flesh, blood, bone and black feathers, the raven
tries to see everything on the shore, scavenges, cries alone.
The raven that flew off with the ball of light
that it found hidden in black box within black box
tears open a bewildered black shore bird,
picks through to the heart and finds food. The animal
that hates looks out over the ocean at the sun
and sees into the black boxes of his heart. In the last box
the dark-raying bird of the sun, the God turned out of the nest,
is feasting on him like carrion. He hears no grieving cry
for the gap he makes in the creation or for the shore
beautiful as at its first sunrise when he darkens it.
* Cherith Brook is where the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens (1 Kings 17).
* The black box containing the ball of light that illuminates the world, and the old man’s daughter as beautiful as hemlock fronds at sunrise—are elements of the Haida myth of the raven who steals the light.
Cormorants at Lonsdale Quay
Black flock, long curved black necks, long black beaks,
torsos belling out against the cold grey-blue,
they roost along the SeaBus dock roof,
feast on the small fish in the inlet. They drop in groups
to the water, dive, reappear, lift and sit
on top of the large shore rocks. Each is a device
with wings turning on a cardinal point in the back bone,
opening and closing as a pair of bone leaves
joined through a knuckle by a smooth bone pin.
Each is a set of hinges allowing doors of air to swing wide.
Producing a sound like that of construction work,
they cannot sing like other birds but simply cry
their labour, carrying an axis inside
as if carrying the earth’s cardinal point
to countless locations. They fly down and back—
wings hinging wave spray that flashes blinding bone-
white across the black rock. The spray is a door opening
while gravity holds the waters around the earth
and the tides move in and out, in and out.
Lost Rain Casting of a Deer
I
The waters of the runoff surge through the ravine, an unending succession of lightning strikes, the mist drives down between the steep banks and the trees, the rain shuts its vault. The creek shakes the skeleton of its rock course shooting along skull after skull. The waters become a liquid natural wax. The wax moves smooth and quick into mouths open to receive it, letting it fill the mould.
II
Curved white edges of creek ripples cut away the confine. The entire creek pulls itself into the body of a leaping raincloud-coloured animal. The moments that animal of wax is encased and melted out are the moments the iron oxides, charcoal and oils of the first paintings run wet on the walls of caves illuminated by fires, the colours still deepening within the bounding outlines.
III
Dark grains of the unencumbered musk pod flow out with the creek’s lost and shapeless wax, and over the waters faceless as the first waters. The creek mist thickens. The musk it is carrying of ravine leaves, glacial till and ozone thickens. Metals present at the beginning melt, and the alloy rushes again into the mould it finds, and that finds it, within the shifting vacancies and probabilities.
IV
The living deer stepped out into the envelope of a clearing in the mountaintop mist, its eyes glittering soft black, the way a sculpture arrives, the mould removed, the polished bronze undraped. But this deer melted into mist leaving the blackness that poured in its eyes, and in the blackness its scent, the sweetness of copper, the nullity of tin, and the musk of the rain that was always the traveller.
Men Fixing a Roof in the Rain
Up on top of the stack of window squares
each with a person at a desk and screen,
two men in yellow slickers and hard hats,
weighty toolkits strapped around their middles,
work with measuring tapes and lengths of steel
on the flat roof of City Hall. Wind, rain
and seagulls veering past, the two workmen
do what they do. Like quiet windup toys,
they go to and fro, turn at right angles,
power-saw the lengths, place them down, figure
the spacing between the rows, and set out
the support frame for a new roof surface.
The wind and rain increase, the travelling
low heavens press down on the men’s hard hats,
the men fix the frame in place. The seagulls
continue to veer, crows flap, past. The men
now stand side by side and survey their work.
They have measured, cut, put in the right place
what they were supposed to put in place; they
intend their work to stay. The two of them
look like little children gazing out across
a play mat or a park sandbox. Except
children will assemble a world with blocks
and shape fantastical grotesqueries
with sunlit mud and immediately,
gleeful and laughing loud, topple it. When
the roof fails of its own accord or when
the poison winds arrive and the window
glass explodes and hot rain flies, the chances
are that somewhere men will be performing
this same rooftop work. Somewhere other men
will be walking back and forth and standing
proud in costly suits or archaic robes
handing out or reaching out for awards
in front of crowds. And as from the beginning,
the real parts of the world will be whispering—
but now they will be whispering more and more
of how all this while it is being destroyed.
