from
DIVINATIONS
and Shorter Poems 1973-1978
DIVINATIONS
Book One: NOTHING
The speaker is a high school girl who lives in Sundown, a small unincorporated town near the Catskills, during the fifties.
*
This, the backside of the universe is home,
is where I live. The Sundown road
winds down through here, its east
is smog and highway dirt. The barn,
our house’s shadow, melts
over the blackened bales of hay
saved from the past, our only crop
the grey blind cats that litter here,
failed genes; they curl out from the barn
like smoke. Uncounted, unaccountable,
their blued eyes clotted like soured milk,
they totter, dying, across the road,
unpurposed distillations of lost hope.
*
This is my room: a quilted spread,
a mirror, and out of the window, white
sky, grey fields, the whitening grass,
the barn and the never-used canoe —
A weary walk to the narrow banks
of the ice-clogged creek
where the water runs through the leafless trees,
the leafless, stunted, withered trees
that stretch forever to the west
where the sky and the ground turn the same red-grey
and the grey frost creeps and gathers like a rot.
*
The land out here was Ullman’s once,
moth-riddled orchards, hobbled farms —
still owns the mill and the wreckers’ shack
and the only spring that lasts.
When the river dries,
our wells shrink into the pasty ground
leaving a scum like cider crust
on the sinks and tubs;
we hike our jugs up Ullman’s hill.
Retired as God from his apple trees,
he rocks on his porch, the hollow shell
of his clean house a hollow nut;
the little hole, bright eye, is his.
His locked, stone-cellar holds the spring;
he unbolts it from outside and fills
our boiled-out bleach jugs for us.
We can’t go in. He makes us feel
like feeble, pink-chafed, clammy things —
white legs like apple petals, foam,
or cuckoo spit in his close-scythed grass —
female, ephemeral, trivial,
mere shades of things.
He used to be a traveller in goods,
all kinds. He used to walk
these country roads and knew all names,
but now, grown old, knows no one, makes
what he needs himself, needs nothing.
Now, as on the platform of a train
that moves immovably away
he rocks, as if he moved in stars,
farther and farther from us
on his porch.
*
The village is a single store,
a condensation of our wants:
gas pump, antiques, rat poison, stamps,
cured snakeskins, garnets, drops of blood,
moose-heads, war trophies, rifles, yokes,
dead chicks in paper doilies, stuffed
two-headed calf by the cookie jar,
and, glistening among brown photographs,
the oily foetus in its jug.
From the cold maw of the cellar where
the cider of the valley fumes, Miss Mac
comes up, her velvet bow
pinned over her bald spot.
She wipes the mugs with a red-stained cloth,
sells the eucharist
of Sundown: flecked with pomace, grit,
skin chafings — sour sweet alcohol
of all that falls from apple trees,
crushed, mashed, fermenting fact of things,
organic, authentic, intoxicant —
Oh to be only ignorant!
and sick —
*
There is nothing clean
but water at its source or snow
before it falls and tarnishes —
Your skin peels if you scratch,
like grease, then bleeds. At school
the joke is Iggy with his wrists
criss-crossed. He didn’t cut
bravely enough. They have no guts —
they would not dare that much, our brave,
our “volunteers,” brigade of monsters
at the bell that want to see a screaming child
crisped at the core of a gutted house,
the arsonists — they would not set
afire themselves — coarse laughter, gross,
their names inscribed forever on steel johns,
they breed and die like sick grey cats —
Wanda, the roller skating queen
in pincurls, white as a maggot, blown
into a bloated, soft balloon —
she bobbed at her desk as if tethered there —
this summer was deflated, popped,
is dead.
The wheels rub on —
*
What language is taught in this mindless school?
the mouth that cries “Mommy” and “Daddy” can’t
tell you the truth —
A dry place shook by a violent wind
stinging my cheeks, the playground here —
sand hot to the flesh as burning fire
and under it two inches, ice —
is icy forever, the winter salt
and cinders staining the gritty walk,
drains reddened as if the clay were blood —
the concrete blocks like calluses
that grow across the feelings closing up
young eyes like ice that seals the ditch —
like trash that’s caught, that flutters
in the briars, rags cast against the universe —
just so our minds
wither and flag. This crushing bin
of knowledge stews us to a red
water, this
that dribbles from the tap,
that stains the sink, that marked
the carpet when I cut my leg —
that wells in water like the sap
from a fresh drowned stump —
the brown, stained spring —
always something else to be done —
excuses —
And for what reason? What?
*
I’ve got to get out of here
my god but I don’t know where to go —
You don’t know how it is —
there’s nothing — watch the rain fall down,
have a hot dog, tea —
go read the funnies — They don’t know
what I’m talking about.
I do not find my room enough.
I do not find my mind enough.
I am not sick.
There’s nothing whatever the matter with me.
That’s all there is.
What good am I — nothing to no one,
nothing —
snow
or rain —
and no one is —
nothing is any good to me —
I’ve got to get out.
*
Kindness is not the same as need.
Oh they are kind,
but no one for my company
will seek me out or need
to hear my voice —
what I call friends
are kind, when I come up to them,
leaning against the corridors,
gym lockers — kind,
no one
no one
looks out for me —
*
Here in my room the cold air stinks
of something grey, untouchable;
the sullen waters of the air, the clock
that ticks its empty hours away
its milky cat-face blinded —
By the barn
the tarp flaps over the old canoe,
that lean, black, knife-nosed coffin launched
forever inverted, a flag distressed,
on its split log blocks.
The briars
have covered over the secret path
to the seepage and silt of the darker woods,
the curling expanses of the swamp,
blank draw of the river, its blank dissolve —
some day, some day —
I’ll get out of here —
*
You either go or you get sent.
Wanda got sent for. The Principal
nixed Iggy, took the derby queen.
She sits in that stone office now
turning to snow — her fat, pale hands,
her blue-green scribblers with her own
initials on them again and again,
her tattered excuses and doctor’s slips
melted and streaked with water,
turning to stone —
*
Sleep is the final end of things,
but here it is a kind of rot,
a ferment on the pillowcase, a quilted itch —
the grey wallpaper flowers bend
and shudder in a pasty wind —
unfailing leaves, pale roses, blue-veined
flowers — the toothbrush foams
with cider spit —
the water runs out rusty from the tap.
*
My semi-twin, my cousin, egg —
unblemished, cottage-curded mind
blanker than chalk — she is all things
convention, sport, or parents’ games
would have her. Should life shake
her, would she see, poor thing,
blind bauble for the striking —
That boy struck flint caressing her
with his blind eyes —
he called us holes —
The white cow totters in the stones,
its flabby udder hard
titted, sore —
flesh only
monstrous, sagging
scab —
two walking holes —
to be a stone —
or water
and not feel —
*
I couldn’t care less.
