Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain

by Russell Thornton

  was walk around and around in circles,

  then try to sleep curled up off in a corner,

  as you tried to avoid the guards and their taunts.

  In your country, you grace a theatre—

  here it is assumed you are a visiting prostitute,

  and I your pimp. We become two humans

  trapped in separate clear containers,

  still trying to join by instinct, slipping

  and falling, again and again. Two children

  trying to climb opposite sides of a hill

  of sand that only sweeps us lower. Two numbers

  trying to occur together and solve an equation.

  No point in mouthing words back and forth—

  it is too far away for either of us to see.

  But you reach out and frame my face. I realize

  I am blowing kisses to someone. You forced

  to live in a part of an airport for five days—

  the first three days without food. Me forced

  to make appeals to officials who ignore me.

  Finally, I put a bribe into the right hand—

  I am let through to cross from bella Italia

  into a departure lounge. We can say nothing,

  but twine ourselves around each other

  across airport seats for an hour, allowed

  entry into a silence we now know in ourselves,

  making a place of no arrival or departure.

  Perfect Day

  Three days before your ninetieth birthday

  was her eighty-fourth birthday.

  A couple of the staff brought a cake

  to the table where you had your meals

  and sang “Happy Birthday” to her,

  and touched gently at her head

  so she would blow in the direction

  of the half-dozen candles.

  Then you got up from your chair

  to sing to her too,

  and in a moment of lucidity

  asked those present, What do you think

  of my eighty-four-year-old bride?

  My grandmother, wide eyes

  unable to see you, tear-filled,

  leant over and kissed you.

  There were second and third cups

  of coffee for her to drink

  as she talked with her friends,

  and after a while, tired,

  you went slowly by yourself

  up to the rooms the two of you shared

  and had a stroke, and lay down,

  and two or three hours later,

  your whole family around you,

  your power of speech gone,

  your last words uttered, died.

  With the memory you had left,

  when you saw the cake and heard the song

  you realized it was your wife’s birthday—

  and maybe in a part of yourself

  found the way to the completion

  of the gift you had promised her

  sixty-odd years before,

  and decided this was as it should be,

  it was the perfect day.

  Playing With Stones

  When I carry her home each evening

  from the park playground swing, she pleads with me

  to let her walk on the bed of smooth stones

  at the front of our apartment building.

  She wants to find individual stones

  and put them in her wide pocket, then place

  the same stones along a row of large rocks.

  I would like us to stay as we are now

  within the flowering and flowing gold

  gaze of the sun’s late rays. And suddenly

  I imagine a day when she is old.

  As if I were her child and she was soon

  to be gone, I begin to grieve for her,

  little mother, my daughter. Carrying

  her shepherdess’s bag filled with her stones,

  one for each sheep in her flock, already

  she is keeping count for when it is night

  and she brings the sheep into the stone fold,

  already she is asking that they all

  be kept in the great invisible scrip.

  The tears she comes to cry for those she loves,

  the tears others who love her cry for her,

  will stray and go lost, so she places stones

  one by one on flat rock, stones that are tears

  she gathered as they rolled out of the sun.

  My Grandmother’s Eyes

  The leaves of last summer

  that danced their green light

  through the lifting trees

  lie changed and scattered now,

  dull pennies on the path

  melting coldly into the earth.

  Her eyes, her old eyes,

  that shone and were pale green,

  the green of the river water

  as it flows in mist and sun

  to meet the deep inlet,

  have turned colour like leaves

  now that sight has fallen away.

  Where once her gaze was wide

  and danced with all it took in,

  now there is a hung head and fear,

  and she looks down at nothing,

  suddenly stares out at nothing.

  Soon her eyes will have become

  more than even she has seen,

  but until then her drained eyes

  are pennies laid over her eyes.

  Blade

  I

  Razor-edged steel. I lean and concentrate

  what strength I possess, worshipful. Keep the blade

  inserted in under another man’s jaw.

  Keep it exactly there. Close around our heads,

  the same original and ultimate means

  as within us, blackness, now a halo—

  the blade the only light. I observe his face,

  the unyieldingness in the glance, and realize

  he is my father, and he and I are here

  to perform this act together and know it

  as our single embrace. If I lapse, he will

  be able to kill me. If he moves while

  I fulfill the pressure, he will sink the blade

  into his jugular. I am dreaming this.

