THE NIGHT SHIFT
This is a secret.
The barn across the road grows dark and inward
sending thin gleams through its chinks like hints.
The dog sniffs, barks at nothing
dissolves into a tawny pool on the porch.
Absent-mindedness
finds its medium.
The last tractor dies
chortling. There are
birds no one has ever seen
uncaged in any book unguessed
by metaphor
chirping from the uncombed fringes of the lawn.
Flowers begin inhaling through their roots
exhaling darkness.
Fields are seduced outward to their edges where raccoons
whet their wits against us.
DIXIELAND CONTRAPTION BLUES
Cranks up one end
sputters out the other:
in between, the whine
the whinny and the fart
achieve their several perfections.
When I got up this morning
I had an aching head, etc., and the domestic
animals were running the machines,
loosely with their wry
imaginations and beaucoup de second-hand smoke.
I used to think the head was zoned
exclusively for single family dwellings, simple
as the wish for a dog of one’s own.
As though
our lives were not long lusts for
instrumentation when I
got up this morning I had gas in my
trombone I had a
frenzy in my clarinet:
as though I never
wished to slide an early
morning stroll into your ear easily
as easy-over eggs as though
this bed were never empty we were
never swung by pendula of raw
emotion like cheap golf clubs or
disaster in the drums as though
o baby
it wasn’t wailing in the rec rooms of the spirit
anyhow
DEEP VEIN THROMBOSIS
Okeanos, ocean river, perfect
circle of psychoses (motion, matter), once
you went without saying, the pure
verb of the heart.
Now
you snag on my thought like a red kite
in a leafless tree.
Punctuated by dreadful caesurae
you do the thrombus
left foot
left foot
dance of the stoolies naming names, lapsing
blush by blush into my consciousness
where you will live another life,
more public, filled with acid rain and politics, the bad
pornography of medicine.
TROUBLE IN PARADISE
Act 13. Tinkerbell is dead, a crumpled
Kleenex by the sofa. Lost
boys and girls are playing indians and
pirates in the rec room,
brandishing their edges, really
bleeding. Fluorescent lighting. Each
totes a pack oozing the PCBs of his
and her sad histories, a sort
of Germany.
Back in Act 12, voice
put down its animals and has taken up
the telephone, paring down to buzz whine
click.
I’m not home right now.
So what? I got your number
into which
you will reduce, or else:
the original recorded message, something muttering
for chrissake
let there be dark.
EDGE OF NIGHT
Certainly the dead watch us, but not
as opera, nor as the Great Grey Owl
tunes in gophers underground.
We are their daytime television.
Sometimes, mid-line, you can
sense their presence like the
o in rôle beneath its roof, a lope
detached from body.
Don’t let on. Tell Brenda
that you’ve had a sex change or that
Harold has run off with her Electrolux, keep
talking lest you fall in with their radical bemusement
and lose interest. This is serious. Invest.
Hold on to the blues. You might win a bedroom suite.
For everyone.
TALK’S END
“Mind bent around the inner ear,”
a foreign agent
round her short wave. Snap,
Crackle, Pop. No one
speaks her language, its soft paws
harden into anglo-Saxon hammer
anvil stirrup no gaps in this traffic.
*
If I were five hundred years ago,
Japanese, and gathered
I would not be talking with my teeth.
My tongue would feather a curve into the air: so:
I would leave you with the soft
end of the quill.
*
Uninhabited thin
winter light stares in each window
redefining edge.
From room to room inside these clothes inside
this skin: rented:
now I owe everything to the owls.
III
SONG FOR WILD PHLOX
Suddenly, June 1, for no good reason,
the riverbank opens its heart: purple,
purplish, blue, whitish, common
currency from a country warmer than ours,
but cooler in its evenings and foothills.
My Great
Aunt Helen, though proper, used to be addicted
to lacrosse, and sat behind the penalty box
to scold opposing players sent off. Nothing
we ever did deserves
these weeds, which seed themselves
in places we have honoured with neglect.
One evening the dog comes home
freckled with petals of phlox, and for a moment
I imagine the wild wedding in the meadow
where his ample humour must have fit right in
with its numerous kisses and pranks.
MEDITATION ON BLUE
Irresistible, on this atmospheric planet, where
there’s a blue to carry the heart home and a blue
for virgins and a blue to call
the spider from the drain.