A long cold drive
and the snow falling — over a year ago
we were driving out through the open fields —
stubble and white road planed and sown
with vagueness, cold —
at first we felt
the sudden heat then heard it then we saw
the whole barn blazing — our windshield seethed
and shimmered like heat from an iron stove —
we passed it. Looking back — the trucks
came, yokels slowing for a gaze, more snow,
small cars like leaves or ashes — if
the dull white air had just compressed
to sunspot, fury — if
the whole of nothing tensed to fire
to flare that fine commotion — or
as if to count the falling of one star
were telling of all time there is —
brief candle —
nothing more —
*
Oh once I was almost free of it,
once, August, when the green
small apples raised their heads
with their first blemishes of rouge —
the heat was too much for me, or the sky
too blue, too toppling heavy.
Halfway from Poughkeepsie it seemed the bus
was stifling me, the smell, the dust,
the looming seats — darkness compounded —
I got off — Red Hook,
that was the name of it —
a stagnant welling of green lawns
and sidewalks heaved
above the roads like granite blocks
tipped from cast iron glaciers
red hot — the trees
had leaning leaves, a tunnel of shade,
until I swam, impalpable and shadowless
to the blazing field — to the tree
of trees.
Older, and greener, and more
corrupt, that fruiting, stinking
apple tree massive to heaven, its giant roots
like boughs and its branches roots,
holding the two worlds half apart
and drenching earth with little fires
from the terrible sun it suckered from —
and the face of it like the oldest man,
the oldest man forever —
It was
Ullman
in that apple tree.
That man.
*
You know how the mouth hangs open
of the dead, of the struck cat how the bulging eye,
or how the wheel keeps spinning upside down,
the motorcycle, the flimsy boys —
how the grass is green, luxurious,
living and numb and flowing, green —
how the empty, gaping windows
see
and see nothing —
the open cave —
the whitewashed cellar with its trough
empty, except for the trickling stream
that brutal, cold, indifferent source —
and, at the door the shadows: cats,
girls, grass stems, summer things
that pass and fade —
passing and fading the water flows —
I hear my parents prattle
like a stream.
*
Who feels too much: the ulcered
boil, the hidden, itching,
oozing scab — like Red
the cow man, mired
in his stone-dunged pasture—
in the war
the locals were afraid of him —
he’d said he’d fight
when he saw “them Germans” coming up
his road — and no one dared
come up his road. He drank his milk
and dumped the rest.
His red hair flapping against his scarves,
his coats shit-stained, he drives
his rack-hipped cattle home
to his fortressed barn, its monstrous sides
emblazoned with his white chalked words:
NO TRESPASSING
In the middle of the driveway squats
a sleek pink headstone:
YOU KEEP OUT
chalked on its face like an epitaph.
KEEP OUT.
At the foot of Ullman’s hill
like the sloughings of the cider press
this filthy red thing spits and stirs,
dogged with cold and suffering —
the hidden life.
KEEP OUT.
*
Ullman’s our shepherd and he wants
nothing. The stupid animals
may crave and churn, imaginings,
as if the darkened window panes
that show us pictures of ourselves
showed us the real —
I want the real,
the real beyond all slippages of sleep.
I want that sense beyond all sense, the source
beyond discolouring, beyond these impotent
blind hours, these scabs and rots —
to be
as natural, indifferent,
as stone,
as water
free —
dissolved
within the absolute —
the power
that lies about here somewhere,
and not here.
*
That day when Red Hook hooked me out
I saw my dissolution, saw
in the shadows of that apple tree
all that there is: one tree
bent under the weights of earth and sky,
one city of cities, one blackened tower
barracked with wormholes, little rooms,
apartments of the living dead.
The pecked boughs steamed with breathings,
dunghill in the frost, and from it came
the whisperings, the half-pitch hive drone
messages, the chatter of millenniums —
nothing and nothing and nothing they said —
out of the grey-furred branches, out of the fire-
fringed leaves, out of the drip of the apple ooze,
out of the weight, the press:
nothing, nothing, nothing — came the word.
The grey bird with the scarlet head
who mines this orchard with his beak,
the traveller, dark angel, he
who siphons the dreams of the apple tree,
shall not be quit of his pasture till
the tree itself turn hydrogen —
pure in destruction of itself, all angel,
fire, all purity, beyond all feeling — he,
inventor, rot, and cancer cell,
seller and maker of all things —
he showed to me
the stream that was the river of despair —
its dark spring waters where the silt
and litter of last winter slipped
and fed the all-forgetting deeps —
and it was full, unrippled, strong —
*
Among the greening fernheads and pale buds
the coffin-hulled canoe.
Among the effacing willow-drains,
day after day in the leafing woods
among the trash and litter sought
discarded the carcassed daughter,
so they, believing, sought her —
so they found.
Book Two: RED EARTH
. . . The tree renewed itself
which before had its boughs so naked.
I understood it not, nor here is sung,
the hymn which then that people sang. . . .
v.v. 59-62, Canto xxxii,
Purgatorio
The speaker, a nurse, goes in May with her husband, John, an anthropologist, to an Indian reserve where he intends to spend his sabbatical leave researching Malecite mythology and excavating the prehistoric gravesites which have given the reserve its name: Red Earth. Red Earth Reserve lies on the Separation River in the northern reaches of New Brunswick’s never-never-lands. What our speaker is able to perceive there is necessarily and variously unreal. “Her” truth is not “the” truth.
*
It was as if my road had stopped, had crossed
the Separation’s seam and ended, here,
abandoned in mid-life. A new start
in a different world, Red Earth.
Where the river plunges toward Indian Falls
the dark bridge rots on its cedar piles
like storm-felled rubbish. In the shade
grey snow still squatted. When we crossed
a man stood under the boulders like a rock
himself, two dogs with him, one white,
one black, like guardians. John spoke
in Malecite, drove on. We came to help,
I wished to say, to help, and to bring hope.
*
The nuns lived here once, long ago,
in this schoolroom like a chapel where
the birds fly in through the broken panes.
We camp here as if under trees. John’s masks,
his treasures, owl-eyed in the eaves, my store
of pamphlets, medicines, is wampum,
and our books on ancient, modern Indians
just leaves, dry, broken leaves.
*
We look down from the schoolhouse porch
toward the reserve: black cabins
furred with river mists, their smokes
dragged down as if their fires
were seeking earth, as if the chill
brown air had jelled, the smoke
strung out between two worlds.
Nervous? Perhaps. The leopard shades
tremble among the alders. John
crouches under the skull-dance mask,
face almost his own since his illness,
reads. I tend the fire.
*
Abenaki, “people of the dawn,”
the Malecite their sunrise lost,
sleep in, sleep late. We go
like salesmen to their doors.
“Don’t believe all you hear,” the agent said.
Distant, polite, their faces pale
in the brownish air of their cabins’ dark,
gentle as ghosts, uninterested,
they nod us by, but one, Rebecca,
says, “You want a cleaning woman.
I come this week.” Through the door I saw,
hunched by the stove, a matriarch
her eyes the last spark in spent ash.
