my nose red because I’m always crying and often
drink from a pocket flask. And I have a cold or am
allergic to something. The crown of my stovepipe
hat, wreathed in black crepe, is broken, but I let it
flap. It is my childhood beating its breast, and if
people laugh, that’s the whip on my back I count on.
Hasn’t a bigshot’s violent hatred always been
the law? Even up close everyone’s far away. On
the balcony I’m sarcastic as an old-fashioned crow
although the building teeters. I’ve cut words from
books and posters and taped them all over my patchy
suit. You can start reading my sleeve or collar or
crotch, it makes no difference. I tromp around
bowed down like Sherlock Holmes with a huge
magnifying glass, absorbed in my tracks.
TRICERATOPS
In the late autumn, in the afternoon as the woods start
to darken, the triceratops comes down the rocky slope
northwest of the house and crosses the field. I watch
from the kitchen window. The setting sun or pale dying
light is always at its back as it ambles east, hoisting
its weight with a little skip and light rhythmic step,
the way elephants do. There’s somewhere it wants to
spend the night. Or it walks and naps—one way or other
it follows a circle that will bring it back to the crest
of the ridge tomorrow at exactly the same time. I could
follow its tracks to find where it goes, but I only think
of this now. At the time, I always gaze at it without
attempting a thought, as you might gaze at a lake or
trunk of toys. Its hide is stiff-plated and coarsely
pebbled in glossy greens and rust-browns. When it
swings its beaked three-horned head toward me it seems
to be reaching in through the window the way you
grope through the coats in a closet looking for keys. Its
eyes shine phosphorescent green like the galley portholes
I once passed at night on the deck of the Newfoundland
ferry out in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in fog. The cooks
were inside in the small room’s steamy light, bursting
out of their white unbuttoned jackets, smoking, mouthing
words, gesturing bare-armed, drinking bottles of beer.
HOW POETRY MAKES A THING A THING
The call is some poor prisoner reciting
hello she’s with something
something research outfit doing a survey
on shopping habits. I set the phone
down on the sofa, continue on
to the kitchen to cut another piece
of Manchego cheese, oily and slightly crystalline
in its structure, hang up the phone on the way
back to my reading chair and munch
the cheese slowly with sips of red wine. Nothing
is blocking the path, but I know
what it is
and hit it with my stick, making the two wrestlers
break their hold on each other, and they
stand there, no
on one side, thing on the other,
as plain and naked as can be, and I walk
on between them, surprisingly
happy in spite of the mid-April cold
and being alone.
MUSÉE DES BEAUX-ARTS
A box of family keepsakes you can walk through.
“Tour the Western Tradition,” the brochure says. “Start
in the Late Middle Ages on the fourth floor and descend
through the centuries.” Contemporary galleries
are in the basement.
The elevator shuts out the foyer’s
noise and ascends into the roots of the upended tree.
Why do I expect vestiges to be gruesome? The toys
and brittle books our parents treasured as children
always seem grim. Poor. The chipped tin horse,
the paralyzed doll serving the same dark imperative
as those carved African heads studded with nails.
Alone,
I follow the hall into a dim room with rows of clear spot-lit
cases, portholes into the deep brain, each housing
a painting on gold worm-holed wood. Altarpiece
parts. The altars, the damp murmuring churches and smoky
lanes all cleared away.
Each painting worries over the same
scene: hunched brutes nailing an intelligent young man to a thick
wooden T. Mallet blows. Blood. Spiked hands and feet.
The pain-wrecked man’s upward gaze.
It’s hard to be human.
The mind a curse, since we’re made to rot. Slaves to our guts
and crotches. Killing and mauling. Why attach ergo sum to this
crap? Spike the brainy bastard down! We’re all spiked down.
Kill him and get back to being happy as larks, happy as pigs
in shit, happy as morons with mallets.
But the next room’s gilt
panels show a young woman holding a child on her knee. Through
the glass her serene joy glows.
Her child’s joy glows.
OLD WORLD
for Stan Dragland
Along the trails in the camps every day some were born.
