The Witch of the Inner Wood

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The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 7

by M. Travis Lane


  and she gathered them up,

  devoured them:

  towers and cities and angels of light —

  the angel of darkness devours them.

  She swallows them up.

  I am covered over with darkness.

  I am eat up.

  Swallowed with me

  the suffering trees,

  the crying beasts —

  yearning to speak,

  to get out.

  To get out.

  “I ONLY REQUIRE YOU TO LOOK”

  As if I was born from darkness I woke,

  and over the walls and all over the ceiling

  I painted the eagle:

  the great brown bird

  dark, with the colours of sorrow,

  vivid, maternal,

  the fierce protector,

  her red beak savage with wilderness.

  From under her wings the children creep . . .

  half of me.

  Half of me —

  stares from these walls.

  Lives in these wings.

  *

  In the shade of the trees,

  in the grey shades,

  I wrestle with a nude log —

  a long, mute, knotted thing that leans

  in the grass and yearns for me:

  for my knife, for my hands, for my strength of will —

  There’s a tongue in this wood for speaking —

  it wants to get out.

  And if the knife slips seize a brush,

  And if the eyes slip,

  hands.

  Even the soft brown clay has speech.

  This is my letter to you,

  whoever you are.

  THE BOMBER PILOT

  (for my father)

  Magenta rock-pink, zoysia grass,

  white-painted stones edging the parking lot

  of the Post Exchange — tidy and peaceful,

  a visitor’s pass

  to that old beggar’s tick:

  “What justifies the soldier?”

  News

  we knew of afterwards? Rumors of

  ash heaps, chimney stacks?

  This noon

  an antique shadow skids

  across green fields —

  a jet’s plain answer

  tagging us:

  x marks the spot.

  *

  In sixth grade Real was News Reel;

  BUY WAR BONDS: a soldier shakes

  a handless fist at creeping tanks,

  we see him,

  mashed

  behind them.

  Mother read

  the blue sheets over and over again,

  V-mail, reduced

  to whispering.

  Post-war I “flew” —

  with St. Exupéry I climbed

  the blue steppes of the air

  and stretched my fragrant metal skin,

  pilot and bird commingled,

  mapped by stars, by morning star,

  by dog star, mad star, by the cross —

  At times

  a pulse-tipped tentacle,

  invasion of the reel,

  reached towards me

  and I waked.

  *

  In the museum at Ottawa

  the hangared bombers, dusted, oiled,

  still keep the hot perfume

  of truth more real

  than daytime. Touching this

  steel watchfulness I know it

  as my flesh — my eyes, back,

  belly-rack and wings —

  that lift me from the concrete

  towards war.

  My head against the fuselage,

  leaning as if against his horse,

  a pilot grows

  for whom machines had decencies

  and honour took

  material shape

  (though in them not

  comrades-in-arms but crew,

  raunchy and currish).

  “We” said the Boy Scout Manual.

  We rose

  in flight formation — bomber’s cross:

  an arrow in a circle — meaning death.

  Our shadows run

  over the sheep shorn hills, a code

  against translation; night

  brilliant as noon,

  but colourless.

  The code

  is x reduced to v,

  man without head.

  Unknowingness.

  *

  That death should be so beautiful

  always amazed him with its lies

  that were the half of truth.

  The blaze of glory or the cloud

  of the unknowing dread was real.

  Crouched at child’s desks

  and bubble-hutched, his best

  math bets trajectory,

  the bombers wheel: drop, rise,

  and duck —

  as a fish leaps up the mill race,

  cut fish, bleeding from its gills,

  dragging its entrails.

  He believed

  in the magical numbers, prayed

  without knowing he prayed.

  Let me not know

  I kill —

  To touch the sky with thumbs,

  play Indian tag,

  count coup —

  *

  I am

  the shrinking knight,

  fastidious. In Durer’s print

  he rides with Death, with shrapnel-headed

  Madness, Dog my crew

  whose snout face mimics my

  snout face.

  *

  My gunner kneels, an acolyte

  who prays by the bombsight’s cross;

  he strafes the Lord with the Lord’s man’s hands.

  Dragging a cross along the grass,

  our shadow below us, we dive;

  we catch the fighter and he flares,

  plummets within a fiery cross, his black cross

  flaming on a red; we streak away

  zigzag. Fear salves us, salves him,

  dying from the grey

  ash Quaker courage that abstained

  from murder, from the fire,

  and from the smoking chimneys of the dead.

  What good is done that does no ill?

  And we dodge home. The cross

  like a little dog runs up

  to meet us as we land.

