by Patrick Lane
Promises get lost. They are like paper scraps wedged in old bark.
How young I was to think I could remember everything:
a rusted old Singer sewing machine under a deserted cabin window.
Oiled paper gave light as if from drenched fire, yellow smoke.
But there are men who will do anything for a woman who wants to see forever.
The light still pours into my eyes through her glass window.
I can see her now watching him come up the trail from the creek.
He is holding a string of trout, browns and cutthroats.
He tells her he left a single fish on the stepping stone for the otter.
In the little sewing machine drawer was the nest of a white-footed mouse.
Her babies were tiny pink thumbs, blind as dreams.
UGUISUBARI
My hand on the winter bamboo.
The leaves are the sound of dry bones clashing under boots.
Walk the old way, every clod of earth holds blood.
Stillness of water, stillness of poetry.
The thief ant floats on its leaf toward paradise.
A shadow leaves its shadow on the earth.
Bamboo on bamboo, a leaf, a thought.
How we are of this world, this portal to yugen.
The cat places his paw on the corpse of a hermit warbler.
He lifts his head and asks me where I am.
Here, I say, here.
Yes and no.
The old artisan studied for years to make a nightingale floor.
WAR
My mother held her hand above the kettle boiling on the stove.
The steam surrounded her in the way a mist does
when a grouse flies into it, leaving only the flight song of wings.
My father walked away into the night.
Everything he left was quiet then, my brothers at the table
holding spoons to their red lips, and me
crouched behind the wood stove holding my breath, waiting
for whatever was going to happen,
the kettle screaming, and mother not moving, again.
WARBLER
I hold in my hands her yellow wings.
They are what bamboo leaves offer to the rake.
The tiny knuckles of her claws grip nothing.
They are the hands of my mother on her deathbed.
I place her beside the stupa of the fallen daisy,
cover her with a robe of white petals.
There are restraints and they are without fault.
The spirit leaves us slowly, forever.
It is the waiting I try to understand, the quietness of that.
WISHING NOT TO BE ALOOF LIKE STONE
I prayed for the doe this morning,
the other world come alive again in me, old songs and soft birds.
Like you I have carried the sorrows.
They are as small now as a koan carved on a grain of rice.
This morning I looked into the bronze mirror and found still water,
my face almost young again as I lifted her head,
cut her warm throat under the apple tree,
the blood flowing across my wrist.
GLOSSARY
“Ars Poetica”
after Czeslaw Milosz’s poem, “Should, Should Not”
“Assiniboine”
title refers to a river in the southern prairie of Saskatchewan and Manitoba
“Barranquilla”
title refers to a city in southwest Colombia
Compadres (Spanish), companions
Vete a la mierda, hijo de puta (Spanish), “Eat shit, you sonofabitch”
Hermoso, sí (Spanish), “Beautiful, yes”
“Bokuseki”
title from the Japanese seki, traces, and boku, ink; early Zen writings
“Bonsai”
title from the Japanese bonsai, tray planting
epigraph from The Analects of Confucius, Book III, Chapter XVII: “Ts’ze-kung wished to do away with the offering of sheep for sacrifice connected with the inauguration of the first day of the month.”
“Bya Jhator”
title refers to sky burial, a Tibetan funerary practice in which the corpse is left out for vultures
“volt” is a collective noun for a gathering of vultures
“Calligraphy”
Basho, our cat, is named for Matsuo Basho (1644–94), a great poet of the Edo period in Japan
“Cowichan Valley Poem”
dedicated to Richard Osler
“Eli, Eli”
eli (Hebrew), ascent
“Hiragana”
Hiragana are feminine brushstrokes in Japanese calligraphy, originally on’na de
“Iki”
iki (Japanese), blunt, unwavering directness
Bette Davis (1908–89), American movie star
All About Eve, 1950 movie drama
“Incoherence”
Persephone is the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology
“Innocence”
“Your poems are the disfigurement of innocence,” a remark made by the poet, Sharon Thesen, for which I am grateful
“Limbo”
in Christian theology, limbo is the abode after death of the souls of unbaptized infants
“Little Hell’s Gate”
title refers to a dog-leg narrowing of the North Thompson River canyon
“Merlin”
title refers to a small, pugnacious falcon, Falco columbarius
“Mujo”
mujo (Japanese), impermanence
Red-veined meadowhawk, Sympetrum madidum, dragonfly
“Off Valparaíso”
title refers to a port city of Chile
“Partita in A Minor”
title refers to a piece of music in four movements for solo flute by Johann Sebastian Bach
dedicated to Martha Royea
“Qu’Appelle Hills”
title refers to the region of the Qu’Appelle River and valley in southern Saskatchewan. The name is a corruption of a French phrase, qui appelle? (who calls?)
“Ryoanji”
Ryoanji is a dry landscape (Karesansui) rock garden created in Kyoto, Japan, during the fifteenth century
“Sabi”
sabi (Japanese), the beauty and serenity that comes with age
“Scree”
title refers to broken rock fragments at the base of mountain crags
“Slack Beauty”
title phrase is from the text of an essay by the American poet, Jack Gilbert
Blida, a city in Algeria
Carrion crow, Corvus corone, a native crow of North Africa
Albert Camus wrote of l’absence totale d’espoir (French), the total absence of hope
Hoko-ji, a temple in Kyoto, Japan, containing the bonsho bell commissioned by Toyotomi Hideyori, last of a series of nine bells cast in August 1612
“Soft and Moist, Hard and Dry”
“At seventy I followed my heart,” from The Analects of Confucius
“Sunyata”
sunyata (Japanese), emptiness
“Swarf”
swarf is grit from grinding metal or dust from sawing wood
the Washita is a sharpening stone fashioned out of white quartz rock from the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas
“Uguisubari”
uguisubari (Japanese), the ‘nightingale floor’ designed to make chirping noises when walked upon to warn inhabitants of anyone approaching
&n
bsp; yugen (Japanese), the depth of the world we live in, subtle, mysterious
“Wishing Not to Be Aloof Like Stone”
title is a paraphrase of the last line from Book I, Section XXXIX, of the Tao te Ching
AFTERWORD
I’ve been a right-handed, one-finger typist for the fifty-five years of my writing life, many short stories, three failed novels, a memoir, a completed novel, and many books of poetry. It was after the novel, Red Dog, Red Dog, was published that I began the second of what I imagined would be a trilogy. One hundred and seventy pages into that next novel my right shoulder froze and I was unable to lift my arm to type. After several crippled weeks I tried to work on a poem. Unable to use my right arm, hand, and forefinger, I used my left, but discovered that the right side of my brain did not know where the lettered keys were. The process of typing became excruciatingly slow, each key having to be searched for visually before I could type a letter and then finish a word. A word such as The came very slowly, a T and an h and then an e … the word, The, safely there and then the relief of the space bar. In the time it took to accomplish the typing that simple article I had discarded numerous adjectives and numberless nouns, my mind reeling at the possibilities language offered in the time between letters. The majority of the poems in this collection are the result of that discovery. The process of writing each poem was exquisite, each letter, each word, and each line meditations rare and beautiful. My imagination became an eddy in a meadow creek, a thin trout in turning water. Each letter was a dry fir needle circling above slow brown fins.
In this late time of my life I am in debt to many people. You know who you are. My gratitude to you all. You have blessed my life with your presence. I name here only my companion, Lorna Crozier, wife, lover, and friend. She is my one, my private beauty.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada’s finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House, with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of eleven. He is an Officer of The Order of Canada and has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General’s Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.