Ten minds perk like coffee pots,
turned on and promptly forgotten.
Teacher is busy bestowing gold stars
for compliance, submission;
behind her back, little Nietzsche
aims to copy Hegel’s paper.
Teacher shoots a look that says:
duty requires you do what’s right!
God is Dead, Friedrich replies, and bonks
young Georg over the head with a robot.
RAPHAEL HYTHLODAY ARRIVES FROM UTOPIA
He tells the story of his town
where things aren’t owned
but rather bound and
passed around: a manuscript,
a book among infinite readers.
A crimeless land, no poverty,
shared property, no upper class.
We wonder: can this place exist?
He’s homesick but he aims to convince,
groups us here in one big ring
to talk through all our doubts.
Someone brings up opposites –
we turn to beg his answer:
where is the pleasure in life without sorrow?
Hythloday?
Sir?
Are you there?
TALKING
Someone thinks a steady voice implies a steady self.
How, he asks, could humans exist in absence of some solid core?
He sees this like an apple’s spine, the sweet flesh bitten away.
His neighbour says the self is spread like seeds throughout
the centre; like separate personalities, or fruit throughout a tree.
A woman in bangles tosses the trope – the core thuds into the trash.
She wipes her hands on the back of her jeans and names the pull
of Reason; points out just how language serves, translating
concept to sign. This is swiftly refuted (of course):
there’s no removed viewpoint to stand on. The woman persists:
she knows she exists. She pinches her cheeks. Here I am!
A voice in the corner: What about trauma? Doesn’t it shatter
the self? Talk turns fast to tight-lipped texts,
always holding back. It’s all downhill from here. The setting sun
applies itself to table, chalkboard, percolator, painting the room
a unified pink. For a moment, the fragments look whole.
NOT TALKING
When you leave I go to the wood
that wears its being like a loose down
vest. Windfall, deadfall, I duck under
words, the quiet forest assembling itself
around the thought of thought. Lie in the snow,
my face turned up. Somewhere close,
the river’s mouth is choked with last fall’s
leaves. Nothing left to say about
all our endless nothing-said, talking
held in place of touch like slides held up
to light. Naked maples, empty-handed,
reach toward that potent height where
things unseen return as form. Magic
trick, mysterious flicker: you turn and take
my hand. Lead me down the trampled trail
where language beat a fast retreat;
show me the hollow behind your heart
where all the cold’s pressed down.
We’re up to our knees now, headed for silence.
Come and lie down with me there.
THE DREAM WORLD
NATURAL SELECTION
The black sleeve of history is rolled at the cuff.
Beneath it, a flash of red silk. Say it’s the red
of someone’s umbrella – a woman at the bus stop,
already late. Say the rain is pocking the gutter,
the gutter is rushing, unstoppable: fate?
Empedocles saw the start of the world
as chaos with body parts floating around it.
Think of pure blackness; a foot sailing past.
At the far end of town a man turns the key,
backs down his driveway, craning behind him.
The woman gives up and decides she will walk.
The rain is still falling like what’s coming next:
at some point the foot will collide with a leg.
The man hits the brakes and the car hydroplanes
into a version of what we expect, smack of the male
up against female. Love was the glue, Empedocles said –
a man boards a ship, bound for a future he’s never
imagined. Restless and bored, unmoored and drifting,
his uncle has pushed him to take the position.
He’s pleased with his title, repeats it to himself.
Charles Darwin: captain’s companion.
THE MAPS OF THE LABRADOR ARRIVE
The first expedition: 1903.
Leonidas Hubbard, George Ellison, Dillon Wallace
set out for the Naskapi hunting grounds,
hoping to find the caribou herd,
enough meat for the winter.
Thousands of miles of uncharted forest,
blackflies swarming their noses and mouths,
trap-like tangle of willow and alder
reaching and pulling them down.
Must not all things be swallowed up in death?
My paddle, my single canoe.
POOR ME
Three days camped at the edge of this lake,
summer light of a dime-store novel, that gauzy softness
dusk can make. Lonesome, heartsick. Now,
after dinner, after the loon has opened her songbook,
started in practising scales, after I’ve poured
a shot of whiskey under one raised eyebrow of moon
nursing my ache for the people I miss and after darkness
unfolds its wings, prepares its descent: a moose.