“She don’t speak white. My old man’s
sick.” She shut the door.
But I have my use. The children: shots,
infections, diarrheas, bleedings, bruised
from parental blows, I guessed.
No doctor up at town, first aid only.
Two hours on: the malls, the clinics,
the hospital. It scares them.
Dying is best at home.
Released,
the children dodge from me.
They swarm together like birds, like flies,
like midges along the river grass —
ignorant of two languages, the white,
the red, their history, knowing no
songs, no myths. Fragile and wild,
the children, like small flames that flutter
against a wind — life quenches them —
as if to grow up were to die somewhat,
or to sink under water — as if this place
were a river raft adrift in stars
beyond all shores, all memories,
nothing to think, or hope.
*
Isaac, Rebecca’s brother-in-law,
drives the kids to school. Some days
the truck won’t make it or they all
sleep in, some days — as if the river’s sponge
kept their red wounds from healing — drained,
Rebecca, Isaac, Marianne — my John,
they all sleep in.
Some mornings only I’m awake,
I, and the old man with his dogs,
keeping their distance in the woods —
he, too, like me, awake.
*
The small man snagged in the alder bush
turns his face away — drunken I guess —
he seemed to say as if his sodden sweater
spoke, not he: Go away. Go away.
*
I have to invent Rebecca’s chores.
Her black coat stinks with cooking smoke;
it seems to crouch against the wall
like a half-tamed bear. She mops
the gyprock panelling with a dirty cloth
and leaves a trail of soot behind.
I pretend to write. She sees no dirt
above her. Does she see the masks?
It would be too crude to point them out.
The agent said this one told lies —
ten kids, two dead, and one in jail —
she pulls the matting from the steps
where John nailed it down. Too strong
to feel the nail’s tug, sweeps below it,
folds it back, loose. Panting, fat,
broad back, thick legs — and her tiny hands —
a grin like a crow’s. Her work
holds all that ragged family. I want
her to be friends with me. I don’t care
if she lies. John’s friends lie over
their love affairs. Protecting her sons,
just thieves after all.
Disloyalty’s worse.
*
Trout lily, erythronium or adder’s tongue —
the brown bruised leaves — earth stars
the heat of summer fades — like the Indians
the lilies of the field, these fields, this world,
these yellow stars the Great Bear drags
towards emptiness. The nuns, like me
they must have prayed all night:
“Lord let us help,” until at dawn
the milky stream climbs in the west,
the ladder fades, the white route closed —
as if an impassible gulf were fixed
between this separate limbo and God’s light.
*
The white beans soak at the back of the stove.
Towels on the line. When I go out
to hack the stones from my garden plot,
to plant Thoreauvian corn and beans,
I hear the people below me stir,
cold as the tiny river clams,
rattling for kindling. The smell of gas
comes drifting over the aching fields,
only enough for the breakfast fires,
not wood for a season. Economize?
They can’t. I want to tell them what to do.
Axes, not chainsaws! They have to farm
seriously, getting a government grant,
or move in town and learn new skills.
They wouldn’t be that lonely if they’d try.
They could do it as a group, perhaps,
not to be lonely. Maybe, they just
don’t want to, though. They don’t come out
and look for me, asking advice. Polite,
but like that hound, curled on the blue
back porch of Ernie Paul’s grandmother —
it won’t look at me, but stares
through me as if I had no shadow here,
no business. Perhaps what I don’t understand
is something I don’t even see.
*
I seem to be bigger than everyone.
When I lean on the walls they sway.
When I want to sing, I bother John;
he must have silence when he works.
When I rub my hand on his shoulder blades,
he sighs, so heavy a hand it seems.
Big mama, I make the bed too warm.
I rattle the springs. He sleeps the best
in morning when I’m out.
Giant,
I spend those hours with the mud-stained
stars, the half-drowned, yellow Milky Way
of the nether world, scattered across
the matted grass where the deer have lain.
I walk the marsh where the spray-blown falls
have christened the bush, where a blinded wind
blows on the shores its false perfume,
smelling of orchards. Ghost in this bush,
monster, mask face, like John’s mask
shaped like a flounder, its eyes set wrong,
warped as I am in this wan world where my
warm health is wry.
Something is wry,
like an injured sun: pink, yellow, awkward,
invisible. The nurse. Big mama. Dead nun.
*
The red earth marks the Indian graves.
He was marked with it
even at first when I married him.
Perhaps the rain, dinning against
the nursery roof was drums, perhaps
the silent Micmac yardman those slow Junes
infected him. He kept his illness secret
like a bag a child keeps hid of feathers,
shark teeth, stones, hare foot, mink jaw;
his mother said, “He always loved
the Indians.”
Museums and middens,
clamshell heaps and beetle-gnawed bark carvings,
masks, clay pots, and copper beads, totems
and ghosts, and vanished gods. Raven,
Bear, Glooskap the Maker whose song
no one can sing now — ink and dust, to me,
but he “loved the Indians,” old worlds,
the half-forgotten tongues.
He was my guide.
*
He seems to tell them what they are,
making his friends as he talks to them,
old Mrs. Francis who does not speak
but giggles a lot, and he writes things down.
I don’t know what they make of him.
I don’t like to ask. They talk to me
and I listen. Rebecca’s horror tales:
the boys who vanished in the woods
no dogs could find, the girl that drowned
herself and her baby, the ones that died
in the lumber truck, all the children burned,
gas fires, road accidents, tree falls,
chainsaws,
and the hospital. When Cele
her cousin’s baby died, how they sent it back
from the hospital in a cardboard box,
naked, in plastic, tied with string
like a lunch.
If I ever killed
it would be over injury like that.
The meanness of it. When I think
of the injured peoples of the earth
I am afraid. It wasn’t me, I want to say;
it wasn’t me. I want them all to be as safe
as me, to be treated as right.
The Francis baby, kitten small,
holds my thumb in its fist, so candle bright,
so silky, so tiny. The lullabyes
John taught me I do not think they know —
to whisper the old Algonkin words
rocking the child — but I don’t dare.
Intrusion on their private world.
Enough they let me hold it for a while.
*
I use the cot in the kitchen now.
Rebecca knows. I think they laugh.
But he’s not well, not yet. It takes time,
taking his rest and his medicines,
and exercise.
But this is only a shadow world
less rich than his own of books and dreams,
his prehistoric painted men, redder
than this tribe knew of, lost, now, too;
closing themselves from history
in their snail-shell huts, forlornest ghosts
who leave no myths, self-murderers
who kill their tongue. John rummages
the senile here, runs, sure-languaged in
a kingdom of the mute,
where my white words
go lame.
But they talk to me.
As I used to talk to my little dog,
something that listened, that needn’t know —
a foolish, sympathetic face.
“I stayed and cooked for the loggers once,”
says Rebecca. “That was a job and a half.
It broke my back for certain. My old man
he needs me home these days. I don’t go out
to work no more. He don’t feel good.”
