though her description makes for a relatively short passage in the Life, she is,
aside from the saint himself or the guardian wolf,
wouldn’t you say, the most important figure in the story,
gathering the relics, ensuring Edmund his beatification.
In fact, does she not stalk the story, as she stalks us now?
Though hers is a relatively short passage in the Life, she is, she does, usually, overpower us a little.
Wouldn’t you say that the most important person in the story,
not because she appears, at first, as a marginal, (that’s so passé –
in fact, doesn’t she stalk the story, as she stalks us now?)
as a minor figure to be brought to the centre later,
usually does overpower us a little?
And that those widows and blind men who hallow the saints
not because they appear, at first, as marginals (that’s so passé),
occasion the miracles, soberly, and with love?
She is not some minor figure to be brought to the centre later.
She stalks the story as she stalks us now, a first state
of the many widows and blind men who hallow the saints
in the lives of the saints. In their anweald, they
occasion their miracles, soberly, and with love.
— 36 —
A BRIEF TOUR OF THE AVENUE
It is irritating. The roots of these black walnuts
devastate whatever else you plant in the ground
around them. Forget putting anything below.
Their shade, too, you can just as easily forget.
Sitting there in the cool will only send you
into the house with a headache. That is no old
wives’ tale. It’s true. Just coming within a few yards
of a black walnut tree (and we have this avenue)
can make you sing out for your bottle of pills.
I suppose we like them, then, for the shadows
they cast on the house or for how they make us go
around and about them to reach the front door.
We usually pass by the borders, the day lilies
or the vegetables instead, and all that error makes
for good conversation. I suppose we like it, too,
for the musty walnuts we gather here, occasionally.
As for these, there is very little getting at them.
Outpace the crows and the tree rats, catch
what has been dropped below before your head
starts reeling, and you are still faced with
drying them in the sun, and husking them, too,
maybe by running over their green bodies with
your car in reverse or by beating them hard
and rolling over them with a pin and board.
After that, you sort out the few whose shells
don’t appear worm-eaten and have your go.
There’s usually, you will find, a couple worth
the effort. And that is how you will remember them,
by the effort. No matter how long the fragrance
lingers on your palate, from the work alone, from
the getting, your hands will stay green for weeks.
— 37 —
THE COURSE OF THE RENOVATIONS
i.
Transformation ago
The Art Gallery of Ontario
Though there are hardly any signs of transformation, though
the few architectural plans posted on the pillar appear blurry
and suspicious, it is no matter. You are still on for renewal.
The renovations they are staking here are bound to shift your
notion of spectacle. And you plan to come again, some time
after the official gala, around noon or on the free nights
if they still have them (what with the expenses) to judge
the standards and the borrowed pieces, too. After being moved
into the expanded galleries, those paintings you know or knew
might even be said to move you differently, placed in more
challenging configurations and offset by the Thomson gifts
and the temporary loans. With the daylight or the free nights
spooning through the enlarged windows and the promised glass
roof, this all might even make the most substantial contribution
to Canadian oils and statuary since the artists first produced
the works themselves. You wonder if you might not just marvel,
in and among your standards, then, your Group of Sevens
and your Québec fires, your Inuit hunters, fishing or owling
fish, sometimes followed by fleets of kids in canoes, marvel,
even after the shine wears off and you grow accustomed
to the changes, if you do. Waiting for your eyes to adjust
to a certain night piece, that one oversized work in oils
(you always had to wait for it, if only to misconstrue) you
might just finally come to know the nature of the accident
that happened there, along the river, by the tracks, see why
the few remaining people can be seen running away on the tar
water, away from the scene or from the noisome maritime bleak
pressed in upon them there and licking at them from the sides.
Or you might improve just in reconsidering the plain
character of Varley’s kneeling girl, Dharana, once again.
