as in that Bradbury story, in which a man,
returning from a dinosaur hunt, exits the time-
travel office to find his world altered,
because at one point on his hunt, he stepped
off of the path and a butterfly stuck to his shoe,
almost dead, writhing. Reading this,
we are thrilled to parse out our ascendancy
over this fool of a man who paid to see and shoot
a dying animal. Then there is that shock
in our discovering that his slightest movement
from the pathway really did astonish the elements,
though not the landscape or the course of the weather,
but certain habits, or habits that once seemed certain
though they never really could have been: that man’s
own reading, writing, spelling, his speaking with a tickle
in his throat, his kind of attitude. It is true enough,
but not entirely true, that we transform this earth,
some by pummelling, and some as willing to save seed,
and that our physical and intellectual habits are hardly
immune to this taking from or drawing into
the finest greenery. Still, our hold on decay is hardly
in dominion. As if the sunlight flashing on the egg
— 47 —
of an unconscious spider won’t, alone, awake
a new poison in all its perfusion, as if Nature
or Nature’s God, with all of these fribbling atoms,
does not recreate a newer wilderness in us
and in our languages before we have roused
ourselves to damn and hail our sway.
— 48 —
II
KENOTAPHION
Time’s the king of men,
He’s both their parent, and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave.
– Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre, II.iii
i.
arrived at ephesus
Pericles III.ii
That this tar-heavy coffin and this woman’s body,
dead from its own labour, could be so heavy
and yet still float. That the ocean would forfeit
this guerdon – those gems still startling through
her closed lids, the epitaph, a scroll
fitted into her clenched fist, that fist
poised to endure – rather than drowning her
and winning her over for a constancy,
for good. Bury this woman, dead in child-
birth. We couldn’t keep her body and the boat
in the storm. Also consider her husband’s
loss, or the grief of her father, and be kind.
If the ocean had only considered the misery
of a Pericles, taking a wife in its vast body,
in kind, she might have remained unconscious,
dead for once and for certain. Or at least,
in that airtight box, in and upon the water,
she might have woken to remember the birth
some hours previous, the infant body she yielded
only to the air and to its own patience. And surely,
if not with fondness then with very little spite,
she should have died again, forever, and for good.
But see how the ocean’s thrown her up, become
an empty grave for all its spreading. Nothing
— 51 —
left now but to wake her, brush the fillet of gold
already breaking from her unstrangled lashes.
What a relief, if she immediately stood
and delivered herself to the temple here.
What a relief, if she were to up and propose
herself certain and celibate for the local deity –
for how can we suggest to this woman, belched up
from an unwilling ocean, suddenly awake,
that if she chooses to rest again, to return
to sleep as a means of recovery or to express
an immediate sense of mourning, she might very well die,
for sure and forever, right here, and in front of us?
— 52 —
ii. herald
Matthew 28:1-7
Here’s some angel, pectoral muscles
the size of human heads, lumbering up
the side of the hill, making heavy of it.
Here’s a body Blake would have died for,
would have etched over and again to underscore
our own very diminutive nature
and all our wants, blue veins writhing.
Here he is apologizing as he bows,
making himself known to the gardeners
and the guards who scatter or are levelled
by the land, shaking. Here he is, struggling
to bend low enough to loosen the stone
that covers the tomb, then sitting on
that stone, cross-legged, mindful of himself.
You would think that with this kind
of a body, it would be easier to battle
some grotesque allegory of sin, any one
of our moderns, monstrous, conspiratorial,
than to lie in wait for two grieving
women, widows of a sort. Some mechanic
battle seems easy compared to this stopping
for two Marys come looking only for what’s haggard
and broken here. For two Marys who have imagined
only the comfort and salve they might bring
to one failed body, on this of all mornings,
to be greeted by a mammoth! Save some
— 53 —
sympathy, then, for the mammoth who sits
making the tomb look smaller, this bulk
by his looks alone, come to tell these women
there’s no body in the tomb, suggest to them
even, that it’s risen, awake. For a moment, then,
pity the brute who must shock the women,
making them acknowledge their capacity
for felicity in the presence of a grief not
easily fathomed, though it continues to return.
