Sunday, May 27, 2007
21 More Canadian Poems
"Waterfront"
The women's bodies lying in the sand are curved like shells.
The men can't take their eyes off them.
The seawater spangles like a drink of champagne,
but the fishermen don't see it that way,
they have their clothes on, they don't care about girls.
The only care about fish. They yell to one another down the beach
as if this were their ocean. Meanwhile,
ignorant, the smelts plod into the nets.
Seated on benches, middle-aged women
in magenta travel dresses, going nowhere,
dressed too warmly for the weather,
delve into the sunlight with their eyes closed and pretend
they are dissolving, like a tablet in water.
Only the babies pushed along in carriages
seem to enjoy themselves, twisting their faces
into vast expressions. Their skin
is still translucent. They haven't yet finished
materializing into the world.
--Roo Borson
***
"Demon Pond"
You step into the crucible,
the philosophical egg, vessel
of the sun and moon. the surface
of this liquid
intersects your thigh
like a bracelet
of exaltation. Matter itself
ringing out a single
clear note.
You step into the water,
indigenous, exquisite.
Your quick grace alive
wire, eerie where I falter
in sweet sickness.
Stirring up the creams
at the bottom of the pond.
Every gesture, the most incidental
of your movements is slender,
candid. You are perfection
doubled back on itself,
standing before me in this
labyrinthine night forest,
a cool autumn mist
over the water.
Our union is a confederacy
outside the common world.
Each other the most remarkable
being we've ever met, adored
by the adored.
The one for whom
we had abandoned hope
years before.
My mind goes anywhere
my hands and mouth travel
weightless and eager
over your radiant flesh.
Snakes aroused by humans coupling
and hallucinations of unearthly paradise
rise like ghostly moths
to the light we burn by.
Hosts of invisible beings
lap at the fiery column
that is us. Flesh a distraction
on our way to a deeper union.
Your love, your body
the knife that cut me
open to my bliss.
--Christopher Dewdney
***
"Found in a sock Monkey Kit"
Sometimes making is play, only that. I've not been
made yet, but will be, and when willed
into my bean-baggish zen loll
\
might wish for you nights of no nightmare,
layabouts with or without some other
when words are your mind's lit
carousel, monkey bars, or gravel pit, not the spiral
jetty you like to make of it. We pretended
affection each for the other, then
wrecked the furniture, is what we'll say when
they ask how we spent the duration. single
man and his simian right hand, memento
origo, minister of the bemused stare. Lean me
against the neck of the reading lamp: sleep,
farts, fucks, illnesses, and idleness, I'm I
through and through, function removed from the feet
and become face with a grin and stillness,
form that gives if you hold it when there's only you.
--Ken Babstock
***
"Fishhawks"
my son stands in waist-high water
the salt reddens his skin
out of his face spring wiry hairs
thickening to a beard
his arms have become wide and heavy
he splices rope
smells of the tar that blackens his fingers
he has learned to make his living from the sea
(the huge shadow of a bird
darkens the sand around us
I speak, say to you look
at that rare creature
an osprey)
further out from the shore
your daughter is a rock
jutting from the waves
she is rounded and hollow
within her is a sea-cave
her face is a pearly shell
a shining operculum
stoppers up her mouth
her singing is muffled, a murmur
the boy smiles
his semen darts out of him
a shoal of swift fishes
entering her secret place
he stretches out his finger
flicks away the shell plug from her mouth
so that she may cry out
you look at me, say
this has all happened far too quickly
we wade out -- I say:
there is just time for us to bless them
but in that glance they have crossed the horizon
are washed away out of our sight
we two return to the beach
the salt water drips from us
making the dull shingles glisten
our wet clothes cling to our legs
behind us the sun is clouded
the sea is cold not splendid
I am a widow I tell you
but we are just strangers you reply
out there where the great bird hovers
mantling preparing to spiral
there is faint wailing
--Anne Szumigalski
***
"Slicing Oranges in Kim's Kitchen"
Each bright orange disk spins, a slow wheel,
not here in my hand only, but in our one
mind's eye. Just think of that mind's eye.
What colour is it? Blue as our planet? And
how does it see? What agile mechanics
carries sight into the mind, still, after all
our thinking, undefined? I think of you and
how we talked, words slipping between
words, standing slicing oranges in your
kitchen; an easy task. An idea from a magazine,
the simplest salad you had ever seen
now spreading in circles, circle upon circle,
plain and sweet and pleasing. And the
conversation, also circling and returning
to children, love and growing old. Nothing
but the ordinary things somehow made
over into suns and galaxies and all creation
whirling ecstasy as we cut the spitting peel
from diminishing fruit, sink knives into the pale
white orbs, slice, flick out sprouting seeds,
and lay out bright slices in concentric rows.
--Diana Brebner
***
"Flower Bulbs"
Most men give flowers in their full leaves,
But I give you flowers still in seed:
These flowers you see are each one wrapped
In the womb, still concentrated in sap.
Think, what I lay on your fearless palm!
A universe compacted to a seeming chaos,
A wary cell waiting to split its tomb
In birth, when the soon-rampant seed explodes.
Yet we generate such, and once were seeds:
Have blossomed once like flowers inside a girl;
Now sit with hanging hands and open eyes,
Nourished by, not knowing, the objective world.
And this which is closed to younger eyes
Only loving you could have opened to me.
I have walked by many a garden in a room
And passed by many a precipice being blind.
Yet love may tell one who grows a plant
How a miraculous ignorance surrounds
Each living thing -- and it still be
Perfect and wise, when these plant leaves appear
Like days unfolding in the calendar,
Will watch the flowers sent out in shoots
Andlove grow out of his mysterious roots.
--Louis Dudek
***
"Poor Bird"
. . . looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
--"Sandpiper," Elizabeth Bishop
From birth, from the first astonishing moment
when he pecked his way out of the shell, pure fluff,
he was looking for something -- warmth, food, love
or light, or darkness -- we are all the same stuff,
all have the same needs: to be one of the flock
or to stand apart, a singular fledgling.
So the search began -- the endless search
that leads him onward -- a vocation
year in, year out, morning to evening
looking for something, something, something.
Nothing will stop him. although distracted
by nest-building, eggs, high winds, high tides,
and too short a lifespan for him to plan
an intelligent search -- still, on he goes
with his delicate legs and spillikin feet
and the wish to know what he's almost guessed.
Can't leave it alone, that stretch of sand.
Thinks himself Seurat (pointilliste)
or a molecular physicist.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
And just because he has not yet found
what he doesn't know he is searching for
is not a sign he's off the track.
His track in the sedge, the sand, the suck
of the undertow, the line of shells.
Nor would he have it another way.
And yet -- the nag -- is there something else?
Something more, perhaps, or something less.
And though he examine them, day after day
the millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray.
But occasionally, when he least expects it,
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
like a work of art across his sight
reminds him of something he doesn't know
that he has been seeking his whole long life --
some that may not even exist!
Poor bird, indeed! Poor dazed creature!
Yet when his ey is sharp and sideways seeing
oh, then the quotidian unexceptional sand is
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
--P. K. Page
***
"Praise"
I come back to praise, the hummingbird in the rain,
that single knot of colour among the dying
blooms of the geranium, another kind of day.
It reminds me of what I saw this morning,
a woman leaning out a window, naked, her breast
no longer young, slack with the loss that come
from a child's suckling. she was staring down
into the flowers she had planted in the window box,
blue lobelia swaying like a kind of sky,
geraniums, the weight of their blooms, like fists
of men who fought with their hands bare,
knuckles rich with blood. She
did not know I was watching, or if she knew,
didn't care. what she wanted was another
kind of praise, the kind where, if she arranged it,
could make the flowers in her mind alive,
like the ones she saw when she was just a girl
and the whole world heat and waiting.
I thought in the thin shade how, if we were lovers,
her breasts might rest upon my palms
or in my mouth, those nipples on my tongue
and feeding there as she leaned and stared
past me at the light in the window and the flowers.
All this, and the hummingbird, the flare
of his feathers vibrating there, his body
bringing back to me her flesh, his tongue
deep in the blossom, that fierce honey
I want to praise, crying out as I do
in the thing I have called memory and trying
to remember, the rain all around me.
--Patrick Lane
***
"Dear Heart"
Rustbucket, little four-popper.
