HILLS

1.

My grandfather pencilled a skyline map

from Pike’s to Long’s, each mountain’s name.

We told them like a rosary.

Childhood, which seems to us so clear,

made as it is of stories, is a myth.

We map the past with images.

The lines grow simpler as we age.

One after one my mountains have gone west,

have faded into the evenings, all

those mountain women, those white heads.

And you, who first meant “mountain” to my life,

come to me now as a sequential image —

not real (the real belongs to God) —

but her I have forgotten and resaid.

Cast to the rise. If I

tickle the surface of this lake

will a ghost leap, silver?

From the moon-tipped crescent of a peak

can I invoke one shadow?

When I stand

a candle in a dark room, in that flame

a spirit circles like a moth

caught in a single image: she

who cooked by candle all winter long

in the mountain’s light.

2.

At first she was only a mountain place,

her dipper a kindergarten grail,

but stories cast around her a dark lure:

disease, divorce, a brother’s death. I gnawed

these fragments into legend, a doubledness

divided, healed, a mind

that shed belief, hope, human ties,

set out toward mountain solitudes

as if the shining of one star, one solitary candle,

were enough.

The great brass bed

heaped with its chilly comforters

has filled with dust. The moon,

seeping between the plastered logs,

has touched the sepia photograph

of the twins in their white, old-fashioned clothes.

Younger than me. The boy is dead.

The other is her. She had polio.

When did I first imagine it:

her brother built the cabin, he, twin,

double, dead — and that

beyond the snow-enkindled lake

(small as a puddle, in memory

a sea, with Sawtooth upside down

suspended in its milky way) —

over the ridge with its bear-clawed spruce

was the lover, the hater, the separate man

once double and twin as husband and now dead

in having no more story — there

was his secret pasture, his iron gate,

barbed wire, a cattle grate, and locked

barns empty of living things. No lights,

no voices, “No Trespassing.”

Her cabin was never locked. The key

hung by the door like a blessing, and the room

her brother started for himself

lay incomplete beyond her hearth, unroofed

and open to the sky. . . .

3.

Maps, trails. houses, poetry —

he wrote his name on every log.

For her the trees were word enough, the open poem,

the wilderness. His choice, not hers, the tighter knot,

the involuted masterpiece worked back

into the crevices, rose gulch, the scent of raspberries,

lode, vein, and darkened cave.

She followed the outcrops of the rock, the paths

deer make to their lookouts —

always the high places, the wide air.

We choose the allegories of our selves —

his niche, his distillations — she

refused a year spent flat in bed

and the corset back.

As a beast will gnaw

a trapped paw free,

she chose immediate freedom, lame.

He was not best man at her wedding, shade

by then. Without his maps and structures was she lost?

How had she mistaken this mind for his?

This mountain man who fastened down each night

with lists, proprieties, “what a woman does

or does not do,” perpetual endings. Once,

a hawk snagged in his barbed wire fence.

It flailed like a fallen Icarus.

She cut it out.

Still over the pasture the mountains shone,

Sawtooth’s white ladder, Audubon’s,

above them the ever-moving stars

indifferent to all labels, maps.

She left the bars up after her.

4.

Along the wave of a precipice

her thought ran like a ptarmigan,

mottled and still like the glacier scree.

Only the wingbeat remembered,

hardly observed, invisible,

the sound of one hand, the thunder

of one breath.

These are the hills where woman has no name,

having communion with the trees

in their green study. Mountainous

the talking in the needles: Engelmann’s,

Jack pine, white bristlecone.

Avens and snow buttercup

profess immortal innocence.

The coney’s house

(its bedding for its airing out)

might have been hers. Good housekeeping

is notice of fair weather.

High enough

the language of destruction fades. In mist,

in cloud, she walked in the original.

It was not to name the mountains she was there.

Even her cairns were secret: a hummingbird’s

moss thimble, or

a white outcrop of lichen where her trail

turned by a star notch in the hill,

a windfall once, a panther’s cache, a broken rock,

broken, each winter, differently.

She knew the mountains as she knew

the compass of her kitchen, dark

(those cabin nights) but everything

in answer to the motion of her hands.

to live in, the solution —

nothing more.

5.

The swordsmen on her mantelpiece

have frosted a little in winter’s light.

Their book-supporting scabbards fill with dust.

Over her pond the hungry deer

scatter their tiny hoofprints like grey hail.

The beaver’s lodge

steams like a chimney in the dawn.

Someone is dreaming. The sky,

staining a little with ruddy snow

as if the sharp peaks cut it, glows

like a mirror. The sun ascends

corn maiden’s ladder and the clouds

huddle like sheep for the shepherd’s horn,

the wind that drives them from the peaks

to beat below the tree line, to subside

filling the unimportant trails,

blocking the skier’s highway.

A vein bursts in the city’s side,

sometimes: cloudburst. The prairie creek

stripes through the city, heaped with glass

and plastic rubbish, peters out

in vacant lots, in camping grounds,

in tales of desert drownings and flash floods.

Now, by the irrigation ditch,

brown waters draining from Cherry Creek,

her old car moves like a crippled toad.

Fumes from the city fog the peaks.

