here on the warm sands of the shore
the beautiful men
play soccer.
Skidding and leaping —
goalposts an oar, a washed up palm —
kicking the sand,
they sparkle like sea spume
or like the bouncing wavelets where
their little bathtub dinghy waits —
Wynken and Blynken —
in their wood shoe . . .
II
Of course I know there are savages
Of course I know there are savages,
trimmed feather points,
a jagged edge on the beach,
bones, though not human, imperfect tales
of woman against woman, child at child —
I have my goat and parasol,
like Bishop’s Crusoe, islanded at home,
my hours against the mealy bugs —
What do you want I could do instead?
Those ships that pass and pass and never come
are islands like this one, this bed —
just tourists, bleating at the sea.
The wars remake themselves.
Far out, I do not visit them.
But in my dinghy I can row
to visit lives marooned like mine
among these gentle pelagoes, or,
clutching my paddle, wade
in the steady rain of my neighbour’s grove
where furies nest like nightingales
and winds make too much noise for sleep.
These are too much for me:
else wheres, else reals,
else others’ pains.
This private ward
is dear to me.
Perhaps I should write a letter,
perhaps should call.
I pace my garden back and forth
leaving no mark upon its sand.
Easier, nothing to explain,
and never that awkward moment when
I can’t ask what I want to know.
*
Sky Island
Sun casts its blond remission.
Cast away on an imperfect peacefulness
as if I rode a raft on others’ seas
(their whirlpool lives sigh under me) —
Over the combers, heavily,
a long line of brown pelicans
streams staidly south.
Bobbing over the leaden sea
the printless pocks of living tears
freckle the day stream.
I lean against these absences
as they recede. The waves
are the grey hills the valley holds
at the far sky’s line.
My glass cell hangs above
a tiny, dirty city fringed
with dusk, spruce, aspen gleam.
Sky Island, this white hospital,
an Astolat where everything through glass
on glass reverses, fades, and ceases to be true —
my window on the universe.
*
Everything’s safe
Everything’s safe. It’s all washed up on shore
above the recent tide wrack, stowed away
the things I never learned to use
or now have lost the trick of:
skis, a wrecked piano, needlework,
a little raft of cookie tins, prayer books
and star charts, mandalas
of what I thought I ought to know.
And the unuseful reference books
that never list the things I search
but other stories, other tracks, sherlocks
to other homes than mine,
outdated even as they speak.
News like a wreath of seaweed drapes the rock.
You’ve been away.
I did not know how long you were.
Each day
seemed its own monument:
granite, huge.
I flounder like a half-drowned fly
at a bathtub’s edge.
I haul
my mind as from a pit
to the bright surfaces of day.
Music
still draws me,
sunrise,
birds,
the homely chink
of dishes in the corridors —
your voice —
and it is good,
all things.
No.
No.
Not all.
III
Dawn, with its usual hospital scent
Dawn, with its usual hospital
scent of coffee and sour rags
filters across the clammy room.
My hands are puffy, like soft
indecent roses frost has plucked.
Usual noises: the ambulance,
the fire alarm (which is always “a drill”),
the rattle of the gurneys, breakfast trays,
the humming machine in whose web hands
I dangle, passive, hooked and tied,
the weather lashing on the walls.
Outside on the rain-streaked roads
faint pricks of light,
sky dense with reflections, purple-orange
like an old bruise, thick
as the matted wool
of a dog’s blanket.
Here, it is always the same.
Always that floor wax and vomit smell,
urine, bedpans, soaps —
Shelved on the hospital windowsill
among the browning roses, borrowed books,
my teddy bear, icon of guilt —
the child I will not make.
*
A hand’s work
When we drove up to St. Anthony’s
that grey, cold day,
I thought I could not live out here
where damn perpetually braces, braced,
propped up, and swaddled as I am.
Half dozing in the heated car,
the sun in shabby patches on my sleeve,
I watched the muskeg barrens shake
like a wolf’s fur, silver, below the morne.
We counted at the highway’s edge
scrapings of humus, fenced
with a marker rail or labelled with a rag,
plots scarcely a metre square but thrust,
a hand’s work, into the universe.