  II

  I am dreaming this. I hold the blade laid

  in the rot of the wound it made. The one blade

  that can be a balm pouring into that wound

  as it cuts through to where there is no blood

  but a mysterious ore in radiant flow.

  The two of us the wound. Our blood still circling

  but out to the unfathomable tips of all

  dreaming iron and back. The iron laughs.

  I wake, and a grotesque, beautiful one

  slides out of me and away. Murderer

  who removes the blade clean from the fallen neck,

  man who walks free, bright as a song in the air,

  my father and I gone, a new instrument

  of life, the blade buried and lost in his hand.

  Aphrodite’s Mirror

  Robin in the grass, away in the trees,

  on a roof with her new-flying babies,

  her breast a visible electric charge,

  a flung up orange-red disc. My daughter

  is eyeing flowers, pilfering a rich handful

  to give to her mother. Now as she runs

  into a garden where she vanishes,

  half a bouquet in her hand, and runs back,

  the petal-glow concentrated on her

  becomes a deepening show, a bright play

  of the essence of copper. She will go

  to her mother flower- and copper-dipped

  as her mother was when she called her here

  to be born and to know the days and nights,

  the two of them as full of clear singing

  as twin robins. Her flowers her pendant,

  her ancient mirror of p
olished metal,

  she moves to and fro displaying herself

  and wherever her eyes lead her. Laughing

  while light tells its secrets, while it keeps them,

  she runs old ways, from garden to garden,

  first artefact of her mother and me,

  mirror looking at us, with us, past us.

  My Daughter and the Geometry of Time

  Clear sun, spring wind twisting spray up off waves,

  my daughter digging, dropping shovelfuls

  of clean sand through a sea-worn opening

  in a jutting limb of a driftwood tree,

  watching grains fall to an apex of sand

  and slide to the widening base. I see

  the black glowing around the visible,

  the sun, sky, water, beach flat. There are pairs

  of hands in each incoming wave tip’s froth,

  frenzied, fashioning fire and flinging it,

  before they fall away, to the grey sand

  and into that black. My daughter is two

  and I am almost fifty. My mother’s

  parents’ ashes lie where I buried them

  in sand a hundred feet or so from here—

  I think of them as having gone within

  shells that are spheres of time, the radii

  three times the one within which I now stand,

  innumerable times the one within

  which my daughter now stands, her sphere so new

  that it is a radiant point, a source

  full of her future. When she is the age

  I am now, she will remember nothing

  of the hour and a half this afternoon

  she and I spent together. She will not

  ever know the two people I still see

  as clearly as any in my present.

  When young they courted here in the beach light,

  the worn logs and cornered wind their shelter

  and secret escape. Their old eyes become

  more and more for me the one sphere of time;

  whatever my own eyes see, they give me.

  Light taking light into its arms. Light, light,

  in shell after shell. I dream I allow

  my daughter to know more than I have known.

  I think I will be here at her margins

  when I am gone in the same way those two

  are now at my own margins, receding

  to the beginning. I will see the froth

  travelling circular intricacies

  like white flames from the earth’s immense hollows,

  scooped up by the waters and let go free,

  I will see my small daughter gazing back

  at me for a moment from where she stands

  collecting and pouring the sand, moving

  into the future at the speed of light.

  Ambleside Beach

  Once or twice in late summer I come here

  to swim headlong out into the inlet

  as far as I can, and return slowly

  on my back trying to let my arms

  and legs do their work with animal calm

  in the metallic purple-green water,

  the transparent cold sea ore. I look up

  now into rays falling straight down the air

  and fitting the sea, and see the glitter

  and melt of the sun, the nickels and dimes

  that my grandmother would place in our hands

  the nights she visited us and spun spells.

  When she had left I would swallow a coin

  I half-believed would continue to shine

  bright within me like her story. She would

  conjure them up for us right on the spot,

  though the one about her brother who swam

  out from this beach and got caught in the rip

  tide, and ended up in a rescue boat,

  she put together with drama and flair

  from real events of the past. And the one

  about her father who brought her mother,

  herself and her sister here from far, far

  away and built a shack, a makeshift home

  to live in on this shore where one evening

  we stood in a quiet place in the sand

  beyond the touch of the tides and buried

  the contents of her urn. Now I swim here,

  and now I bring my two-year-old daughter

  here to play. While she stays with her mother,

  I swim out. My heart muscle strong for now,

  beating steady within the sea’s rhythm,

  I go out and back, I go out and back,

  riding my heart and the tide, and the sea

  cups me beneath the high sun’s deep dazzle.

