by Alison Pick
CONTENTS
Title Page
Epigraph
ALONE IN THE WOODS FOR THE REST OF THE WINTER
The Hinterland
Full Moon: Reading “The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard”
The Future
Alone in the Woods for the Rest of the Winter
The In-Breath
Unsung
Chasing the Good Life
Disclosure
Seeing Is Believing
Departure
Leaving for the Arctic, Listening to My Lover Sing the Blues
IF ONLY A HOUSE STOOD JUST FOR ITSELF
House-Hunting: 92 Freshwater Road
House-Hunting: 202 Topsail Road
House-Hunting: 81 Sycamore Street
Wanderlust
Making an Offer
Anxiety Dreams
Telepathy: Living Across from the Church
Robin
Ascent
Writing Poetry
The Here and Now
Acquainted with the Night
Dog-Eared
TALKING OR NOT TALKING
Scrabble
The Other Side of the Coin
Thank You for Not Smoking
Touch and Go
The Metamorphoses’ Metamorphosis
Language Travelogue
Winter Landscape: Reading Gertrude Stein
Silhouette
Deontology
Raphael Hythloday Arrives from Utopia
Talking
Not Talking
THE DREAM WORLD
Natural Selection
The Maps of the Labrador Arrive
Poor Me
Ethics
Aesthetics
Gone Fishing
The Out-Breath
Childhood
The Cosmos: Reading Lacan
Prints
The Crossing
Study for Mortality: Charcoal on Paper
Premonition
The Dream World
Notes
Acknowledgements
Also by Alison Pick
Copyright
When at last they awoke, it was already dark night. Gretel began to cry and said: “How are we to get out of the forest now?” But Hansel comforted her and said: “Just wait a little, until the moon has risen, and then we will find the way.”
– THE BROTHERS GRIMM
The dream is the small hidden door…
– C.G. JUNG
ALONE IN THE WOODS FOR THE REST OF THE WINTER
THE HINTERLAND
I walk as far as I can,
then farther, past
the chain-link barring the road,
tire tracks deep as the rut in my thinking,
the place I always get stuck.
Wanting more, or wanting
less, to be rid of the word
called wanting. Boulders,
tall grass, shrubs I can’t name,
birds I can’t name, the ocean.
Being a stranger sneaks me through the latch
of language – briefly. Bottles, I know.
Condoms, I know. And the weight
of being human where other humans have been.
Back of the sea like one line of thought,
slight variation of foam at the shore
where artifice gives itself up. Farther out,
a ledge in the rock
as though attention might help. Turning
for home, hands in my pockets, night mists
like animal breath, the black-brown shapes
of gathering mammals
bending to drink at the silent pool
of mind submerged in mind.
If a gap exists at all, it’s there
I might have slipped through.
FULL MOON: Reading “The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard”
A portal. A circular door to forever,
rebirth – a hole to crawl through
leaving failure behind. Call the place we land in
heaven, although it’s dark: the moon does not shine without the sun. The two-faced sky
sees both sides, its single eye
trained on absence: words not said,
the back of a mirror, the stars’ mirror-image
held on the sea. We paddle through
our own reflections, moon above, a watery
gate. The shape of you, the shape
of me. That infinite distance to cross.
THE FUTURE
I dress for fate: my plastic
pearls, my heels bejewelled
for dancing. You wear a cloak
of stars and moons and gloves
sewn out of satin. The party’s
dark, which hinders my chances,
my hope that our orbits collide.
A smoky wind blows in off the terrace,
blocks the view of what-comes-next,
the way the dealer’s poker face
obscures the future’s features.
He looks at us blandly and shuffles
the years. Everyone’s drunk.
Everyone’s gambling. We choose
another game and form a ring that stands
for time. We sit on the floor, cross-legged.
I catch your eye across from mine.
Set the bottle spinning.
ALONE IN THE WOODS FOR THE REST OF THE WINTER
I wake and the fire in the woodstove’s gone out.
The valley filling with snow. Branches lift
slender arms to pull on lambswool sweaters.
I stand in the kitchen in bare feet and long johns,
nudging the ashes low in the grate. Something flares:
the thought of the man at the party who called me
lovely – I couldn’t help blushing, turning away.
This morning is long with coffee and reading,
snow sifting silently down – the window spotlights
fat flakes falling, slow and bright
as comets. Maples gleam, spruce trees gleam,
the river’s throat is collared with ice. The gravel road
disappears altogether. Staying strangers keeps the spark
of mystery alight. Alone in the woods for the rest
of the winter – my heart glinting bright in the ash.