I've seen more of the surface of Mars
than of you, ultrasound shadow.
How you lay me low! Size of a fist
and the rest of me a fat glass jaw.
I get reports through the wire of veins.
Your rabbit punches, feints and jabs. I log
each personal best and sleep
like a swan with an ear to my chest.
You are the first thing I ever built,
darfty and cold despite blood's small suns.
Your joinery came out wrong.
Sweetmeat, my ugle hero, the fault
is mine. I recline and recline.
Now there is no time but yours.
What leisure you afford, what luxury.
--Karen Solie
***
"At Mycenae"
The dandelions
send up their white balloons
as they have since early time
over the high stone ruins
above the famous citadel
Perhaps a ploughman down below
stopped his horse in wonderment
and sighed a little
to watch the kings and queens go by
when the floating ghosts of flowers
scribbled birthmarks in the sky
in the hot still noon
their white balloons
Ploughmen of the dust
kings and queens at noon
who touched these walls
and their shadows too
dark parallels
the walls still exhale them
whose thoughts were stone
in the broken ruins
Below the citadel
a plain falls away
on earth so known to them
it must have seemed sometimes
that they could never leave
Lighter than air their thoughts
like smallwhite balloons
touching stone and earth
and the floating clouds
anchored to this place
moored like the dandelions
to our drifting earth
where we cannot leave
and where we cannot stay
are stone and earth and clouds
and flesh for just a day
--Al Purdy
***
"The Hunting Knife"
I wash the hunting knife,
scour the rust,
polish off the strange dark
colors.
It was a gift from your father
who still thinks
that you will go out one day
for your own meat.
Beautiful knife,
heavy and sharp. The blade
curves in the air
the way you curve
in me.
after arguments like this,
when you have sheathed yourself in silence
and I have withdrawn
against you, there is still a part of me
that wants to be hunted --
wants to be opened, to steam
like guts into a fall day,
hanging from this cavity,
exposed for love.
--Barbara Curry Mulcahy
***
"Pumpkins"
Oompah Oompah Oompah, fattening
on the stem, tuba girthed, puffing like perorating parliamentarians,
Boompa Boompah Booompah,
earth hogs slurping swill from the sun,
jowls burp fat with photons, bigger, bigger, garden elephants,
mirthed like St. Francis, dancing (thud) dancing (thud,
brumpht, thud, brumpht) with the Buddha-bellied sun
dolphin sweet, theatrical as suburban
children, yahooing a yellow
which wallops air. Pure. They are Socratically
ugly, God's jokes. O jongleurs, O belly laughs
quaking the matted patch, O my blimpish Prussian
generals, O garden sausages, golden zeppelins. How do/ How do? How do?
Doo dee doo dee doooo.
What a rabble, some explode,
or sing, in the panic of September
sun, idiot praise for the sun that burns like a grand hotel,
for the sun, monstrous pulp in a groaning rind, flame seeded.
Popeyes, my dears, muscular fruit,
apoplexies of grunted energy flexed from the forearm vine,
self-hefted on the hill and shot
putted in the half-acre.
Carro-carroo. Are you well,
my sweets, pleasure things, my baubles, my Poohs, well?
I, weeding farmer, I, Caruso
them at dawn crow in the sun
cymballing mornings
and they Brunhilde back, foghorns, bloated alto notes
baroquely happy.
Not hoe teeth, not Rhotenone, but love,
bruited, busied, blessed these being-ward, barn-big,
bibulous on light, rampantly stolid
as Plato's Ideas, Easter Island
flesh lumps of meaning, rolling heads
in my 6-year-old nightmares,
vegetables on a ball and chain, sun anvils
booming with blows of temperature.
Come, phenomena, gourds of light, teach
your joy esperanto, your intense Archimedean aha
of yellow to me, dung-booted serf, whose unhoed brain,
the garden's brightest fruit, ones
communion with the cowfaced cauliflowers,
cucumbers twinkling like toes, and you,
clown prince,
sun dauphin of the rioting plot.
--Tim Lilburn
***
"Pennies on the Sidewalk"
The dead, for all we know,
wear little German shoes and
leave us frozen crumbs, because
the forest is dark even at midday
and weird shadows sidle fleshed
over the pine-needled floor. and since
the dead aren't coming back to us,
we must look out for them, though
the trail is widely scattered and will
take us all our lives to track, a crumb
here, a crumb there, different cities,
countries, continents, the real-estate
holdings of the dead more vast
than those of the Catholic Church.
Just this morning I found the last
brass button off the greatcoat worn
in the trenches of the Somme
by the sole surviving soldier of that war,
and, wiping off the blood, I saw
his King and heard his oath,
then watched the death of faith
invade his eyes, and understood
the horror in the midwife's stare
as she held the future's irony
in her slippery hands. so much mud,
we might never wash it off.
Yet I also found, three weeks before,
a rusted tear my mother cried
because the red-winged blackbirds
at her feeder sand a soft Italian air
out of her threadbare urban childhood,
and she was briefly sad with happiness
at the lucent window of the world.
We are all followers in the dark wood
and the way is lit only by small tokens --
a few words, a date, the picture of a Queen.
When we walk over them,
the air trembles a little,
and night falls
when it falls
like dirt off the sides of an open grave.
--Tim Bowling
***
"Roses Inverted"
The roses that grow in that stony ground
send their roots straight up, and their blossoms down.
Their sun-seeking roots anchor them in the air,
but they find neither water nor nourishment there.
Their leaves stretch toward the planet's hot core.
But the earth's inner engine radiates more
heat than it does light, so that, to their surprise,
they find that they cannot photosynthesize.
They are white as milk. Up among the stones,
the pale roots linger like the half-buried bones
of abandoned camels licked clean by the sands.
Yet the underground flowers that open like hands
are brazen and bright. They unfurl like flags.
Among the miniature caverns and crags
just beneath the surface, these banners gather,
sheltered from the sun, from stars, from weather --
sheltered, too, from admirers; hidden from any
appreciateive eye. and there are so many!
They are thoughts we attempted to utter, but failed.
Or confessions of love: folded, stemped, never mailed.
--Troy Jollimore
***
"Lilacs"
Restless, I walk out in the evening
to the old house; to the patio around the back
where the old lilacs bloom.
This is a surprise, for I would have said
I do not like this place, would not
come to it by choice:
the peeling lattice on the south side,
the crumbling cinder blocks that once made
a failed sort of fireplace on the east.
The pad was small, but even so
you have to pick up your feet not to stumble
where the concrete cracked.
The lilacs lean across the south-east corner,
blocking the walk.
If yo asked my sister, she ould say
it never happened, but I remember that
one spring we tamed a bumble-bee
when it came in the afternoons to feed.
She denies this now, of course,
or would; refuses any salvage, claims I'm inventing
if I say there were moments when the sun came out
like her hair in the shadows of the leaves, heavy, like cream, cut
blunt as a spoon, her small teeth
as she laughed up at me, the bee
humming in my palm as she stroked it; and though I
think hope may be a better guide to the past than despair
I now doubt, too -- these lilacs
are probably thick with insects in the afternoons, it's
ridiculous to think we might have sat inside them safe,
you'd have to be careful, merely brushing by,
not to be stung. When you think of it
she must be right, because why else
would she deny it, and I bury my face
as I might imagine leaning into sea-fowm:
cool, explosive; the way her hand
when it touched me could unlock the bone under its skin,
or how the drowned must feel,
rising though themselves from the ocean floor.
--Jan Zwicky
***
"El Greco: Espolio"
The carpenter is intent on the pressure of his hand
on the awl and the trick of pinpointing his strength
through the awl to the wood which is tough
He has no effort to spare for despoilings
or to worry if he'll be cut in on the dice
His skill is vital to the scene and the safety of the state
Anyone can perform the indignities It's his hard arms
and craft that hold the eyes of the convict's women
There is the problem of getting the holes exact
(in the middle of this elbowing crowd)
and deep enough to hold the spikes
after they've sunk through those bard feet
and inadequate wrist he knows are waiting behind him
He doesn't sense perhaps that one of the hands
is held in a curious gesture over him --
giving or asking forgiveness? --
but he'd scarely take time to be puzzled by poses
Criminals come in all sorts
as anyone knows who makes crosses
are as mad or sand as those who decide on their killings
Our one at least has been quiet so far
though they say he talked himself into this trouble
a carpenter's son who got notions of preaching
Well here's a carpenter's son who'll have carpenter sons
God willing and build what's wanted
temples or tables mangers or crosses
and shape them decently
working alone in that firm and profound abstraction
which blots out the bawling of rag-snatchers
To construct with hands knee-weight braced thigh
keeps the back turned from death
But it's too late now for the other carpenter's boy
to return to this peace before the nails are hammered
--Earle Birney
***
"Prairie Poem"
For George Grant
To go from white-water rivers' valleys or
from the escarpment to
live on the Saskatchewan prairie is
choosing to find out that
space calls, to a reshaping
of person. This is above and
beyond the going to, the choosing.
