CLAUDE GLASS

He is told about
the previous evening’s behaviour.

Starting with a punchbowl
on the volleyball court.
Dancing and falling across coffee tables,
asking his son Are you the bastard
who keeps telling me I’m drunk?
kissing the limbs of women
suspicious of his friends serenading
five pigs by the barn
heaving a wine glass towards garden
and continually going through gates
into the dark fields
and collapsing.
His wife half carrying him home
rescuing him from departing cars,
complains this morning
of a sore shoulder.
And even later
his thirteen-year-old daughter’s struggle
to lift him into the back kitchen
after he has passed out, resting his head on rocks,
wondering what he was looking for in dark fields.

For he has always loved that ancient darkness
where the flat rocks glide like Japanese tables
where he can remove clothes
and lie with moonlight on the day’s heat
hardened in stone, drowning
in this star blanket this sky
like a giant trout
conscious how the heaven
careens over him
as he moves in back fields
kissing the limbs of trees
or placing ear on stone which rocks him
and then stands to watch the house
in its oasis of light.
And he knows something is happening there to him
solitary while he spreads his arms
and holds everything that is slipping away together.

He is suddenly in the heat of the party
slouching towards women, revolving
round one unhappy shadow.
That friend who said he would find
the darkest place, and then wave.
He is not a lost drunk
like his father or his friend, can,
he says, stop on a dime, and he can
he could because even now, now in
this brilliant darkness where
grass has lost its colour and it’s all
fucking Yeats and moonlight, he knows
this colourless grass is making his bare feet green
for it is the hour of magic
which no matter what sadness
leaves him grinning.
At certain hours of the night
ducks are nothing but landscape
just voices breaking as they nightmare.
The weasel wears their blood
home like a scarf,
cows drain over the horizon
and the dark
vegetables hum onward underground
but the mouth
wants plum.

Moves from room to room
where brown beer glass
smashed lounges at his feet
opens the long rust stained gate
and steps towards invisible fields
that he knows from years of daylight.
He snorts in the breeze
which carries a smell
of cattle on its back.
What this place does not have
is the white paint of bathing cabins
the leak of eucalyptus.
During a full moon
outcrops of rock shine
skunks spray abstract into the air
cows burp as if practicing
the name of Francis Ponge.
His drunk state wants the mesh of place.
Ludwig of Bavaria’s Roof Garden—
glass plants, iron parrots
Venus Grottos, tarpaulins of Himalaya.
By the kitchen sink he tells someone
from now on I will drink only landscapes
—here, pour me a cup of Spain.

Opens the gate and stumbles
blood like a cassette through the body
away from the lights, unbuttoning,
this desire to be riverman.

Tentatively
he recalls
his drunk invitation to the river.
He has steered the awesome car
past sugarbush to the blue night water
and steps out
speaking to branches
and the gulp of toads.
Subtle applause of animals.
A snake leaves a path
like temporary fossil.
He falls
back onto the intricacies
of gearshift and steering wheel
alive as his left arm
which now departs out of the window
trying to tug passing sumac
pine bush tamarack
into the car
to the party.
Drunkenness opens his arms like a gate
and over the car invisible insects
ascend out of the beams like meteorite
crushed dust of the moon
. . . he waits for the magic star called Lorca.

On the front lawn a sheet
tacked across a horizontal branch.
A projector starts a parade
of journeys, landscapes, relatives,
friends leaping out within pebbles of water
caught by the machine as if creating rain.

Later when wind frees the sheet
and it collapses like powder in the grass
pictures fly without target
and howl their colours over Southern Ontario
clothing burdock
rhubarb a floating duck.
Landscapes and stories
flung into branches
and the dog walks under the hover of the swing
beam of the projection bursting in his left eye.

The falling sheet the star of Lorca swoops
someone gets up and heaves his glass
into the vegetable patch
towards the slow stupid career of beans.

This is the hour
when dead men sit
and write each other.
“Concerning the words we never said
during morning hours of the party
there was glass under my bare feet
laws of the kitchen were broken
and each word moved
in my mouth like muscle . . .”

This is the hour for sudden journeying.
Cervantes accepts
a 17th Century invitation
from the Chinese Emperor.
Schools of Chinese-Spanish Linguistics!
Rivers of the world meet!
And here
ducks dressed in Asia
pivot on foreign waters.

At 4 a.m. he wakes in the sheet
that earlier held tropics in its whiteness.
The invited river flows through the house
into the kitchen up
stairs, he awakens and moves within it.
In the dim light
he sees the turkish carpet under water,
low stools, glint
of piano pedals, even a sleeping dog
whose dreams may be of rain.

It is a river he has walked elsewhere
now visiting moving with him at the hip
to kitchen where a friend sleeps in a chair
head on the table his grip
still round a glass, legs underwater.

He wants to relax
and give in to the night
fall horizontal and swim
to the back kitchen where his daughter sleeps.
He wishes to swim
to each of his family and gaze
at their underwater dreaming
this magic chain of bubbles.
Wife, son, household guests, all
comfortable in clean river water.

He is aware that for hours
there has been no conversation,
tongues have slid to stupidity on alcohol
sleeping mouths are photographs of yells.

He stands waiting, the sentinel,
shambling back and forth, his anger
and desire against the dark
which, if he closes his eyes,
will lose them all.

The oven light
shines up through water at him
a bathysphere a ghost ship
and in the half drowned room
the crickets like small pins
begin to tack down
the black canvas of this night,
begin to talk their hesitant
gnarled epigrams to each other
across the room.
Creak and echo.
Creak and echo. With absolute clarity
he knows where he is.