And Yet Read online

  BOOKS BY JOHN STEFFLER

  POETRY

  An Explanation of Yellow (1980)

  The Grey Islands (1985, 2000)

  The Wreckage of Play (1988)

  That Night We Were Ravenous (1998)

  Helix: New and Selected Poems (2002)

  Lookout (2010)

  FICTION

  The Afterlife of George Cartwright (1992)

  German Mills (2015)

  NONFICTION

  Forty-One Pages: On Poetry, Language, and Wilderness (2019)

  AND YET

  POEMS

  JOHN STEFFLER

  Copyright © 2020 by John Steffler

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher-or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency-is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: And yet / John Steffler.

  Names: Steffler, John, 1947- author.

  Description: Poems.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200185950 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200185969 | ISBN 9780771094521 (softcover) | ISBN 9780771094538 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PS8587.T346 A83 2020 | DDC C811/.54—dc23

  Published simultaneously in the United States of America by McClelland & Stewart, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company

  ISBN 9780771094521

  Ebook ISBN 9780771094538

  Book design: Emma Dolan

  Cover image: page 315 Handbook of birds of the western United States including the great plains, great basin, Pacific slope, and lower Rio Grande valley (1908), The Library of Congress/ Internet Archive Book Images

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  For Susan Gillis

  and in memory of Ken Livingstone

  CONTENTS

  And Yet

  Silphium: a Notebook

  I Haven’t Looked at These in Years

  Painted Cave

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  AND YET

  You wrote at intervals from Madrid, Algiers,

  Victoria and Corner Brook, and on a weekday

  in June-a silk-wrapped chunk of Roman mosaic

  deep in your duffel bag-you walk the old

  dirt road to the valley’s edge and see far below

  in its fields, exactly as you remembered,

  the house that made your journey a circle.

  Your mother probably in the garden, your father

  at his lathe. For years you’ve pictured them,

  wanted to see them remembering you. Your

  old self. You wait. You hover in the heat-

  in the sight of the small glinting roof

  you’ve longed for—still not ready to return.

  SILPHIUM: A NOTEBOOK

  WE MAKE OUR LONG-TALKED-ABOUT TRIP TO THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOL MUSEUM

  Sharp off the lake, the November wind we shoulder into feels

  like 1953. The museum-a belfry, three tall windows along

  the side-is it really my old school waiting down this street?

  We’re small again, all urges and don’ts.

  The door thuds shut. Museum air. No schoolroom stress-fug.

  No wet-boots-chalk-sweat-coal-smoke-stale-bread ghost.

  “This used to be a Masonic lodge,” the director says, leading

  us to the cabinets. Rows of rulers and nibs. He shows Phil

  an oleograph flipchart of the body’s organs. Joanne talks with

  his volunteers, three white-haired ladies pasting wildflowers

  on greeting cards as they did in grade three. Past the labelled

  erasers, I lean toward tacked-up photographs-

  a raw dirt

  yard tilts glaring, humid under loud June trees. We’re lined

  up, backs to the hot school wall, squinting beside Miss Duncan,

  who’s acting happy and strange.

  I hold still.

  I’m not even picking

  my knuckle warts. I’m watching the man poise his camera on its three

  long legs. His smooth movements. I now know why Miss Duncan’s

  wearing a white blouse and brooch.

  At my left, Wayne (horse-smell)

  Brown elbows my ribs, his face a grey blur. At my right, Sandra Dooley’s

  warm placid arm (woodsmoke, pee).

  The man ducks behind the black

  accordion, its eye blinks like shears slicing a chunk of day.

  If you sing before breakfast, you cry before lunch.

  Lightning strikes the mocker.

  Death slips in by the empty cupboard and cold stove.

  they want to land these children

  want somehow they don’t

  know where their ache pulls at some

  far inside sickening they need to

  walk in plain hello not howl bare

  gutted what they felt is not real is not

  safe the side out here with you

  In the mock-up classroom we sit at small desks. Phil says when

  the local doctor came to their school to talk about health and asked

  if there were any questions, Phil raised his hand and asked where tears

  come from. The doctor beckoned him to the front of the room, took

  down the photo of Queen Elizabeth and got Phil to look very closely

  into the corner of the Queen’s eye, where he could see the tiny little

  hole where tears come out.