The sky is yellowed like stained, dead fur.

Car lights along the highways trim

the Front Range like a distant mall.

But she has slipped under the cottonwoods.

New Year’s: all things must be unlocked,

left open a crack — front door,

back door, a window — so the stars

can coast in on their film of dust

and sail out with time’s leavings. Shells

must break for hatching.

And his room

left roofless, wall-less, only frame

with one red, rusting bedsprings

is the room

where new constructions can begin —

building with sunlight,

starlight,

with spruce dust, sand, with lupine, and the pale

continual agitation of the green

and golden aspen, “shooting stars”

(the “twelve gods” of the swamp).

His ropes sat in the Mountain Club

for months. His boots

almost a year.

A use can be found for anything.

6.

We walk, sometimes, in the woodlot here

in this shabby eastern province where the bears

wander like ruined overcoats

in the city’s unofficial dump.

There are old walls,

the last sites of lost farmlands, clay-filled holes,

pastures of alders and hackmatack

and roadbeds covered with bracken.

Every year

the place where the farm stood when we came

was and is now some rusted tin,

brambles, and something beneath the grass,

chassis perhaps, or a chimney stone — each year

this place is less a place.

We’ll lose it soon,

tracking our way through the beggar’s-ticks

and the drought-browned mosses on the stones.

“There’s the wall,” you may say. It’s around here

then.

And so this night

I watched a sunset drain away

the colours from the city. Just at dusk

my pear and a maple after it

echoed in rose and scarlet shades

the sun’s withdrawn circumference,

beating the gold leaves, shattering green —

and all that green and yellow have gone black.

Just here, where I hold the map

(light, candle, mind)

I see a rose shade glimmering —

pale rags strung on a ghost’s twig arm —

to shake at the edge of my eyesight, almost there

and almost invisible —

so too what I think I remember fades;

it drains away.

Her cabin, this winter, all alone,

with the stuffed bear holding his valet tray,

the fireplace swordsmen cold as ice,

and the snow heaped over the window sills.

What sleeps in the cellar all this time

or stirs when stiff Orion stirs,

moving along the mauve spruce trunks

after the leaping, mad, white hares?

But here’s the sun, rocketing over the aspen rods,

tipping the white cones of the firs

so each encrusted helmet slides

sinking the green ears further. Drip —

the moving needled waters prick the snow.

Plop — and the snow-plugged chimney top

releases its cap. Grey water runs

along the granite chimney stones

and pools below the andirons — wet coals

and soft, decaying ash

that like a compost of years past

hardens again, and night returns:

a whole world under glass.

The cabin is not empty. At the stove

her candle, ghostly, is a shaft

in moonbeams, or a spiderweb.

Her eyes are as bright as an animal’s,

the crystal eyes of the deer, the bear,

the wolfskin hanging on the wall.

The piercing rays from the third, wide room

open the snow, where her brother waits —

and the red springs of that empty bed

rusting past autumn.

The chimney smokes with auroral fires

blue as the tight buds of the firs,

sealed against wind, and the windows shake

reflecting the flat plane of the lake,

and the twins, congealed, in the photograph —

but the imaginable warmth

of what is there,

is there. . . .

LOCAL SUITE

1. Riverside Drive

The wind’s too rough for the sailboats.

A cormorant, starting to hang out its wings,

has had second thoughts. Pale mustard flowers

shake in the rocks and styrofoam

of the riverbank. A runner in red mittens

pounds on past.

At the Armoury

boys play at soldiers. My small dog

noses the thawing ground. Her thick

coat flares like thistle seed.

2. Fredericton Junction

Last summer’s cattails, shaggy in the rain,

and blackbirds; a shiny, plywood station —

a purring bus clogs the parking lot,

the driver’s gone across the street

to the new café. In the waiting room

a girl in a yellow slicker and a child,

too hot in a pink fur snowsuit.

The café signs says “Chili.” “Well,

I’ve got beans,” says the counter girl.

“What else does it take?” The bus driver tells her.

She’s set for the day.

The rain lets up. My husband walks

beside the tracks like a signal man,

and the train looks round its corner, small,

yellow, perfectly genuine,

and right on time.

3. Roberta’s Wood Path

Spruce seedlings, still too small for lights

at Christmas time, line the narrow path

the children take. (The grownups bow.)

Ground cedar overhangs

a doll’s ravine.

(The patch of bluing scilla is a lake.)

The gardener marks her stations with tin tags:

bloodroot, trillium, shooting-star.

Above us squirrels in their choir stalls cry

and drop the stale, wild apples on our heads.

4. Picnic by the River Light

Nearsighted, the moose swam toward us.

Halfway across it saw us, blinked, and turned around.

We watched it wading the island. Later

we saw it stumbling in a patch

of carefully ranked young lettuces,

a kind of Peter, harder to evict.

5. Officers’ Square

With red salvia, purple petunias, orange

marigolds, a turquoise beaver pondering

its flat trough, and the plumbing-roofed

memorial like a bandstand.

The benches are red and yellow but the grass

has been left green.

The girls in their bare feet like it.