Reading in the open world of
this writer's geography of
ideas is to look, staggered and
overwhelmed by the
ideas, almost lost in the
panorama of
the living, long-dead, to him
present as friends, each lifted face
featured for horizons. For
holding close an everywhere of sky.
The land, the books, can never
swallow you, nor even the
fussy spring crocus here -- however
small, at vanishing points.
--Margaret Avison
***
"The Peonies"
The peonies hold so much rain, they've collapsed
to the ground. I spent the day tying their stalks
to wooden stakes I hammered into the garden. Still
they're listless, bobbing in my arms exhausted
from blooming so long and so heavy. I leave them bent
and sweep their petals from the walkway. For days
I don't think of them. The poppies need weeding, the squash
should be thinned. and I don't think of them again until my mother
visits. It's while she talks that I'm reminded. she has that look
of peonies, her voice that weight of rain. and between us
is a walkway, cleared of all we've given, of all we've lost,
where each stone is connected in a constellation,
mother, duaghter, gardener. For this moment
we are the same, we are equal. then something
slips from her grasp and gently nestles in my arms.
--Susan Goyette
***
"Ask a Stupid Question"
"How do I love thee?"
You talking to me, Lady?
"What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? what wild ecstasy?"
Lady, that's just some old pot.
"A child said What is the grass?"
I hope you pointed at the green stuff.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
Oh, yeah, that's just what I need. I'm hot and dry and long.
"If you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get?"
Maybe a big dog, to keep strangers away, stranger.
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
I'd guess about three months.
"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
Hey, you can part your bare behind. You can eat a watermelon, for all I care.
"And you, Garcia Lorca, what are you doing down by the watermelons?"
Heh heh heh heh heh.
"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
You think that's scary? You should see my bare behind!
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
Well, you see, the babe with the tutu on: she's the dancer. That stuff
she's doing? That's the dance. Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?
--George Bowering
***
"The Chinese Greengrocers"
They live their days in a fragrance
of white and black grapes
and tomatoes and the fresh
water smell of lettuce.
They know with their hands
and noses the value
of all things grown.
They will make you a bargain price
on overripe cantaloupe.
They wash with clear water
their bunches of carrots
and radishes. They crank out
a canvas awning to shelter them.
Their babies suckle on unsold bananas.
By the age of six
they can all make change
and tell which fruits are ripe.
The grandmothers know only numbers
in English, and the names
of fruits and vegetables.
They open before the supermarkets open,
they are open all day,
they eat with an eye on the door.
They keep sharp eyes
for shoplifting children.
They know every customer's
brand of cigarettes.
After the neighbourhood movies are out
and the drugstores have all closed
they bring in their blueberries
and cabbages and potted flowers.
In the rooms behind the store
they speak in their own language.
Their speech flies around the rooms
like swooping, pecking birds.
Far into the night I believe
they weigh balsa baskets
of plums, count ears of conr
and green peppers.
No matter how they may wash
their fingers, their very pores
are perfumed with green,
and they sleep with parsley and peaches
onions and oranges
and grapes and running water.
--Pat Lowther
***
"Letter from the Retreat of St. Scholastica"
The aches in my legs have begun again,
the pain so side I feel it in my stomach
and not the source, as if that could be
pinned like a moth to a board, identified --
Antheraea Polyphemus. I told you
I would write when it came back.
A black cat visits every morning
for the little milk I give her,
fur dotted with the eggs of lice.
I could leave a bowl of scraps
but then she'd give up hunting
and the monks won't feed here when I'm gone.
Most of them grew up on farms, believe
an animal should work or be eaten.
Yesterday a finch flew up from the canola,
then another and another like lights coming on.
Such beauty here, my love. I need it
just a little longer.
The sky's blue brings the ocean and you
nearer than you are. Remember Sidney Spit,
the sun hot, both of us one body gleaming,
no one on the beach for miles
till a little girl marched by us with a bucket
then walked past again.
We dind't know if she had seen or not.
Next morning I found sand in our bed
as if left there by a dream.
I stroke the cat anyway and talk to her.
Will I be here when the eggs break open?
Funny what we use to measure time.
The nights so long without you I imagine
death is sleeplessness, not the peace
we've been promised. Soon I'll be ready
to come home.
I want to offer you my breasts, whole
and perfect as St. Agatha's glowing on a platter.
In the paintings they look like peach halves,
round side up and flushed with ripeness.
Others see them differently. Here I've learned
she is the patron saint of artisans who fashion bells
from bronze, hands and faces gold about the vats,
and on her feast day the churches serve
round loaves of bread.
At dusk I remove my glasses as you taught me.
Between the leaden boughs of spruce
the sky breaks into pieces more beautiful
than the glass at Chartres, those ancient
fragments of rare blue,
what the naked eye half-blind can see!
Where I am, every hour, the bells are ringing.
--Lorna Crozier
The women's bodies lying in the sand are curved like shells.
The men can't take their eyes off them.
The seawater spangles like a drink of champagne,
but the fishermen don't see it that way,
they have their clothes on, they don't care about girls.
The only care about fish. They yell to one another down the beach
as if this were their ocean. Meanwhile,
ignorant, the smelts plod into the nets.
Seated on benches, middle-aged women
in magenta travel dresses, going nowhere,
dressed too warmly for the weather,
delve into the sunlight with their eyes closed and pretend
they are dissolving, like a tablet in water.
Only the babies pushed along in carriages
seem to enjoy themselves, twisting their faces
into vast expressions. Their skin
is still translucent. They haven't yet finished
materializing into the world.
--Roo Borson
***
"Demon Pond"
You step into the crucible,
the philosophical egg, vessel
of the sun and moon. the surface
of this liquid
intersects your thigh
like a bracelet
of exaltation. Matter itself
ringing out a single
clear note.
You step into the water,
indigenous, exquisite.
Your quick grace alive
wire, eerie where I falter
in sweet sickness.
Stirring up the creams
at the bottom of the pond.
Every gesture, the most incidental
of your movements is slender,
candid. You are perfection
doubled back on itself,
standing before me in this
labyrinthine night forest,
a cool autumn mist
over the water.
Our union is a confederacy
outside the common world.
Each other the most remarkable
being we've ever met, adored
by the adored.
The one for whom
we had abandoned hope
years before.
My mind goes anywhere
my hands and mouth travel
weightless and eager
over your radiant flesh.
Snakes aroused by humans coupling
and hallucinations of unearthly paradise
rise like ghostly moths
to the light we burn by.
Hosts of invisible beings
lap at the fiery column
that is us. Flesh a distraction
on our way to a deeper union.
Your love, your body
the knife that cut me
open to my bliss.
--Christopher Dewdney
***
"Found in a sock Monkey Kit"
Sometimes making is play, only that. I've not been
made yet, but will be, and when willed
into my bean-baggish zen loll
\
might wish for you nights of no nightmare,
layabouts with or without some other
when words are your mind's lit
carousel, monkey bars, or gravel pit, not the spiral
jetty you like to make of it. We pretended
affection each for the other, then
wrecked the furniture, is what we'll say when
they ask how we spent the duration. single
man and his simian right hand, memento
origo, minister of the bemused stare. Lean me
against the neck of the reading lamp: sleep,
farts, fucks, illnesses, and idleness, I'm I
through and through, function removed from the feet
and become face with a grin and stillness,
form that gives if you hold it when there's only you.