Nobody argues with its
shameless imitation of love, diving
simultaneously into the eye and out of sight: sea,
sky, the absence of convulsions and flags,
our own errata winking at us out of depths or heights.
Knowing that one day we will fall to black
or fade to grey, and blue
has been both places and includes them
as a saxophone includes its drastic
possibilities. It’s with us.
We’ve been gone before.
THE WOLF
Wolf: a jarring sound occasionally heard from certain notes in bowed instruments. The body of the instrument, as a whole, resonates to a certain note and jars, just as a room-ornament is sometimes found to jar every time a certain note of the piano is played.
– The Oxford Companion to Music
Poplar Grove is when the cello shakes the breastbone
and The Cage
Antelope is elongation of the field, when brain
has the illusion of unfolding into prairie.
Sometimes an acoustic host expects the melody so
eagerly a placeless humming “huhuhu” develops
and flies round among the putti:
this is The Snipe.
But The Wolf:
The Wolf is when the wood itself,
carved, bent, and
stretched, is moved –
perhaps some memory of rain –
and woofs its execrable music.
Then some of us will be embarrassed
and pretend it never happened, and the rest
will think of driving home after the sky has
snowed its first wet snow, then drizzled,
then turned so dark and glossy that the highway dreams the
deep black lava dream and flows toward it,
asphalt to asphalt.
CHOOSING THE BOW
The dark bow, you explain, wants her head and
flicks into saltando, taking arpeggia
the way a teenager takes stairs. The heavier,
reddish bow will bite and makes a cross-hatched,
comfortable largo. In the kitchen
the violin-maker’s daughter is pretending
she has lost her hands.
Where did they go?
Are they hiding under the snow, clasped,
plotting in their sleep like rhizomes?
Before the discovery of America,
her father says, bows were made of ironwood.
Now we use pernambuco, from Brazil,
a wood so dense it
tenses at the slightest flex
and sinks in water. Outside the window, snow
swoons abundantly into its soft self, as though
a great composer had stopped
dead in his tracks, spilling an infinity of crotchets
quavers phrases into the earth’s lap.
You guess where did my hands go, O.K.?
Have they moved in
with the rabbits, to stroke their terrors
and teach them to count?
Or are they stealing secrets
from the spruce, the horse, the pernambuco,
maple, whale, ebony, elephant, and cat
in order to compose themselves a voice?
Riversinew forming in the other room.
Someone knocking at the door.
RECIPE FOR DIVERTIMENTO IN D, K: 136
1. Allegro
Gather tictocks, stir in a pot and feed to
tigers. Run these cats round a tree until they
turn to butter. Spread on a muffin. Makes an
excellent breakfast.
2. Andante
Let the clock remember the summer sadly.
Simmer. Tie this phrase to the seagull soaring
past. When seagull reaches the far horizon
lower the curtain.
3. Presto
Catch two chipmunks. Marinate. Open sleeping
clock and toss in merrily. Add the gusto.
Keep the sneezing regular, duple, hearty.
Tickles the angels.
BONE POEMS
I.
Mind is crossed, above
by clouds, below
by their fallen brothers, the bears: brown, black
cinnamon and grizzly.
Busy as tugs
they tow their moods across the screen.
But body is the home of a birch wood
whose limbs are unwritten-upon paper, listening
motionless
full of dance
II.
Of all your secret selves, it is the most remote, communicating in the intimate, carrying timbre of glaciers and French horns. Its unheard hum arrives at inner ear without passing the receptionist. Mostly we are tuned to the heart (passion, drugs, intrigues, attacks), but it is through the bone self that the deaf hear symphonies, that mothers know beforehand that their children are in trouble, and that we maintain our slender diplomatic ties with the future and the dead. Bones attend to deep earth, while your heart is learning, year by year, to listen to your watch.
III.
civilization hinted at by cheekbones.
Little is known, except
they knew how to be lost. Apparently
where we have closets
they had porches.
Everything blew off.
Experience was complete combustion, hence
the scarcity of ash or
personality:
their minds unstained glass
windows, delicately veined
as wings of dragonflies
IV. ANTLER
Holy Cow. Some creature
so completely music that its bones
burst into song.
Now we understand those stories of the savage
pianist, annually growing hands
that stretch three octaves reaching for the loon’s cry fingers
sprouting from their fingers, brilliant
failures thrown out each December.