Their mothers nursed them in plundered farmsteads watching
the buildings burn before moving on, the owners
twisting in nooses from trees. In log-walled shelters
their mothers wrapped them in kisses and charms, rocked them
all through the fire-lit telling of raids. And as they learned
to braid fingerbones in their hair and make axes gleam,
younger brothers and sisters were already following them,
sharing their awe at the bearded heads their uncles
nailed to ridgepoles and wagon rails. For each
lost to the calling of blades and mauls, for each one
lying watching flies pulling their legs
free from his blackening blood there were five
of his kind striding to take his place, riding out, sailing
out to harvest what others treasured—blood, gold, horses,
slaves, houses, fields—no wonder a few
dreamed of a quiet garden filling all their needs
and wore on their necks carved ivory tablets showing
a hand reaching down, pulling a naked human
headfirst up through its split scalp,
letting its old skin clothing fall.
CELL (THE LAST CLIMB)
for Louise Bourgeois
It must be true, the flustered mind-the still famished,
homesick mind—is finally drawn to a cage—or—all along
the cell we’ve lived in was open—its bars are branches
and its trellised gate leads to the foot of a spiral stair—old
clanging treads familiar from precarious nightmares or
a workplace—where sometimes one floor down you glimpsed
your younger self lost in its wishes and maps—but now
the steps rise to an open roof among clear blue spheres—like
you’d hang above a crib—a riddle to explain space—Atlas
has escaped there, leaving—sunk on the floor the pair of massive
cracked wood balls she lugged all her lifetime—you’ve
escaped and left your nerves’ sensations trailing—spooled
from the Old World tapestry you tried to mend—red
from its butchered parts—in the stairway’s space your threads
are gathered to a high-peaked tent as though by flying
birds—maybe—maybe we can’t know what we say and
make, and why, until we’ve gone where nothing is yet visible.
TREES AT SAINT-RéMY
the air is burning and turning to earth
or the earth’s mind is pouring out
green bolts dart between earth and sky, sky and earth so fast they
print themselves on the eye and seem to be standing still
remnants of blind ancient urgency flying past
even the smallest plum tree grabs the sky and waves it like a flag
it doesn’t matter what’s gorging on what, just seeing the turmoil is
a shot of god, but it’s hard not to regret the knowledge-scald, your
self bleached away, worn poor, mute
lonely
when you mention the noise, people step back inside, their faces
slam shut
* * *
the noise a burning city makes—if you were to paint that
Herakleitos wrote: “Everything becomes fire, and from fire
everything is born” the young almond in late February
shoots green wires into your eyes, breeching the nerves’ filter
caps, ramming lit gas down the spine, snarling your
boiling your
giving your thighbone marrow that orgasm ache
shearing your puppet strings—throat going unh! unh!—banging
up through the neck, exploding the brain
* * *
human nature likes to hide in the hope of longevity, how many
crows in a wheat field can we take?
* * *
a permanent bruise on the back of the eye
a thin curtain easily blown away
THE SEA STILL LOOKS WELCOMING
a small glowing corpse cocooned in pale
turquoise wrappings
I carried it up to the rocky pasture,
it weighed no more than a willow basket
April wind blew through the stones
of the hut where I laid it
scatters of light and rain will feed it,
birdsong and blown snow
letting my hands swing, hungry, I walk
down toward the village, red in the evening
EXCHANGE
The ancient Celtic warriors (or
admirers of warriors) spoke their pledges before witnesses
on the brink of a bog, making their vows famous and irrevocable by
throwing a lightning-alloy sword worth more than a man’s life
into the black muck,
or
they were delivering treasures to their dead ancestors, thereby
obligating the dead to lobby on their behalf with the gods
with whom their dead mingled in back of the changing
clouds and hills,
and so
they threw their gorgeous bronze blades—images of their souls—
into the bottomless fens,
the black liquid night into which their ancestors and all the past
had vanished,
and we,
trowelling peat, reach out and catch their votive treasures
like tossed bouquets,
and leaning over museum cases, see their swords within our
reflected faces.
PAN AT TWILIGHT
An excuse to poke through Rideau Antiques—could we find
a cayenne shaker like your small china parakeet?
In an aisle of glints and tarnish I knelt peering into a low
cabinet’s darkness where a brown-orange rabbit sat, downcast,
trim, among blowsy cartoon figurines. I snaked my fingers
in and lifted him.
Seven holes in his lowered brow, under his paws a tiny
cork. Probably ’40s Japanese.