--Ken Babstock
***
"Fishhawks"
my son stands in waist-high water
the salt reddens his skin
out of his face spring wiry hairs
thickening to a beard
his arms have become wide and heavy
he splices rope
smells of the tar that blackens his fingers
he has learned to make his living from the sea
(the huge shadow of a bird
darkens the sand around us
I speak, say to you look
at that rare creature
an osprey)
further out from the shore
your daughter is a rock
jutting from the waves
she is rounded and hollow
within her is a sea-cave
her face is a pearly shell
a shining operculum
stoppers up her mouth
her singing is muffled, a murmur
the boy smiles
his semen darts out of him
a shoal of swift fishes
entering her secret place
he stretches out his finger
flicks away the shell plug from her mouth
so that she may cry out
you look at me, say
this has all happened far too quickly
we wade out -- I say:
there is just time for us to bless them
but in that glance they have crossed the horizon
are washed away out of our sight
we two return to the beach
the salt water drips from us
making the dull shingles glisten
our wet clothes cling to our legs
behind us the sun is clouded
the sea is cold not splendid
I am a widow I tell you
but we are just strangers you reply
out there where the great bird hovers
mantling preparing to spiral
there is faint wailing
--Anne Szumigalski
***
"Slicing Oranges in Kim's Kitchen"
Each bright orange disk spins, a slow wheel,
not here in my hand only, but in our one
mind's eye. Just think of that mind's eye.
What colour is it? Blue as our planet? And
how does it see? What agile mechanics
carries sight into the mind, still, after all
our thinking, undefined? I think of you and
how we talked, words slipping between
words, standing slicing oranges in your
kitchen; an easy task. An idea from a magazine,
the simplest salad you had ever seen
now spreading in circles, circle upon circle,
plain and sweet and pleasing. And the
conversation, also circling and returning
to children, love and growing old. Nothing
but the ordinary things somehow made
over into suns and galaxies and all creation
whirling ecstasy as we cut the spitting peel
from diminishing fruit, sink knives into the pale
white orbs, slice, flick out sprouting seeds,
and lay out bright slices in concentric rows.
--Diana Brebner
***
"Flower Bulbs"
Most men give flowers in their full leaves,
But I give you flowers still in seed:
These flowers you see are each one wrapped
In the womb, still concentrated in sap.
Think, what I lay on your fearless palm!
A universe compacted to a seeming chaos,
A wary cell waiting to split its tomb
In birth, when the soon-rampant seed explodes.
Yet we generate such, and once were seeds:
Have blossomed once like flowers inside a girl;
Now sit with hanging hands and open eyes,
Nourished by, not knowing, the objective world.
And this which is closed to younger eyes
Only loving you could have opened to me.
I have walked by many a garden in a room
And passed by many a precipice being blind.
Yet love may tell one who grows a plant
How a miraculous ignorance surrounds
Each living thing -- and it still be
Perfect and wise, when these plant leaves appear
Like days unfolding in the calendar,
Will watch the flowers sent out in shoots
Andlove grow out of his mysterious roots.
--Louis Dudek
***
"Poor Bird"
. . . looking for something, something, something.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray,
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
--"Sandpiper," Elizabeth Bishop
From birth, from the first astonishing moment
when he pecked his way out of the shell, pure fluff,
he was looking for something -- warmth, food, love
or light, or darkness -- we are all the same stuff,
all have the same needs: to be one of the flock
or to stand apart, a singular fledgling.
So the search began -- the endless search
that leads him onward -- a vocation
year in, year out, morning to evening
looking for something, something, something.
Nothing will stop him. although distracted
by nest-building, eggs, high winds, high tides,
and too short a lifespan for him to plan
an intelligent search -- still, on he goes
with his delicate legs and spillikin feet
and the wish to know what he's almost guessed.
Can't leave it alone, that stretch of sand.
Thinks himself Seurat (pointilliste)
or a molecular physicist.
Poor bird, he is obsessed!
And just because he has not yet found
what he doesn't know he is searching for
is not a sign he's off the track.
His track in the sedge, the sand, the suck
of the undertow, the line of shells.
Nor would he have it another way.
And yet -- the nag -- is there something else?
Something more, perhaps, or something less.
And though he examine them, day after day
the millions of grains are black, white, tan and gray.
But occasionally, when he least expects it,
in the glass of a wave a painted fish
like a work of art across his sight
reminds him of something he doesn't know
that he has been seeking his whole long life --
some that may not even exist!
Poor bird, indeed! Poor dazed creature!
Yet when his ey is sharp and sideways seeing
oh, then the quotidian unexceptional sand is
mixed with quartz grains, rose and amethyst.
--P. K. Page
***
"Praise"
I come back to praise, the hummingbird in the rain,
that single knot of colour among the dying
blooms of the geranium, another kind of day.
It reminds me of what I saw this morning,
a woman leaning out a window, naked, her breast
no longer young, slack with the loss that come
from a child's suckling. she was staring down
into the flowers she had planted in the window box,
blue lobelia swaying like a kind of sky,
geraniums, the weight of their blooms, like fists
of men who fought with their hands bare,
knuckles rich with blood. She
did not know I was watching, or if she knew,
didn't care. what she wanted was another
kind of praise, the kind where, if she arranged it,
could make the flowers in her mind alive,
like the ones she saw when she was just a girl
and the whole world heat and waiting.
I thought in the thin shade how, if we were lovers,
her breasts might rest upon my palms
or in my mouth, those nipples on my tongue
and feeding there as she leaned and stared
past me at the light in the window and the flowers.
All this, and the hummingbird, the flare
of his feathers vibrating there, his body
bringing back to me her flesh, his tongue
deep in the blossom, that fierce honey
I want to praise, crying out as I do
in the thing I have called memory and trying
to remember, the rain all around me.
--Patrick Lane
***
"Dear Heart"
Rustbucket, little four-popper.
I've seen more of the surface of Mars
than of you, ultrasound shadow.
How you lay me low! Size of a fist
and the rest of me a fat glass jaw.
I get reports through the wire of veins.
Your rabbit punches, feints and jabs. I log
each personal best and sleep
like a swan with an ear to my chest.
You are the first thing I ever built,
darfty and cold despite blood's small suns.
Your joinery came out wrong.
Sweetmeat, my ugle hero, the fault
is mine. I recline and recline.
Now there is no time but yours.
What leisure you afford, what luxury.
--Karen Solie
***
"At Mycenae"
The dandelions
send up their white balloons
as they have since early time
over the high stone ruins
above the famous citadel
Perhaps a ploughman down below
stopped his horse in wonderment
and sighed a little
to watch the kings and queens go by
when the floating ghosts of flowers
scribbled birthmarks in the sky
in the hot still noon
their white balloons
Ploughmen of the dust
kings and queens at noon
who touched these walls
and their shadows too
dark parallels
the walls still exhale them
whose thoughts were stone
in the broken ruins
Below the citadel
a plain falls away
on earth so known to them
it must have seemed sometimes
that they could never leave
Lighter than air their thoughts
like smallwhite balloons
touching stone and earth
and the floating clouds
anchored to this place
moored like the dandelions
to our drifting earth
where we cannot leave
and where we cannot stay
are stone and earth and clouds
and flesh for just a day
--Al Purdy
***
"The Hunting Knife"
I wash the hunting knife,
scour the rust,
polish off the strange dark
colors.
It was a gift from your father
who still thinks
that you will go out one day
for your own meat.
Beautiful knife,
heavy and sharp. The blade
curves in the air
the way you curve
in me.
after arguments like this,
when you have sheathed yourself in silence
and I have withdrawn
against you, there is still a part of me
that wants to be hunted --
wants to be opened, to steam
like guts into a fall day,
hanging from this cavity,
exposed for love.
--Barbara Curry Mulcahy
***
"Pumpkins"
Oompah Oompah Oompah, fattening
on the stem, tuba girthed, puffing like perorating parliamentarians,
Boompa Boompah Booompah,
earth hogs slurping swill from the sun,
jowls burp fat with photons, bigger, bigger, garden elephants,
mirthed like St. Francis, dancing (thud) dancing (thud,
brumpht, thud, brumpht) with the Buddha-bellied sun
dolphin sweet, theatrical as suburban
children, yahooing a yellow
which wallops air. Pure. They are Socratically
ugly, God's jokes. O jongleurs, O belly laughs
quaking the matted patch, O my blimpish Prussian
generals, O garden sausages, golden zeppelins. How do/ How do? How do?