*
I have nothing to do — a clinic hour —
the rabbits took my seedlings — so I walk
mile after mile all by myself.
The faceless wind keeps me company
but sings no song I understand.
Who are they sent to, these fading prayers,
these wisps of smoke from the damp ash fires?
Crows rattle the woods, and the old man
follows his traplines but no man
walks in his footsteps. The children run
carelessly stoning the river’s skin,
splitting the water, a living snake
running along between two banks —
Two children drowned, playing like these
last autumn, trapped in its rainbow path;
it closed like an eyelid after them.
*
Now the rose rhodora blooms
washing the lakeside with its wild
sunsetting mauves. It makes a bridge
of flowers cross the swamp.
The cotton grass next, and the Labrador tea,
and after, the bird-sown apple trees
will flower and shock the thicket woods,
a wreath of petals on the dark spruce soil,
or falling, Ophelias, on river flow,
fruitless abundance.
I serve no use.
As I hung the wash rags in the sun
a string of hounds ran by me.
Silently belling a shift of wind,
they ran as if to another world,
deaf, blind, the hunter’s nose to it. . . .
Even after they passed I could feel them run
as if it were me they were set upon.
Wrong side of the river.
*
I went to the tiny graveyard here,
not John’s red prehistoric dig, but theirs,
tucked in the weeds behind the church.
I missed the priest on purpose. He goes back
to the city after his weekly mass.
I find him hard to talk to; it’s as if
he were always thinking of somebody else,
or ashamed of this tiny vacant shed.
Fleabane and thistles; the ground is cold
all the year round, the plastic wreaths
tarnished with weather. A scrap backlot
it looks like, junk. They do not want
me here, my John who digs up graves —
two thousand years old — but they don’t know,
it’s only white or Indian, to them
they are “my people’s graves.”
I said we dug up Vikings too.
It’s not the same.
Or maybe it is.
Just time, and dust, and the smell of pain.
Keep busy. If I do no good, at least
I try.
*
John loves the wilderness, will walk
a hundred yards then meditate
on his inner light, or his inner dark,
his mantra. I don’t know. M.Y.O.B.
mine. Keeps his notes in a box. These days
I walk farther and farther. I have no friend,
no one to walk or talk with me,
drowned as they are in their private griefs
my dog self cannot understand.
Simple as daylight, as ignorant,
I carry my world around with me
and cannot see out of, my fire pot health
that only warms me, not John, not them.
And the darker world fades as I walk through it;
John, too, fades, as he walks away.
I have nothing to do.
*
The bacon sizzling in the pan’s a luxury
I shouldn’t use to rouse him. In the sky
the last star shivers like breaking glass.
Crack, it goes out. No other flue
rises with smoke like this one yet,
flag of the morning. I bang the stove,
throwing the coffee against the flames.
The river steams like a winter road,
I could cross it now, slip like a grease slick
over the pan — salt on the grease, it smokes,
he coughs, and the porcupine, eater of salts,
leaves the privy for him. Crow sneers.
I want to yell at it. He hates me to;
he hates me talking to animals.
At the riverbank the old man squats
making something he won’t show to me,
his dogs beside him, the red-eyed white
on his eastern side, the black lab
on his west. This side of the river
I have no smell, no shadow, no sound.
I am not here.
Wrong side of the rift.
*
Marianne’s at Rebecca’s. “She took the kids,
he was beating on them. She had to get out.
He bust the stove.”
But she’ll go back when he sobers up,
cook in the yard on an open fire,
a child in her belly, a child in her arms,
three frightened children at her side,
the wet wood steaming over them. . . .
(“Get something for the baby’s ear;
it cried all night.”) Could I endure
what they endure? Day after day.
Her wash soap shines, counting her blessings.
Some of the kids don’t go to school,
but Rebecca’s Alex and Janie go,
she makes them go. “The teacher’s mean.
The white kids they go ‘wawawa.’
My old man quit. I stayed. I even
went in town. Not to high school. Needed home.
Besides, what difference would it make?”
I asked about the flowers’ names.
She didn’t know. But I think she speaks
Malecite to her mother. Of course my John
will tell her what she ought to know,
their language, their stories, their Glooskap,
my favourite myth the Rabbit Day —
he tells them what he asks from them.
He wants to hear of the old ones’ ways
or get them to tell him about the old man
who has no children, who lives alone —
stick cabin patched with lichened furs
stuffed under the spruce like an old bear’s cave —
what is his name? To poke a fire
with his pencil tip. “Do you know
what a shaman is? Do you know the word?”
Another form of “wawawa.” She laughs,
and turns away.
*
Bear lady, with a gimpy leg, no,
Crow lady, married Bear, she steals
my non-prescription drugs, pill at a time,
for her “old man,” relies on nothing,
back of iron. Her husband, Roy,
whose lungs fill up; he gasps for breath
as if grappling mid-river an overturned boat,
black water hurtling against his chest. . . .
Next door we wake up Isaac, Marianne’s,
so small, so foolish he looks. Sober,
he stammers and ducks his head. Is this
the man who drove her from the house last week?
Looks at her now with pleading eyes.
I can’t believe what Rebecca says.
John saw Marianne buying him whiskey once.
“He gets drunk too easy,” says his sister-in-law.
It’s his friends think it’s funny, who make
him drink, the clown, the dreamer.
Rebecca says, “Some dreams! Like the old ones.
They come to him and he’s scared of them.”
Isaac, his passive hands closed like a baby’s,
ducks, eluding a wrestler’s hold, and
closes his door.
We walk away.
*
John studies the language of the dead,
sits without asking on their porch steps.
They sit in their chairs and smoke. He plays
his machine; a dead voice creaks
of fables and spirits.
The dusk
draws in. A dog kiyiddles then silences.
Squeak of a rocker. A chimney swift’s
wing-clap. A struck match. A flip-lid’s tick.
The old quilt settling beneath the kids. . . .
What are we here for? Where are we?
Like the great Gauguin with its spectral ghosts
mauve and yellow, a tropic dusk
yearning into the empty skies
the meaningless questions we come here for.
Their faces glimmer like water shades
and the stars come out, cool, wet, and thick,
their incredible throng stronger than
questions. The clear skies show
answers the running man can’t read.
Well of the darkness, dip and see
three times in the river.
I only know
this is the language of the dead
creaking above us like white bees.
*
I told Rebecca of the Devon band’s
Fiddlehead Festival. “Good for the kids,”
she said. I feel like John, telling an Indian
how to be authentically Indian.
I can’t help. Whatever I say it comes
out wrong. I end by saying nothing, put
my hand on hers. I know her by the touch
of her, she feels like me, inside like me.
Her self? I don’t know that at all.
How could I know? I don’t know John.
Know nothing.
On the barren floor
the cold motes of the sun-dust stream,
river, the one-strand Milky Way.
Loyalty that he does not want
keeps me stayed here, the useless one.