Aluminum Beds
When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds
into the house to replace our camp cots,
we see the dark in a metal’s dull sheen
is the dark displayed in his beard. The sound
rushing through the hollows of the square posts,
the frames, guards and rails, is the sound rushing
through the spaces he has made within us.
He sets them all down, the pieces he measured,
sheared, and welded together in the evenings
in his father’s factory, while I, half hidden
in among the machines, gathered up scrap
fallen to the cement floor. The four beds
stand in our shared room, one for each of us—
with this he fulfills his unwanted office.
He leaves us soon after, and I keep vigil.
Nightly I allow not one of my brothers
to speak or even audibly breathe. I know
that the sound of any of our young voices
will distract the light trying to make its way
through the fitted substance of the metal. I know
at the same time that this light is my father
searching for his sons. He does not know it—
long before he left us, his love began travelling
to us apart from him. If I memorize him,
I will be able to see the love. If I cut
from myself all that is not my love for him,
the right set of rays will find us. My brothers
fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait
for my dream. There is no space not swirling,
no fire with its core of blackness not burning,
within the beds’ angular emptiness
because of the love meant for us. Through the night,
the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,
unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,
the light of my father’s l
ove arrived at last.
How the Alley Crow Ends
The outsized crow flaps down its purple-black,
it caws down past a power-chiselling man
and puts its feet onto spat-up asphalt.
The cawing speeds up. The alley keeps on breaking,
the cawing keeps on describing the crow,
it speeds up. The crow circles, arrogant, eye
angled at the jackhammer, wings the colour
and sheen of an oil spill. The overfull
dumpster stinks in the hot sun. The crow comes
with its jerking, cawing head down the flyway
of birds dead and living. It comes bowlegged,
fluffing up its feathers into a mane
to show off. Comes with its black breast ragged
as if it has garlanded itself in the pelts
of the sparrows and robins it has eaten.
The chunks of asphalt keep on rolling up. The crow
vacates its ground for a telephone pole,
goes now from pole to pole, cable to cable,
high gutter to high gutter. It flouts the rows
of the alley crosses as it would the trio
on any storied hill. Its own iridescent
darkness in the middle of the day. The cawing
speeds up, it increases to full volume
the brute static of its beating signal,
the alley flow of horrible noise. My daughter cries
for music—CD! CD! The crow caws
with wet strings dangling from its beak. The rot
drifts up and down the alley. While the lids
in the good yards stay closed tight. My daughter cries
for me to lift her up. The crow observes us
from a pole opposite. Men file down the alley
with supermarket carts and look oil-slicked
in the burning receipt of the sun. The cawing
speeds up. The sun nails the men to the alley,
breaks their legs at the knees and pulls them down
off the crosses of its rays and they disappear.
My daughter repeats Up! Up! to see the heights
of the swaying trees. The alley crows nest there
in rough rings of sticks. Now I see my father
hurt out of the reach of repair. It was if a crow
took and held him in its beak like garbage
and uttered him, death hilarious. I recall
the last I was to hear of his voice, the insult
issuing down a phone line, the caw. My daughter
cries again for music. Music of running,
almost flying, on soft grass green beyond green
and the sky deep-glowing blue, the sea rocking
and the clean sand silver in the wash of waves.
The crow’s caw jackhammers the heat-laden
alley air and now the dark comes and the crow
is gone. The silence after the final caw
is the silence inside my daughter’s cry.
Flowers
for Dora
No one could resist the charm in her bright black eyes.
The townspeople called her Little Maria.
You explained how her parents sent her out
to steal flowers she would then sell in the streets.
Now she was circling lightly through the bar
like an emissary, holding out a bouquet.
Had I drunk too much Greek wine, or had I seen
the same vivid Aegean-coloured flowers before—
left by the relatives who had come before us
to the graveside I visited with you that morning.
It was a year ago today, you had told me,
that you leaned over and closed your grandmother’s blue eyes.
III
Book of Sparrows
I
Fly, fly, okay, okay, she says.
I lift her up to the cold
window and she sees sparrows
appear and disappear.