Doo dee doo dee doooo.
What a rabble, some explode,
or sing, in the panic of September
sun, idiot praise for the sun that burns like a grand hotel,
for the sun, monstrous pulp in a groaning rind, flame seeded.
Popeyes, my dears, muscular fruit,
apoplexies of grunted energy flexed from the forearm vine,
self-hefted on the hill and shot
putted in the half-acre.
Carro-carroo. Are you well,
my sweets, pleasure things, my baubles, my Poohs, well?
I, weeding farmer, I, Caruso
them at dawn crow in the sun
cymballing mornings
and they Brunhilde back, foghorns, bloated alto notes
baroquely happy.
Not hoe teeth, not Rhotenone, but love,
bruited, busied, blessed these being-ward, barn-big,
bibulous on light, rampantly stolid
as Plato's Ideas, Easter Island
flesh lumps of meaning, rolling heads
in my 6-year-old nightmares,
vegetables on a ball and chain, sun anvils
booming with blows of temperature.
Come, phenomena, gourds of light, teach
your joy esperanto, your intense Archimedean aha
of yellow to me, dung-booted serf, whose unhoed brain,
the garden's brightest fruit, ones
communion with the cowfaced cauliflowers,
cucumbers twinkling like toes, and you,
clown prince,
sun dauphin of the rioting plot.
--Tim Lilburn
***
"Pennies on the Sidewalk"
The dead, for all we know,
wear little German shoes and
leave us frozen crumbs, because
the forest is dark even at midday
and weird shadows sidle fleshed
over the pine-needled floor. and since
the dead aren't coming back to us,
we must look out for them, though
the trail is widely scattered and will
take us all our lives to track, a crumb
here, a crumb there, different cities,
countries, continents, the real-estate
holdings of the dead more vast
than those of the Catholic Church.
Just this morning I found the last
brass button off the greatcoat worn
in the trenches of the Somme
by the sole surviving soldier of that war,
and, wiping off the blood, I saw
his King and heard his oath,
then watched the death of faith
invade his eyes, and understood
the horror in the midwife's stare
as she held the future's irony
in her slippery hands. so much mud,
we might never wash it off.
Yet I also found, three weeks before,
a rusted tear my mother cried
because the red-winged blackbirds
at her feeder sand a soft Italian air
out of her threadbare urban childhood,
and she was briefly sad with happiness
at the lucent window of the world.
We are all followers in the dark wood
and the way is lit only by small tokens --
a few words, a date, the picture of a Queen.
When we walk over them,
the air trembles a little,
and night falls
when it falls
like dirt off the sides of an open grave.
--Tim Bowling
***
"Roses Inverted"
The roses that grow in that stony ground
send their roots straight up, and their blossoms down.
Their sun-seeking roots anchor them in the air,
but they find neither water nor nourishment there.
Their leaves stretch toward the planet's hot core.
But the earth's inner engine radiates more
heat than it does light, so that, to their surprise,
they find that they cannot photosynthesize.
They are white as milk. Up among the stones,
the pale roots linger like the half-buried bones
of abandoned camels licked clean by the sands.
Yet the underground flowers that open like hands
are brazen and bright. They unfurl like flags.
Among the miniature caverns and crags
just beneath the surface, these banners gather,
sheltered from the sun, from stars, from weather --
sheltered, too, from admirers; hidden from any
appreciateive eye. and there are so many!
They are thoughts we attempted to utter, but failed.
Or confessions of love: folded, stemped, never mailed.
--Troy Jollimore
***
"Lilacs"
Restless, I walk out in the evening
to the old house; to the patio around the back
where the old lilacs bloom.
This is a surprise, for I would have said
I do not like this place, would not
come to it by choice:
the peeling lattice on the south side,
the crumbling cinder blocks that once made
a failed sort of fireplace on the east.
The pad was small, but even so
you have to pick up your feet not to stumble
where the concrete cracked.
The lilacs lean across the south-east corner,
blocking the walk.
If yo asked my sister, she ould say
it never happened, but I remember that
one spring we tamed a bumble-bee
when it came in the afternoons to feed.
She denies this now, of course,
or would; refuses any salvage, claims I'm inventing
if I say there were moments when the sun came out
like her hair in the shadows of the leaves, heavy, like cream, cut
blunt as a spoon, her small teeth
as she laughed up at me, the bee
humming in my palm as she stroked it; and though I
think hope may be a better guide to the past than despair
I now doubt, too -- these lilacs
are probably thick with insects in the afternoons, it's
ridiculous to think we might have sat inside them safe,
you'd have to be careful, merely brushing by,
not to be stung. When you think of it
she must be right, because why else
would she deny it, and I bury my face
as I might imagine leaning into sea-fowm:
cool, explosive; the way her hand
when it touched me could unlock the bone under its skin,
or how the drowned must feel,
rising though themselves from the ocean floor.
--Jan Zwicky
***
"El Greco: Espolio"
The carpenter is intent on the pressure of his hand
on the awl and the trick of pinpointing his strength
through the awl to the wood which is tough
He has no effort to spare for despoilings
or to worry if he'll be cut in on the dice
His skill is vital to the scene and the safety of the state
Anyone can perform the indignities It's his hard arms
and craft that hold the eyes of the convict's women
There is the problem of getting the holes exact
(in the middle of this elbowing crowd)
and deep enough to hold the spikes
after they've sunk through those bard feet
and inadequate wrist he knows are waiting behind him
He doesn't sense perhaps that one of the hands
is held in a curious gesture over him --
giving or asking forgiveness? --
but he'd scarely take time to be puzzled by poses
Criminals come in all sorts
as anyone knows who makes crosses
are as mad or sand as those who decide on their killings
Our one at least has been quiet so far
though they say he talked himself into this trouble
a carpenter's son who got notions of preaching
Well here's a carpenter's son who'll have carpenter sons
God willing and build what's wanted
temples or tables mangers or crosses
and shape them decently
working alone in that firm and profound abstraction
which blots out the bawling of rag-snatchers
To construct with hands knee-weight braced thigh
keeps the back turned from death
But it's too late now for the other carpenter's boy
to return to this peace before the nails are hammered
--Earle Birney
***
"Prairie Poem"
For George Grant
To go from white-water rivers' valleys or
from the escarpment to
live on the Saskatchewan prairie is
choosing to find out that
space calls, to a reshaping
of person. This is above and
beyond the going to, the choosing.
Reading in the open world of
this writer's geography of
ideas is to look, staggered and
overwhelmed by the
ideas, almost lost in the
panorama of
the living, long-dead, to him
present as friends, each lifted face
featured for horizons. For
holding close an everywhere of sky.
The land, the books, can never
swallow you, nor even the
fussy spring crocus here -- however
small, at vanishing points.
--Margaret Avison
***
"The Peonies"
The peonies hold so much rain, they've collapsed
to the ground. I spent the day tying their stalks
to wooden stakes I hammered into the garden. Still
they're listless, bobbing in my arms exhausted
from blooming so long and so heavy. I leave them bent
and sweep their petals from the walkway. For days
I don't think of them. The poppies need weeding, the squash
should be thinned. and I don't think of them again until my mother
visits. It's while she talks that I'm reminded. she has that look
of peonies, her voice that weight of rain. and between us
is a walkway, cleared of all we've given, of all we've lost,
where each stone is connected in a constellation,
mother, duaghter, gardener. For this moment
we are the same, we are equal. then something
slips from her grasp and gently nestles in my arms.
--Susan Goyette
***
"Ask a Stupid Question"
"How do I love thee?"
You talking to me, Lady?
"What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? what wild ecstasy?"
Lady, that's just some old pot.
"A child said What is the grass?"
I hope you pointed at the green stuff.
"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
Oh, yeah, that's just what I need. I'm hot and dry and long.
"If you were going to get a pet
what kind of animal would you get?"
Maybe a big dog, to keep strangers away, stranger.
"If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"
I'd guess about three months.
"Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?"
Hey, you can part your bare behind. You can eat a watermelon, for all I care.
"And you, Garcia Lorca, what are you doing down by the watermelons?"
Heh heh heh heh heh.
"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
You think that's scary? You should see my bare behind!
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?"
Well, you see, the babe with the tutu on: she's the dancer. That stuff
she's doing? That's the dance. Jesus, Lady, don't you know anything?
