No Ordinary Place (2 page)

And wind, always wind rolled over the land,

pulling the clouds thin and grey.

We had to go out — in snow, in cold, no matter —

I lay the baby in her crib to let her sleep

or cry. Some part of the fence was down;

a deer, maybe, or one of the horses run into it

in the blizzarding dark, or the wind

had sheared it off, the post long rotted

but holding taut in the tension of barbed wire

until, like someone exhausted or dying,

it could no longer keep itself upright.

Wind watered my eyes, the razored barbs

cut my hands through gloves, the bleached

bones of grass bent with the weight

of snow. First we had to pull the rusted

staples out, then the wire off the post,

the hard wooden knot like a face

etched with pain. Then a new post to go in:

the pounding of the maul, my hands

holding the new post straight; I stood

unseeing but for a smear of colour, the tremble

in my bones when my husband hit it clean, each time

missing my hands, my wrists, the skin

exposed and fiery with frost. The chokecherry

beside the cattle guard bloomed with birds

feasting on the final fruit, one hawk

on the power line, patient and lonely,

our child in her crib and her dark hunger.

My prayer for her sleep. Then the wire, coiled

like a summer rattler, pulled snug with the claw

of the hammer I held in place, my feet braced

in snow hard as love, burrs catching on my socks,

sleet of tears stinging my face,

my hands just holding on, and my breasts

sudden with milk. And when we finished,

the birds scattering from the chokecherry,

we stepped into the house as her newborn wail

shattered the air, and I, stunned with cold

and crying, my breasts burning

and the milk coming down.

Three years after I slipped back

 
into the world,

I lay and studied the morning bones

of my hands opening,

 
closing, my fleshy wings,

the house sunlit and silent as heaven.

A sudden
bang
, and I slid my feet

to the floor. A cardinal

had flown into the window, shattering

 
the dawn.

Light curled in sleep on the snow.

The bones of trees tapped at the frozen

 
waters of the sky.

My bald uncle was out in his ear-flap hat,

high-stepping in clumsy boots.

I breathed crystals onto the glass,

 
my palms pressing the thin

 
separation between us,

and watched his eyebrows turn to ash,

his gloved hand lift

 
the blood-red bird

 
motionless as the angels

in my Bible story book. Barefoot

in my flannel nightgown,

 
faced with death,

I never forgot the darkness

in its eyes, shining

with the last thing it had seen

before tumbling through

 
to the other side:

 
that veil

I still knew, and knew

would not let me back,

my loneliness fresh, the bruising

 
air of the world

stroking my strange new skin.

My little soul, fluttering flame,

flies away when I sleep. She has

no fear of death, that dark ice

 
floating between the stars.

She holds her infinity close

and won’t let me see.

My little child who lives in me

lies awake each night

 
and does not sleep.

Her ear attends to nomad birds

crying in their bones,

 
the humming dust of heaven,

a voice behind the blackened moon

whispering

This is not your home
.

My loneliness speaks

in the rivers of my veins, again

and again asking its name.

 
Remember
,

I answer. Your name is
remember
,

it is
mist in the dawn
.

Your name, I say, is
little sparrow

gleaning winter ground
.

And my mother? My father?

They live deep in a forest

 
I have not yet found.

My mother sews dawn to the sun,

my father unrolls the fabric

of the sky. Together, they shake out

the light of summer, fold it over

and over in winter.

After half a century of walking,

 
I will cross a bridge

of fallen leaves to find them.

I will carry bread to them, the seeds

of stars, the worn shoes

 
of desire.

I will stroke their heads and say,

I am here now, little Mother,

I heard you call in dream, Father
,

and I will place my tenderness

in jars ancient and jade.

When they sit down to the table

I will feed them from my hands,

reaching down

 
to the ripe fruit,

scraping each jar clean.

Another word for
daughter

is
remember
.

Remember
ripples the still waters of childhood.

Remember
walks abandoned roads,

 
dust clinging to her shoes.

Another word for
mother

is
silence
.

Silence
tucks the sheets around the child’s bed.

Silence
wanders in and out all the rooms of the house.