THE IN-BREATH
Here’s the other side of waiting:
what you don’t write writes you.
How about silence, late in the season,
holding its tongue in its teeth; drawing
you like ink through a pen. Meanwhile winter
shies up the path, one girl arriving
at the boys’ party, present of paradox
tied with a bow concealed
behind her back. The sky becomes one
with its clouds, the waves with their mist.
Even when narrative flings itself free
a net of meaning holds.
UNSUNG
Candid light forsakes the cliff. Balsamic moon, tight-lipped.
You want to go to the land to learn as Simone Weil went
to the factory – you want more than gesture, but only kneeling
lowers you down to silence’s field, the nave furred over
with inches of snow. Several prayer books down from breath,
the hymn of particular language. You are there with ten thousand
words, your mouth a leaky cup. Every offering flawed, flawed –
still you fear giving them up. You fear the sin of speech minus
listening, listening with only the ears: a wilder hush
of wind through grass, land brushing out her long hair. Goldenrod,
cattails down the back path. Later the ocean like unstudied Latin.
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You’ll need to stay much longer than planned, to hold your tongue
in your palm; to wait in the unsung blue-black of dusk
before writing anything down. Your driftwood heart so quick
to ignite – huddle around its thin flicker. Light-years back,
the house of language, one round window lit – it’s time to turn
your back on home. Time to begin the long translation.
CHASING THE GOOD LIFE
The skinny slick of fame dries up and leaves a sweet relief –
head to the valley and sit by the fall of the stream getting over itself.
The other shore’s close, but walled off by water. You’re after
a glimpse, a brief apparition of nowhere and nothing that humbles
you down. Squint ahead: a shape in the aspen shucks the form
of doe or moose; it scales the ridge of memory’s shadow, swiftly
disappearing. Force yourself to stay cross-legged, night spilling ink
through the grass. A chill settles over your arms. Something makes
its presence known like piano-notes moving through a dark church –
a single hand travelling, slow, up the keys. Silence right after,
the deafening kind, the water’s mind gone still. A tail
breaks the surface. Thought ripples out. Sit until blackness
fills all the blanks – the far shore ripped out like a stitch.
DISCLOSURE
If it were only a matter
of looking. If the gaze
could raise its object
high in the air like a player
preparing to slap the puck
into the back of, right
in the nick of, into the net of
time. Things end. Things
peel back to show themselves
as clothing falls to show
the skin, the body’s one-way
glass concealing what
it won’t allow –
the gut’s vague hunch;
the spleen, both kinds,
especially sadness. Open,
I face you, watch your eyes
take in my heart’s two eyes,
one blind. The double edge
of lust divides. You see.
You see right through me.
SEEING IS BELIEVING
The handsome doctor fills my frames
with different lenses: better or worse?
An answer’s required, though I’ve learned
beauty is built in back of the brain.
I know this in the hazy way
I know about blood vessels, orbiting
planets. My vision’s a blur
of cosmic detritus. I press my face to his metal machine
and tell him, forcefully, better. Outside,
I blink against science’s shine. The sun lights up
my new-found sight; the optic nerve
plugs into my mind. God is in
the beholder’s eye – who else could push
that red ball of fire through the sky?
DEPARTURE
At midnight, the sun is a showgirl in sequins,
too drunk to drag from the stage. Her place makes light
of permanence – an outport town, a point
of departure – everything poised and ready to leave,
a disappearing act. But first the sun returns again
for some uncalled-for curtain call, lifts anew to show
her lustre, never having set. These float planes too,
paused in the bay, a clutch of cockpits and silver
crescendo, seem helium-prone, at the end of their strings,
ready and raring to rise. But something’s wrong: a crowd
draws close, all push and shove around the wharf. A metal bird
lost its nerve a hundred feet above the water – hesitated –
and, of course, in hesitating, fell. The pilot tells
of some rogue wind that grabbed the plane and tore
its wing, then threw it down, a small child’s toy,
into the choppy lake. All survived: miracle?
Testimony to the pilot’s skill? Early tomorrow this same man
is set to fly us out. Out of where – our selves? Our skins? –
Perhaps he’ll take us deeper into something raw
and menacing. The fallen craft, hoisted dry, displayed
on this unstable dock, one arm missing, sunk and gone,
reminds us of our gamble. Were the plane a wishbone, cracked,
we’d hold our short, unlucky half and wonder what it tells about
our impending fate; about redemption’s starting point –
is brokenness the only place from where we might be lifted?