— 54 —
iii. aubade
Tobit 7-9
Before you woke, I went to pray at the window
almost as usual: Take me out of this earth,
I still hear their reproaches. Except the smell
of burnt fish roused me out of it. I stopped
to watch my father in the field beside the house
with his buddies from the town, filling in
the grave they dug in the night. He was drunk.
He kept climbing in and out of the hole
waving a piece of parchment paper, our
marriage license. Once, he lay flat in the grave.
Then he rose into a sitting position, hallooing.
The men roared and then took turns pushing
him in and pulling him out again.
They had loosed the goats, too. They milled
around, disoriented, near the graves
of the seven husbands I already buried.
Once they’d mated, multiplied, but at some
point, they’d all become of one age, too old
to bear or to be eaten. The goats that morning
seemed particularly hungry, starved, nipping
at the heels of the men who stood on
the furthest edges of my father’s posse.
The goats looked as if they, too, had been up
half of the night, minding the diggers
as they handled their shovels, waiting
for one of the women to shriek.
Far away from the others, near a woodpile,
your cousin Azarias, that hulk who looked
— 55 —
nothing like the rest of your family (has he ever
resurfaced?) bent over to gather four fingers full<
br />
of mud. He smeared his cheeks with the stuff.
No one called to him. He was not recognized,
nor did he want to be seen. Though later, during
the wedding breakfast, he’d claim that overnight
he destroyed something sinister, some demon
foreigner – so you would not die like the others,
so this marriage might take. I still don’t believe him.
None of those other deaths resulted from some spirit’s
conniving, nor is your living that kind of miracle.
Downstairs, something broke, a plate, maybe,
or a bottle of wine. I could hear the women circling,
irritating each other with all of their attempts
to keep silent, fumbling with their kitchen tools.
How they must have counted on it being spoiled.
Hadn’t they grown used to these breakfasts as wakes?
But parts slid together. My father shrieked his last
halloo, climbing out of the hole with his shovel.
The goats ran like kids into the hills, bleating.
I heard Azarias lumber into the kitchen, encouraging
the women to clean him up, giving them some purpose.
And your little dog leapt to my ankles, cowering,
as if he, too, knew what was going to happen,
that we would be spied, against the window, by a deep-
breathing man collecting his first full wash of sun.
— 56 —
iv. sweet spices
Mark 16:1-4
Why couldn’t this have been more slapstick?
Three hefty women carrying their equal weight
in groceries and linens shoved up against
their breasts or slung over their shoulders,
three horse-strong women barking at each other
about how heavy the door over there is, and who’s
going to bother to open it once they get to the house.
You’d see Mary, sunburnt, carting a tub of aloe
on her left shoulder, fixing a braid with her free
hand, saying, no, not me, as she shoo-shoos
a pigeon from the sidewalk in front of her, then James’
mother, the little Mary, almost upending herself
as she bends over to swat at the first Mary’s pant-
leg, saying, I’m not touching that door. She’s trying
to remove a leaf that’s caught on the ankle, swatting
at it with her box, a box half the size of her own body.
The leaf’s still sticking as big Mary walks, and the spices
in the little one’s box, cinnamon and cassia, keep slipping
out at the sides, followed, sometimes, by larger,
gummed-up pellets of myrrh. For a moment, it looks
like little Mary’s shaking her spices out purposefully
over the sidewalk, as you’d mill icing sugar over
the top of a cake for decoration. Salome, swaggering,
brings up the rear, thinking the spices smell sweeter
in the outdoors. She remembers a story about a queen
who had herself embalmed in cinnamon when she died.
How she made the whole town cover their bodies and blanket
their walks in layers of spice. How they kept it up for years
— 57 —
after her passing, a sign of honour. They say the demand for cinnamon opened up trade routes there. So Salome’s fagged
out, too busy rooting her nose in her basket of linens,
thinking tonight’s the night she might finally play sweet
in bed, play dead to make him think she’s winsome.
Wouldn’t it be better if the butt of this whole thing
was that those women were able, even with all
of their packages, to open that door, but that they
were just too lazy? With all this, wouldn’t it be
sweeter, then, for them to find the door already
open when they got there, to watch them drop
their heavy parcels, maybe knocking each other over,
before they entered the house, rearmed with pots
and rolling pins, ready to attack the robbers?