I can’t get out.
In dreams I saw them dancing
without sound. My John danced skull-dance
with them. Masking Face, passing among them,
turned each one to white head, rag bone, whirling
dust. It came to me and grabbed me, held
my head inside its mask as in a fist,
squeezed me skew-eyed, glared from my face
with red eyes, like a strangled hare. . . .
*
Drove Marianne to the hospital.
X-Rays. Swollen kidneys. A bruised face.
“She should turn him in,” the doctor said.
“He’s a bad man.” She should leave him then?
Last time she stayed at Rebecca’s house,
he beat on the door with a spade all night.
“I won’t carry my troubles there,” she says.
Prescribe her rest, a week in the ward,
sleep in the great, white hospital
where no man dares to come in drunk,
to line them along the kitchen wall
with his gun in his hand, to shout of death —
Why won’t she leave him? Where would she go?
But she loves him. It’s his friends
get him drunk, she says. He promises,
keeps his promise for months, until it breaks —
she plays him true, following him
on his dark trek to madness and she draws
him back, as if by a thread of hair.
*
I have no hold so strong on John;
he seems to see Death in the dusk
walking in small, damp moccasins
away from him, her long black hair
trailing like ivy.
He must get well.
My hot hands clutch at his hanging sleeve —
he brushes me off like air.
*
The tiny, white, wild strawberries
are in blossom now. The old man warned,
“Don’t eat them.” Speaks white when he must.
I don’t know what he means.
Dear Lord,
I used to pray, remember them,
but now I pray, remember me.
I am no use. The more I know
the less I see, the less I’m sure.
But that my love should be no use!
Dear Lord, remember me!
The spruce grove dripping its evening scent
darkens the noon, and my tiny light
hovers, a moth in the shaking boughs,
like a word I haven’t the meaning of.
I cannot get out, get out.
The ants go into their hole and come out,
front door, back door, window flues;
the grey air filters in and out.
Over his window the boards are cut,
a glassless window boarded up.
I dream he leaves the house that way,
slides through the knothole like an ant
into an anthole where the dark
busy with all its teeming dead
busies with him. He writes it down
all night. At dawn he tucks it into
his tiny books where nothing I can see
speaks to me, looking away when he eats
with me. Could I draw him back?
I visit here. They do not like my smell.
Land of the dead. He has smuggled in.
I could carry him back in my haversack,
lighter than air, but he fled through the screen
like a skein of smoke, ducked from my drumming
hands and heels — no one could catch him. Dreams.
The red graves uttered a twittering sound.
A dust storm gathered. The hunched tribes stirred.
I heard the men and women creep
shadow to shadow, from house to house.
Dancing the red tribe to its dark
he danced among them, a pallid ghost
stained with their grave soil. Not a sound
came from him or them. I could not bring
him out from the dark that he dances in.
This is the world that I cannot reach.
Bad dreams. The old man spoke to me.
He said, “Get out.”
*
In the woods above Separation Lake
is a bear-clawed tree, marks nine feet up.
Below the scratches dangling wires
where something once was tied, perhaps.
On the ground grey beads, bored mussel shell.
River ground. Something in history
casting no shadow.
“Get out.”
I hide at night by the clearing’s edge
to watch the hares leap like soft clouds.
A dusty moon plumes over them,
till a fox’s bark or a snapping twig
erases them like dreams or ghosts.
Children of moonlight the forest holds,
even the cities contain them, free,
useless, lovely, invisible.
Returning, grey pasture and thistle-heads,
bats spinning above me inaudible.
John burrows further into bed
as I come in.
Exiled, I keep my coat
on my cot, axe, flashlight handy,
world in reach.
The moonlight threads the aspen,
ties the leaves and grass together, pearls
my arms with rabbit fur.
The Great Hare leaped
the Milky Way, pelting the crying hounds
with sleet. From Vega to Aquila he leaped
the white, divorcing river line.
Escaper, who lives in the burial mounds,
who dances when all the world’s asleep,
be my totem then.
Rabbit. Disloyal.
I will not leave.
*
The children gathered wild strawberries.
John stained his mouth and hands with them.
When I reached for some the old man’s dogs
barked at me. He had said, “Don’t eat them,”
broken strawberries, like blood —
the stained, red men.
The sweet smell seemed
to bruise the air. The children’s harvest,
their crimson pails, meant festival, surely.
I watched all day.
There were few signs.
Quiet, as usual, everywhere.
When the long day dimmed and the winds drew up
and the lights furred over in every house
and the white night of midsummer rose,
its milky river lit the sky, but
no light answered it below, black earth,
black river, it seemed for hours.
At two or three the first torch starred
the forest edge, from the old man’s house
it seemed to lead from house to house
gathering the men. I thought I saw
Roy’s stumbling figure at their head,
and Isaac’s, holding the old man’s torch,
the women and children after them,
moving under the river’s noise
as if they had no weight, and soon
the torch went out, or passed into
a greater dark I could not see.
They might have gone underneath the soil,
or into the water.
The long march passed.
The marshy ground gave out a wind
like a rosy light; the sky grew pale,
and I was seized by sleep.
When I awoke,
the world was still as if the shadows
had distilled their silence in the sodden grass,
as if I had dreamed the strawberries,
or as if the birds had found them all,
for the roadsides now were bare.
The day passed slowly like a flower
that withers into a hanging head.
I learned no more than that,
waiting alone, unvisited,
until the clouds put evening to my watch.
*
I dreamed that night of the old man,
bear father of the tribal woods, standing
upon the tortoise that is earth.
Four heads grew from his bear back, a young boy’s,
a woman’s, a chief’s, a skull shell-eyed.
A gull came to him, its harpy beak
held a reddened leaf. A raven called
from the western woods. These were his dogs.
He fed a snake from his fingertips,
a black snake, long as a tree trunk, coiled
under the stones and vanished there,
root of the water. His carved wood staff
was blotched like a rattler’s diamonds.
He held two long flight feathers like two keys.
He stood like a gate in the dismal woods
and the great carved masks rose over him,
hovering like owls, like fuming clouds,
and I saw the watery peoples rise,
gathering along the river bank,
pale, drizzling fires from the woodsmen’s shacks,
from the iron chasms of city slums,
from snowdrifts, bus stations, hospital wards,
waiting rooms, jails, junkyards, and dumps.
Rising, rustling, the jackstraw tribes
like fire-shagged trees against red skies,
and the old ones riding among them, armed,
their wolf-tails, plumes, and red batons
like slashing grass. The river raged
rattling against its rocks like chains.
