Heads on Cyrene’s bulgy lopsided coins might be Apollo
or Zeus-Ammon, tails is always a thick stalk of silphium
like a six-armed electric transmission tower or a triple-tiered
public fountain. What was silphium? It tasted like no other
plant. You closed your eyes and it went on up the palate,
fanning into new things, flavours and possibilities opening
each from each like a gustatory precursor of Bach’s organ
fugues. Did it heal disease? Make the face lustrous
and young? It made Cyrene rich. Some think it was an
abortifacient. Was it incense? It couldn’t be cultivated,
it would only grow wild. Was its smell exactly what people
mean by “what we want to be”? Hermes handed it to Orpheus.
It was worth its weight in gold, at night thieves killed the
guards and dug it up. Its seeds were the shape of Valentine
hearts. Will a silphium seed be found in some sandy Libyan
tomb, in the wrappings of a mummy or crumbling scroll,
a little heart-shaped seed we can water and nurture back
to life in our time and space? Its green cells held a nation
more ancient than ours. There were silphium cities, silphium
epics and lullabies. Silphium people gathered in markets
and councils, married and feasted and celebrated the beauty
of silphium life. They were communicating with beings in
other galaxies. Here we are, eating and inhaling every variety
of soot-barbed corkscrew molecules of ash boring into our
eyes and brains, growing cancers in every nook of our bodies.
For each creature we exterminate, we are evolving a new one
dependent on human flesh, their taxonomies strangely related to
deep-sea creatures, fungi, fruiting lianas. Signals are still coming
from Alpha Centauri: “Hello, Silphium! Are you there?” But
we cut it all down. We go around bashing each other with cars-
silphium is gone. It can’t answer. We fawned on it, we
reached up its tall stalks like puppies trying to climb a kind
lady’s leg. There it is on coins that last answered to human
desire twenty-two hundred years ago-if we don’t include
what they bought for whoever sold them to the museum they
lie in now or the riches I’ll get from making this poem. Nice
how we’ve always added value to the gold and silver of coins
with symbols of gods and monarchs and how monarchs have
attached themselves to whatever money can buy, so that Caesar
is there in my blood lusting me toward more life, toward new
shoes or a trip to Malta or a bottle of wine or an operation to
cut a sea cucumber out of my brain. I lie in bed looking up at
the ceilingless dark, longing for silphium. I read gardening
books, impatient with roses and carrots, longing for silphium.
I kneel, dribbling pinches of lettuce seed alongside the string
on the finely raked soil, my nose drips, my back aches, I rise
and dust off my knees and eat bread and soup and try not to
think of a world with silphium. Silphium would have made us
all happy with what we have.
* * *
Dear Green Thumb,
Will the clematis eventually strangle me while I nap in
the arbour? I love your column,
John
Dear John,
Yes, it will.
Green Thumb
* * *
THIS
for the rose bed: William Baffin
John Davis
Marie-Victorin
John Cabot
Henry Hudson
* * *
and blurred names, Akerman, Hedford, Stevenson-the way
a dangled magnet flutters at a buried nail. You check the map
for the route to the Richmond Hill library where, in an hour,
we’re going to read. Beyond the guardrail, the past lies
in layers, and I’m down there a few layers above Berczy,
under the factories and asphalt, sprawled on the farmhouse lawn
with Shawn, Carol and Tom, marvelling at the clouds’ white
boil and the fine bottomless blue beyond the elms at the field’s
edge. I couldn’t then see myself streaking across the freeway-
framed horizon glancing down at us buried in July light.
What isn’t a curtain that might part at any time?
* * *
A CHAIR IN A THICKET
the woods are slowly chewing-wide leafed-out
lips riding the jaws’ relaxed roll as though munching
peanuts watching a game-and seem about to speak, lips
slightly parting, settling again, boughs dipping, lifting
in the speckled light, a walking pace, a thinking pace,
the strolling boughs speaking all the while, not
the boughs, the lips in the pollen-haze light, the shrilling
insects, the fine veins and eyes, in the listening,
the habitual intricate taking in, itself speech, selves
presenting themselves, forming skins, faces, shared
walls, building rooms within rooms, light-shuttered,
shade-lit, distant corridors, doorways, calls overlapping,
lapping into this cove, into this this, going elsewhere
still here, arriving new with no memory of here
* * *
TOOLROOM
My father is waiting for me to bring him a set of calipers.
