Like dogs in a windstorm, we dig in,
curled in our story, its tiny note
a lamp-prick in the bellows of the skies,
in our immoderate medium a living mote.
4. Familiars
From the crowded, trivial shelves of dreams
descend, soft-footed, bellies to the ground,
the small, low dreads that turn our plots familiar.
We do not use their names,
wild beasts which hug the corners of our brains.
The stains they seem to leave behind
haunt us, as if, asleep, we dreamed them
and could wake
as different, nobler than ourselves.
Who has clean hands? Don’t lie.
The hills are deep and torturous: the long ascent,
this swamp, these briars, that slimy log
half-balanced over the cataract.
Through humid tentacles of noon
or under night’s star-piercing thatch
we might suppose we climbed alone
but never felt alone enough —
the scrabbling pebbles under foot,
the pattering behind us,
a whiff of sour, miasmal breath —
they will be there when sunset drains the peaks.
Each night
supplies its little cairn of anger, pain,
and paltry greed which seems
to nip us as we pass, with thin, brown teeth.
5. Bristlecone*
Below the interstitch of noons
the crag knife splits the wind-floes.
Clouds shaggy with ice,
a temblor of white scree
like pelted bison, shake the stones,
remind us of our origins:
the viscous tempest, ash like rain,
and in the sea-shelf’s hourglass
shrunk and receding —
dragon teeth
upthrust and cooling, lichenous,
creased by marauding glaciers.
Our thoughts like fine hairs mat,
our breath exhales green centuries
where we maintain our heart-grip, grab,
here, at the high peak’s wind-shorn edge
not to go down untenanted
in these sun-flooding solitudes
but hang our purple pennants,
seed and cone,
majesty crowning in birth and death:
flower and nest and insect drone —
declare! declare!
* pinus aristata, timberline specimens of which have been found to be over four thousand years old.
IN A GLASS HOUSE
The prince is the angel of death. The kiss
has put her straight to sleep
in a glass house (a shoebox) where she lies,
a plastic lily. Her gold tongue
stiff as a bodkin, silent as a thorn.
Around her the attendant dwarfs
like ants around a larval queen
wait the ejection of a word.
None comes. She has no story.
She is like paper, blank
as the white covers of her bed.
She is her bed, containing and contained.
Of course they mourn, the animals
and the attendant spirits. Who else spoke
or taught their humours each their names?
She made their den a house, their labours home.
It must have been food, the little folk suppose,
to put her stupid, deathly, in this trance —
undead, because unrotting, but
glassed in by a thick ignorance.
The leaves of every season fall.
Each snow repeats her countenance.
The wintry stars that glint from tears
like crystals, weeping trees (the dwarfs thought),
or like dripping springs, reflect
the glitter of her cage.
She does not thaw.
The dream has sealed her shut.
*
Dwarf Songs
If, when we breathe, the cold air fogs,
might we not breathe on you and warm
your rose red, white, and ebony?
As motionless as porcelain
the little hands that petted us, the voice
that hummed our puppy selves to sleep!
The white down of the poplar tree
freckles and rusts, as you do not.
The sparrows picnic on your lid
and rattle in the branches.
We will die
and who will then come sweep the leaves?
You hurt us, Princess, sleeping, Please awake!
*
Be quiet. Do not waken her,
Owl, silence. Breeze, be still.
Moon, rocking on the forest’s rim,
send her no dreams, but fill
her sleep with honeydew and dim
the shrill night whippoorwill.
*
“In case of crisis break the glass.”
But it is always crisis here. Each beast
devours another. Is the worst
of crises still the deafness of your sleep?
Or have you left all churnings of this world
for an imaginary height
so gathered into nature that the light
cannot dismiss or fracture you,
but, steady as the issues of plain math,
you shine, a simple axiom?
*
Angry and sore we shouted. You were deaf.
Threw stones. You did not blink.
Your glass container blunts our knives.
We cannot cut your image from our minds,
stone sister.
*
What secret have you hidden there, what seed
held on your tongue unswallowed, or what word?
Half open, as if between two breaths,
your mouth seems still to hold his kiss,
frost angel, who enciphered you!
He sewed the bird voice silent, shut your eyes
(our light) and sealed you out of sentences.
His voice still whispers in your ear.
What secret has he hidden there?
What should we know?
*
We do not wake our heroine.
We could not, should we try.
