THE DUMPE
An old dance of which no one knows anything except that the word is generally used in a way that suggests a melancholy cast of expression.
– The Oxford Companion to Music
No one remembers what is
danced to the echoless drum one
one
one
one or you can simply
slam the door.
When you feel the spirit move you
plant your foot. Stamp each
butt into the pavement.
Close your right hand loosely
round a disconnected gearshift.
You never asked for this. This
is what you got. Forget
“refining figuration of the human
form in space” and other psychosomatic noise.
Wear your luggage.
Get in line.
Think of the alligator and the pig.
They never asked for this.
Drop the disembodied body. Stamp.
Forget.
NIGHT FIELD
1.
“Burning thirty years of paper,”
he can’t resist repeating to himself as he
tosses another shopping bag of correspondence on the fire.
Thirty Years of __________ (fill in the blank) gathers,
listens to some speeches, marches on the embassy and turns
ugly with the desire to let go and be mob, the air
a thick fabric of thuds. Already they have burnt
the library at Ephemeros, bills, receipts, notes on
notes on drafts of copies, tax data from 1978 and an interesting,
well-written paper on one of the most difficult
problems in Spinoza, B+. In his daughter’s art class
they did gesture drawings of a moving model on newsprint,
fifteen seconds a sketch, no more, and since
these are already two-thirds of the way to flux
they bloom at once, while the notebooks and journals
close themselves in airless strata.
So many styles of fury: he names the tickle and twist,
the Baked Alaska,
tongue-of-the-serpent, at one
point in the life of the fire it reads as we do,
one page at a time, but purely, lifting
and curling, then browning each leaf before –
nothing is cooking here –
the burst of perfect understanding.
Leaving only black flecks to float off and briefly
speckle the air. Junk food for bats, he thinks, or
echoes from that dreadful place, the blank page.
That pool full of wonderful risk.
2.
The painting was given to him by his godparents a few years before his godmother died, a gesture so loaded it occupied his mind like a cathedral. In their tiny basement flat it had taken up a whole wall. Mostly black, but opening into a spectrum of purples and bronzes when you drew close, it had the force of an icon presiding over their collection of books and records, the splendid clutter of art spilling from shelves onto the floor, leaving only enough room for Marg to pass in her wheelchair. There is a tuft or tussock of straw in its lower middle, as though briefly caught in a headlight. He would sit, listening to The Trout or The Pastorale, staring at this tuft, imagining the truck (an old ’40s pick-up with a plywood box on the back) paused for those few seconds at the gateway to the field, then backing up and turning, the cone of light swinging in a short arc across the grass, then the velvet purple-black closing in entirely, an eclipse. His eye dawdling over the spray of straw, always aware of before and after, two unknowns. The painting like one frame in a long dark film.
Just before his mother had her heart operation, she was given a weekend pass from the hospital. And since he lived in the country close by, both his parents came to stay at his house. They all sat on the porch and talked gently. Seen through her eyes, everything was etched and precious: the afternoon unfolded itself.
But that night she had trouble with breathlessness and angina, and lay awake for a long while, staring at the painting on the wall opposite.
“I hate that painting,” she said at breakfast.
“What, Marg’s painting? Why?”
“It has a monster in it, like a death’s head. It reminds me of everything that happened to Marg, that whole terrible business. It’s like it’s mocking us. Everything.”
“I’ll move it,” he said, “but I’ve never seen anything like that and I’ve looked at that painting quite a bit. Where is this critter?”
“Right in that mess or bundle of whatever it is that’s lit up. I know what you’re thinking, but it’s there all right, and once you see it you can’t ignore it. I just stared and stared and felt worse and worse. Go look. There’s a definite nose and this sneering mouth and a black pit for an eye. Terrible.”
“That’s just a bundle of grass, lit up by a flashlight or something, like you’re walking in a field at night.”
“Then it’s a field with a monster in it,” she said firmly.
He took down the painting, and looked for the monster. His father could see it, and so could others, once it was pointed out to them, but he never could. He often found himself gazing into the field while talking on the phone, tilting his head this way and that way, trying this or that combination of straws and blackness. Sometimes he does think “Rorschach test.” Sometimes he thinks “coils and recoils of interpretation.” And sometimes he feels like the inadequate hero of a fairy tale whose shape he can’t make out: the old woman is an old woman, the dog is a dog, the field is a field, and the monster who will laugh and steal the silver thread of meaning from a life is never there when he’s looking.
3.
The movers, having cursed their possessions,
cubed them in the van and left.
Now the hangers hang like queries in the closets,
the carpet runs unimpeded to the wall,
and the walls, freed from calendars and art, relax
into a gentle geometry of their own.
The house listens, surprised
to hear itself think.
He wishes he could listen with it, that he’d lived
less noisily among its shades and angles.
Maybe the house hears branches creaking in the forest
no one walks in. Scraps of aria under the eaves.
The dog whimpering in his sleep.
MOTH FEAR
These must be the dead souls who have not
quite graduated into ghosts, air
No wonder they’re terror-stricken, still
clinging to the light, indentured
to the dark, flapping the loose
bandage of themselves against the screen.
Why can’t desire just die and be dead
when we are?
Let them in
they collapse upon your charity
eat your socks and drown themselves
in coffee cups.
Crush them
they find their voices in your memory.
Better not.
MEDITATION ON SHOVELS
How well they love us, palm and instep, lifeline
running with the grain as we
stab pry heave
our grunts and curses are their music.
What a (stab) fucking life, you dig these
(pry) dumb holes in the ground and (heave) fill
them up again until they (stab)
dig a fucking hole for you:
beautiful,
they love it, hum it as they stand,
disembodied backbones,
waiting for you to get back to work.
But in the Book of Symbols, after Shoes
(Van Gogh, Heidegger, and Cinderella)
they do not appear.
Of course not.
They’re still out there
humming
patiently pointing down.
DOMESTIC ANIMALS
that blue
blush rising in the snow and the dog
follows his nose into a drift: woof: weightless
explosion on the moon. Farther off
the dead express themselves
in little lifts of painless terror. Unadulterated
dance. By the edge of woods
they dress and undress mindlessly
shopping, trying on snowsuits
bedclothes, elegant underwear, nothing
fits their windscape.
They’d rather be naked.
Who wouldn’t?
Dutifully
we chase the news. We cook
and type. We
calibrate.
Our jobs are on the line, our speed
is Zeno’s car. The same sunset
blooms, fades,
blooms, pursued from one horizon
to the next while sleep
widens its sweet toothless exit
underneath the chair: the missing
person: the cat’s own
ecological niche.
SONG FOR THE RESTLESS WIND
The wind is struggling in her sleep, comfortless
because she is a giant,
which is not her fault. Whose idea was it
to construct a mind exclusively of shoulders?
In her dream
the car chase always overtakes the plot and wrecks it.
Maybe she will wake up
a Cecropia moth, still struggling
in a kimono of pressed-together dust
bearing the insignia of night.
Or as her own survivor, someone
who felt that huge wrench
clamped to her skull, loosening cutlery and books,
whirling round her,
corps de ballet, then
exit every whichway,
curtain.
NIGHT SKATING ON THE LITTLE PADDLE RIVER
Skinny music: needle
in its empty groove.
Our cattail torches make dark
darker but more interested in us,
gathered in velvet fists around each
halo of light. Slow
flits; we circulate as cautious
ceremonious bats.
Some, turning
with crossovers chick
chick chick place themselves
among the starswirl and the mix
of elements, as ice
receives the image of our torches deep within itself
and thinks.
Some may glimpse a lost one
in the spaces between skaters or the watchers,
elderly or pregnant,
by the bonfire.
And some may concentrate on carving little
crescents of this hospitable dark to carry home
and dwell on through the solitudes of daily,
perfectly legible, life.
POPLAR
Speak gently of Poplar, who has
incompletely metamorphosed out of flesh
and still recalls the Saturday-night
bath and toughly tender country blues which,
when she used to travel,
moved her.
Consider that her leaves are hearts,
sharpened and
inverted into spades. Who else
has strength to tremble,
tremble and be wholly trepid,
to be soft so she can listen hard,
and shimmer, elegant and humble,
in the merest wisp of wind?
Who blurs the brittle
creek bank, lisping into spring?