Last fall, raking the fallen leaves,
tanbark of summer’s circuses,
we found a primrose eastering on its own
among the cardboard poppy pins
and rotting jellies from the crab,
and, watching us, a squirrel with its tail
upstanding like a flame.
Nothing is too small to say.
(I love you.
What do I bring to you?)
*
Pane after pane
Pane after pane cracks open to the sun:
red sores, red flames,
a swelling over the trees —
now like a streak of syrup,
maple, apricot, lavender —
striations of rock in a cut bank —
a Jacob’s coat,
and
under the window,
the parking lot:
asphalt splashed with hard nights,
the night staff leaving the hospital,
sleep rubbed away.
Wisps of music, a little blue,
baroque diminished by distances,
tug at my inattention.
Submerged below the rustles of the hall
the noises of the highway,
distant woods —
the jet trails its white sentences
dissolving,
never quite saying . . .
IV
Sonata for flute
Coffee, “the drug of choice” you said.
And music. Sonata for flute.
“Shot silk for James Galway;
velvet for Rampal.”
And I thou
ght of you
when the flute played over and over
against the soft, autumnal drums
of the Malecite. More like a loon’s
soft hooting.
It was Ned Bear,
whose mother I know, her black fur coat
transmuted into his masks’ black hair,
their mouths emitting silent notes
that deafen the observer:
pain,
slag — earth’s face stabbed
with the horns of trees,
a clear-cut like a migraine, hills
broken for charcoal.
You play your flute in the other world,
silent in this. You make
a music in the middle night when you awake
(as you so often waken) — keeping watch.
(I steal this poem from you.)
You tell me what the skies say,
their suns and their auroras, angels,
shooting stars helplessly falling
like tiny hail, unwritten, unsung, a dignity
outside of measure — the shaman’s stick
drumming the heartbeat we seem to know.
Also serving, you only wait.
I must learn from you.
*
An eagle’s feather in red cloth
The gift goes as it came.
The eagle’s flight
brushes God’s face with its human prayer.
The shaman’s drum
gathers together the continents,
bridge that the stars pass over,
trailing blood,
with spotted wings like the
pierced-heart dove, shrike’s larder —
like a livid peak
in the undecided moment sun and storm
sinking together shed
their incarnated glories —
red
godheads —
The eagle speaks
higher,
speaks to the dragon’s eye,
sunspit
the eagle’s voice.
Listen, deaf children,
our shabby hands
beating like wings against our drums
spread poems out to the sunlit sky —
(feather wrapped in a red cloth) —
rise higher,
flight
of the eagle’s prayer.
Meanings I cannot decipher yet
(the buds in their winter shapes,
corselet and shield,
the evening shedding its yellow flakes) —
*
Sky
Sky, with your blue rose
windows of dove feet,
your cold sea-amber,
your combers pounding the new day numb,
infinite barren longing, ocean, prayer,
to your community of grace
elect our lonely island selves!
Your mornings come
like living coals. The pain
we must endure; the light
pass on.
“CRACKED”
One imaginary letter to me from my partially cracked poetess at Amherst.
Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson to Anna Higginson
i
I was a whole, a cypher, a white knot
until that blow
divided me.
Like the doubled rag doll I’ve no feet.
My dress is my address;
I can’t get out.
My polar heads
(white Eva up, or,
up black Pip) —
Topsy topside,
Moebius egg,
inseparably twinned.
I write on paper like my skin
this Friday print,
Elaine reversed in mirror glass,
Crusoe alert
boat-keeping for the Visitor
who never comes.
The blow that forced my being split
me from my wholeness,
fell
on the clear waters of the air.
I am a meadow,
enclosed,
walled in,
shut door.
ii
Daffy with weakness my black self holds
the secret of my strength.
Pip’s tambourine
shivers against the gaping cracks
of those white nights.
What music creeps across the sands,
those blocks of ice,
that tumulus
of coral?
Running to freedom Eliza crossed,
but dropped me,
daisy,
in the sea.
I sank,
lead plummet,
pendulum.
