to lead us, somehow,
out of language and intelligence.
IV
EARLY INSTRUMENTS
The wolf at the door
and the wolf in the forest and the work
work work of art. The scrape,
the chop, the saw tooth
tasting maple. The cradle, the cup, the muscle
in your mother’s arm and back
and pelvis, muscle flexing in the air
between two people arguing,
two people loving, muscle
pumping blood. Gut
summoned to speak. The rotary cuff, the wrist,
having learnt the trick of witching wands and locks,
the heft, the grain, the web,
the rub of moving parts.
And the tiny sea in the ear
and the moth wing in the mind, which wait.
TWINFLOWER
What do you call
the muscle we long with? Spirit?
I don’t think so. Spirit is a far cry. This
is a casting outward which
unwinds inside the chest. A hole
which complements the heart.
The ghost of a chance.
*
Then God said, O.K. let’s get this show
on the road, boy, get some names
stuck on these critters, and Adam,
his head on the ground in a patch of tiny
pink-white flowers, said
mmn, just a sec.
He was, let’s say,
engrossed in their gesture,
the two stalks rising, branching, falling back
into nodding bells, the fading arc
that would entrance Pre-Raphaelites and basketball.
Maybe he browsed among the possibilities of elves.
Maybe he was blowing on the blossoms,
whispering whatever came into his head, I have
no way of knowing what transpired
as Adam paused, testing his parent’s
limit, but I know
it matters.
*
Through the cool woods of the lower
slopes, where the tall
Lodgepole Pine point
into the wild blue while they supervise
the shaded space below, I walk,
accompanied by my binoculars and field guides.
I am working on the same old problem,
how to be both
knife and spoon, when there they are, and maybe have been
all along, covering the forest floor: a creeper, a shy
hoister of flags, a tiny lamp to read by, one
word at a time.
Of course, having found them, I’m about
to find them in the field guide, and the bright
reticulated snaps of system will occur
as the plant is placed, so, among the honeysuckles,
in cool dry northern woods from June to August.
But this is not, despite the note of certainty,
the end. Hold the book open,
leaf to leaf. Listen now,
Linnaea borealis, while I read of how
you have been loved –
with keys and adjectives and numbers, all the teeth
the mind can muster. How your namer,
Carolus Linnaeus, gave you his
to live by in the system he devised.
How later, it was you,
of all the plants he knew and named,
he asked to join him in his portrait.
To rise in your tininess,
to branch and nod beside him
as he placed himself in that important
airless room.
TO SPEAK OF PATHS
… c’est le moment de parler de vous, chemins qui vous effacez de cette terre victime.
– Yves Bonnefoy
One gestures to a blue
fold in the hills, meaning
follow your heart. Another scrawls
follow your nose into the raspberry canes
and may later show itself to be
the deer’s own way to the water.
Some will speak
only to the third and fourth ears that persist,
vestigially, in the feet.
One way or another
they feed us a line, and we go,
dithering over the outwash or angled as an oar
into the forest, headed for the top,
the lake, the photo
opportunity, the grave of the trapper
who lived all alone and trained a moose
to pull his sleigh.
Strange marks on a far slope turn out,
hours later, to have been your zigzag path ascending,
earning every inch the waterfall beside it spends
like a hemorrhage. And always
the thrill of the pause, when your eye drinks
and your heart pounds and your legs
imagine roots, when your whole life,
like a posse, may catch up with you and tumble
headlong into the moment.
You may wish to say something to it, but your tongue
seems to be turning to an alder twig
and you must wait for wind.
GLENN GOULD, HUMMING
not along with the music, which isn’t listening,
but to the animal inside the instrument,
muffling the perfections of hammer, pedal,
wire, the whole
tool-kit, humming
he furs the air,
paints an exquisite velvet painting of a far-off country
where the rain falls
contrapuntally the wind lies on the land
like a hand caressing a cat’s back, humming
“this is your death, which is but a membrane away,
which is but a leaf, turning,
which is falling in these delicate
explicit fingers, as you have always known,
and worn, though only we,
the instrumentalists,
have found a way to sing it for you.
Sleep.”
