And Yet
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in history, feeling the same packed light.
WOODSHED HILL, LATE WINTER 2018
Woodshed Hill is just beyond the window where I write.
I am alone with it for hours. It rises from underneath
the house and is not separate from the sky. It is a large
animal with a profile beautiful in all its changes. It
extends beyond where etymology can go. Old snow, all
gaps and tatters, plasters its lumpy slope. Last fall’s leaves
show through the tears, and each grey oak and elm pokes
through a stretched hole. On the steep south face the snow
hangs on rocks and stumps like ripped lace. In a few months
sedge and low boughs will hide it all. Yesterday I found
the draft of a poem from March two years ago. I wrote that
the hill was “stepping out of a white distance where it had
disappeared.” I said it was “moving back into its half-wrecked
home, awkward, gawky, starting again in grade nine.” As though
I’d written that on the window and blocked the view. The hill is
always full-grown. It feasts when the sun comes with its followers,
but I see no end to its patience and dignity. It gathers its history
in each leaf and bone, and I have a few years living beside it,
facing it. I look up from the page to something I’ve never seen.
NOTES
“We Make Our Long-Talked-About Trip to the One-Room School Museum”: Not having crossed paths with Philip Larkin in ages, I’m surprised to see him coming out of the museum just as I’m about to go in. We nod in passing, and the door thuds shut.
“Silphium”: Cyrene’s precious (now extinct) silphium was not the same (also threatened) plant that Aldo Leopold writes about in the July chapter of A Sand County Almanac.
“Unconsoled”: see Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, 1995.
“In the Morning I Sit with Cézanne”: Cezanne Paintings, Dumont Buchverlag, Cologne, 1993.
“Treo”: I gathered these italicized words through research and have no speaking knowledge of them. The poem attempts to imagine an oak tree as extending out beyond the boundaries we normally assign to it, out into its physical environment and support systems; at the same time, the poem imagines the words and concepts from which the poem itself is constructed as stretching back (and out) through their etymological and cultural histories; it also tries to imagine versions of its words and concepts in the human history surrounding the tree—in the language of people who witnessed the tree before the coming of my culture and language to its location. The named, observed tree is a linguistic tree. Its roots and branches merge with its natural environment and with its human-cultural context simultaneously and indistinguishably.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of the poems in this collection were first published in the magazines Arc, The Antigonish Review, Brick, CV2, Event, Fiddlehead, Halibut, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Reliquiae and Riddle Fence. My thanks to the editors of those magazines.
Early versions of “I Haven’t Looked at These in Years,” “Since Life Values Nothing Higher than Life,” “Treo,” “A Word Fights Speech River to Its Highest Pool,” “Openings” and “A Movement Catches the Eye” first appeared in Forty-One Pages, published by University of Regina Press. I thank Jan Zwicky for her editorial work on that book, and Karen Clarke and everyone at University of Regina Press for their care in its publication.
I thank especially Kelly Joseph and Dionne Brand for their support and their help in creating this book.
And I thank Susan Gillis for sharing this journey.
JOHN STEFFLER is the author of six books of poetry, including Lookout, which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, The Grey Islands and That Night We Were Ravenous. His novel The Afterlife of George Cartwright won the Smithbooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. From 2006 to 2008 he was Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada.