Washita

by Patrick Lane

  His wife and kids scraped by on welfare, cold nights and withered glass, waiting.

  I look out the window at the day coming on, grey clouds without end.

  Some mornings the maple leaves fall and my heart has no dignity.

  Some mornings there’s just too much rain.

  RYOANJI

  The path narrow at the corner and the old monk on his knees

  gathering pine needles in a willow basket, dew on the moss,

  the trace of the nun’s small shoes among the stones.

  She led me at first light past her meditation by the pond.

  When I was young I built a pool in the thin creek by my door.

  This morning I meet again the cougar at dawn,

  my hands cupped, water slipping like years through my fingers.

  The mountain had no name, the creek as well.

  We arrive as water does with no identity beyond light.

  It is rare to see the dew gathering itself on bamboo leaves.

  The turtles lie deep among the roots of the water lilies.

  A chickadee sips a drop of water from a pine needle

  and the nun lives in me still in the quiet I glimpsed, the heron by the pond,

  so many years ago now, her thin hand guiding me on the path,

  far from home, the poem not written until now.

  SABI

  A pheasant rises wild from the pea vines.

  A shadow settles in the maze of poverty grass.

  Home at last, I scrub my hands, the peasant’s song in me.

  Things move through things. My son’s first hands in air.

  Each time I see the crescent moon I see his small head crowning.

  The past declines.

  A pale cloth hangs between me and the sun.

  Years ago my mother strained blueberries through white muslin.

  I wore it over my childish face, a thin ghost laughing.

  Stained shroud, my skin streaked with berry blood.

  In the desert lichens eat my father’s stone at the speed of stars.

  We are of this world and no other.

  Crude and rough, my old eyes searching among the weeds.

  SANCTUARY

  I try to find sanctuary in the labyrinth of my mind.

  The word eludes me, ill lit in a dark tunnel of bone.

  My father’s headlamp hisses deep in the hard-rock mine.

  A child, I laid my head on his chest to hear the crystals sing.

  One search leads to another: my mother in the lamplight.

  The centuries are small as the pins in her sewing cushion.

  I took them out and pushed them slowly through my skin,

  my wrist bones fragile as a little clock.

  The drops grew like rubies, and once an artery, the blood a tiny fountain.

  Refuge, asylum.

  Which of the many seeds in my father’s body was I?

  I see the thousands of my dead brothers and sisters swarming.

  The chancel of her womb. Misplaced words, lost souls.

  When I am at last blind I will see her, clearly.

  1914.

  1939.

  She will tell me again we are harbingers of death.

  SCARIFY

  The welts he gave to his body when he wanted

  to feel something, his flesh rising white to the whip

  he made from the laces in his father’s boots.

  In the old books from the Empire, children

  wore on their faces designs beyond their skin.

  The girl’s wounds were pearls dribbled on her flesh.

  He dreamed her necklace scars on his tongue.

  I watch the old turtle dry her shell in the sun.

  Within her is the patience of old blood.

  In the lee of a dune a child rubs dust into a wound.

  This is my body, the boy says, touching the scar on his chest.

  O Lord, I knew that boy.

  Let someone hold him close.

  SCREE

  The broken stones are mountains in the ruts by the desert gate. Even so,

  the ant does not hesitate as it drags the butterfly over the high passes.

  SHELTER

  My friend before he died looked only to the wind.

  Near the end he lay down on straw in a rough-hewn house, the clutter gone.

  In the ditch black ants scurry among the bright feathers of a dying quail.

  They feast on the eggs of fleas, the unborn unable to shun the body.

  It was west of Moose Jaw where the rolling hills began. I remember now:

  white wood, pale sky, the shells of bark dry cups where the grass slept.

  The old barn in the shelterbelt was trying to lie down.

  SLACK BEAUTY

  Her silk stocking, the thin dress breathing as ash does when it falls.

  Salt on his tongue, the strand of hair wet below the lobe.

  The unheard, the ear of the sleeping cat turned toward quiet with intent.

  Three boots on the narrow shelf, the severed legs in the bin after.

  The bone man picking lice from the seams of his cap,

  a dry rain, the kind they call tears of dust in Blida,

  the refusal of despair even as the carrion crow calls the names.

  Those last nights, Camus writing: l’absence totale d’espoir.

  And the ninth bell in Hoko-ji, the one they let rest for fifty years,

  the bronze needing to learn sound before the carved log could strike it.

  As the emptiness poor men leave of their bodies in the ash of the beehive burner,

  the care they take at dawn to follow each inward step out so none will wake.

  Without wind, the gesture, as of a woman wanting to be seen, not easily, but well.

