And Yet Page 3

  my father would have hated that, this pipe in my uncle’s

  mouth, see, my beloved uncle, was always a problem, only

  animals carry with their mouths, my beloved father said,

  leave the ashes, the scraps, the slash, the bones, we’re

  made to go forward, he said, that’s why we haven’t got

  eyes in the backs of our heads or toes behind our heels,

  here’s my beloved aunt holding a pistol, my sickly cousin

  with a book, some close-ups, hand with rosary, steering

  wheel, telephone, cheese grater, matches, food dish,

  beloved shoe, my father said never carry junk, remember

  people only if you can describe their hands, them

  touching you, some of them, hands want to reach for

  what’s clean, what’s young, he said, what’s past is

  past, or maybe passed is passed, now, he said, is for

  packing up, here he’s shutting the trunk of the car

  FIRST MEMORY

  White-ceilinged space fills my face, which is the size of the room and includes everything in sight.

  Recalling this, I know I’m on my back on a grey rug in the old farmhouse living room, but at the time I’m not aware of the rug, the room or my body as separate things.

  An unstable presentation of light and shadow, warmth and coolness, surrounds me and shares my awareness. It materializes from a distance, swelling and full of purpose, then it falters, veers and fades. And then it grows again, at times feebly, partially, at times with sudden vehemence and force.

  I take this activity of light and shadow to be a creature endowed with emotion and intent, a potent being like my mother or father but lacking human form. And although I witness its behaviour as unpredictable and independent of me, I also encompass it. It inhabits me. Its changes work my emotions and shape my physical presence.

  The actions of this creature of coolness and warmth, doubt and resolve, its expressions, are never the same. It follows no pattern. It hesitates, it hovers between being here and somewhere else, it surges up, fully decided, glorious, powerful, bursting with plans for things to do, then its attention drifts away, no appetite, no confidence, leaving a queasy aimlessness, a vacancy which is also a kind of pleasure, like watching something fall out of reach, getting smaller and smaller, the shrinking aftermath of a sneeze, a spasm, goodbye saying hello, a wrinkled chill.

  There goes its coming again and here comes its going away. And as it goes and comes I feel it slowly, very slowly lengthening out and sliding over me from right to left.

  And then I realize what it is: sunlight broken by running clouds is passing through a tall south-facing window and casting a pattern of panes and sashes over me. (It was likely early spring.) I recognize the rug, my body, the window and that something in the sky is making the light strong and weak.

  The flighty light-shadow creature has suddenly stiffened and gone into hiding in the window frame, in the floor, in my body, which now all seem set to stand their ground, mute, discrete and secretive, for as long as I live.

  AFTER THE WAR, OUT IN THE COUNTRY

  At the cutting board across from the wood stove

  my mother unfolds the paper wrapper holding

  a white-layered bacon slab and shears off

  thongs of translucent rind she dangles for the cat

  waiting beside me. The bacon pops and spits

  in the black pan. The cat gnashes the rinds

  with sharp gasps, jerking his head. My father

  will go to work, my sister to school. I will

  burrow back under the racket of newspapers

  on the daybed or watch my grandmother root

  through her rag bag choosing the next patch

  for the quilt-a field of deep blue with silver

  clouds, a field of brown furrows, a field

  under cool green water. Or in my slow

  coat and boots I’ll follow the cat’s black

  whittled legs through the snowbanks’ glare.

  EVERYTHING’S ON THE MOVE

  warm cool warm night-wind crazy with jailbreak,

  laced with thawed swamp. spring peepers’ shrill riot

  oceaning over the porch, lifting my shirt. a halfmoon

  staining the haze.

  I brought these things up to bed—

  and the three wild turkeys stilting halting over the lawn

  at dusk, swivelling their blue Jurassic heads high

  between bending pecks—

  awake in the dark now, an ache in my scarred skull.

  let all the unfrozen throats rant their blocked pang! pang! pang!

  wind puffs the curtain from the sill and gasps it back—

  sighs and clamour gathered from all down the continent,

  calls across canyons, final farewells—here’s all

  my memories, all I ever wanted, all I loved and tried

  to hold

  DRACO

  the comet Draco sweeps the earth with its phosphorous

  confetti tail—trickledown animism—detours, loops,

  shortcuts—I drift through bedroom dark into the hayloft—

  its prickly air—how close it always was!—dust-rich

  light streaming through cracks and knotholes—heat

  from the sun-stressed wall, the roof’s creaking tin—I

  lie with my ear to the tine-scarred floor, smell of old

  pine—chaff—grist rubbed in the grain—waiting—wood

  charged with the sun’s hum-I hear you now climbing

  the smoothed rungs-into the raftered heat, the sweetness

  of dry grass—a loose plank rocks under your step—you

  rustle, you kneel and lie beside me, don’t you?—young

  as before we were married—putting your mouth to mine

  IN THE ONE-ROOM SCHOOL

  In winter, while we bent

  over our workbooks in the rows of joined

  desks, Miss Duncan would watch us

  silently from the front of the room,

  stationed

  on the round iron grate where the cellar

  coal furnace heat rose,

  and her dress would swell like a silk

  bell over her warmth-stroked

  skin

  and her gaze would surround me, mixed

  with the murmuring dark algebra

  of her perfume.