— 38 —
ii. Renaissance rom
The Royal Ontario Museum
It is all thinking in general. The rust on the foundation
materials, the orange acid acting or reacting on
the surface of the steel pillars, fixes me. And I stop
to wonder if that rust will seep through the steel and mar
the whole extension to the side of the museum, that crystal,
eating at it from the roots, or if it is just the general nature
of these parts (of which I know very little) to look used
and worn even before their first propping up. It is all
thinking in general. The men in hard hats, hanging from thick
cords, saddle the pillars and weld the impossible angles
of the new addition. They are magnetic. As always, people want
to walk below and beside them. The crew has even cut holes
for windows in the wooden safety walls, to sate us all
from a safer distance. I am sure if any one of these work-
men whistled down to me, I would speed my way to him
(and you would, too), though they all appear too stuck
in their work to notice. When I pass again, as I manage
often in my excitement over the course of the renovations,
I think on their forebears setting the greater bridges
of the twentieth century, the ones, according to the social
histories, who lost or faced losing their families every day,
and in far more hazardous conditions than these. Thinking
modernity, for all that it improves, never does away with risk,
I tremble for these newer men now, too, as if I might be one
of their own relations and I feel I might experience a particular
kind of suffering should one of them falter, or fall near me
or in my own line of vision. But this is all thinking in general.
This far, there have been no serious accidents, no grave cases.
And that steel will hold for ages per the architect’s design,
despite the film of rust that can be seen along its sides.
— 39 —
THE WIFE OF PILATE
When he was set down on the judgment seat,
his wife sent unto him, saying, ‘Have thou nothing
to do with that just man: for I have suffered many
things t
his day in a dream because of him.’
– Matthew 27:19
From my husband, I learned a little something of duty,
and he caught something from me in return. A shock
of hair and feathers shuttled along the floor beside
our breakfast table yesterday as he spoke, still, low,
about his own, about the cleansing of hands, the newly
irrigated fields down the river, spread with dead or de-
programmed fish, and the new annex to the city,
a calendar of homes already sinking into the sand.
Perhaps out of duty, I wanted to see this place he knew
without having stepped a foot outside of the capital.
So I travelled the river, low at this time of year. My legs
spread apart, my skirts hitched around my waist and over
my shoulders so I could see my knees, I felt the grasses skin
my shins. I watched the fish succeeding me, arrowing ahead
and flashing behind like the coloured protons and neutrons
on the pages of our outdated textbooks, old drawings of the atom.
I waded long and never spied that city, only groups
of washerwomen or just their piles of rags
on the side of the water, drying in the sun,
suits of clothes torn up now for housecleaning
or to be made over for the poor. We’d never have this
at home. He never lets a thing run down so as
to divide it among his fellows, and I’m so experienced
now, I can’t escape his règles du jeu, or my own.
— 40 —
You’ll go and say it was a dream. I certainly wanted it to be one. As I was taking my rest under a lime tree,
preparing myself to come back here, disappointed
with the city that never materialized or had already
sunk (all of this probably suggesting he had a fancy
or at least business somewhere I knew little about)
I looked up at those branches – they offered some uncertain shade –
and spotted a hawk looming. What I would have given
to have been a kind of Leda then, for that bird
to have flown down and made a supper of me
or come all over my leg, lifting a cold god
from my thigh. And with my longing the bird
raised its wings on edge. But it was a hawk in wings
only that clambered down on top of me, a hawk
with the face of a man, the paws and tail of a lion
(or one of those cloned sheep) connecting himself to me
in a nauseous instant. And it wasn’t sex he’d come for
or anything like it, but a fight towards a death
of a sort I could barely master – his wings flashing,
his punishing my side with that tail that sent
cross charges circling around my stomach.
And despite his blue-eyed, swollen, pitiful look,
despite his eyes full of remorse, not for anything
he had done, though, perhaps for what I wanted, I hid
my fear and my own pity, and matched his stinging with my
fists and my unbolted knees until blood censored
from the holes where his feathers had stood –
glistening. In return he drew hold of me, blasting
my neck and my eye, using his tongue against me,
that short, barbed thing – another sort
— 41 —
of lash. It bristled me to the teeth. So we fought,
the ruddy afternoon, the night, one half day of nothing
I’d call paradise or even close, rolling, and pausing,
sometimes giving way for breath, but even then,
alert or at least allergic, combative. He’d be at his least
victorious when I’d levy away, when I showed signs
of giving over and sinking it all. ’Til, in an instant
(you might say, one of love), he loosened his grasp,
his tacking me down, and pled with me to bless him.
For all my bloody body I could not fathom
what it was he meant. Unless it had to do with
his eyes changing into screens, broadcasting
the skeleton of a new city, seven steel buildings,
standing and disappearing in an instant,
or the pictures in the thunder I made on his chest,
blueprints for what looked like a metropolis,
already dashed, sinking into his body or into the sand
around us. So I blessed him, as I do my husband
every morning at the sink in the rear of our house.