The small room I’m standing in-the toolroom-off the back of the old summer kitchen, was once a pantry. It has a window facing west toward the barn. Its tall cupboard is full of electric motors, drill bits and pump gaskets. The wall-to-wall counter is piled with wrenches, cans of nails, work gloves, sharpening stones, coils of wire, boxes of bullets, a jar of mercury, a jar of DDT, engine oil, pulleys, fan belts, pliers, smudged folded packets of vegetable seeds.
My father is out in the barn crouched in the dim light beside the tractor handling the parts of its engine he’s arranged on a piece of plank on the dirt floor.
I am motionless in the silence, in the window light, ranging my eyes over the crisscross curves and depths, the juts and nooks, the scythe blade angled down over the hardened paint brush under the monkey wrench and wooden mallet, the blue handle of a glass-cutter partly visible under that, the tip of a corroded plumb bob.
He needs the tractor to grade the lane, to scrape its half-mile length from end to end with a homemade drag, a kind of wooden raft with angle-iron blades on the bottom and a stone block on top for weight. I will sit on the block on the jolting drag, teeth rattling, field and sky like slatted blinds. He needs to fill the lane’s potholes and level the hard mud ruts the Dooleys cut with their pickup in the spring, ignoring his Keep Off sign, tearing his barricade down to reach their house across the field once they’d churned their own lane to muck. But the tractor is broken.
Light in the toolroom is a fine, deeply silent grey. The rust-brown hammers, hinges, screwdrivers, funnels, oilcans, rivets, clamps, trowels, leg-hold traps are intensely motionless. Their stillness seems to contain centuries. To have gathered seasons of changing light and sound into mute knowledge. I will soon reach out and lift a chisel, a pitted bolt. I will hear the metal click and shift. I will remind myself of the shape of calipers.
My father needs the lane to be passable at least in summer to get things in from the highway and out to the highway that are too large and heavy to pull on a sleigh-a load of roofing tin, oats for the horse.
He is waiting for the calipers. They are not under the bucksaw blade. Not under the ball of twine.
He needs to be out of the city, the elbowing, the jeering, the taking what you can get. He needs to know that if the power goes out, we’ll have lamps. If the stores are empty or burnt, the garden and chickens will keep us alive. He saw that in the ’30s. He saw that in Germany in the war.
Not under the pry bar, the fence staples, the can of creosote. The silence is bottomless.
He needs the calipers to fix the tractor, the lane, the ’30s, the war, the city, people’s stupidity.
In the toolroom, nothing has moved for hundreds of years.
* * *
LATE IN THE DAY, SOMETHING STILL MISSING
a starling flock careens across
the cloud face like a ragged black
dog escaping from bees,
balks,
piles up into a tighter and tighter
lung and
coughs itself into a black plume hitting
a wind wall, warping
into a vortex, a tight-stemmed funnel
vanishing down some sky
drain
over the hill
* * *
BEHIND YOU
sometimes while waking up it’s clear what the beads
slide on, you could say, “being human,” but it’s
nothing you own, not even things your parents’
parents told you, it’s inside that, beyond the ears’
grasp-speak with a calm face to friends and
fellow workers while you’re planning what to
pack, buy tickets in different names for different
destinations, only one of which you use,
whatever attracts you, go the other way, into
alleys into darkness into water into silence into
hardness into tightness into what falls through-
not “human”, not “witness”, not “logosphere”, it’s
what’s still behind you when you turn around
* * *
BRACKETS
Among their raised three-pointed leaves, the viburnum
berries are yellow. They nod and shake a little in the warm
September breeze. Will the wild turkey come to pluck them
from the bare twigs when the ground is covered with
snow? Last year a solitary male stood here, wings tight
to his sides, stretching his long neck toward the small
frost-bruised fruit and launched his big body somehow
straight up on those kneeless stick legs, toes pointed
down as though imagining ballet. I picture this and write
the question down because the viburnum hangs over
the chair I’m lying in and I have time for a poetic thought.
Why is that poetic thought? In other places people’s houses
burn with all their clothes and photographs, their children
die, men hold up rain-matted stuffed toys. Men with
rifles. Or cameras. Or notebooks. The wind rambles,
watery, stirring the rock elm’s low-hanging boughs, and then
this page, and then the oak tree’s boughs across the field.
