restless, eager, dour as salt,
on the seacoast falling like mica sand,
heaps over my twilight hours,
empty.
The woven gate
we propped with tree stakes fences out
a famished land
of rock, potatoes, widows —
sea —
I dreamed last night
of the nursing child,
intense,
head hard upon me. . . .
Ah,
of all I never feel again —
I miss that most.
xxxii
Naufrage:
the great ship, nest for fish,
shudders under the diver’s hand.
He tries the bolted cabin where
by the sunk wall shimmers a yellow globe
like a candle’s haze. Oil, wine, perfume —
Odysseus drank
such nectar once.
Opens the door
and lets up float the bubble trance —
bursts on the sea’s helm, wrecks.
An oily fragrance drags ashore,
is scuttled under the salt breeze.
xxxiii
Green fables fluff and go red at the frost.
The earl of Chronos eats his kin.
I web my wool
close in a brigand pattern —
tartan against the sea,
and spread the blanket over my head.
Even a mother must sleep.
xxxiv
I saw my wily huntsman drowned,
whelmed in the massive armaments
the beating seas flung on him.
Dredged by bergs, dashed on rocks,
the whelming berg waves founder him,
whelming my dear one
down.
Down.
He never minded it.
Drowning in dreams, his bright eyes —
blank as a conch.
xxxv
Crop time, canning time, filling the stores
before the long winter, we stood all week
drying the fruits on long laths,
then taking them up.
Later we took great wads
of the frost-felled hay and thatched the bank
where the river ices up in blocks
too deep to saw for fish through.
Now, my men
weary from ocean’s hail crawl in,
burrow into the deep barn
under the bergs of winter.
Where do you wander hungry? Beg or steal?
Like the thin fox stray in the stone wall
I spied this morning but let go
for your sake, fox, my hungry love.
Wired the cocks in though, tighter, the gaudy ones,
all spurs, all flags, all doodle doo,
feeding the roosters for your sake,
my wily one — undrownable —
The night nurse said:
to die of old age in his own home —
This stranger’s place.
xxxvi
A suitor brings his appetite
who should bring game;
who should come, tanned and sauntering,
under a buck, or a bag of fish.
I feed these poachers rabbit stew;
I send your kin out Christmas cards,
nice little notes —
I save the good wine for myself.
Against-Fame wrought an evil work,
Trouble himself, who troubles me,
even in leaving as coming back,
with all these shadows of his wits,
half-wits, to natter me.
This politics is tedious.
Much-Fame bustles in the hall
smoothing their beds with wine lees —
and long lies.
I’d have their leg plates for my ploughs
but one needs men to fight men. What for else?
For children, and for loneliness.
A stranger kin.
xxxvii
I fear Odysseus. Younger than I am
by all that work he didn’t do,
by all those lies and fripperies,
him, medal-wreathed and quick-tongued,
sly in my arms — like a leaping seal —
his eyes lit up by a siege of fires
stretching across the black plains —
watch flames tented from camp to camp,
sparks on the wave peaks,
candled ships —
the hostess’s fires in a good house —
but not my flames, my heart.
xxxviii
The tomb your father made for his
stands at the cliff edge, turtle-backed.
The soldiers’ spears
dangle around it like birch stems
or bent snow fencing. The wind blows —
and all the autumn falls on us
heaping my cold land under —
cellars and stores, my thick-lined walls,
my castle hived like a bees’ den,
the workers, buzzing around me,
cold, but alive.
Last winter I
saw moose come down to the back gate
where the motor skidders shooed them,
shot — smoked — we ate like Iroquois —
like you did in your boy-scout dreams
fiddling around your father’s farm
with a bobcat’s fur on your shoulders
and your dad’s canteen —
Oh it was fun to play wild then —
Where are you now?
What sort of god are you playing at?
xxxix
Somewhere a sand dune pillows him up,
blanketing seas or the white skies —
Never a thought of me troubles his sleep,
who always sleeps well, wakes quickly,
eye in the dark —
never at rest but chafing —
Voyeur, the chief unrealist —
thinking perhaps of his old dog,
or the great rifle his father made
over the mantel, rusting —
or even of me from time to time.
