turn this cold case inside out and use
its lining for clothes.
FAR FROM TOOLS
the poem wants
its clothes, it is so thin
it shivers invisible
in the mirror in the cold
room, it cannot
tell itself from the reflected
bookshelves, the bit
of window showing cloud,
snow, it wants to be something
other than invisible-
wanting-to-be-something-other,
its mirrored absence
is a pain it has difficulty
accepting, difficulty
seeing as clothes, okay,
it knows the window,
the snow are clothes but
it’s sick of them,
it would love to see an iguana
turning to face it,
iguana eyes looking deep
into its own, its lips
opening chalky jade-grey
lumps and points like
talking lichen
HE’S PROBABLY NOT THERE
The guide’s house is hard to see.
Its roof and low walls are built
of the birch and maple growing
around it. From his morning fire
smoke still drifts from the chimney
into the April air. There are no
windows I can see and no possessions
lying outside, not even a bucket
or axe. His living room must be
the forest. I imagine him going
into the house to sleep or wait
out a storm or sit in a different
darkness. I wish I could live in
the guide’s house without feeling
lost or lonely or needing to lay
walkway stones. I wish
I lived in that birch-filtered light
with things as they are, not
thinking their names.
EXERCISE
“Why does the chickadee’s delight in sunflower seeds never diminish?”
“Because, as it passes from the chickadee’s beak to its stomach, the sunflower seed acts as the chickadee’s brain.”
“Right. And the sunflower?”
“The sunflower is delighted to go on a short trip, knowing it will soon be planted again.”
“Very good. Okay, now, why is the sunflower delighted by the sun?”
“Is it because the sun pours out the concentrated sweetness of vowels and the sunflower is a structure of dry fibrous consonants?”
“No.”
“Is it because the sun is immortal, famous, and has thick shining hair?”
“No.”
“Well, is it because the sunflower thinks the sky is a mirror and the sun a reflection of itself?”
“No.”
“Okay, why then is the sunflower delighted by the sun?”
“Because the sun’s delight in chickadees never diminishes.”
“Is that logical?”
“What are you going to dream about tonight?”
A RANGE OF HILLS
Bears lug Woodshed Hill’s bulky darkness into their
dens. It wakes up with them, famished, itchy with buds.
Deer whisk its moonlit branches across highways
in front of cars. Fishers ransack its theatre, littering
Pine Valley with the actors’ heads. Coyotes lope
away, clutching the hill’s money in their eyes. Jays
slash holes in its canopy-their cries disperse its
last leaves. A fox walks across a little fresh snow.
Waking up, I see its tracks disappear. Woodshed Hill
is there in the window. And in the pages on my desk.
CAVE ART
Early March sun hot on the coffee table and my stocking feet, I’m
looking at photos of iron oxide and charcoal paintings someone made
in near-darkness on the walls of Chauvet Cave near the Rhône River
32,000 years ago. Minus ten degrees Celsius outside, but the light
swells on the snowy yard before flooding the window. Jean Clottes’
book Cave Art open on my lap. It’s strangely easy to think in
thousands of years. For 25,000 years we told the same stories,
engaged with the same gods, the great animal rivers, the obdurate alien
fellows, stacked up dense and barging, rhinos, lions, bears, bison,
aurochs, mammoths, in the tundra’s slopes and valleys, never far from
ice. For 25,000 years. Used the same kitchen utensils, answered our
children’s questions with the same words. The herds of thick-bellied
horses, the reindeer, red deer, ibex flowing north and south, upland
and downland, always pursued by the poor sun. We watched and
adored them, filling ourselves like ticks with a drop of their vast
life. We were sticks, we were zigzags, we were eyes only, drinking in,
swallowing images to build ourselves, lines and words to hold the
animals inside our limbs. No stars or sun. The reindeer were the sun.
No plants or rivers. The horses were the plants and rivers. No human
faces. Only animals. We were invisible. Bottomless. Witnesses.
And when the ice began to melt and forests crowded the tundra plains,
some of us followed what was left of the deer and the ice northeast
into America, to Perth, where I sit with photos of Chauvet Cave, and
some of us stayed in the warming forests and raised sheep, pigs and
wheat, made carts and explosions and portraits of ourselves as the sun,
and soon sailed west here to Perth, where we didn’t recognize our
cousins from only a few thousand years ago, had forgotten all our
shared stories, our old gods, except in sorrowful turbulent dreams.