The fugitives and the injured came,
the angry, the greedy, the cruel ones,
and the sullen folk who stank of mire,
the black flies weaving above their heads,
and they melted among the innocents,
face among face, and then wrecked cars
started their motors and lightless drove
into the dark like stampeding herds,
car after car, like blind despair,
and the Masks ran with them and after them:
Wolf, killer, laughing like crazy man,
Raven, fire brand, who stole sky’s coal,
Sir Bear, spirit of rock hills, mad
Cedar Mask, his hanged-man’s tongue
lolling from lips like stirrup straps —
A woman rose from the wailing grass,
held out her child, humped backwards,
knotted arms splayed out: Kenora —
Then a radio blared like a trumpet;
the black clouds broke — the sky was like
a prairie: sandbagged trucks besieged
with rifle shots and tears, a steady rain
of ice.
Mist thickened from the river,
streamed to the north, towards Perseus,
became, white river, the bridge of stars
where myriad myriad dust motes leaped,
pale, useless dancers, creation’s hares . . .
and the old man stood at that milky bridge,
his feet in the soil, his dogs like towers.
It was Marianne, Corn woman, blood
on her bosom, the harvest dirt
thick on her hair, on her moccasins,
small bones like bird skulls in her lap,
she who was buried, who led across.
Behind her all the bright races massed,
the flickering tribes of the not yet born
crossing at night by the light of day
which shines in the heavens’ darkest hours
and by the angel torches of the dead.
Singing like water the nations crossed.
I could not hear what song they sang,
crossing in life to a different dream,
which I could not have.
Mankind
has a different history
than I can suppose. The Indians
a different road. My own, yet dark.
I turned and saw a rain-drenched hare
shivering in alders, a faint red dawn
fading in river water like a stain.
*
Into my sleep came the first bird songs,
whitethroat and phoebe, the spilling light
cleansing the river. The forest stirred.
The smokes are rising above the trees.
I hear a tractor in the fields
growling above the meeting house, and saws
buzzing, a whistle, and someone’s step
lightly coming the river road.
A child’s voice sings: “Molly come over” —
an Indian song I had never heard,
fiddleheading, her lover calls her canoe —
down by the log bridge, loitering there,
I wait for the singer. She will not come,
busy with other business.
Is it the scent of strawberries
anchors me here, or the river’s fish,
ghost food ghostly of paradise?
I can be nourished on anything.
Where I am no use I must let go.
Now like a tearing fish, a flower
panting against the barb, my hooked heart
drums more vitally, this gash
that bleeding at my side flutters a veil
of pulling grief, pink on the wind.
I broke it loose. I left the red flesh
hanging,
and escaped.
On the far shore
is a trail of red where a wounded deer
fled from the dogs.
It is not far.
The blood spots turn to berries at my feet.
Book Three: THE BOOK OF THE THRONES
for my brother in Christ, James Hampton, whose labour, The Thrones of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millenium General Assembly, owned by the National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC, suggested this poem.
PART ONE: RUBY
I have to explain to you about the Thrones and about my sister Pearl. She was very religious. The Thrones are religious but they are too queer for a church and if Mr. Levine hadn’t got the museum to take them I don’t know what I would have done. It’s his garage. I’m not religious myself but Pearl was and the way she worked on those things you had to respect her. She’d go up there after supper and work on them sometimes past twelve and she’d still be up before six to go to work. Well she had to have something and I helped pay the rent for the garage because I figured well that was one thing I could do. And you should have seen the trouble they had getting the stuff out.
You see all those things are so big in spite of Pearl’s being a dwarf but they are mostly just cut up pieces of cardboard with boxes or chairs or pieces of tables inside them. They are junk really but all put together in little bits and pieces and covered all over with aluminum foil. You can’t think how much foil went into that. And she’s got wires and chains and tubes and painted light bulbs and things I don’t know what they are and by the time she’s got it stuck together in those shapes and covered with foil you wouldn’t know what was underneath anyway and you wouldn’t dare lean on it. And the things on the walls they all had to be in the right place. And everything with wings on even the chairs and not just two wings. And things like eyes.
And she had writings, things she made up and printed out in queer shapes, and she’d paste them up and she’d twist up cord and paint it and she’d bunch up cellophane and she’d save up gold foil and coloured foil for special things that you wouldn’t hardly notice what with the darkness in the garage and the lights on and reflected in all that foil it all just looked silver.
You can’t think how hard it was to get all that out of the garage and on to the truck without tearing any of the foil. And those things like pillars with the great wings and spiky tops that look as if they were holding up the ceiling and I think she would have done the ceiling too if she hadn’t died. Well those are cardboard moulds she saw somewhere Mr. Levine got for her and stood them up for her because you know I couldn’t not with the crutches I never did anything for her.
The Thrones is what she called them and they aren’t finished. Sort of like the front of a church except nothing that was human or human shaped could ever sit in those things and if you look at them for a while it gets spooky. But Pearl was the brainy one and that has something to do with it. She used to skip school just to stay home and read. And I never went back after the polio so neither of us finished high school but she was the brainy one and I was the one who went into books. I went into the book bindery and I used to run the binding machine. Back in those days they sewed them. Now I just glue them. I don’t read them. And Pearl got a maintenance job at the Hartmann Building.
They said at first that they couldn’t pay full wages to someone who wasn’t full size because she couldn’t do the full work but she showed them. But it was still just the minimum and it was hard for her. She’d come home too tired to talk but she’d still go right out after supper and work on them. She was a worker.
Even in her last days at the hospital she’d still be working. She’d lie on her back there and her hands just working away at nothing and I’d ask her what she was doing. Washing up, she’d say. Or once when she’d been frowning and working her hands finicky-like she said Making the hands of a bird.
But she meant all this to be looked at.
So that’s taken care of. But I remember Pearl with her big head knee high among the rest of the kids peering up at the paintings in the museum like a pug dog. And this is just paper and stuff. But I’ve done what’s right.
Ruby Fletcher
March 1978
PART TWO: PEARL
Morning
As mollusks sense the tide’s turn
I sense dawn. I wake before it. Here,
hovelled in different darknesses
the city’s night-sunk grove
beyond our window shimmers, creaks.
Ice holds it fast.
One little match,
one kitchen.
After me
the tenements
put out their coral feelers.
Warmth
drifts upward towards the turning hour,
pulse in Lazarenean rock.
Awake.
And over the ashen sea
tendrils of morning,
the sun’s
pure vein
returns —
first as a fragrance,
then as wind.
*
Wind and a white sky freshen us,
snapping the ice from the city’s wires,
signs, streaming roofs, and trees.
The grey snow smoulders.
The birds rejoice.
Rising like sparks from the chimney tops
as if tossed to the sky, they form a disk,
a wheel of feathers, of eyes, of flame.
Burning within them
the single Eye —
livid —
— that looks,
that seals
on me. . . .
And the coffee scalds,
knife in my mouth. I gag for breath.
“My Lord,” I cry. I cry, “My Lord,
send me.”
*
I leave before she rises, climb
before she finds her crutches,
every day.
I leave the kettle for her,
and recall — so long ago —
the child who leaped
from bed to tease me, pull me
from my cot, her living doll, her nuisance,
pet — I followed her. Ruby,
I was your little dog.
