Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red
rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings.
When the first drop falls, she is there
to meet it. The underside of her arm is a fish’s belly,
her mouth a rain gauge. She is the watermark
and the water rising.
Her rusted car. Where the road was, a river the colour of asphalt.
A rag doll is growing heavier beside her boat. Beneath,
a catfish looms. Farther down, street signs
and streets, yellow lines down the centre.
Two-thirds of the earth is composed of water,
not counting floods. I’m more water than this world is.
Maybe that explains the shift of my organs
during sleep, the glass beside my bed.
The curve of the boat’s hold
is the shape my hand makes
when it wants something. How quickly
my palm fills when I stop asking.
TWO BOWLS OF MILK
Are two bowls of milk. They are round
and white and have nothing to do
with the moon. They have no implications
of blindness, or sight. They wait
on the doorstep like bowls
or like things that closely resemble
bowls in their stillness. The bowls do not
foreshadow cats. There are two
because two hands set them out
and each wanted to hold something.
Milk because not water. The curve of
milk against the curve of bowl.
PERSPECTIVE IS AN ATTEMPT
FLOOD, DEER LAKE, B.C.
I’m out in it. The water’s ruddy
with the seepage of needles
fallen from towering fir. Ice
floats thinly in it, and slush,
and patches of snow farther
back in the trees I came from.
It’s shallower there. Here reaches
midway to my knees, here
where the path was last week.
My parents have hung back
in soggy boots, but mine
can take it. I might go farther
still, not around the lake,
as we planned, but into.
The water’s clear white, flat,
under slivers of ice a duck broke,
landing. It laps at the brown rubber
of my boots, cedar trunks.
When was I not out there?
If I leave here, where will I be?
ON THE STEPS OF THE MET
When the first wasp would not stop flying near me I sat still
and let it stay. All thin legs and yellow, it did not find my skin
but the silvered mouth of the Pepsi can. It crawled inside
and then another joined it there. I let those two
fill themselves while I finished my greasy knish and thought
how I would soon not be here and how painful
not wanting anyone. One wasp staggered out
and flew, and then the other, and in Manhattan
they were two cabs on their way in one direction. Inside,
what I had loved most: the folds of the woman’s scarf
in Vermeer’s portrait, their depth of shadow,
how the fabric came so close to itself without touching.
NATAL
Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, Johannes Vermeer, c. 1662-64. Oil on canvas.
I’ve been told she is not pregnant, but regard:
I mean not only look at her but hold her in esteem,
because her heft of belly cannot be attributed to style
or the way her bluish smock rucks up
under her breasts. She would not otherwise hold
the letter at that height, above the swell,
to protect her child from grief. She would not let
the windowlight fall over all that new weight, fall
on the cold within. I would not say a man has written,
the lover from a wide distance,
husband, unsuspecting, coming from the colonies,
father or her brother who will not help.
It might be her mother: come to me.
Or the girl she giggled with when thinner,
now with one at each breast.
It’s long since she was singular and stood
with her forehead warm against the glass, her waist
to the ledge with no flinching tenderness.
Soon she will be forced down and open
and then what rooms will let her and the other in?
Take care, she’s not herself these days
or ever was. To let go of an emptiness
so large, to look upon and love it, how could she not
require the light? The panes divide her and divide.
PERSPECTIVE IS AN ATTEMPT
Because Vermeer looked into a room and saw a map was lit,
I now find it possible to sit here: my shutters flung to sun on brick
on the apartment across the street, where the man rocks
before the blue-draped lamp. Light falls on my pictures
of salal and fern still growing elsewhere (home is not this frozen
sparrow on the porch, an icicle across my sight)
and the girl with the turban, who is always turning.
There’s not long left. She already misses
who she’s witnessing lose her. Because in keeping her still
for several days Vermeer saw the changes and broke
in trying to retain them, the crooked hairs of her brow
and the brush of scarf against shoulder.
He lit mostly the far side of her face, it would be gone
first. Soon he’d have only the nape, and her back
receding. Soon the map would dim and crumple.
I have folded it myself, often, bringing this place near
to where I’m from, but there is still the shadow between
and a difference of time. Here the streetlamps stutter on.
There it’s still light on my mother’s turned face.
WHITE ROCK
My mother said they saw the droves of fish uncoil,
she and my father far out over the water at White Rock
where I used to follow them into the wind.
The fish passed beneath the pier, a quick stream
until they gathered close, whirled around each other
to elongate again and go. The whole school moved
as one creature but the human crowd dispersed,
most watching instead the taut lines, gulls
raiding the bait. Had I been there, we would have been three
bent over the rail, trying for that depth and that
fluidity, the three of us seen from behind recognizably
of the same source and unspeaking, worshipping.
CHEMISTRY
Instantaneous Photographs of Splashes, Arthur M. Worthington, 1908. Gelatin silver collage.
Inept in everything except perception – and even there
subjective – I’m only partially my chemist father: I never
threatened to explode my childhood with experiments
but watched my mother release a blot of half-and-half
into the glass cup that held her coffee and a hurricane
ensued before her spoon dipped in to smooth things out.
When photographed with utmost care – the care my father,
demonstrating for his students, gave to filling his pipette
and counting tears of danger as they mixed with mildness –
a drop of water falling forty centimetres
into a bowl of shallow milk will make a rising
circle, widening until a phallus strains upward
from the centre,
milk and water bound.
With its tip congealed into a sphere, the column falls back,
the globe drops in and the milk is a little more
watery. This quick gift’s gone unglimpsed as I wash dishes –
my hands dank in gloves – and muse on some dumb
wall of brick. Across the continent my father watches
another sitcom while my mother waits for my next call.
Each time she reaches the ringing first: my words travel four
thousand kilometres to the saucer of her ear.