— 58 —
v.
prayer to a heroine of romance for a better memory
Pericles IV.i
Having been nursed on stories of your birth seems
to have increased your capacity to remember,
keeps the knives recoiling from your white
throat, the throat of a paragon, a throat that continues
to release songbirds in its turn. Some other
heroines go as far as to remember the formation
of the stars or the kind and colour of the flowers
that bloomed the morning of their birth. With these
odd snatches of history, told to them by their nannies
or nurses, the accomplished save themselves
from spinsterhood, retrieving the men they’ve lost
to clowns, female ambassadors, or demanding
fathers. But you’re tops with this phenomenon.
Why ask anyone else?
Nothing escaped your nurse, and you can tell
the wind was north when your mother died.
The night of your birth, your father cried, good
seamen, clung tight to the mast like a toddler
to a mother’s skirts, clung to the mast with a king’s
hands because that tempest had already been fed
your mother’s body. You tell and even repeat
to yourself how your father stood on a deck half-
bursting with ocean. And it does not escape you to herald
what the canvas climbers said or how they whistled
down to match the water’s confusion.
If you hadn’t
been taken off the morning Leonine moved
to trace an artery in your neck, your memory
— 59 —
would have saved you anyway. When he asked you
to pray your last, you did not say you could not
remember doing any harm but that you could recall –
clearly, you’d never spoken a harsh word, never crushed
a mouse. And this was true, this carefully netted
register of your faultlessness – sweet enough
to save you. Or if it was not, quite, your reminding
Leonine he had a gentle heart would have kept him
from harming you, even if the pirates had not seen
you standing there, rapt, and taken you off.
Good Marina, despite the fact that I have
parents living, and close by, despite the fact
that despite their living, I still do not know the story
of my birth, not even the hour I was born – in my
recounting all of this, in my coming to terms here
with what is yours, grant me half as good a memory,
so I might escape this dying, too, a while longer.
— 60 —
vi. old road
Luke 24:1-12
It was lumber, their treading,
no one looking up or over
at the sides, or if they looked,
all glazed and passive stares.
The women paced slow enough
but were far too interested
in their own conversation
to witness much, dropping
half of their supplies along
the way. They never saw
how their aloe and myrrh,
fallen, served to plug up
the wider crevices struck
into the path. Nor could they
mark it, running back
with unbelieving looks,
their eyes knocked open
but only giving out, not taking
in the scene. Not soon enough,
a single man sp
ed by, almost
at a guilty pace, making for
the place where the women
were frightened. Was it that
he did not believe the story
they came to tell with their
shocked faces, or did he want
to see that kind of absence
for himself? In any case,
consider it only another
instance of the old denial.
— 61 —
It is an old complaint,
but I will make it anyway.
Had they looked up, or down,
or to the sides at any moment,
they would have known some-
thing or someone had come up.
Had they noted the ground here
was thick in places, broken
in others, that the palms bent
so low you might consider
climbing into one and being
catapulted across the city,
had they noted the wind
blew against the normal,
or that the sun, shaving off
the ridge like that suggested
more of an evening than day-
break, they would have saved
themselves too much amazement
and merely been amazed, they
would have saved themselves
some heavy time and a little
more perdition.
— 62 —
vii. eye of tobit
Tobit 11:7-15
In his basement, this genius of a kid
has rigged up a Museum of the Apocrypha
for Halloween. There’s Holofernes’ Head
hanging on the wall, looking as if it’s
only just been cut off. And there’s the Eye
of Tobit, moulded in plastic and set
in a coffin built to suit. Masterful,
the things kids create, though they don’t know it.
That’s what we say, but they’re always aware.
Proud, the kid squirts paste on the eye he’s made
(a freckle rimming the iris, just like
his dad’s) to fake glaucoma. Then, magic.
He waves his rubber fish above the eye
and wipes off the gall so it can be seen again.
— 63 —
vii. in the garden
John 20:14-17
You would not believe it was his daughter
either, if you sat with her as he sat through
the mandatories and the electives, if you
had watched her come out of the convent,
(their play on l’hôpital or l’hôtel dieu)
wrapped in linens, almost gone. You
would say it was some other child,
snatched, or kidnapped maybe for her looks,
brought in to replace the daughter or to atone,
milling in and out of the rose bushes there,
commenting that the roses he’d planted
at his daughter’s birth smelled like cinnamon
A Newer Wilderness Page 4