Pink
I ask to be taken
to the place
of the dead.
We go on a bus,
we get off at a fairground,
walk up and over a hill—
it is muddy and difficult.
At the top they point and say, “Here is
the pink city.”
Below are flesh-coloured coffins,
thrown like pulled teeth,
or rubber erasers.
People are dancing.
My cousin, Sylvia, says,
“It is witchcraft.”
“You have to keep cutting,” I say.
I move my fingers like scissors, snipping
the threads they throw
to catch us.
I cut thread after looping thread.
A man cries,
but we are not trapped,
we are not dead,
we are not caught
in the pink city.
Orange
My father remembers a young girl
who died of her burns.
The kids were jumping
a bonfire. She was very little,
she tried to do the same,
and fell in.
It was his first funeral. There was a
horse-drawn hearse, and buggies.
The mother walked behind,
crying, My Lala’s gone.
Yellow
I have two sweaters—the yellow one
that Stephen’s mother made,
and the pink, with holes, from the Sally Ann.
I give them to my daughter,
who may have followed me
down the cold road
that sprang up
from the fairground.
I meet the dead buying groceries.
They hurry their bags to their cars,
drive off before I can catch them.
Much colder today:
we wait for the hearse, follow it,
squealing round corners,
race through the streets of Guildford,
lose sight of it, catch up…
There’s a backlog because of the holidays,
they’re on a tight schedule…
It’s January. People force themselves
on walks; their noses stream,
cows turn their backs.
At the end of a lane,
horses test the earth for hollows.
Reverend Strevens in his long black cloak
comes to bury you.
It’s January. Through the lych-gate,
under the yew. We stand.
“What is dying? A ship sails and I stand watching….”
February is for coats—secondhand coats.
In the seams of your blue tailored raincoat
I’ve sewn animal tails.
I put on the coat and go for a walk.
Branches fly past, the great trees toss their heads.
The earth is cold, the fires banked low.
When the storm comes—later, at night—
somewhere, inside a cave,
is a wall painting of a horse
and pictures of bison,
small deer, and dogs.
The colours are gold, red, ochre.
I am in the cave, painting, looking out at you
looking in at me,
and sewing a warm coat.
In the wind, while outside in your coat,
I met a ghost who had killed herself.
Her husband had murdered her lover;
she threw her children down a waterfall
near Tahsis.
She is distraught still.
I gave her the coat.
I came home wet.
When I wear grief
like a helmet and armour,
when the horses are in the far field,
and the woods between are impassable,
I lie on the ground.
You have never seen me like this.
You would hear the horses and start walking,
look back at me with hate.
When I am done,
and my face is sour with salt,
I dream myself free
into my allowance of love,
let my grandmother lead me
into the forest
where I may never come out,
or find the horses,
or ride away,
though it is sweet
to remember her sweetness.
The world is dangerous.
The dead arrive at night to bring me presents:
(Dorothy Livesays snuff box, for instance).
I forget I am married.
I have a lover with a red condom.
When my uncle went water-skiing,
at eighty, my aunt crouched in the bow of the boat,
praying.
Now he is ill: people are taking his money;
he cannot walk,
he is always running.
I remember Stan appearing to Xan in a dream—
she rose, brimming with joy,
to float above the bed before she fainted.
He’d slipped through the door,
his shoes were polished;
she knew it was him
by the Arrow shirts, the grey slacks—
he’d returned from the land of the dead.
He said all was forgotten,
except for the feeling of lunch in the apartment,
the red dust,
horse fleas biting his legs
as he rides
across a stream
into mountains.
April opens with snow:
my house, the trees,
the fall of land
to the lake, turn white.
When we see where we are,
we’re flooded: water to the back steps
and inside over the floor.
Mr. Chalker appears in gum boots
and with buckets: we sweep water
away from coal sacks,
suitcases, books.
I go to bed (the window blank with
melting ice) and hold your sweater
to my face.
Somewhere, not many miles from here,
is a house. If I could find it,
the links of time would join.
Our room is there, a brass bedstead,
apples in the cellar,
our children, a grandmother:
my grandfather whips the little horse,
Forest, pulling the cutter—
we are cut off by the last
of spring snow.
When I walked to school,
I passed a wood
I called “Sad Crimes.”
One time I stopped and went in:
branches shifted—
it was spring.
White petals
swam the air.
I did not have
a question,
so stayed silent
behind a tree,
while a man
took a shovel to wet humus,
tilled out a shining coil of worms.
Tonight I stand at the window,
young buds prick the maple,
but I see snow from that last storm in St.
