BOOKS BY JOHN STEFFLER
POETRY
An Explanation of Yellow (1980)
The Grey Islands (1985, 2000)
The Wreckage of Play (1988)
That Night We Were Ravenous (1998)
Helix: New and Selected Poems (2002)
Lookout (2010)
FICTION
The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992)
German Mills (2015)
NONFICTION
Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language, and Wilderness (2019)
AND YET
POEMS
JOHN STEFFLER
Copyright © 2020 by John Steffler
McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher-or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency-is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: And yet / John Steffler.
Names: Steffler, John, 1947- author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200185950 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200185969 | ISBN 9780771094521 (softcover) | ISBN 9780771094538 (EPUB)
Classification: LCC PS8587.T346 A83 2020 | DDC C811/.54—dc23
Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company
ISBN 9780771094521
Ebook ISBN 9780771094538
Book design: Emma Dolan
Cover image: page 315 Handbook of birds of the western United States including the great plains, great basin, Pacific slope, and lower Rio Grande valley (1908), The Library of Congress/ Internet Archive Book Images
McClelland & Stewart,
a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,
a Penguin Random House Company
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For Susan Gillis
and in memory of Ken Livingstone
CONTENTS
And Yet
Silphium: a Notebook
I Haven’t Looked at These in Years
Painted Cave
Notes
Acknowledgements
AND YET
You wrote at intervals from Madrid, Algiers,
Victoria and Corner Brook, and on a weekday
in June-a silk-wrapped chunk of Roman mosaic
deep in your duffel bag-you walk the old
dirt road to the valley’s edge and see far below
in its fields, exactly as you remembered,
the house that made your journey a circle.
Your mother probably in the garden, your father
at his lathe. For years you’ve pictured them,
wanted to see them remembering you. Your
old self. You wait. You hover in the heat-
in the sight of the small glinting roof
you’ve longed for—still not ready to return.
SILPHIUM: A NOTEBOOK
WE MAKE OUR LONG-TALKED-ABOUT TRIP TO THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOL MUSEUM
Sharp off the lake, the November wind we shoulder into feels
like 1953. The museum-a belfry, three tall windows along
the side-is it really my old school waiting down this street?
We’re small again, all urges and don’ts.
The door thuds shut. Museum air. No schoolroom stress-fug.
No wet-boots-chalk-sweat-coal-smoke-stale-bread ghost.
“This used to be a Masonic lodge,” the director says, leading
us to the cabinets. Rows of rulers and nibs. He shows Phil
an oleograph flipchart of the body’s organs. Joanne talks with
his volunteers, three white-haired ladies pasting wildflowers
on greeting cards as they did in grade three. Past the labelled
erasers, I lean toward tacked-up photographs-
a raw dirt
yard tilts glaring, humid under loud June trees. We’re lined
up, backs to the hot school wall, squinting beside Miss Duncan,
who’s acting happy and strange.
I’m not even picking
my knuckle warts. I’m watching the man poise his camera on its three
long legs. His smooth movements. I now know why Miss Duncan’s
wearing a white blouse and brooch.
At my left, Wayne (horse-smell)
Brown elbows my ribs, his face a grey blur. At my right, Sandra Dooley’s
warm placid arm (woodsmoke, pee).
The man ducks behind the black
accordion, its eye blinks like shears slicing a chunk of day.
If you sing before breakfast, you cry before lunch.
Lightning strikes the mocker.
Death slips in by the empty cupboard and cold stove.
they want to land these children
want somehow they don’t
know where their ache pulls at some
far inside sickening they need to
walk in plain hello not howl bare
gutted what they felt is not real is not
safe the side out here with you
In the mock-up classroom we sit at small desks. Phil says when
the local doctor came to their school to talk about health and asked
if there were any questions, Phil raised his hand and asked where tears
come from. The doctor beckoned him to the front of the room, took
down the photo of Queen Elizabeth and got Phil to look very closely
into the corner of the Queen’s eye, where he could see the tiny little
hole where tears come out.
On the last day of school in June, I say, our teacher got us to bring
razor blades or knives or straight-edged shards of glass so we could
scrape our desk tops clean of the ink stains, initials and doodles we’d
left there during the year.
Joanne remembers the hatred she felt for her grade eight teacher. He
was so cruel, she says, her friend would throw up before class. And
then in December the teacher read A Christmas Carol to the class and
broke down crying, sitting there in front of them on a desk, a sight
that caused Joanne’s hatred to open and show an unhappy human.
And as the man sobbed and read and sobbed Joanne watched the boy
in the desk nearest to him dipping the hem of the teacher’s jacket into
his inkwell and the ink soaking higher and higher up the flank of the
miserable grey tweed.
* * *
a stack of blackboard slates leans against a wall, each
piece five feet square and more than half an inch thick,
their edges still bearing the marks of the stone saw’s
teeth. They’re for sale, and I want one. I want one of these
black rectangles still charged with the quarry where it was
cut, the nineteenth-century men carefully prying and rasping
it free,
the horses that hauled it a hundred miles packed in
straw without breaking it, the carpenters who installed it
in some now-demolished school where generations
of words and numbers were smacked across it, the chalk
clacking, sometimes snapping or screeching leaving a white
scar, I want one of these smooth stone sheets to do what
with I don’t know, it will just be me and a blackboard
slate in a white room with floor-to-ceiling windows
facing south
* * *
Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters
Christine Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping-Stones
Jean Clottes, Cave Art
Polly Fleury and Hope Kingsley, Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860
Götz Adriana, Cezanne Paintings
J. V. Wright, Ontario Prehistory
Max Raphael, Prehistoric Cave Painting
Nick Eyles, Ontario Rocks
Tomas Tranströmer, Bright Scythe (translated by Patty Crane)
* * *
SLIGHT BRIDGE
evening climbs Woodshed Hill’s mauve
snow into its branches’ grey haze, the foxlands,
the bearlands, the deepening turquoise west,
and here, a slim bridge made of watching, not
knowing, hangs between Woodshed Hill, closing
its dark door, and this darkening room
* * *
OLD FOREST
through the family for generations. The children felt
their grandparents’ lives lingered in the dark wood
and they understood who they were in the clock’s
sound and the silvered light reflected into the living
room from the neighbouring slate roofs. But the war
brought that to an end. The bookcases and tables
stood naked for a while in a sidewalk market
and went somewhere else. The apartment’s light
and smells and sounds, the dinners and piano lessons
lasted several years in the thoughts of the family’s
last daughter. Her longing was the strongest force
she knew but it never touched what it reached for.