By the time I speak to him I’ve achieved that even
surface, coveted aftermath of his childhood combinations:
after the bang and froth is that silence we both live beneath,
small water fallen into so much milk.
LUGGIE
In my palm a photograph of me, holding
in my palm the huge gold salmonberry –
it’s summer, the bush behind us
only beginning to turn to luxury houses,
and I have a small room with my name
on the door, a brother and parents
who love me. I picked this fruit because
I wanted to own its size and yellow sheen,
because we called it luggie for its luminous
bursting. What did we think,
naming it? It makes no sense.
My mother coaxes me to eat it.
My father thinks it worthy
of a photograph; my brother believes
it’s magic. It has nothing to do with me.
That it’s yellow instead of ordinary red,
that I found it, means nothing. It is just
what it is. Its taste would leave me
as I was, as I am, as I was, as I am.
VIRGINIA WOOLF’S MOTHER IN THE BLURRED GARDEN
A Beautiful Vision, June 1872, Julia Margaret Cameron. Photograph.
Ten years before your birth, you already live
in her face, in the sharpness of her nose,
the omniscience of her eyes. Your longing for solitude
permeates her, emanates from her like moonlight
to blur the camera’s focus.
Behind her, blossoms quiver, shrink
into their nightly state, leave her alone.
You are not even thought of, and yet she is thinking of you
here with the tendrils of vine at the nape of her neck.
Her eyes sting with salt wind, though the sea
is miles distant, the air draped and still.
She sees, as if through layers of gauze
or water, desires worn to ragged
skin beneath waves. She widens her eyes
against crying, and the shutter blinks
her into permanence. Light spills from her
like ocean water. The mouth
of time gapes wide
and chokes.
HOW IN THE INVERSION OF DREAM, SAW BECOMES WAS
You saw the battered fear on the woman’s face
as she witnessed herself in the mirror, parting
her long hair like a raven preening feathers,
expecting someone behind. And then you didn’t see her,
only her reflection, which you’d inherited
when your sleeping eyelids twitched and you slipped
into her skin. Now your hands lift to bruises,
your heart quickens but your feet won’t go.
You don’t know what came before,
only the certainty of fist raised or scissors
held to your hair. That glint the corner of your eye finds,
which turns to plain sunlight when confronted.
You’ve forgotten what dreams are. No words
can fill the open mouth the mirror shows you, these lips
now yours: numb as gutted fish, wide with the knowledge
that this moment cannot be awoken from.
FARGO IN FLOOD
I’ve never been to any of my favourite places
but I saw the film, that north American town
ensconced in snow. A pregnant woman stood
on a blood-flecked plain beside a car wreck,
pronounced a man dead. Now, like all those
grey roads in my sleep, Fargo’s under water.
Minnows pass through open windows
of that upturned car, lodge in the dead
man’s pockets. The current sways him as if
he were alive, in love. Somewhere, the actress
that swelling within her on the movie screen now
actual. On another channel, Manitoba grows heavy,
towel darkening with spill. I dream
of ghostly birch immersed, roots nudging up.
Those women in the wreckage, seeking
photographs of children, will find
life’s become a soggy matter in their hands,
no one’s to blame. I wake to red
on threadbare sheets, another thin blue sky.
NOONS
Too many hours beside him on the bed are never enough.
Outside is the sun’s old light, inside its dim reaches.
The bleached hills out the window
are not Crete. Heat is an indoor pleasure,
snow heaped in the courtyard over the balançoire.
She dreams alien neighbours and wakes to their footsteps.
Easier even than the warmth of his sleep
is her own tunnelling in. Her skin wall-white
as though she’s seen something terrible.
FLOOD, NEAR JOLIETTE, QUÉBEC
The thousand snow geese lift over the flooded plain
as we drive by, my love, my mother and I remarking on the glint
given by underside of flight, white feather reflecting
water on field reflecting wing. Others shimmer by the hundreds
where water shouldn’t be. That the earth would give this
to thank them for returning is miraculous.
The farmer has his own word to describe it.
That my mother should be here with us for a time, having flown
across this continent of shield and accidental lakes, that I
should live here now, is what the geese pay tribute to.
Yes, I apologize for the struggle of crops. Yes, I recognize
that beauty can violate another wholeness. But that turn of flock
over flood, I can’t say it is not alone enough
to compensate the waist-deep trees. And so I bear witness
and so my burdens lift. We are here.
DEUX PERSONNAGES DANS LA NUIT
poems from paintings by Jean Paul Lemieux
(b. 1904 Québec, d. 1990 Québec)
INTÉRIEUR (1930)
Till now you’ve picked a self each day:
sharp-tongued cynic, innocent, fool in love
with how his face distorts in polished
bedposts. In a lake my features
shift: there shy girl, there mindless, there
adolescent with a crease between her brows.
Each shadow my profile casts on page
or yours on canvas makes another face
to live within. Until tonight: this mirror’s
frozen you in charcoal grey, you’ve traced
your shades to find despair becomes you.
You should not have turned your brush
upon yourself so soon. My shadow’s grown
still darker, will not lighten. How finally
we’re caught, those roses in the wallpaper
half-open into wings of flightless moths.
LE TRAIN DE MIDI (1956)
On first entering the white
field, I think I’m dead, and this
no heaven. Aftertaste of sacrifice:
I’ve left the coast, crossed Rockies,
plains and shield to sleep beside
my lo
ve and learn his tongue.
Born here in winter, you nod
welcome, let me stand beside you
to watch the train pass. We aren’t
going anywhere. I had not known:
that Norway of your idol
Munch no country of the mind,
so dark just after noon he
couldn’t paint in more redeeming
shades. C’est triste, la neige –
your words freeze and drop.