*
Shorter than shadow, buttock high,
I reach the bus steps out of breath,
using my hands for the iron ridge.
Each day those slippery, clammy seats
jerk under me as if the road
were choppy water, as if the bus
scrambled, itself on hands and knees
under the rocks, cranes, rusty beams.
It jolts on cobbles towards Market Slip,
pit of the city, Paradise Row.
My work begins.
*
Slime stains, food stains, corridors
of refuse dropped, kicked, blown —
where smokers innocent as dogs,
as dirty, shed.
This is not chaos
but quickening.
Something will come
from these whisperings.
Though they will not listen.
I find
their doodlings in the trash, their mazes,
their knots, constricted flowers,
secrets deformed —
but the Lord must speak.
He pushes within their fingertips.
But they clench, they fist
their minds.
*
Threaded to God is the work of dust.
I weave as if in silent dance
order around me. From this chink
extend my ladder labouring.
A kind of mercy — this empty world
I scour, I mend, I clean.
*
I was the mermaid in my dreams,
the littlest one, not beautiful,
who loved the prince of the upper world.
Crippled with labour, with queerness mute,
I sweep; I mop; the waters dance,
foam on the tiles by my pinioned feet.
Changeling, slit-tongued sparrow, speak—
stutter, as little children do,
burnt tongue whisper:
“’weep, ’weep!”
Listen, oh Lord,
and the Lord will hear.
His world’s my oyster.
I’ll not want.
Shined with the chafings of my chores
this flat, tear-flavoured water is
my mansion, shore, my all but home.
Darkness
is only parable.
The cleaned eye overflows.
*
The mop, this wavy, sturdy shape,
when I push on its bird wing, bends
like water running along a beach,
like a ruffle of furled aluminum,
like a fringe of lace.
The lace stains rose
where my knuckles bleed,
where the wringer catches.
I looked for gloves.
I found a rainbow in the wound.
Wrong size or right,
the small grow strong —
“sheer plod” — cut hand,
sore feet or side. Shine sillion.
We earn all things.
* REJOICE *
Rejoice that the work will never be done.
In the heating plant
where the watchman throws his cigarettes,
the lights with their dangling chains for me
are the legs of birds.
They are in flight,
against the corners of the wall
a moving fire immovable
burning the eye.
Remember foil:
water breaking the ocean’s light,
or an angel’s side
quivering, tinsel or cellophane,
image for visions —
I strike my beam.
Still as a seed from its hiding place
I push, I blossom.
All things rise
in a different flesh.
All things
will rise,
perspire,
and shine.
Noon
All things are emblems of His way,
this city: map, its asphalt wharfs,
that old man of pink granite — light
flows over him like water, he reflects
no light, like Eden bland, unborn,
a kind of monk. Around him
checkered shades of things, real
and dependent, the animal griefs —
are snow spit melting upon his gloves.
His gaze is barren, crystalline,
no talent spent. Desirelessness
is perfect
and inadequate. The city must
be earned.
*
The harvests come to Market Square,
by Broad Street, Bull, by Crown and Cross.
Straight up six blocks
the talents come
from the farms, the mills, the fishing boats—
smelling of bread, of winkles, shrimp,
cusk, cod, and the bland New Brunswick cheese,
cabbage leaves browned from the truckers’ mitts,
comb honey, slush on the sloping floor.
Spending and getting they flesh Your powers.
The dirty sunlight slides like oil,
responding from the market stalls,
mirror and choir. Before me spreads
communion. At the market door
the gospel couple bounce and sing,
with their guitars and microphones,
the sweet, plump souls — they are two fruits,
two loaves of bread, two doves, two breasts —
their milky good outrushes, song
most common, Christ’s
most worldly wine, the real You loved.
They hold Your doors.
Shine out Your
married Light.
*
We work and then we work again.
The time ticks by
as if it dried upon a stem,
as if each morning withers,
as if noon
dulls as if drained.
So market wanes.
So children drag their way to school.
In the churn of the cars and the buses’ coughs
an empty cipher seems to roll,
rolling along the empty walks
like a carton, like trash,
like a hidden thought. . . .
*
Lovely the buildings the salt sea shreds:
turquoise, rust-red, forest green,
pale blue, dark blue, city grey.
Stair upon stair the acned rock
chafes at their cellars; the pavement cracks
and buckles below them. The brine runs down
their ravaged, sagging, crippled walls
as if the wood had tears.
The blue-green church will be taken down
for a store, Save-Easy. The pungent orange
that colours my fingers the last sad sign
of a world far off.
Oh pray for us,
this lonely, northern city, here
where windows gleam like misery,
sooty, unmended. The only stores
sell junk, lost hopes.
This mandolin
with dented sides, these scratched
enamel basins, rusted skates,
shoestrings in wads, and those oil lamps —
I pass them every working day.
Who sells?
Who buys?
A broken speech.
No one will comprehend.
On the hospital hill the mad man walks
back and forth with his picket sign:
I KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
The bottle that rolled beneath the grate,
the grey hat swimming after it —
signs, and emblems,
and secrecies:
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
Walks back and forth.
*
The noon is the sorriest time of day.
The mouth of the dumb, the desolate —
He cries aloud in the dusty streets:
I KNOW
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
No one will see it, the overlooked,
the stunted, the whisperer —
small —
“The best things come in small packages,”
Daddy used to say. Not beautiful,
oyster not pearl. A face from the earth.
“Dwarf,” they mean, for “shrunken-souled,”
“ugly,” “distorted,” — they are afraid
of a dwarf’s small hands.
My sister knows.
DO YOU KNOW
I KNOW
Afternoon
When the steam boils out of the dish machine,
remember, oh Zion, like shaking cups,
the washed souls tremble in His heat,
sponged, exhausted, and glistening.
Be filled; be emptied;
the Spirit comes
born again in the mind of God
ever and ever — His story run
fresh from my hands! Let my paper, paste,
let the piece of chain
that hangs like bird legs from the foil
speak of Your heat, Your heartening.
for my mouth is scalded,
dumb.
* * * * *
THE BATHROOMS ARE A PLACE OF PRAYER
* * * * *
I heard that Mr. Bauer say
when you turn off the water and open the cock
you can hear the veins and throb of earth,
pores seeping in from the ends of the sea,
the breathings of rock.
They say glory —
glory — glory — glory —
When the rushing is great and it rushes forth,
such is the noise that we cannot hear.
Replacing the washer,
listen,
pray:
glory —
glory —
* * * * * *
LOW ARE THE LAVERS OF SOLOMON
DUST IS HIS PRIVATE SEAT
* * * * *
How shall I purge and not be shamed.
And they call these thrones!
Not glory nor sin,
animal into the animal.
Rust and the roaring is measure of man.
And yet all shall be clean.
*
Leave off ye simple ones and live!
Renew! Renew!
The throne on wheels of fire —
destruction a plumb line — a white stone
hard in my belly — a swallowed book —
rock
shall cry out from the dry wall —
out of the tank, of the bursting side —
The beam from the roof shall answer it.
