The Witch of the Inner Wood
Page 18
at the dark edge of the parking lot
standing under the street lamp’s steam
as if I’m supposed to come out to her.
And I can’t. I can’t.
I’m the best they’ve got.
The best damn salesman that we’ve got.
*
But the prince with no weight carries me.
His soft, leaf-coloured, shadow wings
outstretched like vapor carry me.
His tiny, moth head bears me up,
a worm in blossom, a fragile thing.
Blind as a candle-dazzled mole
he bores into the probing sun
that burns
his brittle wings
that flake
like dust,
like dust in the brilliancies,
break,
and he falls,
a damaged thing.
And I fall down.
What shall I do?
The fairies said:
Receive like a gift your mother’s wound —
through which my life emerges,
red —
trailing
a corded string.
from
TEMPORARY SHELTER
Poems 1986-1990
HILLS
1.
My grandfather pencilled a skyline map
from Pike’s to Long’s, each mountain’s name.
We told them like a rosary.
Childhood, which seems to us so clear,
made as it is of stories, is a myth.
We map the past with images.
The lines grow simpler as we age.
One after one my mountains have gone west,
have faded into the evenings, all
those mountain women, those white heads.
And you, who first meant “mountain” to my life,
come to me now as a sequential image —
not real (the real belongs to God) —
but her I have forgotten and resaid.
Cast to the rise. If I
tickle the surface of this lake
will a ghost leap, silver?
From the moon-tipped crescent of a peak
can I invoke one shadow?
When I stand
a candle in a dark room, in that flame
a spirit circles like a moth
caught in a single image: she
who cooked by candle all winter long
in the mountain’s light.
2.
At first she was only a mountain place,
her dipper a kindergarten grail,
but stories cast around her a dark lure:
disease, divorce, a brother’s death. I gnawed
these fragments into legend, a doubledness
divided, healed, a mind
that shed belief, hope, human ties,
set out toward mountain solitudes
as if the shining of one star, one solitary candle,
were enough.
The great brass bed
heaped with its chilly comforters
has filled with dust. The moon,
seeping between the plastered logs,
has touched the sepia photograph
of the twins in their white, old-fashioned clothes.
Younger than me. The boy is dead.
The other is her. She had polio.
When did I first imagine it:
her brother built the cabin, he, twin,
double, dead — and that
beyond the snow-enkindled lake
(small as a puddle, in memory
a sea, with Sawtooth upside down
suspended in its milky way) —
over the ridge with its bear-clawed spruce
was the lover, the hater, the separate man
once double and twin as husband and now dead
in having no more story — there
was his secret pasture, his iron gate,
barbed wire, a cattle grate, and locked
barns empty of living things. No lights,
no voices, “No Trespassing.”
Her cabin was never locked. The key
hung by the door like a blessing, and the room
her brother started for himself
lay incomplete beyond her hearth, unroofed
and open to the sky. . . .
3.
Maps, trails. houses, poetry —
he wrote his name on every log.
For her the trees were word enough, the open poem,
the wilderness. His choice, not hers, the tighter knot,
the involuted masterpiece worked back
into the crevices, rose gulch, the scent of raspberries,
lode, vein, and darkened cave.
She followed the outcrops of the rock, the paths
deer make to their lookouts —
always the high places, the wide air.
We choose the allegories of our selves —
his niche, his distillations — she
refused a year spent flat in bed
and the corset back.
As a beast will gnaw
a trapped paw free,
she chose immediate freedom, lame.
He was not best man at her wedding, shade
by then. Without his maps and structures was she lost?
How had she mistaken this mind for his?
This mountain man who fastened down each night
with lists, proprieties, “what a woman does
or does not do,” perpetual endings. Once,
a hawk snagged in his barbed wire fence.
It flailed like a fallen Icarus.
She cut it out.
Still over the pasture the mountains shone,
Sawtooth’s white ladder, Audubon’s,
above them the ever-moving stars
indifferent to all labels, maps.
She left the bars up after her.
4.
Along the wave of a precipice
her thought ran like a ptarmigan,
mottled and still like the glacier scree.
Only the wingbeat remembered,
hardly observed, invisible,
the sound of one hand, the thunder
of one breath.
These are the hills where woman has no name,
having communion with the trees
in their green study. Mountainous
the talking in the needles: Engelmann’s,
Jack pine, white bristlecone.