  On the last day of school in June, I say, our teacher got us to bring

  razor blades or knives or straight-edged shards of glass so we could

  scrape our desk tops clean of the ink stains, initials and doodles we’d

  left there during the year.

  Joanne remembers the hatred she felt for her grade eight teacher. He

  was so cruel, she says, her friend would throw up before class. And

  then in December the teacher read A Christmas Carol to the class and

  broke down crying, sitting there in front of them on a desk, a sight

  that caused Joanne’s hatred to open and show an unhappy human.

  And as the man sobbed and read and sobbed Joanne watched the boy

  in the desk nearest to him dipping the hem of the teacher’s jacket into

  his inkwell and the ink soaking higher and higher up the flank of the

  miserable grey tweed.

  * * *

  a stack of blackboard slates leans against a wall, each

  piece five feet square and more than half an inch thick,

  their edges still bearing the marks of the stone saw’s

  teeth. They’re for sale, and I want one. I want one of these

  black rectangles still charged with the quarry where it was

  cut, the nineteenth-century men carefully prying and rasping

  it free,
the horses that hauled it a hundred miles packed in

  straw without breaking it, the carpenters who installed it

  in some now-demolished school where generations

  of words and numbers were smacked across it, the chalk

  clacking, sometimes snapping or screeching leaving a white

  scar, I want one of these smooth stone sheets to do what

  with I don’t know, it will just be me and a blackboard

  slate in a white room with floor-to-ceiling windows

  facing south

  * * *

  Gregory Curtis, The Cave Painters

  Christine Desdemaines-Hugon, Stepping-Stones

  Jean Clottes, Cave Art

  Polly Fleury and Hope Kingsley, Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860

  Götz Adriana, Cezanne Paintings

  J. V. Wright, Ontario Prehistory

  Max Raphael, Prehistoric Cave Painting

  Nick Eyles, Ontario Rocks

  Tomas Tranströmer, Bright Scythe (translated by Patty Crane)

  * * *

  SLIGHT BRIDGE

  evening climbs Woodshed Hill’s mauve

  snow into its branches’ grey haze, the foxlands,

  the bearlands, the deepening turquoise west,

  and here, a slim bridge made of watching, not

  knowing, hangs between Woodshed Hill, closing

  its dark door, and this darkening room

  * * *

  OLD FOREST

  The walnut tables and bookcases had come down

  through the family for generations. The children felt

  their grandparents’ lives lingered in the dark wood

  and they understood who they were in the clock’s

  sound and the silvered light reflected into the living

  room from the neighbouring slate roofs. But the war

  brought that to an end. The bookcases and tables

  stood naked for a while in a sidewalk market

  and went somewhere else. The apartment’s light

  and smells and sounds, the dinners and piano lessons

  lasted several years in the thoughts of the family’s

  last daughter. Her longing was the strongest force

  she knew but it never touched what it reached for.

  The loss of her mother’s china, the weedy lot and

  then the new building that stood where their green

  front door had been mystified her. What had become

  of her father’s desk? Every house, every street and

  walking person was a mark of grief. Hopes were

  always the bud of pain’s dark bloom. The world

  was a plain under low rolling cloud, lustrous

  as wet slate, dark as an old walnut desk.

  * * *

  GIACOMETTI

  the

  brilliant

  snow

  field

  the

  sharp

  north

  wind

  hide

  behind

  this

  picture

  of

  them

  * * *

  NEW MOON

  The words in both our books are wandering off

  in constellations best investigated with closed eyes.

  We click off the bedside lights. The rafters creak.

  Ice grains trickle down the shingles overhead.

  Somewhere in the room the cat rasps itself clean.

  And then, a gnat-faint wailing my neck hairs hear

  before my ear, a distant braid of suddenly swelling

  screams-

  wolves are around the house,

  one shrill

  yell my skin reads as a woman torn over the snow

  in teeth-I strain to detect Help! or No!, set

  to dart out and save someone,

  but the voice bursts its

  human mask, streaking way beyond the orbit of any

  self

  into the yodel tornado.

