Just suddenly this moment they arose
in a great clump to strike the sky
as if I had said something they remarked.
xii
But I was lonesome in my yard.
Why should I be
so lonely? For my cave
is bright,
my mind
coruscates with reflections of the fire
that rustles in the trees I tend,
I bend,
cut,
alter,
and remake.
Oh when I took my chisel to the rock
it let me listen
(Natural Law)
to the sound
my efforts made against it —
like the rain
that hits against the channels of my veins,
like water beating on the shore that moves,
evades,
remodels,
and regains.
I liked him where and as he was:
a monument
to the original upthrust:
a godhead
antidote to mine
as I to him:
a balancing.
xiii
My cat leaps at his shadow; he
catches the tip tail of his own
shadow —
rejoices that it moves.
Such is the joy of godhead:
that it does
move
outside the catching of —
this dull reflection that we make.
xiv
The small beast saunters back and forth
convivial,
like some small tendril that has grown
(Free Will)
between the forest and myself:
an independent, wandering mind
I have not yet control of,
sits
upon the tombstones of my yard
and purrups,
licks his paws.
He loves me for his purposes,
not mine,
my small, designing
colleague
whose white mind
pricks out the patterns of my yard
to suit unique, agley delights,
cat cornered, catty-cornering,
cross purposes
to mine.
xv
It was not that the cook made flaws.
They chose to err.
They chose.
I saw that arm reach out
against my bidding for the knife
that cut that sinew,
tore that thread.
I saw the bush I meant a tree
crouch sullen in its moulded base,
and that trimmed topiary throw
a branching rebel from its head.
It will not be my garden long
except I toil.
I tumult,
I reshape.
xvi
But why blame me?
You were fine in the mould,
in the pudding mould,
all sheep-shape and ducky,
(She grieves …)
all tucked in and warm
the fattest dark raisins for your eyes
(and all the moths and butterflies . . .
go to sleepy little baby)
Oh,
oh,
the lullabyes:
they tell us of our dark mistakes.
We make them mortal,
make them
mortal,
make them
so they die.
Down in the green field far below
where nobody, nobody dares to go —
where every child will ever go —
to the waterfall,
there oh there
the green sheep lies
and all the bees and butterflies
pecking out its little eyes
(go to sleepy little baby)
You were just fine,
so warm and brown,
steaming from the oven,
from the pot.
Little lamb,
little lamb. . . .
xvii
It keeps going wrong.
I have made it over a hundred times.
You think it would come out one more time.
It keeps going wrong.
It’s just cooky dough.
It’s nothing at all that matters now.
But it matters.
Oh,
it matters now.
It keeps going wrong.
xviii
I had such grand thoughts once.
Not just to shape the fountains out of clay,
to wreath the ivy in the spruce, grapevine
the wooden-crutched apple trees.
I had a thought of harmony
beyond all possible suppose
of verse or chord:
polyphony
exquisite,
absolute,
serene —
and true.
Yet when I wrote,
my digging stylus in the clay poked in and out
then broke.
And there were bird tracks in the soil:
a stalking heron
or a crow —
that rose,
that flapped its wings,
escaped —
sat on the farthest towering pine
and mocked me
unharmonious. . . .
xix
Oh when I made the osprey then I knew
(… and celebrates.)
I was the poet of the world.
It hovered like the heaven’s eye
above my sinking river till it found
one that it knew,
then fathomed,
and achieved.
I heard it drop like cannon,
and I saw
the silver fish electric in its claws
strike through the forest’s shaggy tops.
That was the secret pickerel,
the gold eye of the river,
its first thought.
Ah, to have got my meaning, bird!
at one swoop!
But —
It never has come back to me,
that finest bird I ever wrote,
but flew against the setting sky.
Seaward
it followed the draining earth
and where it shelters,
lays its eggs,
I do not know.
xx
There is always the slender mourning dove
with her quaker voice
who speaks from the backyard shed and says
oh love, oh love
I hear her when
I am most lonely,
most betrayed
by my abandoned vanities:
oh love oh love
she is not paid,
not filled,
but incomplete
and whole.
She says
what I have to say:
the round note of the empty moon,
the hollow in the steaming clay
that frosty lies in the wakening sun
and stirs itself to water. . . .
Where the shed
steams like a pan on a bright day’s stove
the vapours fall around her and her note
becomes a kettle’s mutterings;
the dew falls like her music on the earth.
xxi
This is the giant’s garden.
(She explains …)
This is my garden.
How do you think you got here?
Up a stalk?
Believe you me I own this rock.
I squeeze this turnip into sauce.
This stone will weep.
This earth will seethe
and turn up like a turnip stew,
rock stew,
stone stew.
This is my garden.
This is my garden.
This is
my kitchen,
my nursery.
This is the world.
Put the good man down.
Compost.
xxii
But there were two I didn’t make,
two first originals with me,
my husbands:
my firm Absolute,
(and makes
distinctions …)
and Will, the independent soul —
immortal rock,
ephemeral
delight.
Two
absolutes.
Love equals rock does not
and is.
Love equals will does not
and is.
The cat is not the boulder’s son.
The spook that sparkles from my bed
is not his child.
The Christ?
A child I made.
Bread.
Only bread.
xxiii
(… and defines
bread.)
If you don’t eat,
cat, little cat, even you will die.
Bread equals protein: any food:
food for the mind, for the heart, for the son,
food for the rocks in the firmament
that feed on atoms aeons slow
dissolving or solving the raining air —
Only the bread of the firmament —
its wheel revolving
so slow,
so slow. . . .
xxiv
Whatever I touch will turn to bread;
it will nourish me.
