it closed like an eyelid after them.
*
Now the rose rhodora blooms
washing the lakeside with its wild
sunsetting mauves. It makes a bridge
of flowers cross the swamp.
The cotton grass next, and the Labrador tea,
and after, the bird-sown apple trees
will flower and shock the thicket woods,
a wreath of petals on the dark spruce soil,
or falling, Ophelias, on river flow,
fruitless abundance.
I serve no use.
As I hung the wash rags in the sun
a string of hounds ran by me.
Silently belling a shift of wind,
they ran as if to another world,
deaf, blind, the hunter’s nose to it. . . .
Even after they passed I could feel them run
as if it were me they were set upon.
Wrong side of the river.
*
I went to the tiny graveyard here,
not John’s red prehistoric dig, but theirs,
tucked in the weeds behind the church.
I missed the priest on purpose. He goes back
to the city after his weekly mass.
I find him hard to talk to; it’s as if
he were always thinking of somebody else,
or ashamed of this tiny vacant shed.
Fleabane and thistles; the ground is cold
all the year round, the plastic wreaths
tarnished with weather. A scrap backlot
it looks like, junk. They do not want
me here, my John who digs up graves —
two thousand years old — but they don’t know,
it’s only white or Indian, to them
they are “my people’s graves.”
I said we dug up Vikings too.
It’s not the same.
Or maybe it is.
Just time, and dust, and the smell of pain.
Keep busy. If I do no good, at least
I try.
*
John loves the wilderness, will walk
a hundred yards then meditate
on his inner light, or his inner dark,
his mantra. I don’t know. M.Y.O.B.
mine. Keeps his notes in a box. These days
I walk farther and farther. I have no friend,
no one to walk or talk with me,
drowned as they are in their private griefs
my dog self cannot understand.
Simple as daylight, as ignorant,
I carry my world around with me
and cannot see out of, my fire pot health
that only warms me, not John, not them.
And the darker world fades as I walk through it;
John, too, fades, as he walks away.
I have nothing to do.
*
The bacon sizzling in the pan’s a luxury
I shouldn’t use to rouse him. In the sky
the last star shivers like breaking glass.
Crack, it goes out. No other flue
rises with smoke like this one yet,
flag of the morning. I bang the stove,
throwing the coffee against the flames.
The river steams like a winter road,
I could cross it now, slip like a grease slick
over the pan — salt on the grease, it smokes,
he coughs, and the porcupine, eater of salts,
leaves the privy for him. Crow sneers.
I want to yell at it. He hates me to;
he hates me talking to animals.
At the riverbank the old man squats
making something he won’t show to me,
his dogs beside him, the red-eyed white
on his eastern side, the black lab
on his west. This side of the river
I have no smell, no shadow, no sound.
I am not here.
Wrong side of the rift.
*
Marianne’s at Rebecca’s. “She took the kids,
he was beating on them. She had to get out.
He bust the stove.”
But she’ll go back when he sobers up,
cook in the yard on an open fire,
a child in her belly, a child in her arms,
three frightened children at her side,
the wet wood steaming over them. . . .
(“Get something for the baby’s ear;
it cried all night.”) Could I endure
what they endure? Day after day.
Her wash soap shines, counting her blessings.
Some of the kids don’t go to school,
but Rebecca’s Alex and Janie go,
she makes them go. “The teacher’s mean.
The white kids they go ‘wawawa.’
My old man quit. I stayed. I even
went in town. Not to high school. Needed home.
Besides, what difference would it make?”
I asked about the flowers’ names.
She didn’t know. But I think she speaks
Malecite to her mother. Of course my John
will tell her what she ought to know,
their language, their stories, their Glooskap,
my favourite myth the Rabbit Day —
he tells them what he asks from them.
He wants to hear of the old ones’ ways
or get them to tell him about the old man
who has no children, who lives alone —
stick cabin patched with lichened furs
stuffed under the spruce like an old bear’s cave —
what is his name? To poke a fire
with his pencil tip. “Do you know
what a shaman is? Do you know the word?”
Another form of “wawawa.” She laughs,
and turns away.
*
Bear lady, with a gimpy leg, no,
Crow lady, married Bear, she steals
my non-prescription drugs, pill at a time,
for her “old man,” relies on nothing,
back of iron. Her husband, Roy,
whose lungs fill up; he gasps for breath
as if grappling mid-river an overturned boat,
black water hurtling against his chest. . . .
