shadows eating her face like emulsion.

  —In the movies it’s more romantic

  to have glasses for reading

  than for driving,

  she said.

  —Come into the light,

  he said.

  V

  Later, alone, in southern Spain. Thick in the interval all day between your name and what I wanted to write. As the sun was going down I stood from my desk and saw them, three swifts, the soft oily knives of their wings slicing the sharp air between the fig trees and twists of cacti. This-this-this, their quick turnings urged. Articulate in their uncluttered syntax of flight. The sun would be just rising in your life. In the gold light of evening the night before you’d walked down by the lagoon and seen the soft small yellow goslings following their mothers through the weeds, as our daughter shifted inside you. In the gold light of my own evening I put a hand to your belly and felt her kick.

  VI

  Stunned, at the known edge of his life

  at last, light took, flared

  in fired ochre jars of clay

  left cracked in the creaking

  orchards at Mojácar.

  Memory rakes its rocky

  earth, sets everything

  to echoing. In the leaves

  the lit Spanish pears fill

  like warm eyelids in the shade.

  Omens at Dusk in the Year of the Dragon

  Crying then, lifting like smoke off the grass.

  A dark river through black air.

  Black loons in fall, not many, but all

  in the cold and the grey flooded fields

  taken back. We stood taken back.

  My white hand in yours cutting the bracken

  and yellow larchgrass for home. The seeped

  marsh-mud like a wound, closing. For the world

  is not suffering only

  and living is not how we think it to be.

  Notes & Acknowledgements

  The epigraph is taken from Robert Hass’ poem “Winged and Acid Dark.”

  “Orpheus Ascending” appeared in The Malahat Review. “The Second Magi Returns to Parthia” appeared in the Victoria Times Colonist. My thanks to the editors for their support.

  This book would not have been possible without the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the BC Arts Council.

  Thanks are due as well to Fundación Valparaiso, where several of these poems were worked, in part or in whole.

  ***

  Thanks are due also to:

  Kitty Lewis, Alayna Munce, Barry Dempster, and everyone at Brick Books for their enthusiasm and support; Michel Vrana for his gifted eye; my extraordinary editor, Sue Sinclair, for her care and grace; John Baker, Carla Funk, Jeff Mireau; Kevin, Brian, Josie, my parents Bob & Peggy; and always, overwhelmingly, Esi.

  Steven Price’s first collection of poetry, Anatomy of Keys (Brick Books, 2006), won the Gerald Lampert Award and was named a Globe & Mail Book of the Year. His first novel, Into that Darkness (Thomas Allen), was published in 2011. His work has been translated into several languages, including German, French, and Hungarian. He teaches writing at the University of Victoria.