I drew water from the river, filling the crook
of his right shoulder, or where I imagined his shoulder
to be. Taking water from this makeshift hold,
I raised my middle and ring fingers to his forehead,
signing a figure eight – two scrolls. With this, he drew
his feathers from my hair, drew them across his face
and wept. I understand little of this whole scheme, except
I’m hardly bruised and I can hardly show for it. So,
when you go to my husband, down by the prison there,
notwithstanding his pride, tell him I’ve suffered
— 42 —
much over righteousness or some righteous person
today in a dream. And tell him that I’m standing
at the door of our house, or in the basement, anxiously
following the reports online, that I’m willing to welcome him
home in his urgency, when he returns, in spite of all this.
— 43 —
NOTES ON IMMIGRATION
Some voyages out, some immigrations have been fruitful,
curing or encouraging faith. When Scottish soldiers shook
their pillows and abandoned their ship mattresses, the heather
they used as ticking broke free and seeded itself over half
of Atlantic Canada, an unexpected comfort for the Scots
who settled there that comforts us today. Though many immigrants,
they say, behave differently here, especially in the less
temperate zones. They do not sink their taps into the soil,
as if for good. They only drop their seeds. A new plant
each year. You will see the son of the son, the annual,
but never, as the plants diversify, the father returning.
My husband writes about an art professor he knows
who spends his free hours shooting the non-native birds
that dare fly over his property. On the whole, this professor
remains a careful man. To minimize his taxes he has made
each room in his house appear, effectively, an artist’s space.
I imagine, though, one day, this doctor might succumb
to one of those accidents so frequently rendered
by Frost as typical of the agricultural scene.
For the most part, the famous become known
as spenders of nature. The kudzu, that vine
from the east, made its way to the American south
as a leaf on the shoe of a passenger on a trading vessel.
That leaf set out and swiftly strangled a little life
out of the woods, secluding the more secluded houses
in sheets and shingles of acid green. The zebra mussels
who stuck themselves to those spice boats, too, are now
sticking to our local water mains. This season, the Asian
longhorned beetle has cheated half of Toronto of its shade
trees, though those trees, themselves, were imports once.
Once, they robbed a slew of goldenrods of the sunlight
— 44 —
they needed to thrive. And now the yellow wisps,
the goldenrods that hold the eggs the crickets eat or set
>
upon them there so as to thrive are also less in number.
Now we will have to spend a stretch of time grieving
for the talking birds, the crested mynahs, brought
to Vancouver, once, by a bunch of entertaining salesmen.
Freed from the people who imported them there
where they never would have had the energy to fly,
the mynahs, those fantastic mimics, at once appeared
a relaxed species. They were one of the few kinds of birds
who did not seem to mind leaving their eggs unprotected
as they spanned out to forage for food. Today, as far
as the birders can tell, those fantastic creatures who once
startled you by calling out to you in your own voice
were out-competed by that menace, the starling.
I can understand why you might want to shoot those
manic competitors who took the mynah’s nests
as the mynahs themselves wandered lackadaisically,
I can see how you might want to take a couple
of starlings out in order to extend to them your grief.
The same might be said of certain people though,
so the urge needs minding. Whenever splendid rewards
are to be had, accolades, say, in the arts and sciences,
and certainly, in the reverse, in those times when threats
crop the general population, the general population tends
to look among the immigrants, in search of the next
potential star or perpetrator. They say you can usually find
the artist and the immigrant in the same or similar quarters
of the town. Those of us who claim to be both will have
to take particular care. They say, in our most beautiful
advances as in our terrible prognostications, it is the lot
— 45 —
of the artist as the immigrant, in body or in mind, never to fully adapt, not even out of love, but to be killed or,
as he or she finds it in their power, to kill and to consume.
— 46 —
A NEWER WILDERNESS
We are astonished with our capacity to alter
the world’s evolving, not only the damage
or salvation we wreak upon the environment,
but through this apparent meddling, the slight
yet substantial ways we modify language, law,
and human sympathy. A bottle dropped in the wilderness,
or into the sea, or an uncharacteristic clamour in a voice
that is just calling for another cold drink in all this humidity
thrill us with their potential for shifting
the nature of things, keep us contemplating
our inevitable decay, or worse, the decline of culture –
A Newer Wilderness Page 3