BE NOT AFRAID
These bowls like the temples of Solomon.
Wash and be clean.
A book in my heart.
I cannot speak.
An ensign up from the secret thrones,
up from the roaring of waters
and
we shall be clean, be clean.
*
The nations shall lie down in peace.
All shall be washed away.
*
The cleansing fire
incinerates
all that was soiled and horrible.
The shaft, the fall, the clinkers — if
the bonfires in the sky were trash,
were torment — meant
an angel in the furnace, cut
heart, cut
coal,
diamond.
The stone.
The labour.
Pain.
Evening
The black motes gather in the air.
The blinded swimmers pass,
faces in dusk returning home.
Who helps me climb? Who lends me hands?
Mother is dead in Jerusalem —
by currents tossed, by waters shed,
by oceans born away. . . .
*
When we both were little, when we were young,
she could run, I could toddle after her,
we took our best vacation.
There
between the grey, smooth river
and grey sea, the island, grey with mangrove scrub,
palmetto, marsh, with its white
sands, its white
sea oats, white forest, held
the dunes, I sat below them closed
from sea by whiteness, warmth,
by rustling speech . . . .
Leeward on the river side,
the sailboat like a cradle rocked,
and dolphins over beyond it leaped,
kindly, majestic, again and again,
as if they were hosts or guardians.
Daddy carried me into the shallows where
the warm, thick waters sucked my feet,
and we walked out towards the ocean side
where seiners, gnats on a curtain edge,
specked the horizon. Along the beach
were sea fans, yellow, magenta, orange —
sponges weary as old mop heads —
Walking, walking — I grew so tired
he had to carry me back again.
And there still were the dolphins,
three of them,
leaping and leaping beside the boat.
That night the stars, the creaking sails,
the black wake starry with phosphorus —
it was as if the way towards home
were more our home, were mother’s arms —
as if some One
caressed, loved, nourished,
yearned for us.
We had only to reach to touch.
*
We wait at the windy bus stop where the trash
flutters beside us like wet leaves. The slush
turns lilac. In the park
a mist sits on the branches like a flock
of cloudy beings, fruitfulness
of evening like a music, a perfume —
the cars splash by — it hovers,
waits, a vesper’s flush,
the daily shed —
that makes this dirty city
its bright throne.
*
Yet more than light is asked of us.
The hill still rises, Atlas weight,
each day upon another, brick by brick.
*
A hunched house, colour of faded plums,
dulled yellow sky; my neighbour waits
on her porch steps, shadows of leafless trees
crossing her back like harnesses.
The Retarded Children’s bus returns;
she slides its van door sideways and lifts out
her boy strapped to his travelling chair.
The older boy climbs out behind, dragging
the lunch pails, stands and scuffs
at the muddy snow, picking his nose.
I heard him speak once: an injured tongue,
an excited warble — he clapped his hands.
But the younger one
sags on her breast too tired to see,
his eyes unfocussed. He cannot walk.
Eight, he will only grow heavier.
She carries him. Smiles over his head
at the other one, “Come on, little man,
come on!”
Courage as common, as difficult
as need. The crippled God
leans on us.
Needs.
*
This silence shared is almost warmth.
My world contracts.
In the little park the furrowed elms
strain towards the parching vaults and drain
the earth’s wet passions — life
runs out like water; it dissolves
remembered faces. Far,
far out the harbour wails.
You pare us down.
Give us each day
our daily dead.
Mother from child,
friend from friend.
Where is the light when the light goes out?
That matchstick flame?
“Poor little thing,” she used to say,
winding her daughter’s tendril hair
over her finger.
That deep, warm smile —
she warmed the air. She flared,
a candle near its end, sewed wools
of pulsing trees and flowers —
ever more brilliant colours.
All my plans
I told to her,
my secrets, as one gives
a letter to a traveller, a post
no mail can send.
I clung to her.
She, drowning, clung —
her hands
called out when her throat, too bruised,
prevented speech. They called
the impotent machines, unplugged,
to start, to try again.
A light against the blowing wind.
As bruised snow melts,
as gutters run,
our substance pours into the sea.
The spiritual.
What good to us?
When what we loved was flesh.
Night
Stubborn in love, in disbelief,
my sister, a condensing star
sinks in her burning; light
to me, to You, in darkest night
she serves, she loves
for nothingness.
She is
pure Will, like You creates
a good from nothing.
Holiest
that height of soul.
The crippling of despair
hardens the heart
to red gem fire
stronger, more constant
than I am.
*
For what is Pearl?
A coward tear. A chalky glimmer
in the light, but when abyss
blows at me, I—
flicker, weak—
a shade in shades.
I am poured out like water.
Yet,
as a swimmer is nudged, sometimes, to shore
by an unseen fish—
or as a blind man finds his stair—
I swim, I climb—
You hold me up.
And this abyss
a buried crypt
stuffed with the dirt of centuries
where breathes, beside me in the dark,
the black madonna, her black child—
seed bed.
All this is emblem.
My garage,
puny, dug in the rock-walled hill,
a little cave uphill midnights
I work in, fret and carve—
is bonfire set upon the sea,
a light to the sky whose wanderings
will light beyond my seeing now.
When earth in earth my body lies,
that talent, that white stone
that burns me now
shall shine, shall live.
Egg, for Your Word, be Wing.
*
How did I know? My knowledge grew
from the leafless trees, from the freshened force
of the natural, from the poke-eye of babies, the gold tattoo
of dandelions shredding the muddy banks—
I know.
*
Uphill, still up, the mermaid climbs,
her feet still heavy with midnight’s pain.
I wait for You.
These paper dolls, these tinfoil shapes,
this booth of tinsel whirligigs,
this altar — dwarf at Your carnival,
barker, I hoot Your name.
May Your angel come,
bending his lily beam to me.
The hurt, the mute
in the tarnished streets —
who will speak for them?
Send me.
*
The work grows out of my fingertips,
out of my deepest dreams.
Let the shapes speak out and the visions come!
The Christ who lives in our spending Him,
the shed in our fingers, the foil, the coin —
as long as the bearer labours,
Christ
be ever born.
*
Shadows in shine: the massive laws
stand here like towers of the just.
White chains like pillars hang from them.
Clouds heave like iron in the crevices.
Mica glint, mouse crack, scratching nails,
fly wing, beetle eye — holy and blessed
need of the tiny, the pebble world —
dig be my deed; now dig I round.
*
These shadows are the thrones of God.
As I saw them once. As I see them now
through the darkened labours of my hand,
seat upon seat. And the angels fly
hovering with neither hands nor feet,
but wings grown out of their bodies’ cry,
holding by love untireable
their ceaseless murmurs, their comfortings.
Their warm breath brushes across my cheeks;
the tinfoil reddens; their pulsing veins
are the wounds of earth, of the simple rain. . . .
Glory they say.
GLORY
