That man.
*
You know how the mouth hangs open
of the dead, of the struck cat how the bulging eye,
or how the wheel keeps spinning upside down,
the motorcycle, the flimsy boys —
how the grass is green, luxurious,
living and numb and flowing, green —
how the empty, gaping windows
see
and see nothing —
the open cave —
the whitewashed cellar with its trough
empty, except for the trickling stream
that brutal, cold, indifferent source —
and, at the door the shadows: cats,
girls, grass stems, summer things
that pass and fade —
passing and fading the water flows —
I hear my parents prattle
like a stream.
*
Who feels too much: the ulcered
boil, the hidden, itching,
oozing scab — like Red
the cow man, mired
in his stone-dunged pasture—
in the war
the locals were afraid of him —
he’d said he’d fight
when he saw “them Germans” coming up
his road — and no one dared
come up his road. He drank his milk
and dumped the rest.
His red hair flapping against his scarves,
his coats shit-stained, he drives
his rack-hipped cattle home
to his fortressed barn, its monstrous sides
emblazoned with his white chalked words:
NO TRESPASSING
In the middle of the driveway squats
a sleek pink headstone:
YOU KEEP OUT
chalked on its face like an epitaph.
KEEP OUT.
At the foot of Ullman’s hill
like the sloughings of the cider press
this filthy red thing spits and stirs,
dogged with cold and suffering —
the hidden life.
KEEP OUT.
*
Ullman’s our shepherd and he wants
nothing. The stupid animals
may crave and churn, imaginings,
as if the darkened window panes
that show us pictures of ourselves
showed us the real —
I want the real,
the real beyond all slippages of sleep.
I want that sense beyond all sense, the source
beyond discolouring, beyond these impotent
blind hours, these scabs and rots —
to be
as natural, indifferent,
as stone,
as water
free —
dissolved
within the absolute —
the power
that lies about here somewhere,
and not here.
*
That day when Red Hook hooked me out
I saw my dissolution, saw
in the shadows of that apple tree
all that there is: one tree
bent under the weights of earth and sky,
one city of cities, one blackened tower
barracked with wormholes, little rooms,
apartments of the living dead.
The pecked boughs steamed with breathings,
dunghill in the frost, and from it came
the whisperings, the half-pitch hive drone
messages, the chatter of millenniums —
nothing and nothing and nothing they said —
out of the grey-furred branches, out of the fire-
fringed leaves, out of the drip of the apple ooze,
out of the weight, the press:
nothing, nothing, nothing — came the word.
The grey bird with the scarlet head
who mines this orchard with his beak,
the traveller, dark angel, he
who siphons the dreams of the apple tree,
shall not be quit of his pasture till
the tree itself turn hydrogen —
pure in destruction of itself, all angel,
fire, all purity, beyond all feeling — he,
inventor, rot, and cancer cell,
seller and maker of all things —
he showed to me
the stream that was the river of despair —
its dark spring waters where the silt
and litter of last winter slipped
and fed the all-forgetting deeps —
and it was full, unrippled, strong —
*
Among the greening fernheads and pale buds
the coffin-hulled canoe.
Among the effacing willow-drains,
day after day in the leafing woods
among the trash and litter sought
discarded the carcassed daughter,
so they, believing, sought her —
so they found.
Book Two: RED EARTH
. . . The tree renewed itself
which before had its boughs so naked.
I understood it not, nor here is sung,
the hymn which then that people sang. . . .
v.v. 59-62, Canto xxxii,
Purgatorio
The speaker, a nurse, goes in May with her husband, John, an anthropologist, to an Indian reserve where he intends to spend his sabbatical leave researching Malecite mythology and excavating the prehistoric gravesites which have given the reserve its name: Red Earth. Red Earth Reserve lies on the Separation River in the northern reaches of New Brunswick’s never-never-lands. What our speaker is able to perceive there is necessarily and variously unreal. “Her” truth is not “the” truth.
*
It was as if my road had stopped, had crossed
the Separation’s seam and ended, here,
abandoned in mid-life. A new start
in a different world, Red Earth.
Where the river plunges toward Indian Falls
the dark bridge rots on its cedar piles
like storm-felled rubbish. In the shade
grey snow still squatted. When we crossed
a man stood under the boulders like a rock
himself, two dogs with him, one white,
one black, like guardians. John spoke
in Malecite, drove on. We came to help,
I wished to say, to help, and to bring hope.