The loss of her mother’s china, the weedy lot and
then the new building that stood where their green
front door had been mystified her. What had become
of her father’s desk? Every house, every street and
walking person was a mark of grief. Hopes were
always the bud of pain’s dark bloom. The world
was a plain under low rolling cloud, lustrous
as wet slate, dark as an old walnut desk.
* * *
GIACOMETTI
the
brilliant
snow
field
the
sharp
north
wind
hide
behind
this
picture
of
them
* * *
NEW MOON
The words in both our books are wandering off
in constellations best investigated with closed eyes.
We click off the bedside lights. The rafters creak.
Ice grains trickle down the shingles overhead.
Somewhere in the room the cat rasps itself clean.
And then, a gnat-faint wailing my neck hairs hear
before my ear, a distant braid of suddenly swelling
screams-
wolves are around the house,
one shrill
yell my skin reads as a woman torn over the snow
in teeth-I strain to detect Help! or No!, set
to dart out and save someone,
but the voice bursts its
human mask, streaking way beyond the orbit of any
self
into the yodel tornado.
We yank the curtains aside-
stars-fields’ grey tarpaulin-forest’s dark
bulk-
in the morning we’ll look for tracks.
* * *
GIACOMETTI
enough
clash
and
racket
without
your
hullabaloo
listen
…
…
windswept
snow
is
everything
* * *
BOARDWALK
To have a year-round path to the lake I build a boardwalk across the swamp.
The late winter ice is soft and grainy under the sharp sun but still holds me while I chop through it.
Black ooze smelling of beavers spurts from the holes as I pound in posts that will hold the boardwalk’s stringers and slats.
Across the lake’s ice, tiny geese and trumpeter swans float in shimmering layers.
And above where I work, in the silver maples’ fine branches nearly dissolved in light, a white-throated sparrow sings in a moment that has lasted a million years.
I reach through a million years for the saw and cut a plank. There is no resistance to my arm.
A deer pauses-curious neck/ear slivers in the trees’ slatted haze-and disappears.
I will soon be able to cross from shore to shore as easily as the sparrow’s song.
* * *
But when I go walking I want to forget everything I’ve read. The black walnut steps sideways, is not a history of itself or body of lore. It’s a sound coming from all sides, its leaves are the smell you could call Atlantic or sentient or Cenozoic or music or walking to school.
* * *
PUSHING EVERYTHING ASIDE
Rising sun warms the pale cut ends of the wood
stacked in the lean-to on Woodshed Hill. All
winter the cat and mice, the jays and squirrels
have staged their plays on the elm chunks under
the wide up-tilted eave, and I’ve left their
theatre intact, burning thorn brush, worn-out
slippers, fish-fat-soaked magazines. I pay my
taxes at the long counter of the fisher’s
tracks across the snow, and the fisher redraws
my acres’ boundaries every night. Sometimes
I find them under the bed in a snarl it takes
all morning to undo. Sometimes I walk for
weeks back near the lake and can’t recognize
anything. There are tents, smoke and voices,
white ribs high in the hemlocks. I felt the swift
deepening of time. Who set the beech tree here,
watching, watching, in its fine grey sleeves,
choosing not to say what it could? These
ladder marks where the bear climbed into cloud
and went to sleep. Or the trunk is occupied.
Someone in there on the phone. A mastodon for
godsake. How long has it been since a mastodon
called from here? Already red-winged blackbirds are
snatching the horizon line to weave their nests.
* * *
CROSSINGS
To get free of Nora, meowing us out of sleep from
the bedroom doorway, I grope down the dim stairs
following her swanky tail and open the door, letting
her dart onto the frosted porch-into the presence
of eight deer, clean as cream in the first light
on the field’s brown snowless stu
bble. They lift
their faces to gaze at her as she walks toward them, tail
neither greeting nor hunting, as though lost in thought
on the way to the neighbours’—and sits, messageless,
not far from them. And the deer-straightbacked,
humpbacked, legs braced, bunchlegged, sideon, halfturned-
stretch their questioning necks and step toward her in
stops and increments, as curious as sheep, or pretending
to be, and Nora-nervous? what, her? nervous?-dawdles
briskly off to watch from amongst the bare forsythia
stems as, one by one, in their large space, the watching
deer gradually turn away, pulled into their forest trail
in slow leaps, until only one sleek deer grazing by itself
is left. It looks up, high-steps toward the forsythia and
stands in its growing aloneness, staring at Nora. Then,
raising its right front hoof, it bangs the ground, stabs
the ground again and again, as though commanding her
to flee or follow, and wheels, filling the sky with its wide
white tail, bucking its hind legs so high it disappears
in a somersault into the dark white spruce.
* * *
On the ground among bare rose canes
a robin is scuffling last year’s leaves,
pausing, listening, cocking an eye.
Earthworms’ tips are the first buds.
* * *
How could a weed be a book? (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. 46)
* * *
SILPHIUM