BOOKS BY LORNA CROZIER
POETRY
Inside Is the Sky (1976)
Crow’s Black Joy (1979)
Humans and Other Beasts (1980)
No Longer Two People (with Patrick Lane) (1981)
The Weather (1983)
The Garden Going On Without Us (1985)
Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence (1988)
Inventing the Hawk (1992)
Everything Arrives at the Light (1995)
A Saving Grace (1996)
What the Living Won’t Let Go (1999)
Apocrypha of Light (2002)
Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals (2003)
Whetstone (2005)
ANTHOLOGIES
A Sudden Radiance (with Gary Hyland) (1987)
Breathing Fire (with Patrick Lane) (1995)
Desire in Seven Voices (2000)
Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast (with Patrick Lane) (2001)
Breathing Fire 2 (with Patrick Lane) (2004)
Copyright © 2005 by Lorna Crozier
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
Crozier, Lorna, 1948-
Whetstone / Lorna Crozier.
Poems.
ISBN 0-7710-2467-3
eBook ISBN 978-1-55199-655-4
I. Title.
PS8555.R72W47 2005 C811′.54 C2004-905954-8
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
The epigraph on this page is an excerpt from The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard. Copyright © 2003 by Shirley Hazzard. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
The epigraph to “The Physics of the Rose” on this page is from God’s Equation by Amir D. Aczel.
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v3.1
For my mother and for Patrick
“I realise, too, that I now have a substantial past – which means that I am no longer young but have become more interesting to myself.”
— Shirley Hazzard, The Great Fire
This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:
Leaving home like Louis Armstrong – though there’s no one like him –
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CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Disclaimer
Autobiography: Birth
This Sky Demands a Certain Patience
Beauty
Sand from the Gobi Desert
Calm
When My Father Lived on Earth
Leaving Home
Something Else
Winter Birches
Prayers of Snow
The Simplest of Movements
Whetstone
Three Movements for the Wind
What Comes After
Drought
The Light in My Mother’s Kitchen
To See Clearly
Ice-Fog
Drought
Form
Shadow
The Silence of Creation
The Physics of the Rose
Lazarus
It Is Night
Anonymity
Rapture
Brushes Made from Animal Hair
Four Cows in Moonlight
Melanoma
Letter Home: Too Much, Too Little
Poem for a Hard Time
What Refuses Form
Setting
Solitude
Past the Middle of My Life
Rebuttal to the Higher Power
Drought
Hoping to Fix Up, a Little, This World
Drinking in Moonlight
Tu Fu Warns Li Po When Li Po Departs after a Night of Carousing
What Can’t Be Seen
At Anny’s Stable
Winter Day
Leaving the Garden
Family Custom
Divining
All Things Passing
Counting the Magpie
Summer Small Talk
Late July
The Weight of August
No Music in It
Birthday with My Mother
Measure
Below Zero
Late August Threnody
Wind/Mind
Small Gesture
Blizzard
The End of the Century
Acknowledgements
AUTOBIOGRAPHY: BIRTH
In my old bones I make the journey back.
My mother’s mother has come in from the farm,
my brother waits at the table for our father
who didn’t believe I’d arrive today;
he’s betting on the horses – Tony, Prophet,
Sweet Forgetting – at the Gull Lake Fair.
At seven, my brother knows what he can do,
his new knife cutting through caragana,
how he can strip the fibre to the wood’s white heart
and leave us all behind, that glint in his pocket.
I drop my bones in the kindling box
and then I’m out the window, high and fast
to where breath flutters in the lilac leaves
and all the deaths I’m heir to
turn a little from their tasks and look at me.
There’s so much light beneath the moon,
my shadow’s there below
as if some part of me has fallen:
a stain where a hand has rested
on skin that holds a bruise.
THIS SKY DEMANDS A CERTAIN PATIENCE
With all this sky to cross
how can Jesus find you? Surely
there’s too much of it, even for one
who’s called the Lord of Light. You try to find
the stone that speaks in tongues. The rooster
who’s an angel with a useful job.
Sometimes wind leaves its footprints
on the water. Sometimes the dust’s
a voice that rises when a car goes past.
A god is walking through the wheat fields,
you’re sure of that. But it’s not you he’s come for.
There are coyotes to save, the wheat itself, short
and shriven, and the skunk who’s about to eat
the poisoned egg. Let alone the egg, the song inside it.
The devil s
eems to have more focus; he believes
you deserve his full attention. If you hang your soul
on the line he’s right there, especially if it’s pinned
beside a good woman’s laundry,
her cotton underwear so thin from all the washings,
light passes through it and is changed.
BEAUTY
It’s not the antelope’s
golden leaps across the grasslands
but how she stops
drops to her knees at the barbed-wire fence
and crawls under
then springs when she’s on her feet again
So too with you. The beauty’s in
your fall, your startled
grace –
everything
turning on
how you bend –
SAND FROM THE GOBI DESERT
Sand from the Gobi Desert blows across Saskatchewan,
becomes the irritation in an eye. So say the scientists who
separate the smallest pollen from its wings of grit,
identify the origin and name. You have to wonder where
the dust from these fields ends up: Zimbabwe, Fiji,
on the row of shoes outside a mosque in Istanbul,
on the green rise of a belly in the Jade Museum in Angkor Wat?
And what of our breath, grey hair freed from a comb, the torn
threads of shadows?
Just now the salt from a woman’s tears settles finely its invisible kiss
on my upper lip. She’s been crying in Paris on the street that means
Middle of the Day though it’s night there, and she doesn’t want
the day to come.
Would it comfort her to know another, halfway round the world,
can taste her grief?