Who feeds the beaver, living in their culture
as potato lives in Irish? Well,
if a man begins to wonder in his tracks and
at them, arrowing behind him and before, should purpose
slow, grow empty arms,
and know itself again as slough or delta, then
that sometime man may wish for a chair of comprehending wood
to lay his many bones in: Poplar.
LUKE & CO.
1.
Shriek of brakes spiked
with your spirit splits the evening suddenly
this is it everything leaks we draw heavy
outlines trying to keep stone stone
boot boot shovel shovel
shovel this raw mouth into the earth
and feed you to the meadow.
2.
Each time he settled on his blue-black sofa Luke
went out, invisible except for small white patches
on his chest, left forepaw, and the tiny paintbrush
tufts on his tail and prick-sack, winking when he
wagged or recomposed his curl:
milkweed
growing on this wild unspecial
patch of ground
let your silk slip
gently to the wind.
3.
A dog on his sofa, a dog
underground, a committee of dogs which
circulates beyond the bounds of decency
sniffing crotches
raiding garbage
stealing from the butcher
begging from the banker
befriending nasty Mrs. Kuhn, convincing folk
that every act is sexual and droll.
Raggedly
they range the meadow,
alternate hosts for all our seminal ideas
(soft sell, the revolving
door, the interminable
joke) tucked in snug cocoons behind their wise
unknowing eyes:
underground
they spread contagiously, freelancing dreamlife to
dreamlife through networks of long rambling after-
dinner anecdotes Mr Glover had an old blind
terrier could fetch a ball by listening to it hit
and roll, I don’t know, could be he smelt it in
the air sure well Luke followed his nose the
way Ezekiel followed God, he’d vacuum up your
trail like you had fishline paying out your arse
you’d double back it didn’t matter he would find
you up a tree thing is, like they only partly
live in this dimension since they smell and hear
things that do not exist for us so on their level
it’s like synesthesia is common sense well, you
know Alice Dragland had such ears folks said her
mother was part fruit bat she would practise
flying when the family was asleep and when she
swam (for miles) behind the boat she mostly sailed
and then of course there’s breakthroughs
as when Luke
discovered down-filled pillows and extrapolated,
grazing the surface of soft
improbable objects with exquisite
fish-bites, chien stupide, chien
brillant, trying to tease feathers
from the cat the sofa and at least one
English professor of each rank and gender,
chien comme une tasse de la nuit, he wouldn’t
let himself become embossed with discipline
but played it like a melody
(Perdido Blues) from which he improvised in long
irregular loops
exits
entries. Letting him out in out to chase a
car bike jogger snowplow (caught, tossed in an
otter’s arc of snow) rabbit motorcycle train the wind
whose speed
was with him even in repose a space
left in his dogginess for metamorphosis and style
where once
right here in this kitchen, Luke ate
three-fifths of Hemingway’s For Whom
the Bell Tolls, fell asleep on his sofa
wrapped in the perfect fur sleeping
bag of himself.
ANOTHER THEORY OF DUSK
What is there to say
when the sky pours in the window
and the ground begins to eat its figures?
We sit like dummies in our kitchen, deaf
among enormous crumplings of light.
Small wonder each thing looms
crowding its edge.
In silent movies everyone overacts a little.
It would be nice to breathe the air inside the cello.
That would satisfy one
thirst of the voice. As it is
only your ribcage speaks for me now,
a wicker basket full of sorrow and wish, so tough
so finely tuned we have often
reinvented the canoe
and paddled off.
It would be nice to write the field guide for those riverbanks,
to speak without names of the fugitive
nocturnal creatures that live and die in our lives.
MEDITATION ON SNOW CLOUDS APPROACHING THE UNIVERSITY FROM THE NORTHWEST
One of us, paused between buildings,
will remark that snow is the postmodern
medium, or national equivalent to Lethe,
and release us to our offices
and tweeds.
We are not
a simple people and we fear
the same simplicities we crave.
No one wants to be a terminal
Canadian or existentialist or child, dumbly
moved because the clouds are bruises,
crowskin coats through which invisible
bits of rainbow nearly break.
The clouds look inward, thinking of a way
to put this. Possibly
dying will be such a pause:
the cadence where we meet a bird or animal