Washita

by Patrick Lane

  IKI

  And maybe it isn’t beauty he wants. Maybe he wants

  the feral dog draped in the ditch below Hartland dump

  to be a fur stole fallen from a bare shoulder and forgotten,

  a slim woman moving from the piano, every eye upon her

  in the Empress Theatre of sixty years ago. It’s a long way

  from Bette Davis to the vultures folding their wings

  in the oldest geier the world knows, their hunger spiral.

  Tearer, purifier. Or is affliction nearer to the truth of things?

  Are the birds that lumber awkwardly a pantomime

  as they lean to the flesh? Is All About Eve all about Eve?

  Bette Davis lived in my father’s eyes. My mother in the early photos

  wore the face and shoulders of a concubine, hard and cold and without pity.

  IMAGO

  We come from the sea of our mother’s salt blood,

  hang upside down from our father’s hands and weep.

  And what of the birds singing in the laurel,

  the brittle leaves enough to keep the cat at bay?

  Where does the butterfly sleep whose wings are glory?

  What wish has the fox who grins among the tall grasses,

  the bear dancing in the stream?

  Something tries to go dead in us all the time

  even as deep in the earth the cicada dreams its imago.

  INFORMIS

  In the gully an Indian boy plunged his hand into an ant mound for a dollar.

  I stood aside as the men from the highway crew watched his flesh

  become another thing, a red swarm screaming.

  Some days our bones shine through our skin,

  but such times are bitter music, their history best lost.

  We take away everything we can to keep the mystery intact.

  It is why in the morning I turn the porridge down to seethe.

  The woman who moved with me from motel to motel worked hard at her unhappiness.

  She told me it was all she could do not to place her face in the steam.

  There is a flawed beauty in that other world.

  You could spend a whole life trying to find the portal close at hand.

  The boy, the ants, and little shade on that stretch of highway north of Cache Creek.

  If you want a metaphor I could say she was a pine tree without a shadow.

  She was the quiet of the ewe in the paddock

  dying of the dead lambs inside her,

  grazing anyway at the scant desert grass after a night’s rare rain,

  the cactus gone mad in sudden glory blooming.

  IN SNOW WHEN CREATURES AWAKEN TO SUCH BEAUTY

  In the night tunnels, in the fallen grass laid waste by winter,

  a creature small and questing finds its way

  in the dark woven galleries of the dead.

  Kneeling in the drifts I see it pass below me

  in the labyrinthine galleries of snow.

  Once in ice I saw a fly dance as if in amber,

  a dark flaw caught by the moon, an infracted blaze,

  a wound made in some alien Baltic age, a violation

  beautiful as a shadow moving in the underworld,

  this winter, impossible and amazed.

  INCOHERENCE

  He squats in the sun, the koi breaching in the pond.

  Their golden backs break the waters. If he reaches out

  he can touch them a moment before they flee, a moment to return,

  mouths gaping as he thinks men drowning under ice must gape,

  their hunger for a sky gone cold.

  He knows the way out, but persists as Persephone did,

  promising the dead they will have the chance to die again.

  Far from the north the snowy owl waits on the fence by the airport.

  She starves perfectly.

  Inside her feathers there is nothing left but bones.

  INNOCENCE

  Delivered a baby girl one time in the North, a little one

  wet with her mother’s blood, the caul a veil.

  The baby wept when first she breathed the world.

  Secrets then were kept in silence, the young ones hidden away.

  The mother signed to me, mute girl, as her father raged.

  I tried to understand her hands, not knowing the sign for love.

  Three days later their battered trailer swung wide

  over the brown waters below Mad River bridge.

  Salmon red as tears swarmed among the dead in the shallows.

  A woman I know spoke to me once of the violence in my life.

  Your poems are the disfigurement of innocence, she said.

  I told her the mist above the river hid the mountains,

  that I tried not to think

  when I washed her blood away in the creek without a name.

  LICHEN WHITE

  Lichen white, she lies in a narrow bed,

  light among the icons and the glyphs.

  The coffin is small that homes a child to rest.

  Who placed her there bears her without weight.

  Still, he staggers as he weaves among the stones,

  his shoulders pale as a gossamer web at dawn.

  A chill surrounds him, down from the Monashee,

  the lines of the hills a wrong blue, the dry leaves breaking.

  A hard earth waits for a poor man’s shovel.

  Who buries his child walks now without bones,

  his flesh white as bled snow.

  LIMBO

  The red truck by the barn, rust on its fenders.

  Ice crystals grew there like forgotten cities,

  the windshield a broken star where a face found itself shining.

