And Yet Read online

  Heads on Cyrene’s bulgy lopsided coins might be Apollo

  or Zeus-Ammon, tails is always a thick stalk of silphium

  like a six-armed electric transmission tower or a triple-tiered

  public fountain. What was silphium? It tasted like no other

  plant. You closed your eyes and it went on up the palate,

  fanning into new things, flavours and possibilities opening

  each from each like a gustatory precursor of Bach’s organ

  fugues. Did it heal disease? Make the face lustrous

  and young? It made Cyrene rich. Some think it was an

  abortifacient. Was it incense? It couldn’t be cultivated,

  it would only grow wild. Was its smell exactly what people

  mean by “what we want to be”? Hermes handed it to Orpheus.

  It was worth its weight in gold, at night thieves killed the

  guards and dug it up. Its seeds were the shape of Valentine

  hearts. Will a silphium seed be found in some sandy Libyan

  tomb, in the wrappings of a mummy or crumbling scroll,

  a little heart-shaped seed we can water and nurture back

  to life in our time and space? Its green cells held a nation

  more ancient than ours. There were silphium cities, silphium

  epics and lullabies. Silphium people gathered in markets

  and councils, married and feasted and celebrated the beauty

  of silphium life. They were communicating with beings in

  other galaxies. Here we are, eating and inhaling every variety

  of soot-barbed corkscrew molecules of ash boring into our

  eyes and brains, growing cancers in every nook of our bodies.

  For each creature we exterminate, we are evolving a new one

  dependent on human flesh, their taxonomies strangely related to

  deep-sea creatures, fungi, fruiting lianas. Signals are still coming

  from Alpha Centauri: “Hello, Silphium! Are you there?” But

  we cut it all down. We go around bashing each other with cars-

  silphium is gone. It can’t answer. We fawned on it, we

  reached up its tall stalks like puppies trying to climb a kind

  lady’s leg. There it is on coins that last answered to human

  desire twenty-two hundred years ago-if we don’t include

  what they bought for whoever sold them to the museum they

  lie in now or the riches I’ll get from making this poem. Nice

  how we’ve always added value to the gold and silver of coins

  with symbols of gods and monarchs and how monarchs have

  attached themselves to whatever money can buy, so that Caesar

  is there in my blood lusting me toward more life, toward new

  shoes or a trip to Malta or a bottle of wine or an operation to

  cut a sea cucumber out of my brain. I lie in bed looking up at

  the ceilingless dark, longing for silphium. I read gardening

  books, impatient with roses and carrots, longing for silphium.

  I kneel, dribbling pinches of lettuce seed alongside the string

  on the finely raked soil, my nose drips, my back aches, I rise

  and dust off my knees and eat bread and soup and try not to

  think of a world with silphium. Silphium would have made us

  all happy with what we have.

  * * *

  Dear Green Thumb,

  Will the clematis eventually strangle me while I nap in

  the arbour? I love your column,

  John

  Dear John,

  Yes, it will.

  Green Thumb

  * * *

  THIS

  for the rose bed: William Baffin

      John Davis

      Marie-Victorin

      John Cabot

      Henry Hudson

  * * *

  The lost landscape flickers briefly-bleached-out holes

  and blurred names, Akerman, Hedford, Stevenson-the way

  a dangled magnet flutters at a buried nail. You check the map

  for the route to the Richmond Hill library where, in an hour,

  we’re going to read. Beyond the guardrail, the past lies

  in layers, and I’m down there a few layers above Berczy,

  under the factories and asphalt, sprawled on the farmhouse lawn

  with Shawn, Carol and Tom, marvelling at the clouds’ white

  boil and the fine bottomless blue beyond the elms at the field’s

  edge. I couldn’t then see myself streaking across the freeway-

  framed horizon glancing down at us buried in July light.

  What isn’t a curtain that might part at any time?

  * * *

  A CHAIR IN A THICKET

  the woods are slowly chewing-wide leafed-out

  lips riding the jaws’ relaxed roll as though munching

  peanuts watching a game-and seem about to speak, lips

  slightly parting, settling again, boughs dipping, lifting

  in the speckled light, a walking pace, a thinking pace,

  the strolling boughs speaking all the while, not

  the boughs, the lips in the pollen-haze light, the shrilling

  insects, the fine veins and eyes, in the listening,

  the habitual intricate taking in, itself speech, selves

  presenting themselves, forming skins, faces, shared

  walls, building rooms within rooms, light-shuttered,

  shade-lit, distant corridors, doorways, calls overlapping,

  lapping into this cove, into this this, going elsewhere

  still here, arriving new with no memory of here

  * * *

  TOOLROOM

  My father is waiting for me to bring him a set of calipers.