Another would send her, if she could, the rare flakes of snow
falling here before the sunrise, snow that barely fleeces the brown
back of what’s
too dry to be a field of wheat, and winter’s almost passed. Snow
on her lashes.
What of apple blossoms, my father’s ashes, small scraps of sadness
that slip out of reach? Is it comforting to know the wind
never travels empty? A sparrow in the Alhambra’s arabesques
rides the laughter spilling from our kitchen, the smell of garlic
makes the dust delicious where and where it falls.
CALM
The lake has gone beyond reason. It drifts out of itself,
casts shadows and reflections across the skirts of fir
greening the shore, making of their wind-still study
a flicker and slide, the way souls must move, ichorous, transparent,
hovering near the flesh before they go. I want the green under
green,
the thought below the thought, the one deep down and cold,
ravelling its divination in the dark. Are there gods who need
no slaking? Ungathered, the water’s blank and beautiful,
intricately wrought. No one knows where mind and body
come together, that clean join fingerlings slip through.
WHEN MY FATHER LIVED ON EARTH
The second time my father lived on earth
he was my father. There were many things
he did and didn’t do. Out of them he made
a storm and salt. Hands that held my head
when it was small and wet.
The first time? I want him to have been
something I could’ve seen or touched,
red osier in the coulee’s cleft,
a hare halfway to being winter.
I want him to have been fresh snow
scooped into a basin and set
on the south side of the house to melt
so a man could wash the shirt he’d wear
to meet his lover. Once he was thin air,
an iron hasp, an opening. Storm and salt
were what my father left me.
The many things he did and didn’t do.
LEAVING HOME
When Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago
at King Oliver’s request, his mother
packed him a trout sandwich and no one met him
at the train, though he could blow his trumpet
and be heard across state lines. I don’t know why,
but I love to think of that trout sandwich he carried
in his pocket and later ate, the wheels spinning him
into fame, though it took some years and at least
two women. When my dad and I went fishing
Mom laid roast chicken from the day before
between slices of store-bought white. Was there mayonnaise?
I don’t remember, but in the boat, a few fish biting,
our fingers shone with butter as if we’d dipped our hands in fire
then treated them for burns. The sun was bright but weaker,
the afternoons so long I watched the hairs on my father’s arms
turn gold. If I’d been called away by someone other than myself,
years later, that’s what I’d have wanted, chicken on white bread,
and the thing that turned my breath and body into music.
Leaving home like Louis Armstrong – though there’s no one like
him –
and his trumpet. And the sandwich he saved until he reached
the outskirts of Chicago, savouring the Southern taste of what
his mother made him. Imagine those fingers, that mouth.
SOMETHING ELSE
Belly-snug on the floor, linoleum
warmed by the woodstove, I watched
the tongue of our new pup lapping milk.
I told my friends she’d come from far away
by train, told them my father claimed her
at the station in a wooden box like the ones
full of oranges from Japan. Just last year
Mom said I’d got it wrong. She came from
Mrs. Rittinger on Sixth, we lived on Fourth.
Those days, Dad drove an oil-delivery truck.
Behind his boss’s back, he’d swapped a good month’s
worth of heat for a purebred Pomeranian.
Though she became my brother’s dog
she slept with me because he tossed
too much in sleep. When she was older
if I moved at all, she’d growl and nip.
I learned to lie like a statue on a tomb,
carnelian dog on a marble cushion at my feet.
One morning from the neighbour’s porch
I saw her skulk past our kindling stack
and with her teeth turn the wooden latch
on the cage Dad had built to hold two ducklings
he’d won tossing coins at the summer fair.
He was always winning things like that –
a guinea pig named Elvis, a one-winged turkey,
those golden ducks I loved.
From a distance I couldn’t cross,
I watched her disappear into the cage
then back right out, her muzzle bloody.
She made no sound, just closed the latch –
she was that smart – then trotted off between the lilacs.
Mom said later the dog was jealous;
the ducks had trailed my brother everywhere
as I did if he’d let me.
When my brother left for good, she was mine
as much as anyone’s. For a time she followed me
as if I’d take her to him. I didn’t know where
he’d gone, just far away, too far for him
to write or visit. Things changed
then. Everything got older fast.
The day my father put that small red pup
beside the kitchen stove,
my mother named her Tiny.
I would have called her something else.
WINTER BIRCHES
Even the ground needs rest.
Frozen eight feet down, it won’t
take the dead any more. The few
who will not wait till spring
are pulled on sleds across the snow
to the birch grove north of town.
There, they turn that white, that
ghostly. They’ll sometimes step
toward you in the moonlight,
arms outstretched or reaching up,
mouths stuffed with snow.
When that happens it’s best
to keep on walking. Pretend
you never knew them,
your own face cold.
It’s winter, after all. It’s night.
If you hear your name
don’t look back. Think of water
running under ice, a green bud opening.
Say they’re only birch trees,
they’re only trees. Don’t
think of what that means.
PRAYERS OF SNOW
Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,
a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.
It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent
a blizzard returning to the sky. It prays to the white-footed
mouse, the snowy owl, the varying hare and vole,
the cat with fur between his toes. It closes the gap
between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy,
the ear and silence. It is a migration of birds
without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches
on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow
in dreams or waking, you are a star-walker.
It prays to the soft fall of your boots.
THE SIMPLEST OF MOVEMENTS
The Noh actor, rehearsing for a play in London,
couldn’t make the simplest of movements.
Such as, sitting in a chair and lighting a cigarette.
Such as, cutting a loaf of bread while talking
over his shoulder to an imaginary wife.