She sleeps within the story of the earth
and held here, in the cradling rock,
can tell us only
silence.
All the stars
can tell us nothing further than she does.
She is our utmost poem,
blank, snow white.
*
Rest through these bitter seasons till the world
turns round, grows new. No sweeter birds
will sing to you than sang before, or leaves unfurl
more freshly than they did when you were young.
Time only wears out shabby things, the words
of fools, the shadows of short songs.
You will never change, but as a pearl
wedged in the deepest nook of time
by secrecy grows lovelier, the long
unvoiced sweetness of your name
will grow through silence a divine
accretion, numinous. No verse
could say whatever once you might have meant.
Your purity of silence, glassy, harsh,
disowns our labour, weeping, and consent.
*
Dwarfs in unison:
Prince of the air, who will not take
our sister from us, or release
her from the prison of our minds,
forgive us what we make of her.
Break our glass icon! Shatter us!
For we must make
her story next time different.
It was not you who tempted her, but us.
*
Snow White:
(Only the echo
of a sigh.
<
br /> Unfurnished with a human life,
I am not I.)
GROUSE
1. Interrupted
Grouse, having her sand-bath under pines,
scratching fleas,
or warming her rheumatic pains,
resolves her mind toward poetry
eyes closed (but grouse) still listens
for
scrape of a wing-case,
beetle foot,
tread/pause
fox?
FLIES UP
thwacks branches — god,
no meditation undisturbed!
She is
a poet of unfinished themes,
more grouse than plot. Her flights
are short. And if her eggs
prove marble or get et,
why so might she —
a bird becoming stone —
or stomach —
she
has an immortality
in that forgetfulness repeats,
or nature does,
(or so we used to tell ourselves)
but are her grouse years running out?
She’s getting on.
2. A nest, a bowl, a darning egg
Stones from all over the house: two
from Katahdin; a Bronze Age flint;
black eyeball from Fundy; lava drop;
the nursing home path’s pale amethyst;
crystals from Hot Springs, Caribou,
Green Village; a slice of shin
from an unidentified dinosaur;
aggies and marbles; a fishing float;
slate chips for a dollhouse walk;
some Channel shingle (its roar withdrawn);
a green stone inked with an eagle’s wing;
quartz-veined red granite from St. George;
and fossils: Joggins reeds, a Boulder
fish, a glossy, polished ammonite;
quartz cysts; geodes; pyrites; a coral gnawed
by a teething dog —
sand for a grouse,
rocks where she steads her universe
at any one particular time, or,
now and then.
3. Bijouterie
The larger the mess, the nobler the theme,
whether the wreckage of a war
or merely “installation art.”
Lace, cameos, netsuke, painted
miniatures:
just things for the very rich
who, bored
with messes anyone can make,
will buy what almost none can make.
Too small for “statement.”
Bijouterie.
Though every summer morning spider’s silk
embroiders the lawns with diamonds . . . .
There’s some ingenious fellow, she has read,
has run out with his mower so that, dawns,
he can restripe or fashion (dew or none)
and sell enlargened photographs
of his results. We pay
for his destructive eye.
4. Those heaven flights
Imagination soars. The body’s flights
are fugitive; it fails, and leaves
affection in its place
like an old stamp on an envelope
which dries, as it adheres.
Did Prospero discard his books,
his wand, and his presumptuous tongue?
This chicken at the grey end of her life
will have to find her magic in stale feathers,
dust, the dried out wings of flies
which, useless, shine — still iridescent
in their death. And as for grief,
the bottled tears the drugstore sells
will do.
5. Herein ist alles
In the beginning was Alice, who,
in these sacked halls
thought she was lost. Like Pamina
she wept, but more effectively,
and swam an educated stroke assured
of shore; she gives a prize
to all such equal swimmers, everyone
being an equal victim of
invention, grief, or history,
which dries us off.
The prize, though, was the thumb-bell. Dumb,
it values silent labour,
white on white (a hem, or darn!)
No hymn to her,
for what she says
is water writ on water, tears
she cannot mend.
The seals who stretch below her waves
are her sea children. So, of course,
are dolphins, sharks, the great
lace-bodied lion’s mane with its
surmising tentacles, the sunray,
manta, minnow, us.
But we
crawled out; we tipped the cradle, dried
into the sound of ms./
story.
Mama, we cried, ist alles hier?
Dumb belles, she answered;
gave us each a prize.
