The Witch of the Inner Wood
Page 7
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