  THE DAUGHTER

  A woman in her seventies, shortly after her husband’s funeral. Her only son, married, lives in another city. Her mother, who died over a year ago at the age of ninety-nine, speaks to her in her mind; the house and its objects speak to her. With the exception of a short visit paid by the minister, she is alone throughout the poem.

  *

  8:30 — Note to the milk man.

  9:00 — Wash hair.

  Cat out

  if I had a cat.

  Stare

  out the thick window where the rain

  jellies against it.

  The boxes went

  to the Salvation Army last week

  but I still find his stuff where he mislaid

  it, some of it. I keep

  some of it.

  I found

  her knitting in an attic box —

  half-finished socks.

  Kept herself busy. Killed

  by a ten-speed bicycle;

  meaning to make centenary

  she was too sure to look.

  Mother, old dragon,

  a silly death!

  Bear with me this sharp

  funeral,

  burying

  these days.

  No longer a daughter no longer a wife,

  what do I do with the rest of my life?

  *

  My daughter-in-law keeps writing:

  “How much easier it would be —

  in a smaller place —

  so much less worry for us —

  consider our feelings —

  how do you suppose
we feel with you

  all alone in that —”

  Mausoleum — she used that word out loud.

  I heard her in my mind’s eye.

  I brought him up here. Hates it,

  she does. Hates him, sometimes,

  she must.

  My son, no son.

  He used

  his growing up all up

  that cuddled so

  between us on cold mornings once.

  Rebelled, the books say,

  doesn’t write.

  She does.

  He’s fifty.

  And for forty years —

  closed tight.

  *

  She says to sell my things,

  to throw them out, the photographs,

  the china cups all different —

  “Nobody does that anymore.”

  if I break my hip,

  grow helpless,

  fall into her hands —

  (“How is thee?” my own voices ask.)

  Not well.

  Not well.

  From the window sill

  a gentle voice or the dust uncurled

  uncurling from beneath the couch

  loves me (“I love you”) someone says —

  No.

  *

  “We worry about you all alone!”

  My house! It’s not alone to me.

  Leaves fall from the tree

  and it walked away

  but I can’t do so.

  No, not true, the secret eyes

  looking out of the bureau,

  the cat in the glass.

  Only the wind

  and the furnace creaks.

  Listen:

  a car hisses up the drive —

  It’s the good little minister

  paying a call.

  You’re only ten

  pounds cold boiled muddy potatoes to me,

  young man, and the Scout canoe

  coming down the Nashwaak round and round.

  No one could paddle,

  not even Henry.

  Good little fellow.

  Clean paws.

  A son.

  I held mine in my arms so hard

  he disappeared, dried up—

  (singing: Henry in the choir

  his old voice cracking: “Comfort ye!”)

  my boy

  I somehow washed away

  with my own crying. . . .

  Not even thirty, the minister

  dreamed by his mother,

  my Henry’s Scout,

  trying to comfort:

  “to get out of yourself”

  He’s young.

  Like Henry at the high school dance

  with his confident air —

  back, armful —

  (“Tickle him? Kiss him?”)

  Stiff-backed I quote

  Samuel Sewell: I find it hard

  to be reconciled to the Lord’s hard ways.

  “We’re not asked to like it”

  man-like he says, ignoring my fiddle;

  the sofa squirms. (“Hmpf!”) says my mother.

  She means me. (“Idle hands!”)

  He goes.

  (“Oh what a relief!”) says the rocking chair,

  holding its breath for me all that time.

  *

  Mrs. Thomas who isn’t comfortable,

  comforting, said, “I feel

  like the last rose of summer.

  I don’t want to be a burden

  on my children. I don’t like

  old people. All they talk

  about is all their aches and pains

  and people I don’t know.”

  Go read a book, I’d say. She can’t.

  Her eyes are bad. Her head hurts.

  Illness scares her. It scares me.

  God help her. God help me.

  Sick, lonely, old.

  The stove, the couch in the kitchen where

  they left their mittens, the cellar stairs

  with the jars of jam that mother made

  ten years ago, nobody wanted it.

  All of this mutters, fidgets, speaks:

  (“No, don’t look at me!”) cringes the bedroom door.

  (“I’m an old woman!”)

  *

  “Get rid of that stuff”

  writes my daughter-in-law.

  Oh no you don’t cookie, that’s My stuff,

  mine. (“The trouble with you is”) mother says —

  Mother, be quiet! (“The devil finds

  work for the idle. You’re idle, child!”)

  Idle, unfortunate. (“Can’t dodge sin

  by talking”) says she.

  Of course it is sin

  to grow old gracefully

  sitting all day

  staring out of the window,

  a warm cup

  of memory wind doesn’t touch,

  a mirror that’s blank,

  birds

  silently brooding. . . .