Hooves the size of salad plates, legs
the height of my shoulders. He walks, regally,
out of the woods, as though arriving fashionably late,
then swims the narrow channel leisurely,
antlers high and proud. He climbs the bank,
hindquarters bulging, an athlete going up for a medal.
One minute later he’s gone. The moose is nothing less
and nothing more than temporary –
and yet there’s mud marking the surface where
halfway across he paused. What to make
of his slow glance behind him, the single blink of eyes?
He took in the lake’s unflinching reflection,
the rippled blaze, clear and pink, of the season’s
imminent end. Then he turned his gaze
on me. A simple gesture to summer light.
Look, it asked. Do you see?
ETHICS
The field guide shows a stork-like bird
whose likeness I fold
from Japanese paper.
The careful work demands a mind
with as many complex pleats,
the kind of mind we elevate
to the height of flight.
Meanwhile snow geese
migrate for miles to reach
their nesting grounds. They angle
through the dull white sky, wedging
winter open. High ground gone,
simple instinct slides them south
at season’s end, a gosling
with a broken breastbone left behind
to die. My own heart flutters
at this ousting, wings
held out like an origami crane’s.
Why the ache to fly with the flock?
Smooth out the paper:
my animal creases remain.
AESTHETICS
A rotting cod, the shine
of spine, the skeletal secret
named in sleep, and in
that other, sounde
r sleep
that gleams like wet sand,
unto itself, as though
in wanting nothing at all
the glint of something
appeared. The water
tosses, turns in its bed,
tide’s wide blanket
thrown briefly back:
form without use, backbone
of beauty, washed up
on shore, picked clean.
GONE FISHING
The rainbow trout has lost its life
and stays, mounted, liquids drained,
displayed atop the fireplace, a foot above
that steady flame like some protracted
hell. Heaven, for this fluid one, existed
as a quiet pool, a place where something swift,
piscine, could slide beneath the water’s
ceiling, elude the rod ingeniously
as in the truth of dreams.
For three months the river narrowed,
tied its thread round summer’s finger,
reminder of oxygen’s final failure –
how we’ll all hang, one eye glassed,
some reluctant trophy. Take the fish above
the mantle – vigour dimmed, snuffed-out
wick – why should I be different?
Yet faced with death I somehow see
my own escape, a sweet release,
a swish receding through the reeds –
the one that slips away.
THE OUT-BREATH
The cabin at dusk is the body, contained.
Tall grass slopes down into sleep. From here
the stream that slips through the willow: a visible
ribbon of longing, of time. To cast without
intent to catch; to stand on the bank of a beautiful
ending, fireflies floating out over the water,
lost children swinging their lanterns.
CHILDHOOD
Triscuits, cheese cubes, fingers
of celery, cool grooves filled
with peanut butter – sourdough,
made by my mother’s hand,
the starter yeasty, stored
in the dark. The plate appeared
at noon precisely,
cleaving the day into unequal halves,
an apple split, then split again, a wedge per year
of life so far. School was approaching,
reckoning day. I drank my milk
and knew the world
as child-sized bites to cram in my mouth,
token bits of something bigger. Late
at night the world was lost, the way
a hunger fills and empties, plate
or planet, round and white:
look up. Look up and marvel.
THE COSMOS: Reading Lacan
The baby is learning
to eat soft foods. Fruit
of experience puréed
by father, simplified into
minuscule mouthfuls that manage,
still, like wayward missiles,
to miss their target and splatter
the faces of innocent
children. This one here
begins to glean that evening
means betrayal. Meal adjourned,
bathed and changed, kissed
and laid in the cell of his crib,
his hunger remains. He fits his fist
into its shape, fills his face
with fingers. That other flesh,
that milky moon, comes less often,
sets too early – mobile above
a stellar distraction, wild constellation
cleaving the cosmos, baby peers up
from the crux of his cradle,
mouth as wide as its absence.
He searches the spheres like
an early astronomer starting
to question his central position;
unsure what exactly he’s lost
but already desperate to find it.
PRINTS
Late afternoon, alone in the trees,
the quiet creak of skis through snow,
a shy approach, your stealth.
A pattered line of rabbit prints
veers off into evening.
Think of shadow, someone
leaving, somebody else bedding down.