HOW DISTANT THINGS FEED THE HEART
That small breath jolted out seeing clouds and
land suddenly gathered into bison or deer,
shining in them—aahhh! An adoration gasp.
Pleasure returned to the pleasure-givers
in gratitude. A caress reaching out from
under the larynx—this was so well understood,
it had its own word, as one might say “a laugh,”
“a shudder.” We don’t know how the word
sounded, but there are many carvings of it,
of the creatures that caused the sensation
the much-loved word described. Carvings
in bone and ivory. Also paintings on rock,
and a few models in clay.
WINTER QUARTERS
from the goatpath ledge over the frozen river,
with paints, scraper and brush in a bag on my back, shielding
a lamp,
I wriggle into the mountain
inside is the heart’s sky
what am I? a sign for hunger. sticks held together by bawling
or jokes
my bared hand burrows under her coat’s cold leather
beyond daylight, beyond wind, beyond the slither-escape you touch in slit bellies-nose and ears find the deer’s passageway, the route summer takes to her winter quarters, across plains and plateaus, over glaciers and passes, down into a valley where the sun lives,
where bison are born
flame-light staggering under the shoulders’ onroll, the dark animal-honey flecked with gold eye-glints pours through my paint-stained hands, taking the black-manganese and red-ochre flesh I offer them
daubing ankles and lips, I sop their heat into my starving
space
SINCE LIFE VALUES NOTHING HIGHER THAN LIFE
and because animate matter always has at its core
a soft quick, and brains and hearts need to be nearly
mush, the great currencies have all been versions
of flint. (Even the earth favours gladiators over
poets, limestone makes its bullion from thick
skulls and teeth, only once in a lucky while we find
fossils of flowers or tongues.) But those pure
hard tools for cutting and smashing survive the millennia
still clearly describing their vanished opposite,
the hot flowering beauty their makers fed and defended.
I claim this, that all the axes, spears, arrows,
swords and daggers were for guarding tender life, not
ripping it. I claim this. I claim this. I claim this. Shut up.
I claim this claim this claim this claim this claim this claim this
WALLS
Through the damp whispering draft, through
my ringing ear and the echoed plink, plink
of a distant waterdrop, I hear the people’s faint
blended voices seep through the cavern’s walls.
They are talking or singing in a neighbouring
chamber, their voices close but blurred through
thousands of years. I think they are here to
honour the animals’ birthplace in the earth’s
night. I hear them come closer. Just on the
other side, they reach toward me brushes
dipped in ochre and black manganese and
paint my shape on the thin surface between us.
LIMITS
If language has learned to live in the mind
the way racoons have learned to live in the city,
maybe words can go feral again, smother in vines
the sign saying City Limits and make me
dream when I think I’m awake.
Come on, trees,
I’m waiting to take dictation!
I have no idea what you’re going to say
or if it will sound anything like birdsong or boulders.
Boulders?
Fewer and fewer things fit
in my hands. Something the size of a steer or small
car is brushing the backside of whatever I’m
seeing and hearing—
like that huge
carp I once felt sliding against my
hand in the cold muddy water I reached down
into until my ear and cheek lay
under the surface
TREO
What man with a framed licence and a ring engraved with a compass and ruler
has laid out the boundary lines of the oak’s estate? Its soma, its miyaw. In what
charter is the border between bark and aer, ojiibik and aki, wrot and erd set
down? The oak spreads into the streaming light phos, giisis and climbs
the condensed code right to the sun’s brink, it’s that tall, swims up a radiant
sugar cascade millions of miles high, the sky pneuma, lyft streams through
the oak’s pores, pours through the tunnels and galleries waanzh, bloma, miskwi
the street map, metro and hallways of Mexico City and all its traffic are simple
and small compared to this oak grown into the wind, into the suburbs of air, the
commerce of breaths and whistles kreas, carnem, wiiyass carbon and oxygen
bales, tanks, pouches, veins and aerial alleys, wrens’ routes beyond the ken of
London cabbies widu, xylo, mitig, wod, vates while roots drink from the heavy
dark, the depths under old words, sleep gast, manidoo the roots are not afraid
to enter every room, every thought you have, your dreams and faint rememberings,
drinking the knowledge into its growing reach gikendaasowin, manas, munih,
mantis you would never explore this one oak’s forest if you had all the lifetimes
from Lascaux to Mark Rothko. And the light? Who has measured out its border
with the sun, counted the eyes it employs, the forms it paints on nothing? Who
has set the sun on one side and the sky on another? And the water, the earth,
the heartwood and me heorte, giiyoon, gaia, erd—my looking and being here—
who has put a percentage to each of them? To the heartwood in me and to me
in the oak’s roots? treo, truce, truth, bimaadan, zhiibine, du, duer, endure.