6. Impatience on Grosvenor
The Rabbit’s in love with the Queen of Hearts
who loves the Knave, if anyone.
Knight engineer loves Alice, who,
daisy head, loves no one, not
the frat boys Tweedle, Dr. Hump,
or the sleeping King.
(An unfortunate sex.)
A good man, if you want one, is hard to find.
It is man’s voice, she thought, that touches so:
(Placido’s, Dietrich’s) which,
a lifeline in the darkness
seems to help. Its warmth and beauty
lift us so, we float on gusty thermals
as on dreams. As if without
we were one-winged.
Silence and age teach otherwise.
She runs quite nicely on the ground,
and where’s to run to, for, or when?
Here’s all that’s left, no longer nest,
but earth, and reasonably warm.
Yes, Tigerlily has her points
(hard beds make women garrulous) —
must Alice choose? A wife, a husband,
one dear friend?
It was Dinah most of all she missed
(since Suki, Suki, Suki’s dead)
and all babies are pigs.
Is Eros just bad temper? Or only if
the pink flamingos will not play
and all the other little girls
have rolled up into hedgehogs and bowled out?
On this broad field
so plaided by neat brooks,
the pawn not taken takes the king.
Game over.
Must she
play the game?
Better a pumpkin of her own
than this lead crown.
7. Give it a whirl
How important is sex? Don’t ask the grouse.
For us with our slow babies we need men
almost all the time —
and, sometimes, yes, that fellow’s cute —
(bear friend who breaks the butterflies)
or, better, another sort of grouse,
with different fleas.
Somebody’s baby. It might be fun.
Yet this October in the sun
the grouse floats into reverie
unpeopled, untethered — bliss of age,
all of her chickabiddies gone.
Of course she has always her memories
(some of them good) and next year,
which she thinks might come,
an itch of sorts —
But isn’t she lonely?
You have to love!
All of the poems keep telling her.
(She may have written a few herself.)
What, in the end, does she believe?
In, next to Nature, Poetry?
Or sun, sand, fleas?
THE VIEW FROM UNDER THE BOOKCASE
1. The king of poetry has died.
The king of poe
try has died;
his daughter will decide
what laureate reigns after him
(whoever verses her riddle right.)
Among Canadian candidates our Phoeb,
lately come up from the veritimes
with us, his rural retinue
transformed by grant-ma’s magic wand:
domestic vermin, sheep, geese, pigs,
chickens in glad rags — and his Dad’s
old pickup playing a Cadillac.
Each afternoon we’re all in form,
disguised so donkeys look like dons
and bureaucrats half-assed,
rodents and rustics radiant.
Phoeb has a ball.
I, most long-toothed of all the rats,
am woman till midnight. Then the rest
tout-de-suite back to the pet-motel.
But I stick around.
(The view from under the bookcase isn’t bad.)
I use these moments to compose
a kind of requiem for Phoeb,
although right now he seems just fine.
Dear Phoeb, our mini-Hamlet, sow’s heir, writes
his poems on tiny post-it notes
which he re-orders every night
and snips up ever tinier.
Stirring his stew of consonants,
he takes pot luck.
My poetry is different.
I need the sentence to emerge,
dragging its long narrative —
(but Time, who shortens every tail,
stalks me and Phoeb alike.
My marks along the wainscot fade;
the grant won’t last.)
2. Deus ex machina
The prince of disassembly, Phoeb.
His father’s scrapyard — body parts,
hubcaps, kneecaps, unlicenses,
machines dismade, shafts, shards, and screws —
is briar patch for br’er Phoebus where
the patterning alternative
is an open field, distructured, where
inception and perception cannot meet
in the unpicking of a text.
Phoeb makes a desert, the desired
(for Dad’s desertion consolate) effect.
He flip-flops words and alphabets
in palindromic particles or petty cash
(small change). Rupture as rapture —
and doesn’t he
ramble?
(When
didn’t he?)
Sometimes he almost makes some sense
with his eclectic mini-mots,
yet, listening, I want to cry.
The courtiers see him as a priest
who makes the world with its loose scrap
communicant — (Not that he thinks
it holy or a whole —)
A kind of lyric liar, or
a mirror of the glass shard in their hearts
(truth being, as they know it, out to lunch).
3. The riddle is: what does the princess want?
She wants her will, this daughter of the king.
But no one expected her to rule;
her will is want. She wants avowal, narrative.
The Witch of the Inner Wood Page 22