Avens and snow buttercup
profess immortal innocence.
The coney’s house
(its bedding for its airing out)
might have been hers. Good housekeeping
is notice of fair weather.
High enough
the language of destruction fades. In mist,
in cloud, she walked in the original.
It was not to name the mountains she was there.
Even her cairns were secret: a hummingbird’s
moss thimble, or
a white outcrop of lichen where her trail
turned by a star notch in the hill,
a windfall once, a panther’s cache, a broken rock,
broken, each winter, differently.
She knew the mountains as she knew
the compass of her kitchen, dark
(those cabin nights) but everything
in answer to the motion of her hands.
to live in, the solution —
nothing more.
5.
The swordsmen on her mantelpiece
have frosted a little in winter’s light.
Their book-supporting scabbards fill with dust.
Over her pond the hungry deer
scatter their tiny hoofprints like grey hail.
The beaver’s lodge
steams like a chimney in the dawn.
Someone is dreaming. The sky,
staining a little with ruddy snow
as if
the sharp peaks cut it, glows
like a mirror. The sun ascends
corn maiden’s ladder and the clouds
huddle like sheep for the shepherd’s horn,
the wind that drives them from the peaks
to beat below the tree line, to subside
filling the unimportant trails,
blocking the skier’s highway.
A vein bursts in the city’s side,
sometimes: cloudburst. The prairie creek
stripes through the city, heaped with glass
and plastic rubbish, peters out
in vacant lots, in camping grounds,
in tales of desert drownings and flash floods.
Now, by the irrigation ditch,
brown waters draining from Cherry Creek,
her old car moves like a crippled toad.
Fumes from the city fog the peaks.
The sky is yellowed like stained, dead fur.
Car lights along the highways trim
the Front Range like a distant mall.
But she has slipped under the cottonwoods.
New Year’s: all things must be unlocked,
left open a crack — front door,
back door, a window — so the stars
can coast in on their film of dust
and sail out with time’s leavings. Shells
must break for hatching.
And his room
left roofless, wall-less, only frame
with one red, rusting bedsprings
is the room
where new constructions can begin —
building with sunlight,
starlight,
with spruce dust, sand, with lupine, and the pale
continual agitation of the green
and golden aspen, “shooting stars”
(the “twelve gods” of the swamp).
His ropes sat in the Mountain Club
for months. His boots
almost a year.
A use can be found for anything.
6.
We walk, sometimes, in the woodlot here
in this shabby eastern province where the bears
wander like ruined overcoats
in the city’s unofficial dump.
There are old walls,
the last sites of lost farmlands, clay-filled holes,
pastures of alders and hackmatack
and roadbeds covered with bracken.
Every year
the place where the farm stood when we came
was and is now some rusted tin,
brambles, and something beneath the grass,
chassis perhaps, or a chimney stone — each year
this place is less a place.
We’ll lose it soon,
tracking our way through the beggar’s-ticks
and the drought-browned mosses on the stones.
“There’s the wall,” you may say. It’s around here
then.
And so this night
I watched a sunset drain away
the colours from the city. Just at dusk
my pear and a maple after it
echoed in rose and scarlet shades
the sun’s withdrawn circumference,
beating the gold leaves, shattering green —
and all that green and yellow have gone black.
Just here, where I hold the map
(light, candle, mind)
I see a rose shade glimmering —
pale rags strung on a ghost’s twig arm —
to shake at the edge of my eyesight, almost there
and almost invisible —
so too what I think I remember fades;
it drains away.
Her cabin, this winter, all alone,
with the stuffed bear holding his valet tray,
the fireplace swordsmen cold as ice,
and the snow heaped over the window sills.
What sleeps in the cellar all this time
or stirs when stiff Orion stirs,
moving along the mauve spruce trunks
after the leaping, mad, white hares?
But here’s the sun, rocketing over the aspen rods,
tipping the white cones of the firs
so each encrusted helmet slides
sinking the green ears further. Drip —
the moving needled waters prick the snow.
Plop — and the snow-plugged chimney top
releases its cap. Grey water runs
along the granite chimney stones
and pools below the andirons — wet coals
and soft, decaying ash
that like a compost of years past
hardens again, and night returns:
a whole world under glass.
The cabin is not empty. At the stove
her candle, ghostly, is a shaft
in moonbeams, or a spiderweb.