John’s when I stood,
with Mr. Chalker, broom in hand,
sweeping water
like a woman.
When they put me in the hospital,
I was Ophelia,
because Ophelia was mad,
and her lover had hurt her.
I understood Ophelia
when I looked up from my book
to see my lover open my blouse
with his knife.
I searched for her through boxes of books,
I looked through the town,
behind a church,
across a bridge
where lights stung the water,
and in a park
where my lover said,
Are you ready to find out
who you are?
When I was twelve, I went to the library.
The books spoke softly.
It was spring,
thin grass grew on the boulevard.
Next door was a sweet shop.
I went in and counted glass jars;
Ophelia stood on tiptoe in a dark room.
(When God tells you to do it,
you cross a bridge.)
Linda lived at the edge
of East London,
with a big wild hill
at the end of the street.
The wildness stopped
at an asylum. One day
a neighbour girl was grabbed
by a half-naked man,
but nothing happened.
Linda and I walk between hawthorn hedges,
buttercups and nettles blow,
the sheep, a Greek chorus, gather beneath an oak
to cry, you can’t have it all,
it is never enough,
you can’t stay here,
and if you do, you won’t like it.
We watch our words,
tread softly along the mown path
between graves
at the end of the lane,
look down
at the rich brown water
of midsummer.
If you say the wrong thing, says Linda,
you’ll end up dead.
I dream I am in the dark,
holding hands with Linda,
and others, in a chain.
I dream that somewhere
at the end of us
someone is made well.
A father hit golf balls
into a wire fence
and at black-headed gulls
and oyster catchers gathered
at the sewer outlet;
a child put clothes on and off;
a mother sat in the cold
and watched the power station
to the south.
Linda tramped north into the wind
to watch islands sink
and the estuary grow.
Then Linda wanted a drink,
so we drove for miles and took a road
and stopped on a square of gravel
in front of a house.
The house was closed,
but Linda hammered
on its great oak door.
Eddie opened it and said
it was unusual for people to knock
when the house was shut;
we’d woken him from his nap.
We sat near the window in the bar,
and Eddie, in deck shoes, paced in and out.
I began to weep
there, in the room across
from the long gallery,
beside the fireplace,
below the hidden hammer-beam ceiling
from the fifteenth century,
in a house first built in the twelfth century,
with a Norman dovecote nearby where there were
two thousand doves;
I thought at first the house shook,
but it was me,
filled with whatever could not be contained,
like the arrowhead on an arrow
or the perpetual stream.
Eddie said
the house liked some people.
Linda remained polite while Eddie explained
that the house met five ley lines
and sheltered twelve spirits,
one of whom was an abbot who illustrated books.
And another was himself,
Prior Eddie.
I wept on
as the view included a moat,
and an orchard where I used to walk.
Eddie said
did I remember the romps we took
in the meadow with orchids underfoot?
He padded near in his deck shoes,
grinned, touched my hair,
leaned in for a kiss.
Linda said
it was time to go.
An oak steadied a field,
the forest was smoke
(and the sorrow I felt
on leaving the house
has remained:
no charm but the mystery of
accident
to keep us sane).
Mrs. Mary Watson of Holly Cottage
has to drag a small mattress in
from the caravan to sleep us:
she’s a tiny hundred years old, with sharp eyes
The downy and pillow are scented,
the bathroom sink’s so small
I rinse one hand at a time
before I lie down.
Outside, are pale pink
and red roses, rhododendrons,
a stout box hedge:
beyond the hedge, a narrow road,
a pasture, forest and hills:
behind these
a stone-walled yard
in which a dozen huskies—
thousands of miles from home—
paw and howl.
Each afternoon
they run the track up Doon Hill:
the dogs are training for snow.
Black cows graze the hill,
slow as boulders
against the grey sky,
a grey-and-white cat sits
on an aggregate rock
to watch us palm
thumbnail-size golden frogs
that share the road with us.
Our feet strike hollows,
a pale green light
lays a wash
on the oak floor,
and the hollies and rowans
through which the huskies run.
At the top, under a pine,
letting the wheeled sled drop,
they lie down,
as did the Reverend Kirk
who vanished
the fourteenth of May 1692,
and who knew
that desire is a harmony
with loss,
and the unseen, like imagined sea or snow,
sustains a dream
so real we may find it.
Thin strips of paper tied to branches,
swing like tongues:
Dear fairies, I wish for my cousin to come alive,
I wish my family would be happy,
I wish you to care for Breaker. He was a great dog.