Hiding, hiding, she says,
laughing, chirping, as if she knows
they are taken care of in their lives
in the trees and in the air.
II
I go get it, I go get it, she says.
I let her down and she runs
to a book and opens it to where
sparrows sit on a summer branch.
Light is finding her eyes, new,
wise as an old woman’s. The one
who calls out with her voice
is only barely hiding in her.
My Daughter and the Seagull’s Cry
The cries come sharp, deep as the night and bright;
they tear the dark in my ear. It is the gulls
that have come up from the inlet through the still air,
the first proprietors of the daylight. The cries
rush out through the single narrow way of all their throats.
My daughter’s favourite among her first words:
seagull. Then I seagull. She remembered
the white-winged ones that came clamouring and flocking
where she stood on the sand at the sea edge. The sweet
crystalline cry poured from her as she went up
on her toes and flung her arms about and gull after gull
arrived and circled close and cried into the circle
of soft lightning they had made around her.
My daughter’s first nightmare: standing at the crib bars,
eyes fixed wide yet still dreaming, not knowing
where she was, repeating again and again
her bottomless cry. The cry as full of address
as the cries of the lovers in the next apartment
calling out wordless across the sudden distances,
a calling almost unearthly. As full of address
as the final cry of abandonment on the cross.
The gulls’ cries come sharp, and gulls come wheeling
up from the water as if on reconnaissance
and searching for what they have lost, not knowing
what it is they have lost though they carry it
as they perform every wing-thrust, every glide.
They fly their torsos, beaks, eyes; they are alive and yet
they are desperate ghosts, their cries scavenging cries.
They wake her now, one cry then another
like wild beings in the room, and immediately
my daughter shouts seagull, as if a dream
has been waiting within her to put the word in her mouth
at just this instant. In her two-year-old voice
she takes her ecstatic run out to meet
the gull’s sound with her word and runs out into all
the words that will ever come to find her,
even the word that is her own name. Like a hand
through a window, they will come to snatch her away.
The sea waves will arrive, hushed and radiant,
rolling her first cry in their foam. The flock’s cries
will collect up the world, opening it like a door.
Mykolaiv Bells
In the planted, tree-swayed back garden
in the hot late summer sun—
I hadn’t thought it would be hot here,
or the fine, baked earth rich
with ripe peppers, tomatoes,
hazelnuts, walnuts, pears, plums, apples, grapes.
I had imagined a cold plain,
not a voluptuousness, not a subtle,
various fertility, not a flirtatiousness.
I thought now of vineyard-crowded
corners of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly—
this deep-lit air around the delicate vines,
its flitting, swinging, insubstantial gold.
I hadn’t thought I would hear bells here—
rhythmic bell-clatter while I lay half-sleeping
in the garden in the morning. Near-East-
&
nbsp; sounding to me—not East-European.
And the earth itself
keeping time. Clanging,
calling the sun close, calling the grapes—
so the wine could arrive, clear gold,
in its cupboardful of old bottles.
How did we find each other? you asked—
on the poor bed and couch
of that den-like house, and as you walked in
through the low doorway, across
the small, astonishingly bright threshold,
tall and slender, hair draping you.
The whole morning, a garden filling
with echoing bell-ringing, bell-music
I listened after, wanting more and more of it.
While I lay and read in the afternoon,
I looked up to see different-coloured cats leap
lazily from a fence onto the house.
Then, in the night, we heard weasels, come
out of hiding in the garden, or out
of some other garden—quick gong-drumming
of their feet as they ran the sloped roof.
Late morning, potatoes and wine
on a rough kitchen counter—
set out because it was what there was.
Wine that seemed to be ringing
within its gold—looking out
at us from simple glasses.
Arrivals, Departures
First a guarded corridor, then fifty feet
of floor and different glass walls between us—
me arrived, waiting for you, you detained,
passport and visa from the wrong country
confiscated, luggage and plane ticket
confiscated, flight back home changed.
There you were in your multi-coloured
homemade coat, a slender Slavic Venus,
Tartar cheekbones, brilliant yet soft blue eyes,
troubling the frontiera polizia.
After a while, we were having a shared dream—
a week of me on one side of a world, you
on the other side, where all you could do
Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Page 3