Next door we wake up Isaac, Marianne’s,
so small, so foolish he looks. Sober,
he stammers and ducks his head. Is this
the man who drove her from the house last week?
Looks at her now with pleading eyes.
I can’t believe what Rebecca says.
John saw Marianne buying him whiskey once.
“He gets drunk too easy,” says his sister-in-law.
It’s his friends think it’s funny, who make
him drink, the clown, the dreamer.
Rebecca says, “Some dreams! Like the old ones.
They come to him and he’s scared of them.”
Isaac, his passive hands closed like a baby’s,
ducks, eluding a wrestler’s hold, and
closes his door.
We walk away.
*
John studies the language of the dead,
sits without asking on their porch steps.
They sit in their chairs and smoke. He plays
his machine; a dead voice creaks
of fables and spirits.
The dusk
draws in. A dog kiyiddles then silences.
Squeak of a rocker. A chimney swift’s
wing-clap. A struck match. A flip-lid’s tick.
The old quilt settling beneath the kids. . . .
What are we here for? Where are we?
Like the great Gauguin with its spectral ghosts
mauve and yellow, a tropic dusk
yearning into the empty skies
the meaningless questions we come here for.
Their faces glimmer like water shades
their incredible throng stronger than
questions. The clear skies show
answers the running man can’t read.
Well of the darkness, dip and see
three times in the river.
I only know
this is the language of the dead
creaking above us like white bees.
*
I told Rebecca of the Devon band’s
Fiddlehead Festival. “Good for the kids,”
she said. I feel like John, telling an Indian
how to be authentically Indian.
I can’t help. Whatever I say it comes
out wrong. I end by saying nothing, put
my hand on hers. I know her by the touch
of her, she feels like me, inside like me.
Her self? I don’t know that at all.
How could I know? I don’t know John.
Know nothing.
On the barren floor
the cold motes of the sun-dust stream,
river, the one-strand Milky Way.
Loyalty that he does not want
keeps me stayed here, the useless one.
I can’t get out.
In dreams I saw them dancing
without sound. My John danced skull-dance
with them. Masking Face, passing among them,
turned each one to white head, rag bone, whirling
dust. It came to me and grabbed me, held
my head inside its mask as in a fist,
squeezed me skew-eyed, glared from my face
with red eyes, like a strangled hare. . . .
*
Drove Marianne to the hospital.
X-Rays. Swollen kidneys. A bruised face.
“She should turn him in,” the doctor said.
“He’s a bad man.” She should leave him then?
Last time she stayed at Rebecca’s house,
he beat on the door with a spade all night.
“I won’t carry my troubles there,” she says.
Prescribe her rest, a week in the ward,
sleep in the great, white hospital
where no man dares to come in drunk,
to line them along the kitchen wall
with his gun in his hand, to shout of death —
Why won’t she leave him? Where would she go?
But she loves him. It’s his friends
get him drunk, she says. He promises,
keeps his promise for months, until it breaks —
she plays him true, following him
on his dark trek to madness and she draws
him back, as if by a thread of hair.
*
I have no hold so strong on John;
he seems to see Death in the dusk
walking in small, damp moccasins
away from him, her long black hair
trailing like ivy.
He must get well.
My hot hands clutch at his hanging sleeve —
he brushes me off like air.
*
The tiny, white, wild strawberries
are in blossom now. The old man warned,
“Don’t eat them.” Speaks white when he must.
I don’t know what he means.
Dear Lord,
I used to pray, remember them,
but now I pray, remember me.
I am no use. The more I know
the less I see, the less I’m sure.
But that my love should be no use!
Dear Lord, remember me!
The spruce grove dripping its evening scent
darkens the noon, and my tiny light
hovers, a moth in the shaking boughs,
like a word I haven’t the meaning of.
I cannot get out, get out.
The ants go into their hole and come out,
front door, back door, window flues;
the grey air filters in and out.
Over his window the boards are cut,
a glassless window boarded up.
I dream he leaves the house that way,
slides through the knothole like an ant
into an anthole where the dark
busy with all its teeming dead
busies with him. He writes it down
all night. At dawn he tucks it into
his tiny books where nothing I can see
speaks to me, looking away when he eats
with me. Could I draw him back?
I visit here. They do not like my smell.
Land of the dead. He has smuggled in.
