vortices
eddies
coefficient of drag
we can say agitated
particles, we can say at present no,
at present there is precious
deformation, the ferocity exhibits final
oscar nominations of those random
characters, the claws, irregulars, the plaths of suspense,
the partisans of sale, the compost rabble
and the lynx that undermines, we can say
killer statics of mean motion, dwarf diseases,
all the eds and eddies and the sad
co-fishermen of drag, the agitated
hearts and hearticles of what
we cannot say there is at present.
UFO
Leaving home loves homing: you can scrawl that
in the washroom, carve it in the old oak, carry it
inside your carry-on
luggage. When I comprehend the tragi-comic
turns and nude scenes of their long
romance it’s going to explain
plenty, from the strange behaviours of the dead
to why I do the dishes happily
and badly. In the cemetery by the sea
the Chestnut-backed chickadees kibitz and flit, Yew
to Douglas-fir to Weeping
birch. They must be the selves
of dear departed ones, still full of just
a minute while I put the kettle on and doctors,
what do they know. Wearing their
tangibility and pluck, their fresh
capacity for being sorely missed. Wearing the way
you sang off key like a new plaid
sports coat. While those others, the cherished
and exquisite rumours of the spirit, soar through our
imaginations with the dumb nonchalance
of albatrosses. Sometimes I listen
much too closely to the crows,
especially those who perch on the neon signs
and rooftops of the plaza, where they
parley in the voices of burnt
oboes, boldface and illegible.
They know something. Something
about scavenging and shopping and the interwoven
deerpaths of desire. Something about loss
made visible. Homing loves leaving
home. When I comprehend that wing.
When I run off with that heartless music.
PLUMMET
Simple.
Under one wing you take the thousand thousand
thuds of your heart, under the other
a lifetime paying taxes to the wind –
and clench.
Where there was flibbertigibbetry of feather, now
the quick of existence in a fist.
Where there was phrase, phrase, nickel-and-diming it to stay
one breath ahead, now
you take the full stop in your teeth
the plumb bob
the bomb.
Where there were unnumbered paths of air, now
the one shaft of your plunge, whose walls
are the shrieks of your old nemesis, gravity
bursting into bloom.
SOMETIMES A VOICE (2)
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? –
wants not to be voice any longer and this longing
is the worst of longings. Nothing
assuages. Not the curry-comb of conversation,
not the dog-eared broken
satisfactions of the blues. It huddles in the lungs
and won’t come out. Not for the Mendelssohn Choir
intoning “Song of the Old Mother” to an ancient
microphone. It curls up in its cave
and will not stir. Not for the gentle quack
of saxophone, not for raven’s far-calling
croak. Not for oh the lift of poetry, or ah
the lover’s sigh, or um the phrase’s lost
left shoe. It tucks its nose beneath its brush
and won’t. If her whisper tries
to pollinate your name, if a stranger yells
hey kid, va t’en chez toi to set another music
going in your head it simply
enters deafness. Nothing
assuages. Maybe it is singing
high in the cirque, burnishing itself
against the rockwall, maybe it is
clicking in the stones turned by the waves like faceless
dice. Have you heard this? – in the hush
of invisible feathers as they urge the dark,
stroking it toward articulation? Or the moment
when you know it’s over and the nothing which you
have to say is falling all around you, lavishly,
pouring its heart out.
FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON
We come from a hidden ocean, and we go to an unknown ocean.