* * *
ECLIPSE
The moon rises full through the pines
as the autumn crickets expect and
the stray cat comes calling and our cat
stalks it down the silvery lane, but
already our shadow-do we have
such a thing?-is creeping out
from its earth cave stalking the moon,
and by midnight only the barred owl
is calling, a dog nervously barks
across the cricketless field and the sky’s
snuffed socket throbs out dark rays.
* * *
Night is full of passageways through which things disappear. Where they disappear to remains a mystery. Sometimes they seem to be standing just on the other side of the bookshelves and chairs. But the passageways move around unexpectedly. Handled by agents. Thieves of objects and lives. In the lawn a coyote opens a tunnel that swallows the cat-the cat that had more personality than the prime minister. And in the morning there’s no sign of where that tunnel was or where the cat has gone.
* * *
GIACOMETTI
the
moon
zero
in
brackets
stares
at
the
earth
love
being
made
and
unmade
* * *
CHARGED
Is there a law that makes us break
the law and take the punishment like a dog
hit by a car? I ache even among morning
glories and hummingbirds, suspecting I’m
charged without hope of acquittal, polarized
to repel every outcome I intend.
Or?
Can we join the clan of the dragonfly nymph
or hang the hypnotized pilot’s portrait
at the head of the court or wear the icon
of mercury or the ash-covered ember or
swear by the twin signs of lichen and hail?
* * *
Woodshed Hill is losing its leaves. Those still clinging
swerve and tremble like a school of orange fish—
glittering—in the clear north wind.
Listen—again that clunk on the outside wall. Like something
trying to find a home for the winter.
Once in a while I think of the arrowhead I found years ago
and so far always find it again in some
box or drawer.
* * *
open doors all down the hallway, piles
of books and curtains, plates, shoes
I HAVEN’T LOOKED AT THESE IN YEARS
WATCHING
I am watching us now, two dark specks in the white fields, my mother pulling me on a sleigh.
Even then, sixty-six years ago, I was watching—part of me already staying behind, watching us move on ahead out of sight, not sure if I was really seeing what I saw.
The vast cold sky is sharp as a spark, but the few barns and bare elms shrink away to the land’s rim.
Her footsteps crunch the jagged snow, the sleigh jolting, swinging the sun side to side.
We are dashing from warmth to warmth, but my throat wants to go with the wind wherever it goes.
Her heels bounding ahead, my mother glows gigantic with struggle.
Why isn’t she sad?
We are specks, and the clouds of our breath fill the world. I stare at her red coat’s swirling skirts like fireplace flames.
She turns and shows her smiling crooked front tooth. Why isn’t she sad?
At the lane’s end, by the white deserted road, she bends and brushes snow from the lid of a box. I stand looking over its edge as she opens it, snow spilling into its square wooden space where two frosted bottles of milk are waiting, their cardboard caps perched on short columns of frozen cream.
The bottles bundled beside me, we turn and begin the half mile back to the house where I’m already waiting, watching us come.
In the wind I am safe, naked as a crow.
There is barely space for us in the dark papered rooms. They are so full of old stains, so thick with silent watching. Why is my young mother hurrying her
e with such appetite?
THIN PATH
All evening the moon has coasted
out beyond the balcony.
You walk
the thin path across the gulf to ask
if there’s anything it wants-a glass
of water, a shawl.
The moon smiles
and shakes its head, it’s listening, it’s
watching something you can’t see.
You turn and walk carefully back
to where you were. For years
you didn’t understand how deep
your shadow is and empty, how
it distances the things it falls on,
how it stretches out looking like
a path.
I HAVEN’T LOOKED AT THESE IN YEARS
my beloved father was human, here’s his hand holding
his knife, it’s how I still remember him, I laid the knife
under his hand and covered him, my beloved sister
was human, mine were the last fingers to touch hers,
I placed this needle—it looks smaller here than it was—
between her finger and thumb, my father used to say
whatever eats leaves waste and hands are hungrier than
mouths, he said human hands are born toothless but
make their own teeth, here I am with my brush, and here
with the camera, beloved brush, the camera I’m not
so sure about, it meant a lot of arguing about catching
god, here you notice I’ve got it in both hands, very
human, and here I’m holding it in my teeth for a joke,