Task: to be where I am.
Even when I am in this solemn and absurd
role: I am still the place
where creation works on itself
— Tomas Tranströmer (trans. Robert Bly)
* Unsteadiness on the feet, dizziness
When was. Crustaceans flick tongues in the ocean’s ear;
fog clings, marbled. Metal gurney and knees pointed
at cracked plaster. Bite down on air.
Salmon-steak pink. Greased and soft-headed. Alternately
slapped and coddled, coddled and slapped — hands
like talons go for the gyroscope of the eye
As if some swell beyond, below the sea’s belt
had bone-chilled us, bale-wrapped and banded
our tongues. Sentenced to stillness, a columnar,
wet-hemlock church. A sharp creak sparrows out
from the shed … slack-drum thud from the shrubs …
It starts in. Pray for its passing
Pool of shallow calm, terns two-step in chalked
mist, moist brush of spruce bough. Belong
here, adrift in amniotic flow, this is your … no —
I’m at it again, quelling the pain and gush. Semiotic
downpour, onslaught; those first quivering lungs
and no one directing the intake
Between brown water potholes and clapboard yellows,
lean night halls, over the sea’s breaking frown;
a brother. A beach stone. Unreliable air of the world.
Housed in hedged, Ontario towns, every shed savouring its bucked
wood, whimpering collie, cords coiled in a gas-blue
helix of meaning. Basement detritus piling and piling
* One pupil larger than the other
Soccer pitch, clipped, green. Raised on pitches of love
lower than a drone and today, brother, you and I weeping
at the touchline, grass glistens with it. Midfield, a boy
fires off a toy rocket. Zenith, where it wobbles, uncertain,
shies from the thinner reaches, burns up its last, and
shimmies down the ocean we all try to look through
* Persistent or increasingly severe headache
Further back. Feet stirruped, muzzled nurses hover
and grip. Crown of a skull slides out. Algae.
Crown of a skull like the mute in a trumpet’s bell and
blow this with your entire, blood-flushed husk. This
music, heard through fog of Demerol, does it flow
into or out from that sea-floor-soft