A WORD FIGHTS SPEECH RIVER TO ITS HIGHEST POOL
Put your boots on backwards, pull your shorts down over your
eyes and let’s go over what you’ve heard and said so far today.
Under the radio’s rope bridge, under the news site’s catwalk
grate, the gorge’s torrent’s noise, treetop mist-you were here
at four in the morning, your hands empty and nothing that showed
in a mirror but your clear-hole eyes, your mouth time-lapse
talking in reverse, back through childhood, through parents’
parents’ cracked pale sloped thin muttering lips showing
more lips underneath, mouths inside mouths saying “world”
“wild” “wald,” back through the plush-lined gulletry, earth-
tunnel-breath—all those long-dead selves are still thinking
you. Clear-headed. Your world is what they see. Your eyes
turned this way and that by a girl with red paint, two quail
Er, ter, der, de, da, met, meter, mater. To be able to break all
the furniture, axe down doors and walls, burn the roof, roll
around outside with ants and asteroids and still leave a trail
of words you can pocket one by one all the way to your front
door-is its paint more weathered than you recall? Your chair
thicker, heavier? Dinner does taste of some stranger’s touch.
WHAT KIND OF TRACKS ARE THESE?
This morning, is the interrogative the only working gear?
Could we say it’s similar to reverse because operating in
Why? or How? we can’t clearly see where we’re going or
gain much speed?
And don’t we find ourselves slowly reviewing a landscape
we earlier passed through taking it in only subliminally if
at all?
And aren’t we now seeing the backside of what we took for
the front?
Is it stupid to assume that the first glimpse we have of a thing
is its front?
Does looking back at the way you’ve come make you realize
you’re lost?
Which European philosopher believed that asking questions
delays or deflects the movement of time?
Are you irritated by lists?
If you could swivel your head like an owl would reverse be
equal to forward?
Likewise, if we refuse to accumulate answers, can a barrage
of questions offer vertical lift?
Are questions inherently more comical than statements?
While a question clearly leads to a gulf that anyone might fill,
is it not true that statements use their bulk or authority or
menace or brutality or beauty or their intimidating confidence
or blurred complexity to conceal the empty gulf behind where
they started?
Do you assume there�
�s someone inside you who could explain
how you got where you are?
CAGES
Back and front I’m slung with empty
cages for wild birds. House wrens,
brown thrashers. Their long
various songs and abrupt certainties
are all around. I catch them
and take them away with me,
spelling each detail out until it’s gone.
THAT THIS
Reading Susan Howe’s thoughts on the writing of Hannah
Edwards Wetmore, I have the impression she’s patronizing
the eighteenth-century woman ever so slightly, moved but also
charmed and a bit amused by her quaint naivety-that
American notion that people from earlier eras were a bit
simple and laughable, apt to be more histrionic and earnest,
lacking in irony—and I build a case in my mind: how
because people were more exposed to hardship and death
in the past, living on closer terms with the slaughterhouse,
the workhouse, slavery, facing the stark consequences
of poverty, accident and isolation, without our medicines
and securities, it was natural for them to express their
struggle against darkness and annihilation with extravagant
drama, and while this might make them look like morbid
fire-and-brimstone yokels to some of us, it’s really we
who are naive; our technological comforts have pushed
catastrophes a little farther into the background or future,
but since we’re still mortal and since it’s not clear how
long our sheltering culture can last, at some point we’ll
need to deal with some form of famine and plague. And
yet, on going back over the pages of That This, I can’t find
any place where Susan Howe patronizes Hannah Edwards
Wetmore.
IN THE COURT OF STEPHEN HARPER
I paint my face white because I run a small theatre
where you can watch things disappear. I paint