*
The nuns lived here once, long ago,
in this schoolroom like a chapel where
the birds fly in through the broken panes.
We camp here as if under trees. John’s masks,
his treasures, owl-eyed in the eaves, my store
of pamphlets, medicines, is wampum,
and our books on ancient, modern Indians
just leaves, dry, broken leaves.
*
We look down from the schoolhouse porch
toward the reserve: black cabins
furred with river mists, their smokes
dragged down as if their fires
were seeking earth, as if the chill
brown air had jelled, the smoke
strung out between two worlds.
Nervous? Perhaps. The leopard shades
tremble among the alders. John
crouches under the skull-dance mask,
face almost his own since his illness,
reads. I tend the fire.
*
Abenaki, “people of the dawn,”
the Malecite their sunrise lost,
sleep in, sleep late. We go
like salesmen to their doors.
“Don’t believe all you hear,” the agent said.
Distant, polite, their faces pale
in the brownish air of their cabins’ dark,
gentle as ghosts, uninterested,
they nod us by, but one, Rebe
cca,
says, “You want a cleaning woman.
I come this week.” Through the door I saw,
hunched by the stove, a matriarch
her eyes the last spark in spent ash.
“She don’t speak white. My old man’s
sick.” She shut the door.
But I have my use. The children: shots,
infections, diarrheas, bleedings, bruised
from parental blows, I guessed.
No doctor up at town, first aid only.
Two hours on: the malls, the clinics,
the hospital. It scares them.
Dying is best at home.
Released,
the children dodge from me.
They swarm together like birds, like flies,
like midges along the river grass —
ignorant of two languages, the white,
the red, their history, knowing no
songs, no myths. Fragile and wild,
the children, like small flames that flutter
against a wind — life quenches them —
as if to grow up were to die somewhat,
or to sink under water — as if this place
were a river raft adrift in stars
beyond all shores, all memories,
nothing to think, or hope.
*
Isaac, Rebecca’s brother-in-law,
drives the kids to school. Some days
the truck won’t make it or they all
sleep in, some days — as if the river’s sponge
kept their red wounds from healing — drained,
Rebecca, Isaac, Marianne — my John,
they all sleep in.
Some mornings only I’m awake,
I, and the old man with his dogs,
keeping their distance in the woods —
he, too, like me, awake.
*
The small man snagged in the alder bush
turns his face away — drunken I guess —
he seemed to say as if his sodden sweater
spoke, not he: Go away. Go away.
*
I have to invent Rebecca’s chores.
Her black coat stinks with cooking smoke;
it seems to crouch against the wall
like a half-tamed bear. She mops
the gyprock panelling with a dirty cloth
and leaves a trail of soot behind.
I pretend to write. She sees no dirt
above her. Does she see the masks?
It would be too crude to point them out.
The agent said this one told lies —
ten kids, two dead, and one in jail —
she pulls the matting from the steps
where John nailed it down. Too strong
to feel the nail’s tug, sweeps below it,
folds it back, loose. Panting, fat,
broad back, thick legs — and her tiny hands —
a grin like a crow’s. Her work
holds all that ragged family. I want
her to be friends with me. I don’t care
if she lies. John’s friends lie over
their love affairs. Protecting her sons,
just thieves after all.
Disloyalty’s worse.
*
Trout lily, erythronium or adder’s tongue —
the brown bruised leaves — earth stars
the heat of summer fades — like the Indians
the lilies of the field, these fields, this world,
these yellow stars the Great Bear drags
towards emptiness. The nuns, like me
they must have prayed all night:
“Lord let us help,” until at dawn
the milky stream climbs in the west,
the ladder fades, the white route closed —
as if an impassible gulf were fixed
between this separate limbo and God’s light.
*
The white beans soak at the back of the stove.
Towels on the line. When I go out
to hack the stones from my garden plot,
to plant Thoreauvian corn and beans,
I hear the people below me stir,
cold as the tiny river clams,
rattling for kindling. The smell of gas
comes drifting over the aching fields,
only enough for the breakfast fires,
not wood for a season. Economize?
They can’t. I want to tell them what to do.
Axes, not chainsaws! They have to farm
seriously, getting a government grant,
or move in town and learn new skills.
They wouldn’t be that lonely if they’d try.