  SOFT AND MOIST, HARD AND DRY

  At seventy I followed my heart … the withered vines on the lattice

  shiver in the rain. That old man knew a thing or two about things.

  I am trying hard not to depend on letters. Throw this into the flames

  when you’re done. I read Confucius when I was young

  and couldn’t wait to get old. Green sticks bend easily in the wind.

  Sew, seam, suture, sutra, everything connects, a thread leading us on.

  It may be that the Minotaur was the silence at the end of a song.

  The young poets give up form before they’ve got it. They want to mean a thing.

  How sanctity gets lost in a scattering of straw. The germ is in the seed,

  saved for the season to come, the ritual of the virgin burying the grains in spring,

  a boy in autumn playing upon an oat-stem flute. Withered vines.

  The dry leaves scatter in the wind coming in off the sea.

  Amazed, I hang in this dark by a thread, listening.

  SOLACE

  What am I meant to miss, the long thread the swallows pull

  through the water when they drink on their wings?

  Is it the rattlesnake in her new skin in the sun, spring on the drifted rocks

  where the mountain flares her skirts above the buds of the paintbrush,

  the heat fooling the flower into a month of early frosts, too soon?

  Or the snake having come up from her winter den where she lay,

  her skin still damp, curled like gauze fallen from a wound

  around a flake of pine bark, the scant red turned pale

  enough to see through? What are my eyes now, kneeling by the bed

  in the sun, you sleeping, the flush above your wrist,

  the faint hairs worn thin by your golden bracelet,

  against your neck a jade earring dangling, closed now, seeing?

/>   Is it the chickadee with a pine seed under its claw

  chittering at me from a branch above my head? No,

  I am not there. That was years ago.

  I am not grieving as I watch the snake,

  the first of the long shadows touching her, retreat into the earth

  as the swallows slip from the lake, the water quiet, the cutthroats

  in the creek mouth feeding in the runoff come down from the hills.

  SOLSTICE COMING

  Typing with my left forefinger today. The poem is immensely slow,

  one letter, one word, one line at a time. This and then this and …

  amazing how the images slow to an intimate crawl,

  each word a salamander peering from beneath a stone.

  The fish this winter are wraiths, the pond’s perfect thoughts.

  I have tried to love this quiet as the hours pass through me.

  It is rare to feel anything deeply. My life is a feast if I allow it to be.

  The slow rain falls without cease. It eats the ice, one drop at a time.

  These days my body breaks down and I cannot lift my right arm.

  My poems now are thin as I was when I lived in the mountains.

  I tried to believe the lake when I came down from the high snows.

  I watched the water for a long time from the safety of the trees.

  It was a trout rising made me see what a day is, a ripple only.

  SUBMISSION

  It is not dark, just blurred, distorted by the retina rotting at the centre.

  Not yet, he said, sitting on the stage while a stranger read his poems.

  In wonder, his struggle in the dark, which it wasn’t, not yet.

  He thinks of Borges listening to a woman turn the pages

  and hears a hunchback in Paris cry out: Sanctuaire!

  Outside the swans pass against the last of sky.

  They sing of a salt marsh in Texas, warm water on their breasts.

  You will see the peripheral, the doctor said, the nurse smiling.

  Penumbra.

  Years ago he watched the moon blot out the sun,

  a terrible ring of light,

  the bats coming out into the uncertain cold, the new night,

  and the blind panic he understands now, in dark submission raging.

  SUNYATA

  My dead brother casts into the shadow of a pool on Six Mile Creek.

  A trout swims to his hook and I drown, thrashing in the air.

  SWARF

  My father pointed to the redtail on the yard pole.

  How beautiful my eyes among imagined feathers.

  My first teacher, young and gentle, told me I couldn’t see.

  That’s when the work began, one letter, one word at a time.

  The art of diminishing returns: a humble birth and then the dictionary.

  I sharpened my father’s axe head through years of fallen trees.

  Was I the blade or the stone?

  Going blind twice: this cup a private beauty, crazed lines.

  I sip my tea and stare into the net of things.

  Yesterday the sea lions fed on the herring shoal in the bay.

  Today gulls worry the corpses.

  A mother vomits into the scream of her young.

  I began blind. It will end so.

  Warp and weft.

  I have nothing left to offer but a worn Washita stone,

  wood and water in the ceremony of the dark.

  TEMPLATE

  As the mouse seems with its bundle of maggots to breathe.

  Rice grains among my fingers, tiny mouths suckling as their mothers cry.

  The belly is a cleft, the fur a desert, bared teeth, the eyes gone gaping.