  Close your eyes. There are only the old answers.

  The antelope calf lay curled in snow, her black hooves crossed,

  her head blunt as the axe my father used to break dry willow.

  There are hearts that give off heat days after they stop beating.

  A scuff of snow where she stumbled in the cold.

  The North held me long before it let me go.

  There are these fragments: the little graves outside the cemetery fence past Rosetown.

  They buried the babies beyond the wire in limbo.

  Plastic flowers in the snow.

  There is a great fear in the world.

  Jesus, sweet Jesus, I know you’re not coming back.

  My mother told me there are children so fragile they exist only as angels.

  I swear it upon her eyes, those dark knots of blue.

  LISTEN

  A cougar drank at my creek, the two of us one thought.

  And the chocolate lily on the talus slope on the mountain.

  A frail beauty in the wind come off the snow.

  My hands pick cottonwood leaves from where the birds come to bathe.

  I try to remember:

  my brother’s last words, my father falling, a bullet in his heart.

  Listen. I am a cup dropped on stone.

  I lean forward because I almost have it and don’t.

  Do you know the wild horse poem?

  The sound of unshod hooves on desert grass, running?

  LITTLE HELL’S GATE

  Tonight I will dream the old darkness, content.

  I say blue and my teenage wife weeps over the kitten my father killed.

  I remember the petals of her blue dress around her thin legs, kneeling.

  The ice gives way at Little Hell’s Gate.

  Thunder on the river.

  How the world dies and dies when we are torn.

  There is nothing sweeter t
han loss.

  Such blessed imperfections.

  A girl on her knees holds a dead kitten.

  What break in us are rivers, the ice going out.

  MEDITATION IN THE BAY OF OTTERS

  The singing at night among the cedars after the drums,

  in the dark as all such voices are and so of loneliness and not

  the scream of the heron at dusk: not that misery.

  A wrenched solitude, like skin at dawn among the stones.

  The smell of burnt sawdust after rain, the chains in the mill quiet at last.

  You pause as the words veer down a narrow tunnel and you write:

  there was the woman who bared her breasts when you were twelve,

  delivering the paper to her each winter morning, her lost gesture,

  and now sixty years later trying to understand the contradictions of loneliness.

  The cup of thick cocoa, hot and steaming, she had made for you.

  You set the cup down carefully on the pine table, pale steam rising.

  I’m sorry, you said, your voice not yet broken, the changes still to come.

  Ah, but she is far away and surely dead,

  or nodding in some ward where men can’t hurt her anymore.

  Burnt sawdust is how you remember it, thin smoke, the unsteady wind,

  the drums still down the shore, and a woman in the utter dark.

  MERLIN

  All else rage, for my breath stopped at her cry,

  her spirit flown as one to the throne of otherness,

  where some god she alone knew needed her to die.

  MIDDEN

  The day comes crying like wet silk, slow,

  the burden of morning an old capacity resembling love.

  Oh, the decades keep me shining.

  I touch the broken words, the forms:

  clouds in the dawn, pale surprises.

  Blessings vanish, the snow falls fast.

  This is the ordinary light, a past so far back

  I can’t find the beginning in all its war and poverty.

  Death’s symmetry fills me with shells and skulls.

  Solitude, that simple anchoritic dance is not enough.

  I am lost in an imagined cemetery.

  I have brought out my dead.

  They stagger down the beach, a spare snow spilling from their eyes.

  MUJO

  You try to remember the last time you touched her.

  You look at hares coupling, the pureness of that,

  the buck falling away insensible,

  and the wail of the doe just before she licks herself.

  Or the eye of the hawk who died in your hands,

  somewhere her eggs cold among sticks and bark,

  the thrush who tried to lift his dead mate from the road.

  There is no word for the skin high up the inner thigh,

  for what lies beneath the lobe, the under wrist

  where veins and tendons grow in fragile sprawl.

  You say her skin was another texture, ice petals,

  her bones white willows moving inside snow,

  but that is like dragging a grey wing across cement.

  You lie in the dark, your cheeks dry.

  You know what her skin was, draped thin over bone.

  But there is no telling anyone. A thrush maybe, a hare,

  or a meadowhawk, that thin creature arranged on glass.

  MUTE SWANS

  And the departures: the mute swans flying out of the dawn,

  their pale wings against the moon and the false light broken.

  There are thin waves on the gravel, on the broken shells.

  Drums begin down the shore, the first people singing in the longhouse.

  I tell you I could fly when I was a child.

  I swear it on the clouds that carried me to the sea.

  But that time too is gone.