  I remember when I was very young

  my grandmother held my face in her hands.

  I have her first photographs—few alive

  would recognize who the girl was but me.

  I swim out to see myself cup my child’s

  face in my hands and feel for a moment

  my grandmother is there as a small girl.

  I look straight up, I hear myself saying

  Never leave me, the sun pouring ashes

  and the sea washing them across my eyes.

  Gas

  Gas twists in the pupils of the blue eyes,

  fastens the backbone to the basket base,

  seizes the entrails and crumples the face.

  He tries to smile, watery-eyed, staring,

  between his grimaces. His cries come fast,

  a tiny bird’s trill. Breast milk his mother

  produces for him as the one true food,

  his mouth draws in and his digestive tract

  rejects as it drags him down its hooked path.

  The flesh nails him to nothing. Even now

  my father is here. I want this infant

  to fight my father for me. He knows it.

  Flesh I helped give him, essence I passed on

  to him, holds the father, anger riding

  in the ageless sperm. He is filtering

  through himself what I filtered through myself,

  forbears, human, animal, mineral,

  molecular, purifying it

  to spirit as he is able. Giving himself

  to the invisible. Anger in him.

  Anger in my father while he views me

  through the eye metal. My son howls, the howl

  owns his breath. I cradle him. He closes

  his eyes, his mouth set tight, while my father

  and my father’s father grimace and grit

  their teeth within him. He writhes, this small one,

  a question he asks returning to him

  as himself, all pulsing answer, question,

  beyond his comprehending. The body

  attempting to digest itself. Hunger

  in him instructs him to eat a god. Now

  he will turn it into a stink. The god

  will hurt him and he will fight it, sweet boy,

  six weeks old, toothless, the anger in him,

  the death in the gas, the death in the flesh,

  with the heaven in living flailing hands.

  Iron, a Summary

  Train-wheel iron ringing in the rain. Gulls and crows

  opening throats that utter their own metal on metal.

  Construction roar. Cranes, excavators and drills. Clouds,

  concentrated and low, flow with ore and alloy.

  The ringing floats up from the shore through the stillness

  in the chambers of the air between the raindrops

  to vibrate my daughter’s eardrums, to touch

  at her brow, her cheek, and the soft curls on her head.

  The black metal of the crows’ wing feathers

  brush against her within the ringing, the grey and white

  metal of the gulls’ wing feathers. The cries

  of the birds cross and echo between the inlet

&
nbsp; and the mountain. The sound of the train wheels

  on a long curve rolls through the bowels of the birds.

  The cold edge of the spinning playground ride

  scrapes and cuts my daughter’s lip in the morning

  in the lathe-cut air and she cries, and as soon forgets,

  and cries again to keep on playing. I’m making a train,

  she sings out later, one coloured block after another

  along the front room floor. With seats to sit on.

  Wheel after wheel continues grinding along rails.

  The wheels of this other iron turn and show

  the rainbows in black wings, the rush of creeks

  and waterfalls in grey and white wings. These wheels ring

  where the roads go through the insatiable

  deep gorge of the human heart from cruelty to mercy,

  through the shut furnace of the human face

  from jealousy to pity, through the iron of the human dress

  from secrecy to peace, and through a fiery forge

  from human terror to love. The three-year-old

  in brilliant boots splashes through and shatters the metal

  of puddles and traces her circle of laughter,

  desire clear and new and relentless as the sun and rain.

  The Praise Tree

  I

  Gusts run through the sapling and it shivers and sways,

  the leaves lift delicate green, glittering silver,

  settle shadow-dark, lift green and silver again,

  and the tree is an actress on a stage,

  swooning, flinging her hands to the sky. In this play

  the bodily motion is beyond measurement

  and the speech beyond hearing, it is all the tree’s

  single intricate electric charge and flow. The sorrow

  in this one in the lead role so full of finding,

  and of being found, the joy so full of searching,

  the leaves are castanets she clicks while wind

  undresses her of matter, dresses her in spirit, undresses

  and dresses her again many times every minute

  as in a wedding dance of the visible and invisible.

  II

  Because of a chance wind and chance open window

  near a well-travelled street, I have become an audience,

  the young actress is familiar to me, and the tall tree,

  I understand now, is the small potted tree that vanished

  from my grandmother’s room in the care centre