SONG FOR BEEF CATTLE
To be whimless, o monks of melancholy,
to be continents completely
colonized, to stand
humped and immune, digesting,
redigesting our domestication, to be too too
solid flesh making its slow
progress toward fast food.
To feel our heavy heads becoming knock-knock jokes,
who’s there,
kabonk, Big Mac, to know our knees
are filled-in ampersands, things to fall on,
not run with.
To put all this to music – a bellow
which extinguishes the wolf, the long arc of its howl
reduced to gravity and spread,
ghostless, flatulent,
over the overgrazed acres.
CAMOUFLAGE
The Ruffed Grouse cannot be seen unless you step inside its panic, and, since this must be done by accident, there is a certain stress involved. Brambambambambam. As though your poor heart hadn’t enough to put up with, now it’s exploded, like popcorn battering the lid with fluffy white fists. Simply ignore it. This was but a ruse to distract you from the grouse itself, as it flaps, an obese moth, further off into the underbrush. Notice instead the subtle blendings of bar and shade, everything ish, everything soft, the apotheosis of feather. But as your heart can appreciate, its terror is a sumo wrestler.
It is easier to make one in your own yard. Just scrape together a clump of dead leaves about the size of a football. Add an elderberry for an eye, and squeeze together – not too hard, you don’t want to wind up with a pigeon – as if you were making dough. Leave a small cavity for your secret fear. Cover and let stand. After an hour place it under a bush, turn your back, and – presto! – it’s a clump of dead leaves again. But a clump of dead leaves capable of instant catastro
phe. All your eggs in one basket.
BIG ALBERTA CLOUDS
If unknowing is a cloud, it must be elsewhere –
some baffled kingdom
where they clot in thickening air.
Here, in radical 3-D,
dangerous brains are hung against the sky, unembodied,
cumulative, Nietzschean,
making themselves up.
They cast their shadows on the crops,
they make the spruce sing sharp,
and scare the people into being weather-wise,
watchful. Clarity
attends them and great weight
withheld. Oscar Peterson plays “In the Wee Small Hours”
with such softness in such power
and vice versa. Look:
here comes the camel, the whale, the Kleenex, l’oreiller
d’assassin. Watch.
They signify all over the map
and do not fear to tread.
ALIBI
Because the swallows had departed from the cliff,
over and over,
the soft knives of their wings tasting the river mist as they
went wherever it is
they went, because
with the air free of their chatter we could hear ourselves
think, because the notes
we left in their holes, full of love and envy
and lament, were never answered and because we need
an earth with ears to hear the long dread
carpentry of history, and then, and so, and so,
and then, each bone nailed, wired, welded,
riveted, because we knew
the gods we loved were charismatic fictions, and because
the swallows had departed.
KINDS OF BLUE #76 (EVENING SNOW)
A blue against the easy clarities of sky,
a blue that eats the light, a bruise
ascended from forgetfulness. Things
have been overtaken by their shadows, stilled
and stricken dumb. What did they know
anyway? Only cold may speak
or not speak. Inside pain,
singing, inside song
another pain which is the dialects of snow.
And us, full of holes
and chambers
and for rent.
HOSPITAL ZONE
First we feel it, trouble, trouble, our airspace
beaten by its own scared heart,
then spot the little bug-blot growing in the sky,
descending to the heliport.
We’ve all seen M*A*S*H,
those domesticated valkyries. Yet
it holds our ears and gazes, throbbing
like the heavy bass on someone else’s amp as it
hovers, lowers as though trying to lay an egg,
carefully. See,
says a lady at the day care,
crouching by a child, someone sick
is coming to the hospital from way up north.
I’m paused beside them on the sidewalk,
thinking of Virginia Woolf – how she would
cherish this bouquet of looks, this small
figure in the infinite welter of mind –
until it drops from sight. Well.
It’s the machines who will keep watch now, high
in those immaculate rooms, chirping and pinging
like kept birds, counting the atoms
as they fall.
And the angel,
when it comes, may not announce itself
with any buffeting of ears,
may not even whisper,
may not even be a full-fledged angel, may be
just an eddy of the air, which
catches the stuttered heart in its two-step
and is off.