--George Bowering
***
"The Chinese Greengrocers"
They live their days in a fragrance
of white and black grapes
and tomatoes and the fresh
water smell of lettuce.
They know with their hands
and noses the value
of all things grown.
They will make you a bargain price
on overripe cantaloupe.
They wash with clear water
their bunches of carrots
and radishes. They crank out
a canvas awning to shelter them.
Their babies suckle on unsold bananas.
By the age of six
they can all make change
and tell which fruits are ripe.
The grandmothers know only numbers
in English, and the names
of fruits and vegetables.
They open before the supermarkets open,
they are open all day,
they eat with an eye on the door.
They keep sharp eyes
for shoplifting children.
They know every customer's
brand of cigarettes.
After the neighbourhood movies are out
and the drugstores have all closed
they bring in their blueberries
and cabbages and potted flowers.
In the rooms behind the store
they speak in their own language.
Their speech flies around the rooms
like swooping, pecking birds.
Far into the night I believe
they weigh balsa baskets
of plums, count ears of conr
and green peppers.
No matter how they may wash
their fingers, their very pores
are perfumed with green,
and they sleep with parsley and peaches
onions and oranges
and grapes and running water.
--Pat Lowther
***
"Letter from the Retreat of St. Scholastica"
The aches in my legs have begun again,
the pain so side I feel it in my stomach
and not the source, as if that could be
pinned like a moth to a board, identified --
Antheraea Polyphemus. I told you
I would write when it came back.
A black cat visits every morning
for the little milk I give her,
fur dotted with the eggs of lice.
I could leave a bowl of scraps
but then she'd give up hunting
and the monks won't feed here when I'm gone.
Most of them grew up on farms, believe
an animal should work or be eaten.
Yesterday a finch flew up from the canola,
then another and another like lights coming on.
Such beauty here, my love. I need it
just a little longer.
The sky's blue brings the ocean and you
nearer than you are. Remember Sidney Spit,
the sun hot, both of us one body gleaming,
no one on the beach for miles
till a little girl marched by us with a bucket
then walked past again.
We dind't know if she had seen or not.
Next morning I found sand in our bed
as if left there by a dream.
I stroke the cat anyway and talk to her.
Will I be here when the eggs break open?
Funny what we use to measure time.
The nights so long without you I imagine
death is sleeplessness, not the peace
we've been promised. Soon I'll be ready
to come home.
I want to offer you my breasts, whole
and perfect as St. Agatha's glowing on a platter.
In the paintings they look like peach halves,
round side up and flushed with ripeness.
Others see them differently. Here I've learned
she is the patron saint of artisans who fashion bells
from bronze, hands and faces gold about the vats,
and on her feast day the churches serve
round loaves of bread.
At dusk I remove my glasses as you taught me.
Between the leaden boughs of spruce
the sky breaks into pieces more beautiful
than the glass at Chartres, those ancient
fragments of rare blue,
what the naked eye half-blind can see!
Where I am, every hour, the bells are ringing.
--Lorna Crozier
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Some Canadian Poems with Birds
The Sparrow Drawer
"I: The Sandhill Crane"
The sandhill crane, in his glass case, performs
his nuptial dance. Jumping, bowing, and wildly
flapping, reads the museum description. Well,
aren't we all the same in love? This dead
male is frozen in the pose, on a bed of
stone. Thus, the museum welcomes us to its
permanent exhibit: Birds in Canada. When I
bring my daughters to the museum, because
it is cleaner and easier than a day in the
bush, they always ask to see the birds, or the
big animals. and I tell myself: this will
do them good. They know enough about mud,
rain, being hungry, no toilets, and wanting
to go home. In the real world, a bird is
always gone before my two-year-old can look.
Or, alternately, I ca never find the great
blue herons they insist are really there.
--Diana Brebner
***
"Albino Pheasants"
At the bottom of the field
where thistles throw their seeds
and poplars grow from cotton into trees
in a single season I stand among the weeds.
Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire.
Here no man walks except in wasted time.
Men circle me with cattle, cars and wheat.
Machines rot on my margins.
They say the land is wasted when it's wild
and offer plows and apple trees to tame
but in the fall when I have driven them away
with their guns and dogs and dreams
I walk alone. While those who'd kill
lie sleeping in soft beds
huddled against the bodies of their wives
I go with speargrass and hooked burrs
and wait upon the ice alone.
Delicate across the mesh of snow
I watch the pale birds come
with beaks the colour of discarded flesh.
White, their feathers are white,
as if they had been born in caves
and only now have risen to the earth
to watch with pink and darting eyes
the slowly moving shadows of the moon.
There is no way to tell men what to do . . .
the dance they make in sleep
withholds its meaning from their dreams.
That which has been nursed in bone
rests easy upon frozen stone
and what is wild is lost behind closed eyes:
albino birds, pale sisters, succubi.
--Patrick Lane
***
"Sestina for Pat Lane After
Reading 'Albino Pheasants'"
Pale beak . . . pale eye . . .the dark imagination
flares like magnesium. And but, pale flesh
and I am lifted to a weightless world:
watered cerulean, chrome-yellow, light,
and green, veronese -- if I remember -- a soft wash
recalls a summer evening sky.
At Barro de Navidad we watched the sky
fade softly like a bruise. Was it imagination
that showed us Venus phosphorescent in a wash
of air and ozone? -- a phosphorescence flesh
wears like a mantle in bright moonlight,
a natural skin-tone in that other world.
Why do I wish to escape this world?
Why do three phrases alter the color of the sky
the clarity, texture even, of the light?
What is there about the irrepressible imagination
that the adjective pale modifying beak, eye and flesh
can set my sensibilities awash?
If with my thickest brush I were to lay a wash
of thinnest water-color I could make a world
as unlike my own dense flesh
as the high-noon midsummer sky;
but it would not catch at my imagination
or change the waves or particles of light
yet pale can tip the scales, make light
this heavy planet. If I were to wash
everything I own in mercury, would imagination
run rampant in that suddenly silver world --
free me from gravity, set me floating sky-
ward -- thistledown -- permanently disburdened of my flesh?
Like cygnets hatched by ducks, our minds and flesh
are imprinted early -- what to me is light
may be dark to one born under a sunny sky.
And however cool the water my truth won't wash
without shrinking except in my own world
which is one part matter, nine parts imagination.
I fear flesh which blocks imagination,
the light of reason which constracts the world.
Pale beak . . . pale eye . . . pale flesh . . . My sky's awash.
--P. K. Page
***
"Small song for the voice of the nuthatch"
Such a brilliant day,
the sycamores
bronze rapids overhead,
and that tiny crumhorn
up there somewhere,
beady and antique.
The autumn light has such long legs
you'd fall in love, but it keeps
gazing off into the distance.
What distance?
Listen to the nuthatch: go home,
make bread, make soup.
Leave one chink open to the wind.
--Jan Zwicky
***
"Thrasher"
Yellow-legs ekes lower at nightfall to a stick nest
brambled in the shade-kill, doing for himself, deft
as a badger in a hammock. Mornings, toeing wracked heights
of the cottonwood, he flaps his brown flag above alkaline
slough beds, over plowlands attesting
to the back and forth of work, their brown degrees
scriven by road allowance cut at right angles through shriven
weeds, fenceposts bracketing brown rut lines slantwise
in relief. In relief at the topmost, he mimics domestic, migrant,
spaniel, spring peepers, quacks, urks, and gurgles akin
to a four-stroke in heavy water. He's slightly
off. None respond. His own call is the vinyl scxratch
between tracks, a splice point. He was hatched
that way, ferruginous, a wet transistor
clacking from the egg in which he had lain curled
as an ear with an itch inside. He carries on
like AM radio. Like a prison rodeo. Recounts loser
baseball teams, jerry-riggers, part-times, those paid in scrip,
anyone who has come out of retirement once
too often. He is playbacks, do-oevers, repeates, repeats
the world's clamorous list, makes it his, replete,
and fledges from persistence what he is.
--Karen Solie
***
"Occasions of Desire"
Occasions of desire with their attendant envies,
the white heat of the cold swan dying,
create their gestures, obscene or most beautiful.
Oh, the clear shell of a swan's fluted wings!