Truly, we will also lose ourselves in forest,
wearing our lawn rakes fanned above our heads, tines
turned toward its darkness,
listening for the lost arpeggio.
V. VERTEBRAL LAMENT
More orders from the star chamber: Higher! Straighter!
To us, the once proud horizontal race of snakes.
Fuck their empire. Remember the amputation.
Recite the remnants of our alphabet, Atlas to Lumbar,
meditating on the lost ones. Query, Sylphid, Zeno,
how they listened and lashed the air and
taught us poetry and danced, far
lither than the arms of maestro as
attired in his pathetic morning coat
he writhes upon the podium.
VI.
Now we know the price of x-ray:
if you want to see your bones you have to
flirt with death a little. Moon-bathe.
Anticipate their liberation from your flesh.
Once upon a time
shoe stores had peep shows that could
melt your skin and show the bones
inside your feet (plenty of room for him to grow there,
ma’am). You looked down zillions, back
into an ocean where a loose
family of fish was
wriggling in blue spooky light.
There are other worlds.
Your dead dog swims in the earth.
VIII.
One day you will have to give yourselves
to clutter and the ravages
of air and be
no good for nothing and forget
how de ankle bone connected to de shin bone and de
word of de lawd. Truthless
you will lie in the kingdom of parts among
Loosestrife, Nightshade,
Pokeweed.
You will learn the virtues of your former enemies,
the sticks and stones, and bless
the manyness of rain.
In some other lifetime you may work
as a knife, a flute, a pair of dice, a paperweight
or charm.
Meanwhile forgive the rasp rasp
of the teething wire-haired
terrier.
NOCTURNE MACDONALD-CARTIER FREEWAY
In the archipelago of coffee, each man is an island. The women are – who knows where – withdrawn but not quite vanished, like god at the end of the nineteenth century. Between your figure and the ground there is a tissue of airless space about the thickness of a piece of paper, in which all double helices untwine, adieu my little corkscrew, and swim offstage at the speed of light. Warnings, some visible, are posted at each junction. The floor may be slippery, the eyes in the mirror may be holes, the cashier may be unfamiliar with your gravity, the money may be avian. But the coffee is real and powers the economy.
Along the re-entry ramp the transports twinkle. Probably their drivers are asleep, ghosts in the machines. We say goodbye to Christmas in Cubism and follow our headlights into the dark.
We drive because we believe in the death of traffic. There will be a kitchen in the middle of a forest, its windows widening slowly, reaching their frames but continuing until the walls are erased. You turn on the tap, an underground river leaps sixty feet into your mouth, a perfectly
composed dream. No phone-ins. No hits from the sixties. No eye in the sky. No internal combustion of any kind. No memory lane. The first song sparrow will have your whole head to itself.
WAKING AT THE MOUTH OF THE WILLOW RIVER
Sleep, my favourite flannel shirt, wears thin, and shreds, and bird-song happens in the holes. In thirty seconds the naming of species will begin. As it folds into the stewed Latin of afterdream each song makes a tiny whirlpool. One of them, zoozeezoozoozee, seems to be making fun of sleep with snores stolen from comic books. Another hangs its teardrop high in the mind, and melts: it was, after all, only narrowed air, although it punctuated something unheard, perfectly. And what sort of noise would the mind make, if it could, here at the brink? Scritch, scritch. A claw, a nib, a beak, worrying its surface. As though, for one second, it could let the world leak back to the world. Weep.
MEDITATION IN AN UNCUT CORNFIELD, NOVEMBER
The sky looks elsewhere, embarrassed.
I have evidently wandered into an old regimental photograph and stand, fading, having no slang, in its legendary mud. We slouch at attention. It is still too wet for the machines, and it will always be. Our sweethearts have married the boys from two doors down and we forget why we were so sad and horny. After the ball is over in Hell Collegiate and Vocational School, no one tidies up, though everyone, mildly encumbered with crepe, wishes someone would. Wasn’t there some magic word that could translate sunlight into sugar? Our tongues stiffen. We all worry at once, cackling like old plastic raincoats over the death of the angel, the death of the author, the breakdown of the tractor. (There was a time, now.) How long until we’re rumours of the death of death? Until we always, only, occur in public?