Wind shoves my back, pushing me to
the stony drop
of the fairy hill.
Mrs. Mary Watson smiles
when I recount
how I crawled on my knees
to the inner wood,
and the warm improbable breath of sled dogs
who ran as if they could smell the Arctic,
their hearts geared to the evidence
of the disappeared.
1.
My friends die in September.
They talk of grammatical structures,
and then they begin to sew new clothes.
There are two sides to a pause:
you would think they would remember—
like sunlight on water or an empty house.
I dream I’m hanging from a porthole:
when the ship veers,
I am flung out—
if I can’t hold on, I will die.
Those who have died find new life.
Their eyes touch my hands,
but they have no strength.
They don’t know that the ship turned sharply;
they don’t know about open portholes.
I am on one side of a caesura:
my feet are wet I am so tired.
You would think they would recall
that all lost causes
end in September.
2.
I was glad it was over.
I remembered my father
sawing boards in his workshop.
I recalled the faithfulness of the bee
all summer: the hive,
the honey,
the last bee dance
on the windowsill.
Perhaps it was autumn:
there was rain,
the door slammed;
the postman prowled
in a black rubber cape;
dark fell: we waited,
but it was daylight
when the pup hobbled home.
Our father said he was hit by a car—
and the street wore chrome
and a cruel eye.
That night I found the car,
wrenched the wheel from the driver,
killed him…
(And the moon
slipped under the granite roots
of islands,
lit them
like samples
of carpet snagged
on the seabed,
and
I named the colours—
as if they could be caught
skinking up a stairway
to a bright room.)
Above the hearth,
before the shelves holding three books,
a small cupboard
is sketched in air—
only her eyes can open it.
It holds the spirits,
but on Saturday night
they come out.
They scent the room,
they trail through the debris
of hearts,
they examine the dead.
Her brother knocks
on their shared wall
at midnight.
He seems to say he is alive;
however, he may appear
in a room with parents,
on the walk to school,
or as he hunches his neck
over homework.
He seems to say remember that I am alive,
if I forget.
She opens the cupboard door again
just in case
there is anything else,
and there is.
In her dream, while she is fainting from cold,
the child imagines a blackboard.
She draws a house, trees, a path, sunshine.
She is inside the house
eating pancakes.
She plays the piano,
sits on a beige carpet touching the lamp cord
softly to the socket.
Around her is a blanket of noise:
not the wind, not Lucifer filling her hollow bones
but the hiss of a swan,
its wings trembling fabulous air.
The child shut in the cupboard
whispers the secrets of her life
to the coats. Their skirts bell,
their heavy folds remove her head
from her body.
When she is brave enough,
she tries the door—how many times
can she bear to find it locked?
Grit from boots and shoes
on her bare thighs,
her arms hug her knees:
do not feel sorry for her—
each coat has a voice
and two arms
with which to love her.
In December “every form that you see
has its original in the Divine world.”
Death is of no consequence,
because there is eternity.
I bend my head to drink.
Timeless water drips from
my lips. It is no substitute,
it does not remember intelligence or faith,
it cannot recall you to me—you who have finished
with this world.
Pass into the deep, if you must,
so that the one drop which is yourself
may become a sea:
but do not drown,
put on your shoes,
set out as if to visit me.
There was snow thick as silver coins,
there was the silence
of broken windows.
The street was troubled
with the heels of the dead,
their broad calves
and trembling knees.
Their open mouths
swallowed our breath,
their wet hands touched my belly:
“Not here,” I said,
and put down my suitcase.
The street stopped its wail
of wrongs,
the dead watched you kiss me,
take out the map,
say, “I’m sorry, I’ ll make it right.”
They were pressed so close
I felt their ragged heartbeats,
the swoon of their longing
to be alive
and not dead
in the abandoned streets
in the dark below Sokolovska station
after midnight.
I saw the snow slide
from their black galoshes,
I saw the mud of the sewers
from which they’d climbed;
I was decades late,
but I had come
on the last train
from Vienna
to the city
at midnight.
I can still see the torn paper
of the snow,
feel the V of the roadway underfoot—
no one loved,
but rats fucked
on drainpipes,
on twisted bed frames,
in the wrenched doorways.
We climbed toward a light:
the dead clutched at my long coat,
my scarf, my heavy suitcase.
Their fingers tucked
into my buttonholes, they pulled,
but you held my hand
all the way to Sokolovska.
The soldier who came
could not help,
but the woman with him said,
“Help will come,
no harm will befall you,
it’s Christmas night.”