And as the old swan calls clarity from dark waters,
sailing triumphant into the forgotten,
desire in its moving is that rapacious cry,
gorgeous as the torrent Lethe, and as wise.
And if the curl of cygnets on the Avon,
so freshly broken from their perfect shells,
take from a dying bird not moral nor enticement,
but float with their own white mother, that is just.
Oh, imperious innocence to envy
only the water bearing such beauty!
--Phyllis Webb
***
"Ascent with Thrushes"
1.
Listen, I tell my knees,
as we pause at the twenty-somethinged
switchback: at each step
we are accompanied by air. Listen:
the phrase slides, heartlessly,
past pain, wonder, grief, into its
interrogative lift, no questions asked,
no special pause called art. It falls
carelessly uphill, I say, listen,
we should be so lucky.
2.
Higher up, we pause to pant
while single buzzy
indigo-blue notes are drilled
toward us from the other side.
Spy-holes, probably,
so the sky can watch us
as we clamber toward it. as though
we were end-wise to the music.
as though we were
looking down the barrel of a song.
3.
Among subalpine fir beside
the partly frozen lake some unseen
singer is -- against the best advice
a poet ever gave --
praising the unsayable to the angel.
I listen in immaculate calm. It's only Churl
and Mort, those unruly
ears of mine, who slaver after every
empty phrase.
4.
Later in the parking lot
I stretch and thank my knees,
without whose efforts, et cetera,
et cetera. On the far side of the notice board
the day's selections (Swainson's,
Varied, Hermit) are being recapped and discussed,
exhaustively, in demotic
American Robin.
--Don McKay
***
"Partridge"
Stopping dead still
on the road,
a trace of it
sleeps in the air
(far back in the fir
a faint rustle)
song:
coiled in spruce bark
an odour:
buck heat or
the juice of fear;
loving a woman, I know
death's thicket,
the must of rotting crab apples
in an abandoned orchard,
this partridge
strutting
through the dying fruit.
--John Thompson
***
"Metro Spring"
The apparition
of these white chickens
in the crowd, petals
on a wet red wheelbarrow.
--George Bowering
***
"Words from the Aviary"
For Monique
I would clothe you in feathers
You are too bare
in your long bones when the wind
sighs in the snow
You are a movement of birds
I would clothe you in voices
appellations, words
spare as the mirror of a young girl
or raw, and deliquescent as the crow's
cawing over chill fields
It is not clothing but a call
of voices, nameless
gone into the still air
of the small birds that drift
above a river running among stones
in the Haute-Savoie
above the grasses of the steppe, and in the small
trees of the taiga
in the summer forest
north
along the Ottawa
I would surround you with a guard
of heron like a tall
smoke, I would surround you with a choir
of unrecorded waterbirds, exiguous
emerging from a wall
beyond the Nile
I would have you smile, and see the sun
arrested, rest among your bones
as glistening
you move within the garden of your names, diaphanous
innumerable
You walk as you have always walked
through desert yards, the cold
spacxes where the night
sighs among the stars
the sunken orchard where the wind
sighs in the snow
You are an overture.
You come
like a migration
like the first waters of the world
with the entelechy of flowers
And then your naked summer
silences my words
--D. G. Jones
***
"Snow and Geese"
for Barbara Harvey
Out here in the frozen barn yard, we prod the sleeping hillocks
until they untuck ther beaks from their plush knolls,
tip their leavened bodies forward, then glide effortlessly,
so white-shadow effortlessly toward us.
They are ghosts hovering above the snow,
white ghosts of geese rising from their iced beds,
unfathomable geese world.
Equilibrium of wing and want.
They dance for us anyway, float above the dead white earth,
saying if they could fly, they would leave us here.
--Laura Lush
***
"Inventing the Hawk"
She didn't believe the words
when she first heard them, that blue
bodiless sound entering her ear.
But now something was in the air,
a sense of waiting as if
the hawk itself were there
just beyond the light, blinded
by a fine-stitched leather hood
she must take apart with her fingers.
already she had its voice,
the scream that rose from her belly
echoed in the dark inverted
conyon of her skull.
She built its wings, feather by feather,
the russet smoothness of its head,
the bead-bright eyes,
in that moment between sleep and waking.
Was she the only one
who could remember them,
who knew theyr shape and colours, the way
they could tilt the world with a list of wings?
Perhaps it was her reason for living
so long in this hard place
of wind and sky, the stunted trees
reciting their litany of loss
outside her window.
Elsewhere surely someone was drawing
gophers and mice out of the air.
Maybe that was also her job,
so clearly she could see them.
She'd have to lie here forever,
dreaming hair after hair,
summoning the paws (her own heart
turning timid, her nostrils twitching).
Then she would cause the seeds
in their endless variety -- the ones
floating light as breath,
the ones with burrs and spears
that caught in her socks
when she was a child,
the radiant, uninvented blades of grass.
--Lorna Crozier
***
"Lagoons, Hanlan's Point"
Mornings
before the sun's liquid
spilled gradually, flooding
the island's cool cellar,
there was the boat
and the still lagoons,
with the sound of my oars
the only intrusion
over cries of birds
in the marshy shallows,
or the loud thrashing
of the startled crane
rushing the air.
And in one strange
dark, tree-hung entrance,
I followed the sound
of my heart all the way
to the reed-blocked ending,
\with the pads of the lily
thick as green-shining film
covering the water.
And in another
where the sun came
to probe the depths
through a shft of branches,
I saw the skeletons
of brown ships rotting
far below in their burial-ground,
and wondered what strange fish
with what strange colours
swam through these palaces
under the water . . . .
with a flat-bottomed punt
and an old pair of oars
moving with wonder
throught the antechamber
of a waking world.
--Raymond Souster
"I: The Sandhill Crane"
The sandhill crane, in his glass case, performs
his nuptial dance. Jumping, bowing, and wildly
flapping, reads the museum description. Well,
aren't we all the same in love? This dead
male is frozen in the pose, on a bed of
stone. Thus, the museum welcomes us to its
permanent exhibit: Birds in Canada. When I
bring my daughters to the museum, because
it is cleaner and easier than a day in the
bush, they always ask to see the birds, or the
big animals. and I tell myself: this will
do them good. They know enough about mud,
rain, being hungry, no toilets, and wanting
to go home. In the real world, a bird is
always gone before my two-year-old can look.
Or, alternately, I ca never find the great
blue herons they insist are really there.
--Diana Brebner
***
"Albino Pheasants"
At the bottom of the field
where thistles throw their seeds
and poplars grow from cotton into trees
in a single season I stand among the weeds.
Fenceposts hold each other up with sagging wire.
Here no man walks except in wasted time.
Men circle me with cattle, cars and wheat.
Machines rot on my margins.
They say the land is wasted when it's wild
and offer plows and apple trees to tame
but in the fall when I have driven them away
with their guns and dogs and dreams
I walk alone. While those who'd kill
lie sleeping in soft beds
huddled against the bodies of their wives
I go with speargrass and hooked burrs
and wait upon the ice alone.
Delicate across the mesh of snow
I watch the pale birds come
with beaks the colour of discarded flesh.
White, their feathers are white,
as if they had been born in caves
and only now have risen to the earth
to watch with pink and darting eyes
the slowly moving shadows of the moon.
There is no way to tell men what to do . . .
the dance they make in sleep
withholds its meaning from their dreams.
That which has been nursed in bone
rests easy upon frozen stone
and what is wild is lost behind closed eyes:
albino birds, pale sisters, succubi.
--Patrick Lane
***
"Sestina for Pat Lane After
Reading 'Albino Pheasants'"
Pale beak . . . pale eye . . .the dark imagination
flares like magnesium. And but, pale flesh
and I am lifted to a weightless world:
watered cerulean, chrome-yellow, light,
and green, veronese -- if I remember -- a soft wash
recalls a summer evening sky.
At Barro de Navidad we watched the sky
fade softly like a bruise. Was it imagination
that showed us Venus phosphorescent in a wash
of air and ozone? -- a phosphorescence flesh
wears like a mantle in bright moonlight,
a natural skin-tone in that other world.
Why do I wish to escape this world?
Why do three phrases alter the color of the sky
the clarity, texture even, of the light?
What is there about the irrepressible imagination
that the adjective pale modifying beak, eye and flesh
can set my sensibilities awash?
