Washita (3 page)

MERLIN

All else rage, for my breath stopped at her cry,

her spirit flown as one to the throne of otherness,

where some god she alone knew needed her to die.

MIDDEN

The day comes crying like wet silk, slow,

the burden of morning an old capacity resembling love.

Oh, the decades keep me shining.

I touch the broken words, the forms:

clouds in the dawn, pale surprises.

Blessings vanish, the snow falls fast.

This is the ordinary light, a past so far back

I can't find the beginning in all its war and poverty.

Death's symmetry fills me with shells and skulls.

Solitude, that simple anchoritic dance is not enough.

I am lost in an imagined cemetery.

I have brought out my dead.

They stagger down the beach, a spare snow spilling from their eyes.

MUJO

You try to remember the last time you touched her.

You look at hares coupling, the pureness of that,

the buck falling away insensible,

and the wail of the doe just before she licks herself.

Or the eye of the hawk who died in your hands,

somewhere her eggs cold among sticks and bark,

the thrush who tried to lift his dead mate from the road.

There is no word for the skin high up the inner thigh,

for what lies beneath the lobe, the under wrist

where veins and tendons grow in fragile sprawl.

You say her skin was another texture, ice petals,

her bones white willows moving inside snow,

but that is like dragging a grey wing across cement.

You lie in the dark, your cheeks dry.

You know what her skin was, draped thin over bone.

But there is no telling anyone. A thrush maybe, a hare,

or a meadowhawk, that thin creature arranged on glass.

MUTE SWANS

And the departures: the mute swans flying out of the dawn,

their pale wings against the moon and the false light broken.

There are thin waves on the gravel, on the broken shells.

Drums begin down the shore, the first people singing in the longhouse.

I tell you I could fly when I was a child.

I swear it on the clouds that carried me to the sea.

But that time too is gone.

The wind drives the white spirits into the trees.

The stars swarm in terrible fires, in endless ice.

There are no stories, but that I make them so.

I am on my knees now translating the wedged language of the swans,

the obsolete informing of their shadows on the snow.

NO STARS, THE WIND OUT OF THE NORTH

The blade found its way in the wood, my young body

bringing the splitting axe down, the weight breaking

the rounds of fir. A kind of longing, the groan of old wood,

the fallen tree remembering its childhood below the cliff

a hundred years ago, and winter hard around me.

Each season has its song, the chainsaw's scream, the wedge

under the sledge, breaking through the knots

where the limbs once grew, the hardness hidden

in the heart. Ah, long ago, the thin light from the shed

burning the snow, the split wood piling up around me,

my young wife at the window folding diapers, her hot tears

on the worn cotton, a child weeping, and the arc of

the swing, my blade a bright star burying itself in wood.

OFF VALPARAÍSO

The whales and ships on the killing grounds off Valparaíso.

The sails drawn and the whales at rest under the full moon,

the waters turned by blood to rust in the pale light.

Flayed bodies slide from the ships. The whales nose the carcasses,

blunt heads still fleshed, the fat there thin and of no use.

And the fires burn, the fat renders, the men circle the vats.

How else but by the flensing knives huge as paddles,

the blocks straining, at times a whale still breathing,

its skin lifted away in strips, the sighs, huge and unimaginable.

And my staring in the night at the slaughter, awake in the dark

with a sorrow so great I wish to be dead that it torment me no more:

the whales in the moonlight at rest after the long pursuit,

the calves sinking to nurse in the deep, rising alone into their mothers' blood.

I see them in the light as if from the moon's height, flying,

as much gull as man, my shaman close to my wings.

She tells me my tears are made from the ocean's blood, old and old,

and far, and far away the whales at sleepless rest, the day's new hunt to come.

I watch the fires, the ships, the men worn thin as they labour at their largesse,

the sea a loneliness as lost as their shouts, the three-year voyage done,

their dream of the bars at the foot of the funiculars where the whores wait,

my sleep sundered, broken by the whales and the ships off Valparaiso.

PARTITA IN A MINOR

A flute perhaps, its virtue to be alone with the small bells in the pines.

Lily stalks reflected in the framed glass of a picture of lily stalks.

The mind moves much as a starving goat moves in a forgotten paddock.

Desiccated leaves, the wind with its fine, clear rattle.

And a woman in her kitchen dances with the ashes of her dead son.

The privilege of despair, how it gathers her in as an oboe gathers the dawn.

I imagine her steps as the kind I used to take among the rattlesnakes.

The steps were simple and of a kind only the bereft ones know.

I was so young then, practising what I would later know as love.

Did I tell you to bring your flute when you come?

Her bare feet on the tiles are the sound of brushes on old drums.

POETS, TALKING

I could wish poems happened more, but wanting them

only leads to the impediment of desire and desire

is never equal to the act. It's much the same as looking back,

expecting a story and finding the characters already dead.

The surprise of that. How the past gets worn down by idle use.

These days the poem comes much as the first bat does

in the false dawn, its flight the mental stumble that I love.

I have my hungers even as they elude me.

Things are so simple, a bat
,
and the consequent
moth

I create to keep my world whole a little longer.

The poems come to me now as occasions, the good ones rarely.

The moth, its wings so white they startle me, escapes.

For the moment. I watch the violence of the dance,

the bat, and the moth too, veering.

QU'APPELLE HILLS

A child dances in the hills to a bone flute.

He is the sound of antelopes breathing.

Behind his eyes are many years of dust.

Come and listen. He is here only for you.

RUST AND WORN EDGES

I woke up on Six Mile Creek, a willow grouse falling from the sky.

I baked her, wrapped in clay, in the coals of a long fire,

wisps in the pines, the smoke waiting for the moon.