  The wind drives the white spirits into the trees.

  The stars swarm in terrible fires, in endless ice.

  There are no stories, but that I make them so.

  I am on my knees now translating the wedged language of the swans,

  the obsolete informing of their shadows on the snow.

  NO STARS, THE WIND OUT OF THE NORTH

  The blade found its way in the wood, my young body

  bringing the splitting axe down, the weight breaking

  the rounds of fir. A kind of longing, the groan of old wood,

  the fallen tree remembering its childhood below the cliff

  a hundred years ago, and winter hard around me.

  Each season has its song, the chainsaw’s scream, the wedge

  under the sledge, breaking through the knots

  where the limbs once grew, the hardness hidden

  in the heart. Ah, long ago, the thin light from the shed

  burning the snow, the split wood piling up around me,

  my young wife at the window folding diapers, her hot tears

  on the worn cotton, a child weeping, and the arc of

  the swing, my blade a bright star burying itself in wood.

  OFF VALPARAÍSO

  The whales and ships on the killing grounds off Valparaíso.

  The sails drawn and the whales at rest under the full moon,

  the waters turned by blood to rust in the pale light.

  Flayed bodies slide from the ships. The whales nose the carcasses,

  blunt heads still fleshed, the fat there thin and of no use.

  And the fires burn, the fat renders, the men circle the vats.

  How else but by the flensing knives huge as paddles,

  the blocks straining, at times a whale still breathing,

  its skin lifted away in strips, the sighs, huge and unimaginable.

  And my staring in the night at the slaughter, awake in the dark

  with a sorrow so great I wish to be dead that it torment me no more:

  the whales in the moonlight at rest after the long pursuit,

  the calves sinking to nurse in the deep, rising alone into their mothers’ blood.

  I see them in the light as if from the moon’s height, flying,

  as much gull as man, my shaman close to my wings.

  She tells me my tears are made from the ocean’s blood, old and old,

  and far, and far away the whales at sleepless rest, the day’s new hunt to come.

  I watch the fires, the ships, the men worn thin as they labour at their largesse,

  the sea a loneliness as lost as their shouts, the three-year voyage done,

  their dream of the bars at the foot of the funiculars where the whores wait,

  my sleep sundered, broken by the whales and the ships off Valparaiso.

  PARTITA IN A MINOR

  A flute perhaps, its virtue to be alone with the small bells in the pines.

  Lily stalks reflected in the framed glass of a picture of lily stalks.

  The mind moves much as a starving goat moves in a forgotten paddock.

  Desiccated leaves, the wind with its fine, clear rattle.

  And a woman in her kitchen dances with the ashes of her dead son.

  The privilege of despair, how it gathers her in as an oboe gathers the dawn.

  I imagine her steps as the kind I used to take among the rattlesnakes.

  The steps were simple and of a kind only the bereft ones know.

  I was so young then, practising what I would later know as love.

  Did I tell you to bring your flute when you come?

  Her bare feet on the tiles are the sound of brushes on old drums.

  POETS, TALKING

  I could wish poems happened more, but wanting them

  only l
eads to the impediment of desire and desire

  is never equal to the act. It’s much the same as looking back,

  expecting a story and finding the characters already dead.

  The surprise of that. How the past gets worn down by idle use.

  These days the poem comes much as the first bat does

  in the false dawn, its flight the mental stumble that I love.

  I have my hungers even as they elude me.

  Things are so simple, a bat, and the consequent moth

  I create to keep my world whole a little longer.

  The poems come to me now as occasions, the good ones rarely.

  The moth, its wings so white they startle me, escapes.

  For the moment. I watch the violence of the dance,

  the bat, and the moth too, veering.

  QU’APPELLE HILLS

  A child dances in the hills to a bone flute.

  He is the sound of antelopes breathing.

  Behind his eyes are many years of dust.

  Come and listen. He is here only for you.

  RUST AND WORN EDGES

  I woke up on Six Mile Creek, a willow grouse falling from the sky.

  I baked her, wrapped in clay, in the coals of a long fire,

  wisps in the pines, the smoke waiting for the moon.

  My brother had fished the pools all day and come back empty.

  He sat by the fire stones, lying about the rainbow that got away,

  a blanket wrapped around thin shoulders, damp coals in his eyes.

  The good days and nights before his death, before it all ended.

  I was trying then to live a life without artifice.

  That I failed did not diminish my reverence for things.

  Those many weeks I disappeared into the blue bush country.

  I offered my brother the breast meat, a chunk of fry bread.

  He took them gladly, telling me how he was going to run away to the city. Again.