  As the dead steer I saw as a boy in the blue bush hills.

  The stone I dropped into the moil.

  What is hell that I am drawn to that torn maw singing?

  The flies dreaming in the seethe, their blue bodies heavy with eggs.

  What choir keening cleans a world without a need for death?

  Those savage songs that call the angels to our rest.

  Where the mind goes when there is no way to find the way.

  The mouse sits in the cup of my hands.

  There is no music sweeter than dark mothers in the night.

  THE ECSTASY OF NO

  He told his wife he lived in the ecstasy of no

  and she told him to write that down. The last

  he saw was her going into the airport, brightly.

  Home, he digs at dawn in the garden, turning

  the old earth, giving its buried face to the sun.

  Around his neck is the new timer on a cord,

  the bread in the stove waiting for its ring.

  The noise reminds him he is old, the tic, tic, tic,

  an ant tap dancing on his chest.

  His wife is afraid he will burn the house down.

  Some days he wants to burn his new poems.

  He thinks he will return to the kitchen, and then

  tries to resist when the timer rings.

  In this he resembles the aging fighter who tries

  to avoid the blows by hanging onto the ropes.

  It is a terrible wanting, this being alive.

  THE POET, WANTING MORE

  It means little to me now, this confusion of poets, the everywhere of them.

  I think if I walked back into the blue bush country

  I would find one of the caves, the ones where I used to sit in the dark, waiting.

  It wasn’t hiding because there was no one looking for me.

  I was waiting. That was it, the hours in the dark.

  And then the coming out into the clear light of August

  to the blinding. That was the best part, the quick pain in the eyes

  and not closing them to what they couldn’t see.

  It is almost enough not to write anymore, the exceptional being

  the ones who watch, the ones who watch, carefully.

  If there is a metaphor it would be when I sat among the snakes

  in one of the old hibernacula in spring, the thickness of their bodies,

  the dense weight in my hands as I held one of the great fathers to my ear

  so I could listen to the whisper of his breathing.

  Like that, I think.

  But it’s not like that anymore.

  THE UNBEARABLE BEAUTY OF DESPAIR ALBERT CAMUS WROTE OF IN HIS LAST NIGHTS

  The song was of myself and beauty, paradise lost

  in the light slipping away from the east window,

  the sleep I had fallen into rousing me to wander

  into old shadows, the splash of the waterfall by the pond,

  the past, the crash of white water on broken stone

  in the gorge of Sheep Creek, and the well my father made

  so my mother wouldn’t have to climb up from the ravine

  with the buckets of water she needed to cook, to clean,

  to wash her dark hair, our hands, my father’s back

  as he leaned forward in the tub that sat on the floor

  he laid in that cabin just below the Kootenay Bell,

  the raw boards he nailed, the walls he raised,

  and the windows, their panes of glass scrubbed clean.

  I can see my mother’s hands lift from the water

  to scour the quartz crystals from the curve of his white back,

  her wishing she could wash from his lungs the crystals

  that were eating him alive, tiny quartz animals

  living inside the scars my father grew in his chest

  and the bullet that killed him before the silicosis cou
ld.

  And she was beautiful kneeling beside him

  and he was beautiful in his weariness, the water

  she carried up from the roaring creek

  and, hot from the wood stove, poured over his back.

  I was sleeping in the drawer she’d taken out of the bureau

  and placed behind the stove to keep me warm

  and though this is a story I have imagined again,

  one I have told over and over until it has become a song

  that has invaded me, the words repeating inside me,

  it is the first where I’ve placed my father

  in the corrugated iron washtub and my mother

  washing him, her hands on his heavy body,

  the whispers of quartz in his lungs, the war still to come,

  and the ragged melody I woke into, a vesper sparrow

  singing to himself among the laurel leaves at dawn.

  TRADITION

  They named the trees without asking the trees their names.

  The shame of my people is without beginning, without end.

  I tell you, the wren cannot be taught good manners,

  nor the hummingbird to fly, the robin to listen to the earth.

  Under the bridge on the Skeena

  baby swallows fall from their nests on ancient wings.

  Old boards are stacked upon old boards.

  There is no other way. By the glacial river

  I walked in the hollowed paw prints a grizzly bear left

  ten thousand years ago this morning.

  TREADLE

  Streams slow in the mind, under the clay banks, pockets of fat trout,

  browns and cutthroats in the late spring, their bellies thick.

  The smoke in water that is an otter at play.

  There was a man carried glass over these mountains on his back.

  The clarity of imperfections, ripples only a thumb could feel.

  The single pane I found unbroken in a cabin up Lost Line Creek.