3. A Shift in the Light
The piebald peonies
want to leap the fence
want the first e
struck from their name
want to rip the grass
without remorse.
You’ll have to be wary,
never carry secateurs or bit;
approach them with a smile
and an apple in your hand,
their big teeth flashing.
4. Karl Marx Observes the Flowers
Bees without
picks and pit lamps
crawl backwards
from the perfumed
shafts, their miners’
faces dusted gold.
LATE JULY
The crow knows what’s going to happen
to everyone. Made large by death,
the sky’s more watchful than before.
Someone opens a window. Does a bird
fly out? A boy stands among the lilac bushes,
too late for blooms. All his mother had
of beauty, their scent sickened the rooms.
If he doesn’t move, nothing worse will happen.
His mind frightens him. It’s like an axe falling
on the chopping block, heat thickening
with blood, the crow flying headless
in small arcs across the yard.
THE WEIGHT OF AUGUST
The exhaustion of flowers, midafternoon,
the stale sun’s spill and stutter
across the lawn, a sprinkler lifting
its tired arc and letting it fall. All things
moving to an end. In the loveseat
under the apple tree I open
The Art of Memory and laugh
out loud when I forget the place
I stopped at yesterday. Soon
I’ll go in, wake you from your nap
and start our supper, anything
the garden’s greens have left to give,
lettuce and chard, that undertaste of
bitterness. We live with who we are and not
what we once wanted. Late August,
its weight on my shoulders, my hand
not on your skin. I turn back
the page and start again,
this part before.
NO MUSIC IN IT
The sun takes longer to rise:
it bears a burden it cannot carry.
Darkness lengthens in the day
and inside me
until I walk on stilts of it,
looking down on everything.
I take no pleasure. After dawn
a raven passes overhead.
He takes none either. Measures
daylight’s this and this
on noisy wings. Blowing in
a bone flute that has no holes.
BIRTHDAY WITH MY MOTHER
In Swift Current I wake in the cot
in my mother’s sewing room, and I am fifty-two.
She pokes her head through the door –
You weren’t born yet. Don’t get up
till after supper. The exact time
she’s not sure of, but I made her miss
the evening meal and she was hungry.
Part of me slips inside her,
behind her eyes now bluer since
the cataracts were peeled away.
How wonderful, after all this time
to be inside my mother
where I grew my bones, my heart.
At eighty-two, she’s so small
she hasn’t left me any room for sadness.
I’m close to leaving her, late afternoon,
when she walks between the pea vines
in the cracked white sandals she saves
for gardening and the John Deere cap
my father wore, her hair now thin.
Into a tin pail she drops pod after pod,
the sound is heavy rain falling onto cotton.
Two Lake Pelletier perch, their heads
intact, gleam in the kitchen sink
as if Dad has just come back from fishing
and left them for our evening meal.
She’ll serve it later than she usually does –
peas, perch floured and fried in butter,
red potatoes in their jackets.
MEASURE
The sun leaning south has a slow drawl,
drawing out the day’s vowels,
taking longer to say but still saying it.
It’s the end of summer, petals closing up,
the bones in my wrists the first to feel
What I’ve read and remember pleases me
but has little use – Solzhenitsyn’s sister
calling cats the only true Christians
or Aldous Huxley, impatient with the coolness
of Virginia Woolf, her meanness to a friend,
writing in a letter, She’s a jar of ashes.
I wish I’d saved my father’s, sealed some
in an egg timer and used it as a measure,
following the sun’s slide across the windowsill,
its slow ease into night. I’m looking more like him,
my face getting thinner, my lips more pinched.
Still, I love the way the sun moves
around lobelia, anemone, geranium,
words lasting longer on the warmth
and thickness of its tongue.
BELOW ZERO
The winter boat reaches shore
and skids onto heavy snow. Above it
the sky migrates from east to west.
There is foxfrost on the harbour lantern.
Whoever beached the boat has turned
backwards into wind, white among
the other whiteness. The wildness
invisible. Not even any tracks
from here to there.
LATE AUGUST THRENODY
Two cats in the garden
under different stones.
The slow unravelling
of wind and dahlias
makes a quiet music that moves
with the light low to the ground.
I, too, lay my head
on a cold pillow. Sometimes
it is night, sometimes not.
The dahlias as they dry
and curl in the wind
are what the cats must hear
when all they are is a silence
and then a listening – moonlight
blindly entering a room.
WIND/MIND
Wind presses its forehead against the ground,
against the sky. What a meeting of minds is there!
Wind presses its forehead against the sea,
the chestnut tree, against you walking into morning.
What scree! What desolation!
As if you were standing on a treeless peak
in driving snow, the stars that once were human
wheeling all around you, pitiless and cold.
Before she moves head down into the dark,
the woman pauses beneath the streetlight,
turns up her collar. Black wool coat.
Now she is a body of pure grief.
From the upstairs window you watch the streetlight
flash her picture, one of several slides
you’ll save on the wheel of winter,
this one called
Small Gesture Against the Cold.
BLIZZARD
Walking into wind, I lean into my mother’s muskrat coat;
around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.
If we stood still we’d disappear. There’s no up or down,
no houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind
and what’s inside us. When we get home my father
will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.
I could lie down and st
ay right here where snow is all
that happens, and silence isn’t loneliness just cold
not talking. My mother tugs at me and won’t let go.
Then stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars
we don’t know if anyone will understand
the tongue we speak, so far we are from home.
THE END OF THE CENTURY
Under the bridge the dead are gathering.
What happened to the ferryman,
his bag of coins, his pity? In all this traffic
how can they cross these girders of steel
and starlight? One of them hears a creaking.
It is you in your father’s rowboat,
newly painted. Your lunch beside you
on the seat, in the bow that singer
who died young. He has spelled you
on this journey but now he begins
in Mandarin the version of Red River
he learned in exile in the fields
far from Beijing. Under the bridge,
hearing him, the dead, too, start singing
We will miss your bright eyes
and sweet smile, in at least
a dozen different tongues.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The title “Hoping to Fix Up, a Little, This World” is a line from the poet Larry Leavis.
Some of these poems were published in Grain, Event, The Windsor Review, Descant, Border Crossings, Southern Review, Nimrod, Tieferet, CVII, Prairie Fire, and the anthology Poetry International, 7/8.
My heartfelt appreciation goes to the editor of this collection, Jan Zwicky, for her quick poetic intelligence, to Heather Sangster for her sharp eye, and to Patrick Lane, who always reads my new work before anyone else and who keeps me going. This book would not have been written without the research support of the University of Victoria and without the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s Writer/Artist Colony where I continue to write most of my early drafts.