I could carry him back in my haversack,
lighter than air, but he fled through the screen
like a skein of smoke, ducked from my drumming
hands and heels — no one could catch him. Dreams.
The red graves uttered a twittering sound.
A dust storm gathered. The hunched tribes stirred.
I heard the men and women creep
shadow to shadow, from house to house.
Dancing the red tribe to its dark
he danced among them, a pallid ghost
stained with their grave soil. Not a sound
came from him or them. I could not bring
him out from the dark that he dances in.
This is the world that I cannot reach.
Bad dreams. The old man spoke to me.
He said, “Get out.”
*
In the woods above Separation Lake
is a bear-clawed tree, marks nine feet up.
Below the scratches dangling wires
where something once was tied, perhaps.
On the ground grey beads, bored mussel shell.
River ground. Something in history
casting no shadow.
“Get out.”
I hide at night by the clearing’s edge
to watch the hares leap like soft clouds.
A dusty moon plumes over them,
till a fox’s bark or a snapping twig
erases them like dreams or ghosts.
Children of moonlight the forest holds,
even the cities contain them, free,
useless, lovely, invisible.
Returning, grey pasture and thistle-heads,
bats spinning above me inaudible.
John burrows further into bed
as I come in.
Exiled, I keep my coat
on my cot, axe, flashlight handy,
world in reach.
The moonlight threads the aspen,
ties the leaves and grass together, pearls
my arms with rabbit fur.
The Great Hare leaped
the Milky Way, pelting the crying hounds
with sleet. From Vega to Aquila he leaped
the white, divorcing river line.
Escaper, who lives in the burial mounds,
who dances when all the world’s asleep,
be my totem then.
Rabbit. Disloyal.
I will not leave.
*
The children gathered wild strawberries.
John stained his mouth and hands with them.
When I reached for some the old man’s dogs
barked at me. He had said, “Don’t eat them,”
broken strawberries, like blood —
the stained, red men.
The sweet smell seemed
to bruise the air. The children’s harvest,
their crimson pails, meant festival, surely.
I watched all day.
There were few signs.
Quiet, as usual, everywhere.
When the long day dimmed and the winds drew up
and the lights furred over in every house
and the white night of midsummer rose,
its milky river lit the sky, but
no light answered it below, black earth,
black river, it seemed
for hours.
At two or three the first torch starred
the forest edge, from the old man’s house
it seemed to lead from house to house
gathering the men. I thought I saw
Roy’s stumbling figure at their head,
and Isaac’s, holding the old man’s torch,
the women and children after them,
moving under the river’s noise
as if they had no weight, and soon
the torch went out, or passed into
a greater dark I could not see.
They might have gone underneath the soil,
or into the water.
The long march passed.
The marshy ground gave out a wind
like a rosy light; the sky grew pale,
and I was seized by sleep.
When I awoke,
the world was still as if the shadows
had distilled their silence in the sodden grass,
as if I had dreamed the strawberries,
or as if the birds had found them all,
for the roadsides now were bare.
The day passed slowly like a flower
that withers into a hanging head.
I learned no more than that,
waiting alone, unvisited,
until the clouds put evening to my watch.
*
I dreamed that night of the old man,
bear father of the tribal woods, standing
upon the tortoise that is earth.
Four heads grew from his bear back, a young boy’s,
a woman’s, a chief’s, a skull shell-eyed.
A gull came to him, its harpy beak
held a reddened leaf. A raven called
from the western woods. These were his dogs.
He fed a snake from his fingertips,
a black snake, long as a tree trunk, coiled
under the stones and vanished there,
root of the water. His carved wood staff
was blotched like a rattler’s diamonds.
He held two long flight feathers like two keys.
He stood like a gate in the dismal woods
and the great carved masks rose over him,
hovering like owls, like fuming clouds,
and I saw the watery peoples rise,
gathering along the river bank,
pale, drizzling fires from the woodsmen’s shacks,
from the iron chasms of city slums,
from snowdrifts, bus stations, hospital wards,
waiting rooms, jails, junkyards, and dumps.
Rising, rustling, the jackstraw tribes
like fire-shagged trees against red skies,
and the old ones riding among them, armed,
their wolf-tails, plumes, and red batons
like slashing grass. The river raged
rattling against its rocks like chains.
The fugitives and the injured came,
the angry, the greedy, the cruel ones,
and the sullen folk who stank of mire,
the black flies weaving above their heads,
and they melted among the innocents,
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 12