My brother had fished the pools all day and come back empty.

He sat by the fire stones, lying about the rainbow that got away,

a blanket wrapped around thin shoulders, damp coals in his eyes.

The good days and nights before his death, before it all ended.

I was trying then to live a life without artifice.

That I failed did not diminish my reverence for things.

Those many weeks I disappeared into the blue bush country.

I offered my brother the breast meat, a chunk of fry bread.

He took them gladly, telling me how he was going to run away to the city. Again.

His wife and kids scraped by on welfare, cold nights and withered glass, waiting.

I look out the window at the day coming on, grey clouds without end.

Some mornings the maple leaves fall and my heart has no dignity.

Some mornings there's just too much rain.

RYOANJI

The path narrow at the corner and the old monk on his knees

gathering pine needles in a willow basket, dew on the moss,

the trace of the nun's small shoes among the stones.

She led me at first light past her meditation by the pond.

When I was young I built a pool in the thin creek by my door.

This morning I meet again the cougar at dawn,

my hands cupped, water slipping like years through my fingers.

The mountain had no name, the creek as well.

We arrive as water does with no identity beyond light.

It is rare to see the dew gathering itself on bamboo leaves.

The turtles lie deep among the roots of the water lilies.

A chickadee sips a drop of water from a pine needle

and the nun lives in me still in the quiet I glimpsed, the heron by the pond,

so many years ago now, her thin hand guiding me on the path,

far from home, the poem not written until now.

SABI

A pheasant rises wild from the pea vines.

A shadow settles in the maze of poverty grass.

Home at last, I scrub my hands, the peasant's song in me.

Things move through things. My son's first hands in air.

Each time I see the crescent moon I see his small head crowning.

The past declines.

A pale cloth hangs between me and the sun.

Years ago my mother strained blueberries through white muslin.

I wore it over my childish face, a thin ghost laughing.

Stained shroud, my skin streaked with berry blood.

In the desert lichens eat my father's stone at the speed of stars.

We are of this world and no other.

Crude and rough, my old eyes searching among the weeds.

SANCTUARY

I try to find
sanctuary
in the labyrinth of my mind.

The word eludes me, ill lit in a dark tunnel of bone.

My father's headlamp hisses deep in the hard-rock mine.

A child, I laid my head on his chest to hear the crystals sing.

One search leads to another: my mother in the lamplight.

The centuries are small as the pins in her sewing cushion.

I took them out and pushed them slowly through my skin,

my wrist bones fragile as a little clock.

The drops grew like rubies, and once an artery, the blood a tiny fountain.

Refuge, asylum.

Which of the many seeds in my father's body was I?

I see the thousands of my dead brothers and sisters swarming.

The chancel of her womb. Misplaced words, lost souls.

When I am at last blind I will see her, clearly.

1914.

1939.

She will tell me again we are harbingers of death.

SCARIFY

The welts he gave to his body when he wanted

to feel something, his flesh rising white to the whip

he made from the laces in his father's boots.

In the old books from the Empire, children

wore on their faces designs beyond their skin.

The girl's wounds were pearls dribbled on her flesh.

He dreamed her necklace scars on his tongue.

I watch the old turtle dry her shell in the sun.

Within her is the patience of old blood.

In the lee of a dune a child rubs dust into a wound.

This is my body
, the boy says, touching the scar on his chest.

O Lord, I knew that boy.

Let someone hold him close.

SCREE

The broken stones are mountains in the ruts by the desert gate. Even so,

the ant does not hesitate as it drags the butterfly over the high passes.

SHELTER

My friend before he died looked only to the wind.

Near the end he lay down on straw in a rough-hewn house, the clutter gone.

In the ditch black ants scurry among the bright feathers of a dying quail.

They feast on the eggs of fleas, the unborn unable to shun the body.

It was west of Moose Jaw where the rolling hills began. I remember now:

white wood, pale sky, the shells of bark dry cups where the grass slept.

The old barn in the shelterbelt was trying to lie down.

SLACK BEAUTY

Her silk stocking, the thin dress breathing as ash does when it falls.

Salt on his tongue, the strand of hair wet below the lobe.

The unheard, the ear of the sleeping cat turned toward quiet with intent.

Three boots on the narrow shelf, the severed legs in the bin after.

The bone man picking lice from the seams of his cap,

a dry rain, the kind they call
tears of dust
in Blida,

the refusal of despair even as the carrion crow calls the names.

Those last nights, Camus writing:
l'absence totale d'espoir
.

And the ninth bell in Hoko-ji, the one they let rest for fifty years,

the bronze needing to learn sound before the carved log could strike it.

As the emptiness poor men leave of their bodies in the ash of the beehive burner,

the care they take at dawn to follow each inward step out so none will wake.

Without wind, the gesture, as of a woman wanting to be seen, not easily, but well.

SOFT AND MOIST, HARD AND DRY

At seventy I followed my heart
… the withered vines on the lattice

shiver in the rain. That old man knew a thing or two about things.

I am trying hard not to depend on letters. Throw this into the flames

when you're done. I read Confucius when I was young

and couldn't wait to get old. Green sticks bend easily in the wind.

Sew, seam,
suture, sutra,
everything connects, a thread leading us on.

It may be that the Minotaur was the silence at the end of a song.

The young poets give up form before they've got it. They want to mean a thing.

How sanctity gets lost in a scattering of straw. The germ is in the seed,

saved for the season to come, the ritual of the virgin burying the grains in spring,

a boy in autumn playing upon an oat-stem flute. Withered vines.

The dry leaves scatter in the wind coming in off the sea.

Amazed, I hang in this dark by a thread, listening.