Roosting in stars, dim branches,
a vagrant crow,
wag wanderer,
Peer Gynt,
clown.
xl
Dido, poor queen, with all her gowns,
her tortoiseshell combs and amber beads,
babies and balls, gone over,
reigning for phantoms,
a child on the beach.
Wanton, the wind rewets them.
Only the sea is left.
xli
This country spins salt looms, white fogs,
white winters, and white nights —
whisked in the dreams of your dreams,
laborious.
Trouble to feed in the cold day,
keeping the stove going, kicking the dogs
aside from the warm hearth basket.
The cellar heaped like Noah’s ark
for more than a season’s sailing, I keep watch
and grudge these moth mouths that you send
me by your absence: locusts, roaches, vermin —
and their tawny, oil-shined
legs —
xlii
Nothing returns that I recognise
but time, recounting the rack-slung jars,
smoked haunches, the strings of onions, herbs —
I drowse in a shawl by the fireside,
with the eye in the hearth, my sparrow nest,
counting the small birds of the yard.
He returns as the son who will never grow old,
but I am grown old beyond him —
grown to the tree, to the oak grove,
to the farm, the hearth, and the palaced heath.
The sea-dyke hardens against the sea.
I, also,
harden.
Spring-Summer
/> xliii
Here on the beach sea clutter
and shorebirds bobbing like black corks,
like wine dreg fillips —
and I alone
in commerce with nothing
feel more real
as this cold wind blows —
until this half-iced landscape seems to flow
into the fog and I alone
am left in the play —
substantial,
hewed,
useful.
Here am I.
Left.
xliv
The temple comb thrust out the drones; so would I too,
that all this barren winter sucked the honey of past summers,
and ignored my absent husband, your long bow, liar,
your staghorn braggartry, that hung like a wreath in our dry hall,
like a set of andirons by our hearth, domestically.
They gnawed at the shelves while the white winds
scuppered the attics. I’d take sail, escape, myself,
these winter-times, except your leave, or the land’s need.
But now this March I walk outdoors where the famished dirt
gapes into frost-shards, spear-points, slashed
with spring’s fresh icings, that cold wind
that chatters from the pine tops like a jay
says, “Spring, spring, work again, take up —
out of the barns the mouldy hay,
and the awkward lambs to the cold fields
where the weak brook broken beneath the ice
spreads over the lower lanes and turns
the ploughman’s road to water —” and I rise
like all the barnyard animals, to resume:
“Here am I working, living. Here.”
xlv
I helm this land.
I built that outer wall that holds
the late sun rays against its cheek,
ripens the feeble berries; I
the one who tore this barren clay
into a heap of shredded leaves, sea sand, beach heavings,
and dried kelp. I scraped the cow field, raked the barn,
and turned this red sterility into rich dirt. I farmed
this country out of wild; it was I
trimmed out the weaker trees; my ships
send out the timbers my mills saw;
I mind the herring weirs; I knit
the nets as I knit here
the history of frivolity:
of wars, amours, dead horses,
damaged men.
xlvi
All this old stubble is burned off.
Fire fringes the orchard.
Deaths at home. . . .
The tree wove bed
rattles about my sleeping
like a shed eggshell —
the child from me out
like a young goat
loosed from the tether, at nighttime,
bleating
alone in the dark.
xlvii
Fidèle, the crafty ship, fool’s day,
comes barging over — a marketplace scandal,
the gaudy fields wild with the flurry,
returning birds ripe for the picking,
for limed snares, twigs in the matted cliffs,
and belled nets — poachers as merry
as prawn skips — all
the folk field fairtime Carnival,
end of the lent, promise of spring —
for some of them.
Not for me, almost,
except I feel
nestle beside me the burglar urge
flaunting the flair of my weak days:
“go ahead, go ahead”
gay whisperer.
xlviii
Backbay: herring, a terrible life,
spicy as marigolds, bright
as the motors, a menace, the suitors:
“Ma’am, are you all alone
in there?”
I fired at their feet.
xlix
The boy’s gone out, gone wandering
his grandpa’s woods, is nothing yet
eyed like a fox, or his slip-tongued father.
Still he fears
the stranger at the palace gate
that, gnarled like the sea’s grove,
stared at him —
with eyes like a hobo’s fire,
like burned crops —
seemed to stare at him.
l
One has to grow old,
but that it meant
living for longer, seeing ahead
more than the times of living men,
that I had not
known.