For thousands of years he’s been travelling through Thessaly,
Capodimonte, Meissen, Sumida, exiled from the ancient world-
pensive, one long ear fallen back on his shoulder, one askew-
oblivious to who was moulding and painting him.
Our table where he now sits filled with cayenne is no more
memorable to him than the auctions and junkshops.
Once in shadowless midday he kicked the whole planet away,
blurred mountains faster than any wolf, laughed, gallant,
savoured every petal and frond without needing to hunt, and
pushed hip-deep into honey’s honey over and over-it was all
waves of gold smoulder up to the roots of his teeth and then it was
getting dark
and the woods were strangely silent and reserved, the shadows
were deepening, the earth heavy inside his bones, the earth
was made of bones, and the rabbit who would be bounding
in tomorrow’s noon, strangely,
would not be him.
GIACOMETTI
the
moon
watches
Mary
buying
mittens
for
Joe
who’s
gone
to
with
Jane
A MOVEMENT CATCHES THE EYE
Hello, white goose beauty pain.
Bundle fire, yes, I have it.
Tree hair, yes, I have it.
The dead child fingers fast feather music under the rocks
over there.
Fast mice finger sunrise face, she eats and grows tall.
Stitching a long long bluebird and canary cape.
Sit down here, I will open the bundle.
OPENINGS
I’ve brought my tray of tea to the screenhouse-
damp June morning, almost too dark to read.
Down the small slope there’s the garden’s unfinished
cedar fence I was working on yesterday. Gateway
posts at odd heights. The dampness darkens another
degree down, then down again, air blurred with wet
wood settling its weight, slackening like a slowly
opening palm showing a small pearl, a faint ping
like a fallen tree seed on the tin roof, a stretching
silence and another soft ping the same here-not-here
fulcrummed presence as the black and yellow
gartersnake I found resting on the handsaw’s flat blade
last evening when I was gathering the tools. Maybe
enjoying the sun-heated metal. Its straight-mouthed
utterly unfake face. White plated lips and obsidian
bead eyes. So real it could not be distinguished
from other things. I slid the saw out slowly
from under the snake, leaving it taut and curled
on the straw bale. Cold living flame. It only
looked at me, flickering its tongue. I too was invisible.
ELEGY
Cutting bread near the north window, a dark jot in the white
outdoors catches my eye-a dashed inkbrush line-a
fisher bounding the snow field into the far trees. It pulls
the land into itself with long grabs. Its leaps, its live tail
stretch to a black ribbon that stays in the air. I buckle on
snowshoes an
d follow its wide-spaced prints, intaglios
of its five toe pads and thick claws. Then drips of frozen
blood. Then stiff strands of muscle, clean as grocery-store
meat. At an elm’s foot churned snow splashed
with piss. Crisscrossed tracks, more blood and piss.
When I lived near a bar, sometimes the glass smashing
and sirens would go on past dawn. From here our roof’s
white ridge and smoking chimney show above the rise.
NO NAME, NO DATE
Nightfall—the clouds pull away
exposing the farm to stars and deep space.
On the dark path to the door, in slow boots, each
step we take makes the snow squeal.
Above, in the wooded hill—looming spiked silhouette—
something cracks like a gunshot.
Under the duvet, under the sloped roof, we sleep without
names, without age.
At dawn the frost-bent roofbeams clank and wake us.
With a pail of grain, I step onto the brittle porch in
time to see the wild turkeys gliding heavily down
from their roosts in the cottonwoods at the field’s edge.
Neither wary nor oblique now, they come necks outstretched
half flying over their snow trails to the place
where I scatter feed.
In close unison, milling, they stabstabstab the fresh grain
then slacken, hunched, shifting from foot to foot, and one
by one hoist themselves with stiff huge wing-sweeps up
into the branches of the oak
where they slump, heads somewhere buried in their rumpled
heaps, sometimes drooping half-splayed fans that flash
surprising feather-glint, metallic-teal
in the level sun. Their rough brown shoulders tilt to
iridescent bronze, oiled turquoise-salmon, amber,
raspberry-gold scales. They twitch
and warm their listless dignities—old family money,
antic and darkened after millions of years.
We watch through the frost-edged window at no point