Her eyes are as bright as an animal’s,
the crystal eyes of the deer, the bear,
the wolfskin hanging on the wall.
The piercing rays from the third, wide room
open the snow, where her brother waits —
and the red springs of that empty bed
rusting past autumn.
The chimney smokes with auroral fires
blue as the tight buds of the firs,
sealed against wind, and the windows shake
reflecting the flat plane of the lake,
and the twins, congealed, in the photograph —
but the imaginable warmth
of what is there,
is there. . . .
LOCAL SUITE
1. Riverside Drive
The wind’s too rough for the sailboats.
A cormorant, starting to hang out its wings,
has had second thoughts. Pale mustard flowers
shake in the rocks and styrofoam
of the riverbank. A runner in red mittens
pounds on past.
At the Armoury
boys play at soldiers. My small dog
noses the thawing ground. Her thick
coat flares like thistle seed.
2. Fredericton Junction
Last summer’s cattails, shaggy in the rain,
and blackbirds; a shiny, plywood station —
a purring bus clogs the parking lot,
the driver’s gone across the street
to the new café. In the waiting room
a girl in a yellow slicker and a child,
too hot in a pink fur snowsuit.
The café signs says “Chili.” “Well,
I’ve got beans,” says the counter girl.
“What else does it take?” The bus driver tells her.
She’s set for the day.
The rain lets up. My husband walks
beside the tracks like a signal man,
and the train looks round its corner, small,
yellow, perfectly genuine,
and right on time.
3. Roberta’s Wood Path
Spruce seedlings, still too small for lights
at Christmas time, line the narrow path
the children take. (The grownups bow.)
Ground cedar overhangs
a doll’s ravine.
(The patch of bluing scilla is a lake.)
The gardener marks her stations with tin tags:
bloodroot, trillium, shooting-star.
Above us squirrels in their choir stalls cry
and drop the stale, wild apples on our heads.
4. Picnic by the River Light
Nearsighted, the moose swam toward us.
Halfway across it saw us, blinked, and turned around.
We watched it wading the island. Later
we saw it stumbling in a patch
of carefully ranked young lettuces,
a kind of Peter, harder to evict.
5. Officers’ Square
With red salvia, purple petunias, orange
marigolds, a turquoise beaver pondering
its flat trough, and the plumbing-roofed
memorial like a bandstand.
The benches are red and yellow but the grass
has been left green.
The girls in their bare feet like it.
Stretched out flat, with their dress shoes
under their heads, they are getting
their lunch-break sunburns. Each
as pink as a rose.
6. Needham Street
Narrow, its dusk closed in with wires
as if to catch some late hawk-watching pigeon.
A tiny, tidy house is dwarfed
by the massive, white datura bush.
The ancient, crippled apple tree is
propped on crutches, a loyalist.
Hopvine, nightshade, half-wild cats,
the houses crowd the sidewalk, but
there is Boldon’s light, a stained glass window:
a beckoning cup, blue amber grail.
Against it the white budworm moths
flutter like cinders and beat the screen.
7. Loyalist Graveyard
Dust on the willows and raspberry briars,
and grey seed heads: angelica, milkweed,
virgin’s bower — a sort of fog. The plot
might once have been bare meadow. Elms,
drawing their darkness like a hood,
have closed it in till it seems hardly large enough,
only by accident not forgot. The past
gets smaller the less we remember it.
This is almost too small.
8. Odell Park
The rags of this year’s tartan come apart,
unroof the old farm’s gravel road. The sun,
slanting between the tree trunks, looks
like the last of the tourists. It touches us,
lightly, its hands already cold.
There will be frost.
9. Burning the Greens
From the post-Christmas pyre of trees
speckled with tinsel, a steam of snow
dampens the smell of starter fuel.
A missed gold ball wags sadly. Flame
reddens the wet face of a child
slumped on his father’s shoulders.
Soon the blaze
will send the old year toward the sun
we’ve not seen much of, lately. Dusk
happened at three. The bonfire’s through
by bedtime. Like one small, red eye,
Mars dogs pathetic Jupiter.
10. The Myth of a Small City
The myth of a small city where,
on a snowy night,
it doesn’t do to walk carelessly:
the walker behind you with lengthening tread
has raised his wooden hammer.
He is the clock of midnight, the bad turn
someone will do you, sometime.
By the wall, a shadow fidgets,
starts to run.
DEAR TIGER