  FULL MOON

  Ross Denby’s words had brought me to the dark

  dining room’s window. January full moon.

  The house cold, soundless. His words had wakened

  me, drew me slowly past my parents’ half-open

  door and down the long invisible stairs.

  The week before, while he and my father

  jigged their lines through the opened ice,

  he said, “You know this lake here’s bottomless.

  Bert Roddick took a team and wagon out to

  about here to cut ice—broke through and was

  never found.” A mauve jackrabbit

  darted in the twilight near us. Ross Denby

  said, “Them hares dance under the winter

  full moon.” He looked at me. “You’ll see them

  dance, if you watch for them.”

  Beyond the glass, the prowlers’ world stands

  moonstruck, drained of dark. The swing

  hangs from its pine bough, bone white. Its seat

  I carved my name on casts a puzzle-piece-shaped

  shadow sharp as ink.

  My parents and sister are far away in a small

  newspaper house.

  In the moonyard, the knuckled black net spread
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  under the apple tree flutters. Blurs into moving

  bodies. Red-spark eyes. A wisp of rabbits crouch

  low flailing at mute drums. They burst apart, then

  huddle, hunting for a lost ring.

  They make a hopping carousel. They jig on hind

  legs, wavering tall. They vault each other up

  and up, white arch on arch to glitter-haze.

  Behind my eyes a sun-filled plain. Open road.

  Beyond the glass, under a frozen dome, ghosts

  clamour toward the one bright hole—climbing

  shadow rungs in the gaze of the great white owl.

  MY FATHER TAUGHT HIMSELF ARC WELDING

  Alone in the cellar he wired the welder directly

  into the fuse panel’s main feed, and every

  evening billows of burnt-metal smoke pulsing

  with green-blue light boiled from the open cellar

  door next to the kitchen. Zot-Zot-Zot! He

  was down there in gauntlets and dark-lensed

  helmet, bent over the sparking rod while the lamps

  and ceiling bulbs in the rest of the house wilted

  to migraine brown, and I Love Lucy shrank

  to a white dot on the TV screen. We

  sat in the dark. The room, wracked by electric

  fits, filled with vaporized steel. We could only

  wait. He was under a spell, determined to master

  the incendiary stitch that fused metal to metal,

  and to waken him would have unleashed something

  worse.

  PASSAGE

  Little snow has made it down through the boughs

  of the white pine and now the slope at its base catches

  the winter sun. The fallen dry needles make a pocket

  of hot rosin smells in the February air—a moment

  you can occupy and pass through. When you were nine

  you slept in this smell on warm pine needles behind

  the school. An island washed in waves of glare.

  Beyond the frozen marsh, the sun is sometimes engaged

  in cloud, a breeze wanders here, handles the soft

  surrounding boughs then strolls away ruffling a stand

  of cedars. How little breeze it takes to make this pine’s

  high branches sing. Their faraway thin-brushed

  whistle—braiding three minor keys—hungers—memories

  of storms—fades—drops to an ear-touching whisper.

  DISTURBANCE FROM AN EMPTY ROOM

  My sister moved out at fifteen and the fighting

  stopped and for months I heard my parents’ footsteps

  in separate parts of the house and the silence

  of her room rang in my ears, I was ten, I spent days

  alone in the barn’s loft building a hay fort, a thick-walled

  cave in the high cavernous space with its blades of dusty

  light, in the stillness above the stall where her horse

  had snorted and paced, where one fall Saturday afternoon

  in my dark burrow, talking out loud to imagined people,

  I pushed my hand out through a seam in the bale wall

  to feel fresh air or imagined rain, and a hand

  seized my hand, a dry cool flat-palmed barky strong

  hand gripped my outthrust palm where I couldn’t

  see it and pulled it silently for a long time, I was

  silent too, my shoulder and cheek drawn tight to the

  stubble wall, and then the hand let go and I crawled

  to the fort’s low door and looked out not knowing

  who or what I’d find, it was honour and the need to claim

  sensible business that drew me out, and there was Barry

  Knox, a boy a year ahead of me in school who had

  never visited me before, I said, “Oh, hi,” as though he’d

  knocked and I’d opened the front door, and he seemed

  to have just awakened from sleepwalking with no

  better idea than I had of what he was doing there.