Stretched out flat, with their dress shoes

under their heads, they are getting

their lunch-break sunburns. Each

as pink as a rose.

6. Needham Street

Narrow, its dusk closed in with wires

as if to catch some late hawk-watching pigeon.

A tiny, tidy house is dwarfed

by the massive, white datura bush.

The ancient, crippled apple tree is

propped on crutches, a loyalist.

Hopvine, nightshade, half-wild cats,

the houses crowd the sidewalk, but

there is Boldon’s light, a stained glass window:

a beckoning cup, blue amber grail.

Against it the white budworm moths

flutter like cinders and beat the screen.

7. Loyalist Graveyard

Dust on the willows and raspberry briars,

and grey seed heads: angelica, milkweed,

virgin’s bower — a sort of fog. The plot

might once have been bare meadow. Elms,

drawing their darkness like a hood,

have closed it in till it seems hardly large enough,

only by accident not forgot. The past

gets smaller the less we remember it.

This is almost too small.

8. Odell Park

The rags of this year’s tartan come apart,

unroof the old farm’s gravel road. The sun,

slanting between the tree trunks, looks

like the last of the tourists. It touches us,

lightly, its hands already cold.

There will be frost.

9. Burning the Greens

From the post-Christmas pyre of trees

speckled with tinsel, a steam of snow

dampens the smell of starter fuel.

A missed gold ball wags sadly. Flame

reddens the wet face of a child

slumped on his father’s shoulders.

Soon the blaze

will send the old year toward the sun

we’ve not seen much of, lately. Dusk

happened at three. The bonfire’s through

by bedtime. Like one small, red eye,

Mars dogs pathetic Jupiter.

10. The Myth of a Small City

The myth of a small city where,

on a snowy night,

it doesn’t do to walk carelessly:

the walker behind you with lengthening tread

has raised his wooden hammer.

He is the clock of midnight, the bad turn

someone will do you, sometime.

By the wall, a shadow fidgets,

starts to run.

DEAR TIGER

The happiest women, like the happiest nations,
have no history.

George Eliot

1.

I was a perfect picture then. I breathed

the summer of perfection. I was five.

The painter was my papa’s friend.

We walked in the public gardens every day.

The fountains made a gentle noise

like mama’s skirts.

You can see in the picture: my blue dress,

the curls they cut off later — she would wind

them round her finger with the comb.

There were lilacs and poppies like soft balloons,

and I, as tender silky as the rose

that, faded from the opera bouquet,

lay in its gilt posy rim

limp as the fish that papa caught

which leaped a little in the grass

like rainbows, then grew dim —

they wilted, bent their rosy heads

into the basket’s lettuces —

I shone.

The fever came.

The heat came in from the dusty trees

and soured the whitewashed nursery.

The white sheets prickled me like briars.

They cut my papa’s favourite curls and dried

white towels upon my head. I dreamed,

and saw the fountains leaping in the park,

making no noise, and I went to them.

And in this silent picture I awoke.

2.

At sixteen I made my classmates each

a valentine — a poem, a drawing —

whimsical, romantic, as

each one might like, so everyone,

even the ones who had no friends,

would get one, unsigned valentine.

A secret. No one guessed.

(A quiet girl like me!)

I didn’t mean them all to guess,

though Mother thought they ought to have,

I think it made her angry.

How she would feel, now,

that you do not even know my name,

holding my album in your hand!

But after all, how could you know?

You are not kin.

I took my album south with me

when I married.

I didn’t write my friends’ names in,

though I wrote

“Dr. Williamson” on Father’s, since it looked

so stern (he was never stern!)

and on the little drawing of

“The beautiful Miss Helen Jones”

who was my best friend ever —

It was after the War. Dr. Falligant

studied homeopathic medicine

under Father, and he asked for me.

So handsome, so truly considerate!

Father said I was too young;

they could not bear

to part with me.

Three months —

but Father never could say no

too long, to me. I was

your great-great-grandfather’s

first wife. I died

in giving birth to a dead child.

He will never have mentioned me.

I left my album for you, dear.

(unsigned)

3.

I stood straight as a soldier

when Daddy was

the Brigadier.

I sent the Royal War College

his papers in a shoebox.

Do you know,

they never even acknowledged it?

I think the silly fellows have

mislaid it.

But they sent

me an invitation to their mess.

The Prince was there.

He does not hold himself as well

as Daddy did, but better than

these men you see upon the streets

these days, slip-slop.

When Blackie died

Daddy would never have another dog.

We never had cats.

But if they want to visit me —

like Tiger. I knew who owned him.

He’d come in for his tea

and go out again. When his family

were all away they’d leave him out

and he’d come right in

and sleep all night at the foot of my bed.

He was a soldier, Tiger.

He grew old.

One day a new tom on the block

came in our yard and fought with him.

By the time I got a bucket of water out

to throw over them

it was too late.

There were bits of Tiger everywhere.

I went out this morning for raspberries

(Daddy loved them so)

and slipped

on the porch steps and fell.

I lay with my face on the gravel path

and I thought of Tiger,

dear Tiger.

It must have been almost a year

after that terrible, terrible fight.

I lay with my face on the gravel path,

and I thought of dear Tiger.