Other words for
daughter

 
are
stranger
, and
shadow
 —

the child wakens in the night and knows

 
she is a stranger

to those who sleep in the other rooms,

as
remember
and
silence
meet each other,

one on the top and one on the bottom stair.

Not even the geese know her, who pass in the sky

riding two long wings, their music

another word for
poverty
,

 
which echoes

through the shadowed chambers of her heart.

And another way to say
heart

is to say,
little drum beating

 
under the moon
.

And another way to say
moon

is to say,
blue crayon circle

 
caught in night’s branches
.

And another way to say
night

is to say,
remember
 —

 
the ruddied face of the moon

she reaches for,

 
a memory

of those who loved her

before she became human again,

 
snagged in the branches

of her bones, the radiant hum of heaven

dying in her ear.

I knew then there were infinite possibilities.

The world was catching fire.

Leaves turned one by one to flame.

I saw my life clearly, in an instant:

I had travelled by train, the long scarf

of its smoke the colour of your hair.

Once, the conductor turned his head to look at me.

His eyes told me he knew.

I travelled by foot the rest of the way.

Someone else had planned this journey.

Someone knew what my life was for.

I am here now. This is my story.

Lift your head and I will tell it to you.

This is the dream that has recurred

all my life. It is the farm

I love and long to return to, and know

 
I cannot.

It is no place I can find in this life.

They are still young,

 
my mother, my father,

the trunk they carried off the ship

hunched and weary in a corner

of the cabin they built together.

The hearth logs lick the flames

 
of their desire,

her dress rumpled on the floor,

his hat hanging from a peg. In the loft

where I will sleep in the bed

he will make for me,

 
I hover, listening,

the night pregnant with stars,

the plow horses’ thunderous feet

 
quiet in their stalls,

the milk cow curled in the straw, all

waiting for the day I will reach out to them

with my curious hands.

Tonight there is a moon

 
in the window

of the barn. But I remain

with the mother and father I will love

even beyond this life.

 
Like the rain

before it reaches us, like music

before the first note is struck,

 
I am the pearl

that will gleam inside her,

I am their song of songs.

And when the bright egg

 
of the sun dawns,

I waken and rise, wondering

where in the world they are now,

certain I would know them

by the sound their hands make,

 
their quickening breath,

their sighing just before sleep.

I have come from the other side.

I have crossed the field of battered weeds

and discarded tires, of razored glass and despair,

and I come searching for you. I am the voice

of the naked branch scratching the sky,

I am the groaning throat of stars, glaciers

of original light. I have touched the soles

of your shoes and tasted their dust,

I have counted your scars and hear

your hymns of grief. I carry your dreams,

the ponderous and prophetic, weighted

in my arms. I speak them into your ear

as you sleep. Beneath the insouciant moon

I hover in my lonely dress, my moth-wings

drawn to your lighted window, and there

I find you, burdened by memory, chained

by desire, your slow tenacity in scraping pen

against a page as if you chiseled words

in stone. I, who know only peace

and the inexhaustible light, come again

and again to stroke your silvering hair, marvel

at your thread-bare heart, your exquisite pain

here in the lovely, lovely dark.

Dawn, the lynx-eyed moon slides down,

a dim sun in the West,

 
and the birds

cluster in their nests for the moment

of their rising. That pair of horses

hang their heads and wait

for the night to die its little death.

And the bones of deer and bison lie

beneath their skins of soil,

 
fluted, sharpened

into what a hand could make

to be of use, render to stone:

an image of itself and of its universe.

The house you wake in sleeps,

just as the one you made

 
in crayon as a child,

slept on its sheet of white,

a white house, the bright grass

at its feet, the light waking

behind trees holding their breath,

and the small fountain

you have fashioned in a bowl

pours itself out again and again,

 
one leaf

lying happily at its depth.

The rose you set into earth

has begun to think once more of roses,

 
and the cats

place themselves at the door

because they know you will step out,

walk down the path singing

whatever hymn you devised

in the furious clatter of your being.

And now the sorrel gelding

 
rings the bell of the gate

with the hard fist of his hoof

and thus begins his prayer

that you come down

 
because he knows,

and the cats, raising their tails to you, know

as rose, water, the trees’ stony arms

 
and the moon, all know.

You are a god, and all your kind.

Always so have you been.