We picture ascending up through the ether, a ravel of white
unrolling behind us, ribbon of smoke, visible mark of everywhere
we’ve been. Is this the wish of every bride who trails a train
down the aisle? And what about the what-comes-next;
the plane’s stalled hover, horrible tumble, giant cosmic
fun-fair ride, passengers screaming wide-eyed? Tomorrow
we will rise, like them, trusting the pilot’s doubtful credentials,
and though it’s late, we feel awake, alert to what’s ahead:
another day when we must risk our temporary natures. Another
way, the flight’s our calling, forecast of our final trip
high into our human failure. Our terrible, dazzling falling.
LEAVING FOR THE ARCTIC, LISTENING TO MY LOVER SING THE BLUES
If it should ever happen that
I lose my way and winter arrives,
my heart contracting,
thin and white, turning
for another; or if the barrens take me up
like history takes an unknown year
making of me a circle of rocks
with nothing in the centre;
or if the light that fractures blue
into a million rivers and ponds,
in a final act of surrender,
gets in my eyes and blinds me,
wait for me at the piano.
I will know the tips of your fingers
softly on my inner thigh,
your back that bends, releases, bends
over what’s open before it.
I will know you by your sounds –
rough and sweet at the back of your throat –
I will know your hard luck song
and it will sing me home.
IF ONLY A HOUSE STOOD JUST FOR ITSELF
HOUSE-HUNTING: 92 Freshwater Road
You cannot keep your eyes off
the owner, ring through her nose, braid
down her back like a length of rope
you could climb. Save me. Let down
your hair. Your words are chewed up
in the garbage disposal she’s using
to woo you. You need a friend.
She calls you honey –
it tempts you to sign. Kitchen
features a built-in dishwasher,
stove she is willing to leave.
She needs to move now –
she wants to be gone.
You, of course, take this personally.
Back at home the flashing red light
is just a wrong number, a hang-up.
You’re porous, lachrymose, social-life
starved – but hip
to the law of supply and demand.
You want to buy. She wants to sell.
Both of you human, no less.
HOUSE-HUNTING: 202 Topsail Road
Great house for kids, the owner says gaily,
and stares at the flat of your stomach as though
it will now begin rising like bread. A punch
in the gut of intention and you’re doubled over.
From the top floor, sunset’s view,
your old life sink
ing too. Use the closet
off the master to shelter the egg
of your dream for yourself; a crack
in the shell of your armour and longing
weeps through. Whatever you ache for,
this isn’t it. But your breasts start to leak
and your hands begin searching – fuse box, cellar,
under the sink – opening every dark hole
of the future. Hide-and-seek, or maybe sardines,
this is like finding four or five bodies
crammed in the crawl space under the floor,
the instant of fear before recognition:
is that what you’re looking for? Is it?
HOUSE-HUNTING: 81 Sycamore Street
When you mention this street, no one knows its name.
On the map it is lined in with careful grey pencil:
it smudges beneath your wet thumb. Weeds
in the yard. Chicken-wire fence. Step over
razors, needles, syringes, your lover’s hand hot
in the small of your back,
a parent persuading a child.
Windows stare wanly, pupils dilated –
the front door sighs open, ready to welcome,
slams in a sharp gust of wind.
Inside, your eyes blink hard to adjust
to a cliché of dust, sheets over chairs. Light bulbs
blown out. Each door reveals another dark room,
nesting dolls shrinking in size. This could be a study,
says the Real Estate Man. Trying to convince you, and himself.
You send the Real Estate Man to the car, and kiss your lover –
his tongue is on fire. Steady wail of sirens closing in.
House of your nightmares. House of your dreams.
You cannot say which is stronger: desire
to fix it up, or desire for decay.
WANDERLUST
Next things to learn are the routes out of town.
Clearly, the humpback off Freshwater Bay is just
a red herring, the width of its tail obscuring your view
like a blindfold. So many sights you aren’t meant
to see: squint, and the sea disappears. Nude and alone
in the tide pool at Flatrock – a man walks by, hands
in his pockets, swivels the compass of his face
away from the blight of your breasts. Nothing here’s
female. Sky: an Old Testament God. Eternal
fog has the warden’s approval,
unlike you with your self-absorbed lines,