– Antonio Machado
Everything you think of has already happened
and been sung by the sea. We were hiking
along the coast, with the hush and boom of surf
in our ears, on a trail so wet it was mostly
washouts strung together, forcing us
to find fresh ways around, teetery
and nimble, until I thought, yes,
the real agenda of this so-called trail
is not to lead us through this sopping biomass
but into it, with the surf
as soundtrack. Everything you think, it sang,
has already happened and been sung in long
confessional sighs and softly
crashing dactyls, wash, rinse,
wash, useless to resist. Each wave,
having travelled incognito through its ocean,
surges up to rush the rock, Homer was here, and perish,
famous and forgotten. On the beach
the back-drag clicks the stones and pebbles
on each other, a death rattle that is somehow soothing, somehow
music, some drum kit from the far side of the blues
where loss begins to shuffle. It’s O.K. to disappear. Off balance,
I’m trying to hop from stepping stone to stone
when I flash back forty years to my friend’s
younger sister sitting in the boat,
trailing her fingers as we row out to the raft, how she gazes,
pouring herself into water as its depth
pours into her. I remember
being embarrassed she’d been caught out
having an inner life and rowed hard for the raft
where summer fun was waiting with its brawny cannonballs
and swan dives. I think each memory is lit
by its own small moon – a snowberry,
a mothball, a dime – which regulates its tides
and longings. Next time I am going to lift the oars
so we can watch the droplets fall back,
hidden ocean into unknown ocean,
while we drift. I will need a word
to float there, some empty blue-green bottle
that has lost its label. When we lose the trail entirely,
or it feeds us to the rain forest,
what will we be like? Probably not the Winter wren,
whose impossible song is the biography of Buddha,
then Mary Shelley, then your no-good Uncle Ray.
Not the Cat-tail Moss
which hangs in drapes and furs the fallen logs in lavish
sixties shag. I think we come here so our words
can fail us, get humbled by the stones, drown,
be lost forever, then come back
knowing everything. Knowing everything they
think of has already happened, everything they think of has
already happened and been sung, knowing
everything they think of has already happened and been sung,
in all its tongues and metres, and to no one,
by the sea.
WINTER SOLSTICE MOON: AN ECLOGUE
(December: Pacific Rim National Park)
Full moon falling on Christmas eve: I wondered,
as we carried our supplies – wine, rain gear, gifts –
from the car to the cabin, whether everything was
about to get conscripted into either family life
or lunacy. We put
the perishables in the fridge,
walked out on the beach: in the east
the blacker blackness of the mountains, already backlit
by the moon, and lower down each cabin’s roof
outlined in lights, reminding everyone that this
was supposed to be the feast of homes
and homebodies, the time to bring a tree indoors
and charm its boreal heart with bric-a-brac,
to make ourselves so interesting its needles would forget
the roots they left behind. On the wet
corrugated sand the lights were smeared and
rippled, an elaborate film noir effect,
an opening sequence into which a cop car,
like an urban orca, should intrude. To the west
ocean was a far roar under its hush-hush
in the sand, a giant with a lisp.
I was thinking of the house we’d left
huddled darkly round its
turned-down furnace, one missing tooth
in the block’s electric smile. How much
we ask of them, that they articulate
the space around us into stanzas,
pauses in the flow which gather time,
or rather where time, slightly pregnant,
might gather if it chose; that they should be the bodies
of our bodies and the spirit’s husk
against the hypothermia which dogs it,
a.k.a. the dreads; that they be resolute yet intimate, insulated,
pest-free, dry, well-founded in the earth but airy,
fire in the belly and a good deep well attached to copper
plumbing, CSA approved; that they should be
possessed of character but not by ghosts, and not
the sort of character who wakes you
in the middle of the night and suddenly
needs money; that they should shed the rain and keep the wind
from blowing out the candle flame of talk, the bedtime stories,
murmurings, the small redundant phrases with which one voice
solaces another.
And when it goes awry – the cracks the bills the noise the
drains the silences the bugs – to take the blame and sit there,
stoically, on the market while new dreamers sniff the air
and poke their noses into closets,
hatching their improbable plots.
We walked through soft mist,
filling our ears with the ocean’s boom
and whisper. Is it the listening that loosens,
letting its knots go, or the voice,
saying those great unsayings to itself until
ovation on the inside equals ovation out? And rain forest,
I thought as we turned back at the cliff,
must be the way it gets translated into plants,
who remember water with each rounded,
downward gesture.