Pip was my heart. His music was
pure firefly with no fathoming,
but
coward in the graveyard, whistled,
leaped —
He heard the sailors shouting far away.
The black waves buoyed his body.
His mind drowned.
This body has no legs to leap.
The coffin that upholds me drifts
secured in a closed pasture.
Sea
is my white wedding dress.
Oh carry me,
lost bird,
to my drowned Ararat,
my Captain’s fabrication,
his whole cloth!
iii
A storm sometimes in the outer world
beats at the shutters.
The twin
stirs,
shuddering cygnet,
signature,
who sings like a fly trapped in this room.
You who live in the processes,
what can you know,
unfractioned, unreflecting,
nailed to the unlettered literal —
a pebble in the gizzard of the Lord?
The sea had jeeringly kept me up.
I could not drown
but led by lazy music fell ashore.
I looked, you looked, he looked —
No one was there.
iv
I climb the ladder to my room
drawing my writing after me
like a long rope.
Each day,
among the rattles of the birds,
the mad girl’s cry from over the pond,
another real world shuts its door.
I had my finger on the thread;
it snapped.
It wrapped around my neck.
They pulled an unsigned tablet from the sea —
(bloodstains
on a white handkerchief,
brown as the sherry the visitor leaves —
is leaving . . .)
Didn’t Pip sing those summer nights?
Dancing, as if his feet cut glass,
lighting the whiteness of the sea
with tinsel exhalations.
Heart of a daisy.
Such innocence.
In what forge was my firefly forged,
my cowardice?
Captain, You told me, “Stay.”
I rust.
This hand
which held His, watched his troops
die with Him, a black victory.
Among those marble senators
my voice
creaks like a dory.
Deserting Him
I made a desert where my twin
who goes before me where I go,
yet tags my heels.
v
In Eden there’s safe rowing
but not here.
Cracked head,
cracked heart.
Jack in the corner, my father, crow,
pulled out my heart, a ruby plum,
and spun it toward the tropics,
whipped my cord.
And didn’t I spin and spin and spin,
and didn’t I ramble?
White letters, shrouds of summer,
a white flag —<
br />
this hand
will nail its message down.
Each day
the smells of home: baked bread, sweet ginger,
honeycomb —
the heartless, joyous, juvenile
eternities, bee-lovely,
waft me toward what shores
what tropic luxe,
what paradise?
I could not stop.
I had gone souther than the pole
toward Arcturus.
Beyond earth’s magnet apron strings
white clouds flapped like dishrags.
Shall I leap?
Abandoning my Father’s house,
out through the walls and the barn’s back door —
a swimmer, dying a thousand times,
dives down, at last, to the miracles.
from
TOUCH EARTH
TO PERSEVERE
1. Hour after hour
Hour after hour: crows, browned cedars,
house after house in last year’s Christmas lights,
dumps, sheds, cattails, roadside trash.
We’ve passed that car two times —
that one with the table and four chairs
strapped to its top as if picnicking.
Here’s where the road salt kills the pines
and there’s the mammoth shovel that holds up
a “star”-topped fir tree in its beak.
Over brown fields the winter sky
glimmers like the inner horn
of some hard seashell. Malls
flare their orange lights.
The margin of the road
seems scribbled all over: weeds,
rags, swatches of old snow.
The penmanship of dusk checks off
each item: moon
(print of a thumbnail pressed in dough)
numbers the issue.
The evening, like an empty hand,
seems portent with meaning, unsayable.
2. The young grackle
The young grackle sat on the feeder top
with open beak.
Sometimes the young seem never to catch on.
But were we really quicker?
Puttering about in our memories,
don’t we dust, rearrange, rewrite?
The sky is as open as ever was,
and the little shadow after me
I think of in the image of a hawk
changes its shape as the weathers change.
Sign of the times, difficult always.
But are things worse?
The diaries in the attics of the dead
are like these letters that I write:
don’t say what words can’t find to say,
but what they must.
3. “70 under at Baker Lake”
“70 under at Baker Lake.” The caribou
browsed last night at the end of town
by the almost empty storage sheds
that ring in the wind with a metal sound.
Winter with all its tentacles
is stronger than we are, more absolute.
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 21