This kind of softness brushes your shoulders,
keeps your secrets
safe. Hush, hush, your human tracks;
your binding’s metal tick; you’re moving through
the natural world and understanding
nothing. Day’s last sun gives up the fight
like something in you
sacrificed, something bright that glints like blood
staining the snow beneath the trap,
that melts in ice and light on spruce and finally
ends as glistening.
THE CROSSING
The snowshoe dreams a frozen lake
as the mind dreams thought –
pulled inside out, a mitten drying
next to a campfire. You’ve crossed the ice,
a dim line of reason: turning, turning
and doubling back. Finding your way,
losing it. Birch bear witness,
arms thrown up. The snowshoe dreams
a quiet mind where breaking trail
leaves no mark, a sharpened cold as dusk
drifts in, woodsmoke over the lake.
You draw your knees up to your chest,
hold yourself as night holds day.
The final light leaks out. It leaves
its pink and gentleness on the snow
you’ve come across: the broken surface
thinking leaves. The endless criss-crossed tracks.
STUDY FOR MORTALITY: Charcoal on Paper
Woodsmoke drifts across the cove
like memory rising off the mind.
What’s left is thought, and deeper, being,
that shimmering coal in a heap of ash.
You turn for home across the low hills –
three or four houses scattered behind you,
a child’s toys hastily abandoned
in favour of the eternal life.
PREMONITION
The early snow-removal trucks
arrive like liberating troops. Up and up
the streets they charge to roses tossed
from windows. Winter’s a war almost won.
Throw back the drapes: warmth sashays in,
a kink, little inkling: we’ve felt this before,
forgotten it too, in the womb, in an earlier
life. Dreaming is easy in hours like these,
the mind’s backyard awash in new light,
but troops are troops, welcomed or not.
Still I haven’t said what I mean: something lost
will clear a space for something new to follow.
Ice in the harbour, for instance, melting,
starts the swell of spring. The Quakers,
for instance, worship in silence that breaks
in an outburst of words. The shattered things,
which is to say the cool of your palm against
my thigh, which is to say there is no saying
for the dark and shady. No perfection.
My broken parts have always been broken –
touch me. Touch me there.
THE DREAM WORLD
Shake up envy. Shake up
the impulse toward acquisition –
it batters you nightly, a moth at a bulb.
Shake up the trope of the moth at a bulb:
words take shape in fresh combination,
cheerleaders on court at half-time. A girl
tossed skyward, bent at the waist, a check mark
against a ballot’s blank box. Vote for the moment,
vote for atonement, for taking a long walk alone
through the forest. Morning is raising
its snapping white flag. You ex
it the alders, hands
in the air, and wake: your final surrender.
NOTES
The first epigraph is taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Margaret Hunt, Dover Publications, 2007.
The second epigraph is taken from Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 10: Civilization in Transition, Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 1970.
“Acquainted with the Night” borrows its title from Robert Frost.
The italicized line in “The In-Breath” is from Li Qingzhao, as quoted in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, ed. Jane Hirshfield, HarperCollins, 1994.
The italicized line in “Full Moon” is from The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, ed. C.J. Mews, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
The italicized line in “The Maps of the Labrador Arrive” is an abbreviated quote from Plato’s Phaedo dialogue, Plato Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, translated by G.M.A. Grube, Hackett Publishing Company; New Ed edition, 1981.
The epigraph to “Winter Landscape” is from Gertrude Stein’s lecture “Poetry and Grammar” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909–1945, Penguin Books, 1967.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
These poems, often in different versions, first appeared in Arc, The Malahat Review, Grain, The New Quarterly, CV2, The Columbia Poetry Review, PRISM International, Atlas, Descant, Prairie Fire, and in the anthology Breathing Fire II: Canada’s New Poets. Several were published in the online journals nth position and slingshot, and others in The Current, The Walrus, and the Globe and Mail. “Winter Landscape,” under the title “December,” and accompanied by an image by the brilliant Will Gill, was published as a “poemphlet” by Running the Goat Press in St. John’s in 2005.
The House-Hunting poems were commissioned for the 2004 CBC Poetry Face-Off, recorded on a CD of the same title, and broadcast on Sounds Like Canada. Ten others, under the title “The Mind’s Eye,” won first prize in the 2005 CBC Literary Awards, were broadcast on Between the Covers and published in enRoute Magazine. “Robin” was an Editor’s Choice in the 2006 Arc Poem of the Year Contest, and a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Awards.