  The small room I’m standing in-the toolroom-off the back of the old summer kitchen, was once a pantry. It has a window facing west toward the barn. Its tall cupboard is full of electric motors, drill bits and pump gaskets. The wall-to-wall counter is piled with wrenches, cans of nails, work gloves, sharpening stones, coils of wire, boxes of bullets, a jar of mercury, a jar of DDT, engine oil, pulleys, fan belts, pliers, smudged folded packets of vegetable seeds.

  My father is out in the barn crouched in the dim light beside the tractor handling the parts of its engine he’s arranged on a piece of plank on the dirt floor.

  I am motionless in the silence, in the window light, ranging my eyes over the crisscross curves and depths, the juts and nooks, the scythe blade angled down over the hardened paint brush under the monkey wrench and wooden mallet, the blue handle of a glass-cutter partly visible under that, the tip of a corroded plumb bob.

  He needs the tractor to grade the lane, to scrape its half-mile length from end to end with a homemade drag, a kind of wooden raft with angle-iron blades on the bottom and a stone block on top for weight. I will sit on the block on the jolting drag, teeth rattling, field and sky like slatted blinds. He needs to fill the lane’s potholes and level the hard mud ruts the Dooleys cut with their pickup in the spring, ignoring his Keep Off sign, tearing his barricade down to reach their house across the field once they’d churned their own lane to muck. But the tractor is broken.

  Light in the toolroom is a fine, deeply silent grey. The rust-brown hammers, hinges, screwdrivers, funnels, oilcans, rivets, clamps, trowels, leg-hold traps are intensely motionless. Their stillness seems to contain centuries. To have gathered seasons of changing light and sound into mute knowledge. I will soon reach out and lift a chisel, a pitted bolt. I will hear the metal click and shift. I will remind myself of the shape of calipers.


  My father needs the lane to be passable at least in summer to get things in from the highway and out to the highway that are too large and heavy to pull on a sleigh-a load of roofing tin, oats for the horse.

  He is waiting for the calipers. They are not under the bucksaw blade. Not under the ball of twine.

  He needs to be out of the city, the elbowing, the jeering, the taking what you can get. He needs to know that if the power goes out, we’ll have lamps. If the stores are empty or burnt, the garden and chickens will keep us alive. He saw that in the ’30s. He saw that in Germany in the war.

  Not under the pry bar, the fence staples, the can of creosote. The silence is bottomless.

  He needs the calipers to fix the tractor, the lane, the ’30s, the war, the city, people’s stupidity.

  In the toolroom, nothing has moved for hundreds of years.

  * * *

  LATE IN THE DAY, SOMETHING STILL MISSING

  a starling flock careens across

  the cloud face like a ragged black

  dog escaping from bees,

  balks,

  piles up into a tighter and tighter

  lung and

  coughs itself into a black plume hitting

  a wind wall, warping

  into a vortex, a tight-stemmed funnel

  vanishing down some sky

  drain

  over the hill

  * * *

  BEHIND YOU

  sometimes while waking up it’s clear what the beads

  slide on, you could say, “being human,” but it’s

  nothing you own, not even things your parents’

  parents told you, it’s inside that, beyond the ears’

  grasp-speak with a calm face to friends and

  fellow workers while you’re planning what to

  pack, buy tickets in different names for different

  destinations, only one of which you use,

  whatever attracts you, go the other way, into

  alleys into darkness into water into silence into

  hardness into tightness into what falls through-

  not “human”, not “witness”, not “logosphere”, it’s

  what’s still behind you when you turn around

  * * *

  BRACKETS

  Among their raised three-pointed leaves, the viburnum

  berries are yellow. They nod and shake a little in the warm

  September breeze. Will the wild turkey come to pluck them

  from the bare twigs when the ground is covered with

  snow? Last year a solitary male stood here, wings tight

  to his sides, stretching his long neck toward the small

  frost-bruised fruit and launched his big body somehow

  straight up on those kneeless stick legs, toes pointed

  down as though imagining ballet. I picture this and write

  the question down because the viburnum hangs over

  the chair I’m lying in and I have time for a poetic thought.

  Why is that poetic thought? In other places people’s houses

  burn with all their clothes and photographs, their children

  die, men hold up rain-matted stuffed toys. Men with

  rifles. Or cameras. Or notebooks. The wind rambles,

  watery, stirring the rock elm’s low-hanging boughs, and then

  this page, and then the oak tree’s boughs across the field.