If with my thickest brush I were to lay a wash
of thinnest water-color I could make a world
as unlike my own dense flesh
as the high-noon midsummer sky;
but it would not catch at my imagination
or change the waves or particles of light
yet pale can tip the scales, make light
this heavy planet. If I were to wash
everything I own in mercury, would imagination
run rampant in that suddenly silver world --
free me from gravity, set me floating sky-
ward -- thistledown -- permanently disburdened of my flesh?
Like cygnets hatched by ducks, our minds and flesh
are imprinted early -- what to me is light
may be dark to one born under a sunny sky.
And however cool the water my truth won't wash
without shrinking except in my own world
which is one part matter, nine parts imagination.
I fear flesh which blocks imagination,
the light of reason which constracts the world.
Pale beak . . . pale eye . . . pale flesh . . . My sky's awash.
--P. K. Page
***
"Small song for the voice of the nuthatch"
Such a brilliant day,
the sycamores
bronze rapids overhead,
and that tiny crumhorn
up there somewhere,
beady and antique.
The autumn light has such long legs
you'd fall in love, but it keeps
gazing off into the distance.
What distance?
Listen to the nuthatch: go home,
make bread, make soup.
Leave one chink open to the wind.
--Jan Zwicky
***
"Thrasher"
Yellow-legs ekes lower at nightfall to a stick nest
brambled in the shade-kill, doing for himself, deft
as a badger in a hammock. Mornings, toeing wracked heights
of the cottonwood, he flaps his brown flag above alkaline
slough beds, over plowlands attesting
to the back and forth of work, their brown degrees
scriven by road allowance cut at right angles through shriven
weeds, fenceposts bracketing brown rut lines slantwise
in relief. In relief at the topmost, he mimics domestic, migrant,
spaniel, spring peepers, quacks, urks, and gurgles akin
to a four-stroke in heavy water. He's slightly
off. None respond. His own call is the vinyl scxratch
between tracks, a splice point. He was hatched
that way, ferruginous, a wet transistor
clacking from the egg in which he had lain curled
as an ear with an itch inside. He carries on
like AM radio. Like a prison rodeo. Recounts loser
baseball teams, jerry-riggers, part-times, those paid in scrip,
anyone who has come out of retirement once
too often. He is playbacks, do-oevers, repeates, repeats
the world's clamorous list, makes it his, replete,
and fledges from persistence what he is.
--Karen Solie
***
"Occasions of Desire"
Occasions of desire with their attendant envies,
the white heat of the cold swan dying,
create their gestures, obscene or most beautiful.
Oh, the clear shell of a swan's fluted wings!
And as the old swan calls clarity from dark waters,
sailing triumphant into the forgotten,
desire in its moving is that rapacious cry,
gorgeous as the torrent Lethe, and as wise.
And if the curl of cygnets on the Avon,
so freshly broken from their perfect shells,
take from a dying bird not moral nor enticement,
but float with their own white mother, that is just.
Oh, imperious innocence to envy
only the water bearing such beauty!
--Phyllis Webb
***
"Ascent with Thrushes"
1.
Listen, I tell my knees,
as we pause at the twenty-somethinged
switchback: at each step
we are accompanied by air. Listen:
the phrase slides, heartlessly,
past pain, wonder, grief, into its
interrogative lift, no questions asked,
no special pause called art. It falls
carelessly uphill, I say, listen,
we should be so lucky.
2.
Higher up, we pause to pant
while single buzzy
indigo-blue notes are drilled
toward us from the other side.
Spy-holes, probably,
so the sky can watch us
as we clamber toward it. as though
we were end-wise to the music.
as though we were
looking down the barrel of a song.
3.
Among subalpine fir beside
the partly frozen lake some unseen
singer is -- against the best advice
a poet ever gave --
praising the unsayable to the angel.
I listen in immaculate calm. It's only Churl
and Mort, those unruly
ears of mine, who slaver after every
empty phrase.
4.
Later in the parking lot
I stretch and thank my knees,
without whose efforts, et cetera,
et cetera. On the far side of the notice board
the day's selections (Swainson's,
Varied, Hermit) are being recapped and discussed,
exhaustively, in demotic
American Robin.
--Don McKay
***
"Partridge"
Stopping dead still
on the road,
a trace of it
sleeps in the air
(far back in the fir
a faint rustle)
song:
coiled in spruce bark
an odour:
buck heat or
the juice of fear;
loving a woman, I know
death's thicket,
the must of rotting crab apples
in an abandoned orchard,
this partridge
strutting
through the dying fruit.
--John Thompson
***
"Metro Spring"
The apparition
of these white chickens
in the crowd, petals
on a wet red wheelbarrow.
--George Bowering
***
"Words from the Aviary"
For Monique
I would clothe you in feathers
You are too bare
in your long bones when the wind
sighs in the snow
You are a movement of birds
I would clothe you in voices
appellations, words
spare as the mirror of a young girl
or raw, and deliquescent as the crow's
cawing over chill fields
It is not clothing but a call
of voices, nameless
gone into the still air
of the small birds that drift
above a river running among stones
in the Haute-Savoie
above the grasses of the steppe, and in the small
trees of the taiga
in the summer forest
north
along the Ottawa
I would surround you with a guard
of heron like a tall
smoke, I would surround you with a choir
of unrecorded waterbirds, exiguous
emerging from a wall
beyond the Nile
I would have you smile, and see the sun
arrested, rest among your bones
as glistening
you move within the garden of your names, diaphanous
innumerable
You walk as you have always walked
through desert yards, the cold
spacxes where the night
sighs among the stars
the sunken orchard where the wind
sighs in the snow
You are an overture.
You come
like a migration
like the first waters of the world
with the entelechy of flowers
And then your naked summer
silences my words
--D. G. Jones
***
"Snow and Geese"
for Barbara Harvey
Out here in the frozen barn yard, we prod the sleeping hillocks
until they untuck ther beaks from their plush knolls,
tip their leavened bodies forward, then glide effortlessly,
so white-shadow effortlessly toward us.
They are ghosts hovering above the snow,
white ghosts of geese rising from their iced beds,
unfathomable geese world.
Equilibrium of wing and want.
They dance for us anyway, float above the dead white earth,
saying if they could fly, they would leave us here.
--Laura Lush
***
"Inventing the Hawk"
She didn't believe the words
when she first heard them, that blue
bodiless sound entering her ear.
But now something was in the air,
a sense of waiting as if
the hawk itself were there
just beyond the light, blinded
by a fine-stitched leather hood
she must take apart with her fingers.
already she had its voice,
the scream that rose from her belly
echoed in the dark inverted
conyon of her skull.
She built its wings, feather by feather,
the russet smoothness of its head,
the bead-bright eyes,
in that moment between sleep and waking.
Was she the only one
who could remember them,
who knew theyr shape and colours, the way
they could tilt the world with a list of wings?
Perhaps it was her reason for living
so long in this hard place
of wind and sky, the stunted trees
reciting their litany of loss
outside her window.
Elsewhere surely someone was drawing
gophers and mice out of the air.
Maybe that was also her job,
so clearly she could see them.
She'd have to lie here forever,
dreaming hair after hair,
summoning the paws (her own heart
turning timid, her nostrils twitching).
Then she would cause the seeds
in their endless variety -- the ones
floating light as breath,
the ones with burrs and spears
that caught in her socks
when she was a child,
the radiant, uninvented blades of grass.
--Lorna Crozier
***
"Lagoons, Hanlan's Point"
Mornings
before the sun's liquid
spilled gradually, flooding
the island's cool cellar,
there was the boat
and the still lagoons,
with the sound of my oars
the only intrusion
over cries of birds
in the marshy shallows,
or the loud thrashing
of the startled crane
rushing the air.
And in one strange
dark, tree-hung entrance,
I followed the sound
of my heart all the way
to the reed-blocked ending,
\with the pads of the lily
thick as green-shining film
covering the water.
And in another
where the sun came
to probe the depths
through a shft of branches,
I saw the skeletons
of brown ships rotting
far below in their burial-ground,
and wondered what strange fish
with what strange colours
swam through these palaces
under the water . . . .
with a flat-bottomed punt
and an old pair of oars
moving with wonder
throught the antechamber
of a waking world.
--Raymond Souster