  We yank the curtains aside-

  stars-fields’ grey tarpaulin-forest’s dark

  bulk-

  in the morning we’ll look for tracks.

  * * *

  GIACOMETTI

  enough

  clash

  and

  racket

  without

  your

  hullabaloo

  listen

  …

  …

  windswept

  snow

  is

  everything

  * * *

  BOARDWALK

  To have a year-round path to the lake I build a boardwalk across the swamp.

  The late winter ice is soft and grainy under the sharp sun but still holds me while I chop through it.

  Black ooze smelling of beavers spurts from the holes as I pound in posts that will hold the boardwalk’s stringers and slats.

  Across the lake’s ice, tiny geese and trumpeter swans float in shimmering layers.

  And above where I work, in the silver maples’ fine branches nearly dissolved in light, a white-throated sparrow sings in a moment that has lasted a million years.

  I reach through a million years for the saw and cut a plank. There is no resistance to my arm.

  A deer pauses-curious neck/ear slivers in the trees’ slatted haze-and disappears.

  I will soon be able to cross from shore to shore as easily as the sparrow’s song.

  * * *

  But when I go walking I want to forget everything I’ve read. The black walnut steps sideways, is not a history of itself or body of lore. It’s a sound coming from all sides, its leaves are the smell you could call Atlantic or sentient or Cenozoic or music or walking to school.

  * * *

  PUSHING EVERYTHING ASIDE

  Rising sun warms the pale cut ends of the wood

  stacked in the lean-to on Woodshed Hill. All

  winter the cat and mice, the jays and squirrels

  have staged their plays on the elm chunks under

  the wide up-tilted eave, and I’ve left their

  theatre intact, burning thorn brush, worn-out

  slippers, fish-fat-soaked magazines. I pay my

  taxes at the long counter of the fisher’s

  tracks across the snow, and the fisher redraws

  my acres’ boundaries every night. Sometimes

  I find them under the bed in a snarl it takes

  all morning to undo. Sometimes I walk for

  weeks back near the lake and can’t recognize

  anything. There are tents, smoke and voices,

  white ribs high in the hemlocks. I felt the swift

  deepening of time. Who set the beech tree here,

  watching, watching, in its fine grey sleeves,

  choosing not to say what it could? These

  ladder marks where the bear climbed into cloud

  and went to sleep. Or the trunk is occupied.

  Someone in there on the phone. A mastodon for

  godsake. How long has it been since a mastodon

  called from here? Already red-winged blackbirds are

  snatching the horizon line to weave their nests.

  * * *

  CROSSINGS

  To get free of Nora, meowing us out of sleep from

  the bedroom doorway, I grope down the dim stairs

  following her swanky tail and open the door, letting

  her dart onto the frosted porch-into the presence

  of eight deer, clean as cream in the first light

  on the field’s brown snowless stu
bble. They lift

  their faces to gaze at her as she walks toward them, tail

  neither greeting nor hunting, as though lost in thought

  on the way to the neighbours’—and sits, messageless,

  not far from them. And the deer-straightbacked,

  humpbacked, legs braced, bunchlegged, sideon, halfturned-

  stretch their questioning necks and step toward her in

  stops and increments, as curious as sheep, or pretending

  to be, and Nora-nervous? what, her? nervous?-dawdles

  briskly off to watch from amongst the bare forsythia

  stems as, one by one, in their large space, the watching

  deer gradually turn away, pulled into their forest trail

  in slow leaps, until only one sleek deer grazing by itself

  is left. It looks up, high-steps toward the forsythia and

  stands in its growing aloneness, staring at Nora. Then,

  raising its right front hoof, it bangs the ground, stabs

  the ground again and again, as though commanding her

  to flee or follow, and wheels, filling the sky with its wide

  white tail, bucking its hind legs so high it disappears

  in a somersault into the dark white spruce.

  * * *

  On the ground among bare rose canes

  a robin is scuffling last year’s leaves,

  pausing, listening, cocking an eye.

  Earthworms’ tips are the first buds.

  * * *

  How could a weed be a book? (Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, p. 46)

  * * *

  SILPHIUM