They could do it as a group, perhaps,
not to be lonely. Maybe, they just
don’t want to, though. They don’t come out
and look for me, asking advice. Polite,
but like that hound, curled on the blue
back porch of Ernie Paul’s grandmother —
it won’t look at me, but stares
through me as if I had no shadow here,
no business. Perhaps what I don’t understand
is something I don’t even see.
*
I seem to be bigger than everyone.
When I lean on the walls they sway.
When I want to sing, I bother John;
he must have silence when he works.
When I rub my hand on his shoulder blades,
he sighs, so heavy a hand it seems.
Big mama, I make the bed too warm.
I rattle the springs. He sleeps the best
in morning when I’m out.
Giant,
I spend those hours with the mud-stained
stars, the half-drowned, yellow Milky Way
of the nether world, scattered across
the matted grass where the deer have lain.
I walk the marsh where the spray-blown falls
have christened the bush, where a blinded wind
blows on the shores its false perfume,
smelling of orchards. Ghost in this bush,
monster, mask face, like John’s mask
shaped like a flounder, its eyes set wrong,
warped as I am in this wan world where my
warm health is wry.
Something is wry,
like an injured sun: pink, yellow, awkward,
invisible. The nurse. Big mama. Dead nun.
*
The red earth marks the Indian graves.
He was marked with it
even at first when I married him.
Perhaps the rain, dinning against
the nursery roof was drums, perhaps
the silent Micmac yardman those slow Junes
infected him. He kept his illness secret
like a bag a child keeps hid of feathers,
shark teeth, stones, hare foot, mink jaw;
his mother said, “He always loved
the Indians.”
Museums and middens,
clamshell heaps and beetle-gnawed bark carvings,
masks, clay pots, and copper beads, totems
and ghosts, and vanished gods. Raven,
Bear, Glooskap the Maker whose song
no one can sing now — ink and dust, to me,
but he “loved the Indians,” old worlds,
the half-forgotten tongues.
He was my guide.
*
He seems to tell them what they are,
making his friends as he talks to them,
old Mrs. Francis who does not speak
but giggles a lot, and he writes things down.
I don’t know what they make of him.
I don’t like to ask. They talk to me
and I listen. Rebecca’s horror tales:
the boys who vanished in the woods
no dogs could find, the girl that drowned
herself and her b
aby, the ones that died
in the lumber truck, all the children burned,
gas fires, road accidents, tree falls,
chainsaws,
and the hospital. When Cele
her cousin’s baby died, how they sent it back
from the hospital in a cardboard box,
naked, in plastic, tied with string
like a lunch.
If I ever killed
it would be over injury like that.
The meanness of it. When I think
of the injured peoples of the earth
I am afraid. It wasn’t me, I want to say;
it wasn’t me. I want them all to be as safe
as me, to be treated as right.
The Francis baby, kitten small,
holds my thumb in its fist, so candle bright,
so silky, so tiny. The lullabyes
John taught me I do not think they know —
to whisper the old Algonkin words
rocking the child — but I don’t dare.
Intrusion on their private world.
Enough they let me hold it for a while.
*
I use the cot in the kitchen now.
Rebecca knows. I think they laugh.
But he’s not well, not yet. It takes time,
taking his rest and his medicines,
and exercise.
But this is only a shadow world
less rich than his own of books and dreams,
his prehistoric painted men, redder
than this tribe knew of, lost, now, too;
closing themselves from history
in their snail-shell huts, forlornest ghosts
who leave no myths, self-murderers
who kill their tongue. John rummages
the senile here, runs, sure-languaged in
a kingdom of the mute,
where my white words
go lame.
But they talk to me.
As I used to talk to my little dog,
something that listened, that needn’t know —
a foolish, sympathetic face.
“I stayed and cooked for the loggers once,”
says Rebecca. “That was a job and a half.
It broke my back for certain. My old man
he needs me home these days. I don’t go out
to work no more. He don’t feel good.”
*
I have nothing to do — a clinic hour —
the rabbits took my seedlings — so I walk
mile after mile all by myself.
The faceless wind keeps me company
but sings no song I understand.
Who are they sent to, these fading prayers,
these wisps of smoke from the damp ash fires?
Crows rattle the woods, and the old man
follows his traplines but no man
walks in his footsteps. The children run
carelessly stoning the river’s skin,
splitting the water, a living snake
running along between two banks —
Two children drowned, playing like these
last autumn, trapped in its rainbow path;
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 11