  *

  (“Come to bed, then, come to bed”)

  the pillowcase purrs

  but I will not

  go

  this early.

  Door

  I could go out of once,

  now where? It’s closed.

  The couch sighs, (“It’s

  more cosy here. Speak to me dear.

  Speak TO me.”)

  (“Seepy time dearly, seepy time dear,”)

  voice from the dark room darkening:

  (“Cute as the dickens.”)

  (“Are you at home?”)

  (“Fun and games?”)

  No.

  No.

  The bed stays cold that half all night.

  (“Be your age”) says mother

  angrily.

  What age is that on the inside?

  (“Then talk to me, better than talking

  to chairs!”)

  I don’t talk to them; they talk to me.

  It’s nothing to do; it’s the nothing to do —

  (“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”)

  *

  What should I do, mother?

  So sure she knows.

  (“Do good.”)

  Go dump it on the poor?

  (“They don’t care what your fidgets are.

  Be useful. Unselfish.”)

  Meals on wheels —

  poor Mr. James,

  a fever four days on the fifth

  he died. In the hospital

  the doctor rang the intercom:

  “Mr. James? Mr. James?”

  He’d just arrived.

  I hate to drive.

  And what do you say?

  She wanted to pay

  for a loaf cake cut flat

  thirty-six ways. . . .

  That frail old man

  like a fish film thin —

  he giggled and lurched at us

  clutching the fridge,

  saying “Cheers, ladies, cheers!”

  intending to pinch us —

  on orange juice yet.

  Insides so much more strong than skin.

  I know.

  I’m bored with the Red Cross suppertime,

  with the needs of strangers,

  they hunger so feed —

  then who feeds me —

  I hunger too —

  and the carpet slithers out the door

  sulkily dodging a mother’s words.

  (“You should think of somebody else

  for a change.

  You should visit the old.”)

  I AM the old. You don’t understand.

  Mother, I kept you up.

  They want me down —

  a smaller apartment, sell my things —

  (“You don’t want all that junk!”)

  Mother!

  (“I never liked that clock.”)

  You kept it though, brought it here from

  Scotland nineteen six.

  (“I never liked it
.”)

  What did you like?

  (“Sun up. The birds. The old minister.

  He gave right sermons.

  The new one’s weak.”)

  You never heard him speak.

  (“I know.”)

  (“You’re soft. Your generation’s soft.

  And where’s your son?”)

  Away, I couldn’t keep

  him loving me.

  Nobody does.

  But Henry did.

  *

  I do believe. I do believe

  in God somehow.

  (“Of course you do. You’re not an idiot.”)

  I don’t know what I am.

  (“Don’t sit there like a bump on a log.”)

  Do you remember Janey? She kept house for us

  when I had Roy? She said:

  “I want to do something for my people.”

  So dignified, my people.

  (“Aren’t the poor your people?”)

  They don’t think so. I’m the rich.

  The roof leaks and I can’t afford

  new tiles but I’m the rich

  they think.

  There’s no one I can talk to here.

  I wouldn’t know what I could say.

  What Martha Libby said: “I’ve found

  the best thing’s to keep silent.”

  A woman’s knowledge,

  a lifetime’s work:

  “the best thing’s to keep silent.”

  I don’t know what

  I’d said to make her tell me that.

  She had some point in it.

  Mother says:

  (“If one does not want to make the place

  one lives in a hell

  one must not live

  as if one were already damned.”)

  (“Where are my socks? I can’t find my socks!”)

  his voice in the cellar drowns out hers.

  (“Jesus calls us o’er the tumult”) humming,

  looking for his things, can’t find them.

  He’s not here.

  Don’t tell anyone, silence the better thing.

  If I could just

  hold someone for a little while.

  (“Your generation’s soft.”)

  You made Christine

  go on to school when father died.

  Aged ten. “Carry on,” you said.

  Why couldn’t she’ve

  been left to cry the way I did

  in my college room?

  (“I’m dead.

  Speak to the living then.”)

  Who’d hear?

  Your strength your virtues

  were absurd.

  Those pickles that you wouldn’t stir

  on Sunday, a five day batch begun

  on Thursday, you too old to count —

  (“Not in my house”) so we played cards

  over the river.

  Our church group plays

  cards now, they pay

  ten cents to the Devil,

  twenty-five to the Lord.

  The world has changed, even your own

  Presbyterian world.

  (“And have you changed so all that much?”)

  Not I, not that much. Pickles, yes,

  rum in the fruit cake, card games, but

  not that much. I left off

  the silly part.

  My virtue is

 

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