  THAT WAS NOTHING

  The elms have gone on their pilgrimage

  in the grey wind, leaving no clue

  to the routes they travel.

  They might return with a passion

  for awnings and deckchairs, but now,

  the heat off, pipes drained, their rooms

  stand open to snow and stars.

  No, I never whispered any such thing

  or cared

  or had those thoughts you’re thinking of.

  UNCONSOLED

  I’m back in Newfoundland at a celebration of Al’s

  life and poetry. So many old friends. Smokey looks

  as young as when I first met him. I’m so glad to see

  him alive, I say, “Let me press you to my breast,”

  playful and honest. I quote Ron Hynes: “It’s all gone,

  it won’t come back no more,” and realize I’ve come

  unprepared, invisible, without really picturing the event

  or its importance to me or the value my show of love

  has for my friends. I should have brought a book

  and planned to read a poem in Al’s honour. I should

  have written a poem. Al would have done that.

  Celebrations and displays of love made the landscape

  he lived in, whereas for me they often feel like

  an accepted loss, consent rigged by those in control.

  And yet what other presence do I have? I’ll have to

  ask someone to drive me to their house in the hope

  of finding one of my books. In a room off the hallway

  a group of gleefully furtive women are smoking hashish.

  They beckon me in. I inhale from a small hot pipe wet

  from their mouths, telling myself I’m crazy, I’ll lose

  track of time and never come up with a book, I’m farther

  and farther from what I intend, I’m in The Unconsoled.

  AUNT AGNES

  I see in old photos that my Aunt Agnes

  was beautiful when she was young—clear-faced,

  endowed with an open future—the person whose dress

  I thought was a kind of upholstery, who moved

  like a pulpit on casters, whose hair was a layer of black

  macaroni, whose small face was a pouch of old

  accusations, who worked her mouth like she would

  spit something when you weren’t watching.

  At the dining table we were nearly silent.

  Uncle Walter breathed thickly through his nose. He could fix

  radios although his fingers were stumpy.

  “Would you like more cake?” my mother asked.

  “No,” he exhaled, “I’m full as a bull.”

  Aunt Agnes’ eyes sagged at him, her throat swelled and coughed up

  quietly, “Ach, Walter.”

  I blame you, Ontario, for her ruin and my squeamish ignorance.

  She was still young when her twelve-year-old son was shot

  and people went back to their jobs and dim parlours.

  Simcoe’s and Osgoode’s and Russell’s long-running charade.

  If you haven’t made a puppet to enter in your name, stay home.

  And make sure that home is very small and no one else can get

  in.

  The man from Timiskaming or Nipissing asleep on the snow

  near the equestrian statue of Edward VII in Queen’s Park.

  He had fallen off a bench. I paused to see if he was still

  breathing and walked on.
What could I do?

  SICK AND WRONG ABOUT MANY THINGS FOR A LONG TIME

  Last night I wandered onto a small borderland road

  and met my friend David Freeman who was witty and serene

  about being dead, and today, after spending the morning

  with Bly’s Vallejo translations, groping through the Spanish

  to see how his poems go, I eat lunch reading a review

  of a book that mentions Edward Thomas hiking the countryside

  to escape depression, so I go to see if I’ve got some Edward

  Thomas on my shelves and find his Selected Poems with

  an inscription in David Freeman’s hand wishing me happy

  birthday and adding in different ballpoint, “ ‘As the Team’s

  Head-Brass’ is one of the very best poems to have emerged

  from WW1 (on p. 256).” Poor Edward Thomas who found

  himself on the borders of sleep and gave in to the popular

  logic that he could only prove his love for Britain’s earth

  by getting turned to worm shit in France. Which reminds me

  why Lawrence was so great, refusing to sleepwalk into

  death with his countrymen. And Vallejo, who knew

  our dreams are not confined by sleep.

  SAD ONTARIO

  Ontario is sadder than landlocked Bolivia.

  It has its Great Lakes, but they’re cut down

  the middle and, with American smokestacks along

  the water’s horizon venting brown fog, their shores

  aren’t thresholds to eternity. There are too many

  fences and borders. If you can’t walk through

  a forest without thinking of fuel and intruders,

  you’re still indoors. And Hudson Bay, real

  saltwater, is not in real Ontario, fortunately

  for Hudson Bay. It lies north of the mirage line

  where roads and travellers get refracted back

  to Toronto or ripple and reappear up to their brows

  in muskeg, covered in deerflies. Hudson Bay exists

  in textbooks in the south and otherwise in its own un-