See how the words that shadow fall
from the breath of the pine tree down on me
fall like red crumbs on the shining snow?
All that I touch will turn to bread —
This mould
I scraped from the slaty roots
where the split rocks of the broken field
cling to the hairs of the fallen tree
like the nodes of a lung —
they beat,
they blow —
they swell in the warmth of my cold hands.
Soon they will bleed.
xxv
Where does the heat of my cabin go
but up and out — I am the round
concave reflector,
the bright glass
astronomers use to view the moons
that dally round the planets.
Each reflects
a word, a
notion,
each
a poet in its dim
remote
cold, icy fashion — so
they hover round the planet that they love,
ammoniac,
or dusty,
or that rock,
that rounding boulder in their field.
Oh rock I round you.
You are earth,
your poles
I crown with a filmy fern
each summer.
Is that grace
yours or my own?
Without my work
you would be bald as thorn.
xxvi
Why do I love you, obdurate,
the uncreated actual
that is?
Rock, the huge
ungardenable,
still point —
you are not chaos.
I can spin
a spoon in chaos as in sauce,
transmit a thousand furies,
or a kiss —
but you,
the absolute that is,
math,
granite,
space—
All things pretend,
and as they lean and beckon, they grow dim,
grow plain,
grow simpler—
they evolve
toward the plain-tempered granite of the sky.
You,
equable,
are all the sky
I can, with two hands, hold.
xxvii
Rock,
when my lantern finds you
it finds specks
of feldspar, mica,
ligneous grains
of lichen in your crevices.
You blot
the light out from the sky
behind you
and you pull
the warmth in toward your sunny side;
you cool my hands,
transmit
no fire,
absorb
all light, warmth, water, spent on you,
and change
nothing,
not even my gardening.
You merely
are.
xxviii
The chanterelles are the little songs
the moist earth makes late summer in the woods.
I hear the apricot perfumes
of these orange, earlobe-soft, rib-veined
extrusions from the green-mossed soil. . . .
(All things
nourish …)
Where the rainbow falls my treasure is,
this gold, not Zurich gold, not fairy
drunken glitterings,
but what the wild woods lover knows —
we eat the music of the earth.
The meadowlark’s falls like brown wheat;
the chickadee’s
crisp chirrup feeds me.
Eat
me said the riddled soil,
its slashed side darkly glistening.
The rain said Drink.
It was given for thee.
Feed in thy heart.
Be nourished.
xxix
The brown bats hang like withered leaves
in the veteran bush,
like tatters of lost wars.
I can unhook
(but not all
are nourished.)
one tiny soldier,
place him,
crippled,
on the grass
to crawl,
light-blinded,
staggering,
his mouse-face shuddering for the night
in which black times his wars were real.
In daytime all is shrapnel.
Lift
this soul.
Return him
like an overcoat lost by a doll
to lost and found
and found again
in day’s
deep-founded
trials.
xxx
The dead bird’s breast still crawls with lice:
in every thing
a shift of meaning,
shift of time,
a pattern of dependencies.
My killer, innocent as rain,
plays with his needled shadow there,
a small impertinence of claw
repatterning.
He snips
my devious knittings.
At my loom
he breaks the bobbin’s thread.
His will
impervious,
indifferent,
a sheer delight
to see the bright world fluttering —
to alter,
catch,
re-needle —
play.
xxxi
He makes his own precisions.
See
his tail tuck up beside him like a vine
that seeks support —
then like a child’s
soft wandering hand it flickers —
then it speaks
a moment’s irritated twitch —
or then
reposing
bends around him like the end
of sentence, paragraph,
or book.
Still as the rock he sits on
he amends
the very wind that blows on him.
What could be stiller than that mind
this moment,
now?
I cannot hold
my mind
so still,
my body so
achieved —
a finished poem,
gem.
xxxii
Oh come to me, Little.
Perch on my chest,
and put your arms around me,
prickle paws.
Beat out your warm, oppressive heart.
Like a tiny god
you breathe on me,
on my closed face, fish fragrant,
and you stir
me;
you reach out
your supple, life-inspiring paw
and pat me on the eyelid;
I awake.
You ask, like any god,
your feast,
your worship,
and you wind
your comma self around my feet
like an unending sentencing,
then, pausing at your cadenced clause,
you let an atom of the air
draw your attention from me —
and are gone.
xxxiii
Stale pine cones, their white hearts nibbled out,
spread out like shredded cabbages,
like brown and crumpled onion skins —
nothing will come of:
eaten seed.
Dried, windblown shell,
cracked, drained.
A membrane clings,
brown veil like blood to the inside of
that fallen
nothing
that fell out.
Dead egg.
Three russet, wrinkled, sordid pears
cling like old scabs to their shivering tree.
And all this to my reckoning:
only so many pears and pines,
so many birds in the spiny trees,
only so many grasses where
I numbered them,
took count
their hairs
fine combed and glistening.
I pulled the weeds.
xxxiv
My garden runs ahead of me
as if it were a child.
It runs
asserting will and wildness; it is still
rich chaos, barren chemistry,
barren
and fertile
and needing
me.
I straighten,
circle,
centre it.
Without me would a tree fall down
except I saw it falling and exclaimed?
xxxv
There you are, sweetheart, I knew you were.
An egg like a pebble,
aqua blue,
light-hearted,
(Birth …)
almost empty,
but a stir
that quickens as I warm you in my hands.
Oh unhatched hatchling of my mind,
blue girl,
evolve your freckled delicacies
beyond my wrenching cooking tools
beyond my wry imaginings,
expand —
Beyond your gaping gaudy beak
the first pinheaded feathers show,
my parakeet,
my small blue bird
of happiness.
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 16