Then the moon. Over the mountain it hung
and roiled inside itself,
pure style which took the scene aslant, selecting
the bristle of frost on the drift logs, the patch
of duct tape on my boot, the whites of your eyes,
leaving whatever was not glimmering in deeper shadow,
uninhabited. Can you recall
those nights we spent learning from the wolves to be
the tooth and tongue of darkness, how to hunt
and howl? Me neither. Now that howl’s
inverted in us, the long o of alone. The wolves
are dogs. The sun says here, the moon says
nowhere, the nameless moon
that sheds the blunt domesticating myths
the way a mirror utterly forgets you
when you leave the bathroom, the empty moon
soliciting our ghosts, calling on them to leave home,
that gilded cage, that theme park of the human.
But the sea was gazing back, its look
rich with tumult and the possibility of huge hearts
sounding the depths. Between them
otherworldliness is quickened. One theory –
my favourite – goes that once the earth and moon were one,
spinning monthlessly in space, and somehow –
whether by asteroid
or apple, différance, tabu – they broke up and the moon,
newly fallen, risen, floated off into its orbit, while
into the crater of its absence flowed
the greater tear known as the Pacific Ocean.
So:
a story full of loss and eros, three-fifths
of the way to myth. Let’s leave it there – something human,
homespun, like a basket, a translation, or a loaf of bread –
beside the incandescent water. Our cabin sat
under its little party hat of lights, and to it,
wanting its warmth, and supper, and to give our gifts,
we went.
ON LEAVING
Leaving home is the beginning of resemblance.
– David Seymour
On leaving, you circulate among the things you own
to say farewell, properly,
knowing they will not cease to exist
after your departure, but go,
slowly, each in its own way,
wild.
So long and thanks, with one last chop, tap,
twiddle. It won’t work just to
flip them into negatives – minus T-shirt, minus Roger
Tory Peterson both east and west –
nor to convert them into liquid
assets. This is no yard sale, this is loss,
whose interior is larger than its shell, the way you wish
home was. Do not dig the dog’s bones up
nor the rosebush by the porch.
Choose a few companions of no weight –
a crow feather found in the parking lot,
the strawsmell of her hair, a few
books of the dead, 1000
Best Loved Puns. And leave. There is a loneliness
which must be entered rather than resolved, the moon’s
pull on the roof which made those asphalt shingles
shine. A time for this,
a time for that, a time to let them both escape into
whateverness, a time to cast
away stones, to stop
building and remembering and building artful
monuments upon the memories.
To leave.
To step off into darker darkness,
that no moon we call new.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I have, over the years, been fortunate in having excellent readers attend to my work. Thanks to Roo Borson, Robert Bringhurst, Barry Dempster, Stan Dragland, Dennis Lee, Tim Lilburn, and Kim Maltman for this long-term listening. As always, I am especially indebted to Jan Zwicky.
Thanks also are due to the magazines, some still active, some having passed on to little-mag heaven (where there ain’t no typos and the Canada Council makes house calls), that first printed these poems, and have been perennial sustainers of poetry. I hope this list (east to west) is reasonably complete: TickleAce, The Fiddlehead, Pottersfield Portfolio, Windhorse, Matrix, Quarry, Poetry Canada Review, Arc, The Canadian Forum, Exile, Brick, Descant, Saturday Night, Harvest, Impulse, Tics, Eclipse, Applegarth’s Folly, Stuffed Crocod
ile, Prairie Fire, Grain, Dandelion, Event, and The Malahat Review.
Among literary presses let me again thank the chapbook publishers – Reference West, Outlaw Editions, and Trout Lily – as well as Brick Books, Coach House, and of course everyone at McClelland & Stewart for supporting Canadian poetry over the years. Special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Anita Chong, and Peter Buck at M&S.
Some of these poems were written with particular people in mind. Let me just mention “Bird Thou Never Wert” (John McKay), “Simply Because Light” (Jean McKay), “Night Skating on the Little Paddle River” (Bob Zwicky), “Suddenly, at home” (Naomi McKay Sharpe), “Setting Up the Drums” (Andy Miller), “To Danceland” (Margaret McKay), “Finger Pointing at the Moon” (Jane Clement Chamberlin), “Wings of Song” (Stan Dragland), and “Another Theory of Dusk” (Jan Zwicky).
A couple of these poems (“But Nature Has Her Darker Side” and “On Seeing the First Turkey Vultures of Spring”) have sustained minor revisions. The prologue poem was written to introduce this book.