RAIN, RAIN, RAIN
On the roof its drone
is the horizon drawing closer for a
kiss, for an embrace whose message is,
whose muscle is the comfort of,
the family of,
the sociability of being mortal.
Outside, the leaves have multiplied its pitter
into the stuff of plainsong.
So many oceans to be spoken of.
Such soft ovations numbering
innumerable names for hush.
Who understands this tongue? No one.
No one and no one and no one.
SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE VARIED THRUSH
In thin
mountain air, the single note
lives longer, laid along its
uninflected but electric, slightly
ticklish line, a close
vibrato waking up the pause
which follows, then
once more on a lower or a higher pitch and
in this newly minted
interval you realize the wilderness
between one breath
and another.
SONG FOR THE SONG OF THE WOOD THRUSH
For the following few seconds, while the ear
only the offhand is acceptable. Poetry
clatters. The old contraption pumping
iambs in my chest is going to take a break
and sing a little something. What? Not much. There’s
a sorrow that’s so old and silver it’s no longer
sorry. There’s a place
between desire and memory, some back porch
we can neither wish for nor recall.
THE LAUGH
The inverse of language is like a laughter that seeks to destroy language, a laughter infinitely reverberated.
– Emmanuel Levinas
The laugh that ate the snake and
runs through the city dressed in a sneeze, the mischief
done in these sly
passages of time, when the tongue is
severed from the voice and
fed to the weather, when the running
patter of catbirds simply
swallows the agenda, nothing to be held back,
nothing rescued in a catch-phrase or figure, your
house is on fire
and your children are gone.
When evenings pass as unseen
immaculate ships, and folk –
everyone is suddenly folk – rush to their porches
and lift their faces to this
effervescence of air,
wishing.
Wishing what?
Just wishing.
SUDDENLY, AT HOME
there was no place we could sit or look
that was not changed to an icon, cursed
with significance: the clothes tree
groping air, the last video, her fish still
nosing the glass, the clocks,
which might as well be moons, the beds,
mouths, and the great great
grandmother staring bleakly from her portrait.
It is just what she might have suspected.
Suddenly at home the cigarette replaces sentences,
its red eye burning in.
In each phrase
the blesse’d finch of small talk perishes.
What can you say,
we say, it will take
time, we say, while the mills of thought churn
should have should have and the dog
holds everyone under suspicion.
APRÈS LA BOHÉME
After the aesthetic poverty, the bonhomie,
bravado, after the melodies which swell and
spread themselves like easy money,
no one pays the bill
and Mimi dies on four blasts from the horns.
Death is outside in his pickup
which is like a rock. C’mon Mimi
for chrissake.
Now what, brave
bohemians, with the century down to its last
evocative cough and bad
inflamm
able manuscript,
and an ocean of cold hands rising in the streets?
WHAT KIND OF FOOL AM I?
Bill Evans Solo Sessions 1963
To find your way through the
phrase. Some keys are made of edges some
of broken glass. Bauble. Bangle. You knew the tune
before it was mined. You are the kind of fool
who searches through the rubble of his favourite
things. A note could fall in love off
a cliff down a well. When you fall it
will be forever. Whoever has no house whoever
picks his way and finds
his favourite ledge. Far from April,
far from Paris. Far from his left hand down there
pecking the bright shiny beads. Telling them
off. That kind of fool. Everything
happened to you.
MATÉRIEL
I. THE MAN FROM NOD
Since his later history is so obscure, it’s no wonder he is most remembered for his first bold steps in the areas of sibling rivalry and land use. It should not be forgotten that, although Adam received God’s breath, and angels delivered his message, it was Cain who got tattooed – inscribed with the sign which guarantees a sevenfold revenge to be dished out to antagonists. Sometimes translated “Born to Lose.”
He was the first to realize there is no future in farming.
How must he have felt, after tilling, sowing, weeding, harvesting, and finally offering his crop, about God’s preference for meat? Was God trying to push his prized human creatures further into the fanged romance of chasing and escaping? Was he already in the pocket of the cattle barons? Cain must have scratched and scratched his head before he bashed in his brother’s.