Here am I,
deaf to the parlour, reaping in
wools and walls for a hundred years —
lust for the land, and the land’s life,
for next spring’s goats in the lively bush,
for villages set on little hills
like candles to darkness.
If I live
next spring I start an aquaduct,
brick, so the women may carry them.
li
Averse to nothing, the rosy shore
beckons; my arms are open —
freckled and blond like the sea marsh,
sandpiper legged in the white surf where
the flute winds of the simple dawn
call to me.
lii
The beautiful seasons take away
the trouble of sorrow. The light moves
on the grass stem; voice in the leaves —
a baby’s laugh,
somewhere, the wet winds singing,
following clouds. . . .
liii
I cuddle the soil, but the sea purrs
at my back. Like an old crone, I thought it first,
or like the hearth fire muttering
“bye-bye” to my dozy dreams;
then like a giant’s lap it seemed,
its long arms stroking my chilled shores.
More like a husband, these days, bronze,
throbbing my bed with its snoring,
constant, faithful, the sea’s din
by me . . . .
liv
A spring light leaping from the sea
heralds the fish before me as they jump,
driving into our nets like love.
The ocean gifts a day like this —
that other times
stretched out before us vapid,
bare, empty of all but the white spout
of winter returning, whirling —
The seasons criss-cross overhead
and plenty falls, the fish sleek plenty —
good belly ballast from the sea,
man’s root, the comfort harvesting.
To bottle this light for my dark days
or the green sea’s kindness — or memory —
that flakes in the sun. . . .
Enough.
Enough where plenty is,
and a bright day —
to sail forth.
lv
What did he rise to falling?
The bearable lust of death?
Innumerable husbands brilliant fall
unhanded by arrows, the bright blood
staining the earth.
Skillful at any survival,
roof-thatch loiterer, rainsquall runner,
sea skidder, stone dodger,
scamp of the waves,
only the spiritual lover,
never the host —
My lucid justice falls from peaks
like summer nights, a violet shade
on the parched stone floor; my hearth is
empty now, but cosy, warm.
The old dog greets.
Athena and I, the multiple fates, and
the idle waves reweaving
Penelope’s mere ux thought.
A blasting wind at the hig
h hut
scatters the sun like dry dust
where our deserted shepherds dug —
dug out of their life their living hole.
A flicker of paper across the ground.
Echoes of noisy passagers.
lvi
I cry a tepid grief,
spun out alone in the dull dust,
till I am out of patience with my loss,
finding the scent of the warm figs
drying in sun on the white laths
sweeter than all the summers past
or any one
bruised fruit.
lvii
The dog is a ghost at the doorstep,
holding the sun, thumps his tail once.
The knob-ribbed beggar passed him,
and he tried to rise.
lviii
What am I weaving this blanket for?
Against what winter —
when the warm
the passional heat of the hot sand,
patient as no other lover is,
yearns from the shore,
by the sea’s
beat —
lix
My country embraces the sea’s brawn;
his fishes leap in my web weirs;
all of my waters run down to his deeps —
my husband, true husband, the salt sea,
mutterer, snorer, and singer, friend,
my sealskin side on these long nights,
out of whose amorous buffetings I
strengthen my house!
THE LETTER
Argument:
A man leaves British Columbia after the death of his wife for his sister’s home in California. He buys a small house with a large garden in Watts. At first hopeful, he later becomes more and more depressed for various social as well as psychological reasons. Returning to British Columbia, he is eaten by a totemic figure.
The poem consists of his meditations over a thirty-year period during which he erects a Rodia-like garden of towers. With the exception of the lines in italics, he speaks throughout.
The works of art in this poem are real, but the “artists” are demons of a different imagination.
This poem lies.
* * *
Dedication:
for Simon Rodia, Watts, Los Angeles, California, 1875-1965, from whom these towers are stolen;
for Emily Carr, Victoria, British Columbia, 1871-1945, from whom this poetry.
* * *
I
Inhuman trees
“unpaintable”
nothing of mine.
All the way down the long coast
monster of night
receded.
The long tracks braided after me,
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 4