  * * *

  ECLIPSE

  The moon rises full through the pines

  as the autumn crickets expect and

  the stray cat comes calling and our cat

  stalks it down the silvery lane, but

  already our shadow-do we have

  such a thing?-is creeping out

  from its earth cave stalking the moon,

  and by midnight only the barred owl

  is calling, a dog nervously barks

  across the cricketless field and the sky’s

  snuffed socket throbs out dark rays.

  * * *

  Night is full of passageways through which things disappear. Where they disappear to remains a mystery. Sometimes they seem to be standing just on the other side of the bookshelves and chairs. But the passageways move around unexpectedly. Handled by agents. Thieves of objects and lives. In the lawn a coyote opens a tunnel that swallows the cat-the cat that had more personality than the prime minister. And in the morning there’s no sign of where that tunnel was or where the cat has gone.

  * * *

  GIACOMETTI

  the

  moon

  zero

  in

  brackets

  stares

  at

  the

  earth

  love

  being

  made

  and

  unmade

  * * *

  CHARGED

  Is there a law that makes us break

  the law and take the punishment like a dog

  hit by a car? I ache even among morning

  glories and hummingbirds, suspecting I’m

  charged without hope of acquittal, polarized

  to repel every outcome I intend.

  Or?

  Can we join the clan of the dragonfly nymph

  or hang the hypnotized pilot’s portrait

  at the head of the court or wear the icon

  of mercury or the ash-covered ember or

  swear by the twin signs of lichen and hail?

  * * *

  Woodshed Hill is losing its leaves. Those still clinging

  swerve and tremble like a school of orange fish—

  glittering—in the clear north wind.

  Listen—again that clunk on the outside wall. Like something

  trying to find a home for the winter.

  Once in a while I think of the arrowhead I found years ago

  and so far always find it again in some

  box or drawer.

  * * *

  open doors all down the hallway, piles

  of books and curtains, plates, shoes

  I HAVEN’T LOOKED AT THESE IN YEARS

  WATCHING

  I am watching us now, two dark specks in the white fields, my mother pulling me on a sleigh.

  Even then, sixty-six years ago, I was watching—part of me already staying behind, watching us move on ahead out of sight, not sure if I was really seeing what I saw.

  The vast cold sky is sharp as a spark, but the few barns and bare elms shrink away to the land’s rim.

  Her footsteps crunch the jagged snow, the sleigh jolting, swinging the sun side to side.

  We are dashing from warmth to warmth, but my throat wants to go with the wind wherever it goes.

  Her heels bounding ahead, my mother glows gigantic with struggle.

  Why isn’t she sad?

  We are specks, and the clouds of our breath fill the world. I stare at her red coat’s swirling skirts like fireplace flames.

  She turns and shows her smiling crooked front tooth. Why isn’t she sad?

  At the lane’s end, by the white deserted road, she bends and brushes snow from the lid of a box. I stand looking over its edge as she opens it, snow spilling into its square wooden space where two frosted bottles of milk are waiting, their cardboard caps perched on short columns of frozen cream.

  The bottles bundled beside me, we turn and begin the half mile back to the house where I’m already waiting, watching us come.

  In the wind I am safe, naked as a crow.

  There is barely space for us in the dark papered rooms. They are so full of old stains, so thick with silent watching. Why is my young mother hurrying her
e with such appetite?

  THIN PATH

  All evening the moon has coasted

  out beyond the balcony.

  You walk

  the thin path across the gulf to ask

  if there’s anything it wants-a glass

  of water, a shawl.

  The moon smiles

  and shakes its head, it’s listening, it’s

  watching something you can’t see.

  You turn and walk carefully back

  to where you were. For years

  you didn’t understand how deep

  your shadow is and empty, how

  it distances the things it falls on,

  how it stretches out looking like

  a path.

  I HAVEN’T LOOKED AT THESE IN YEARS

  my beloved father was human, here’s his hand holding

  his knife, it’s how I still remember him, I laid the knife

  under his hand and covered him, my beloved sister

  was human, mine were the last fingers to touch hers,

  I placed this needle—it looks smaller here than it was—

  between her finger and thumb, my father used to say

  whatever eats leaves waste and hands are hungrier than

  mouths, he said human hands are born toothless but

  make their own teeth, here I am with my brush, and here

  with the camera, beloved brush, the camera I’m not

  so sure about, it meant a lot of arguing about catching

  god, here you notice I’ve got it in both hands, very

  human, and here I’m holding it in my teeth for a joke,