And Yet Read online

  turn this cold case inside out and use

  its lining for clothes.

  FAR FROM TOOLS

  the poem wants

  its clothes, it is so thin

  it shivers invisible

  in the mirror in the cold

  room, it cannot

  tell itself from the reflected

  bookshelves, the bit

  of window showing cloud,

  snow, it wants to be something

  other than invisible-

  wanting-to-be-something-other,

  its mirrored absence

  is a pain it has difficulty

  accepting, difficulty

  seeing as clothes, okay,

  it knows the window,

  the snow are clothes but

  it’s sick of them,

  it would love to see an iguana

  turning to face it,

  iguana eyes looking deep

  into its own, its lips

  opening chalky jade-grey

  lumps and points like

  talking lichen

  HE’S PROBABLY NOT THERE

  The guide’s house is hard to see.

  Its roof and low walls are built

  of the birch and maple growing

  around it. From his morning fire

  smoke still drifts from the chimney

  into the April air. There are no

  windows I can see and no possessions

  lying outside, not even a bucket

  or axe. His living room must be

  the forest. I imagine him going

  into the house to sleep or wait

  out a storm or sit in a different

  darkness. I wish I could live in

  the guide’s house without feeling

  lost or lonely or needing to lay

  walkway stones. I wish

  I lived in that birch-filtered light

  with things as they are, not

  thinking their names.

  EXERCISE

  “Why does the chickadee’s delight in sunflower seeds never diminish?”

  “Because, as it passes from the chickadee’s beak to its stomach, the sunflower seed acts as the chickadee’s brain.”

  “Right. And the sunflower?”

  “The sunflower is delighted to go on a short trip, knowing it will soon be planted again.”

  “Very good. Okay, now, why is the sunflower delighted by the sun?”

  “Is it because the sun pours out the concentrated sweetness of vowels and the sunflower is a structure of dry fibrous consonants?”

  “No.”

  “Is it because the sun is immortal, famous, and has thick shining hair?”

  “No.”

  “Well, is it because the sunflower thinks the sky is a mirror and the sun a reflection of itself?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, why then is the sunflower delighted by the sun?”

  “Because the sun’s delight in chickadees never diminishes.”

  “Is that logical?”

  “What are you going to dream about tonight?”

  A RANGE OF HILLS

  Bears lug Woodshed Hill’s bulky darkness into their

  dens. It wakes up with them, famished, itchy with buds.

  Deer whisk its moonlit branches across highways

  in front of cars. Fishers ransack its theatre, littering

  Pine Valley with the actors’ heads. Coyotes lope

  away, clutching the hill’s money in their eyes. Jays

  slash holes in its canopy-their cries disperse its

  last leaves. A fox walks across a little fresh snow.

  Waking up, I see its tracks disappear. Woodshed Hill

  is there in the window. And in the pages on my desk.

  CAVE ART

  Early March sun hot on the coffee table and my stocking feet, I’m

  looking at photos of iron oxide and charcoal paintings someone made

  in near-darkness on the walls of Chauvet Cave near the Rhône River

  32,000 years ago. Minus ten degrees Celsius outside, but the light

  swells on the snowy yard before flooding the window. Jean Clottes’

  book Cave Art open on my lap. It’s strangely easy to think in

  thousands of years. For 25,000 years we told the same stories,

  engaged with the same gods, the great animal rivers, the obdurate alien

  fellows, stacked up dense and barging, rhinos, lions, bears, bison,

  aurochs, mammoths, in the tundra’s slopes and valleys, never far from

  ice. For 25,000 years. Used the same kitchen utensils, answered our

  children’s questions with the same words. The herds of thick-bellied

  horses, the reindeer, red deer, ibex flowing north and south, upland

  and downland, always pursued by the poor sun. We watched and

  adored them, filling ourselves like ticks with a drop of their vast

  life. We were sticks, we were zigzags, we were eyes only, drinking in,

  swallowing images to build ourselves, lines and words to hold the

  animals inside our limbs. No stars or sun. The reindeer were the sun.

  No plants or rivers. The horses were the plants and rivers. No human

  faces. Only animals. We were invisible. Bottomless. Witnesses.

  And when the ice began to melt and forests crowded the tundra plains,

  some of us followed what was left of the deer and the ice northeast

  into America, to Perth, where I sit with photos of Chauvet Cave, and

  some of us stayed in the warming forests and raised sheep, pigs and

  wheat, made carts and explosions and portraits of ourselves as the sun,

  and soon sailed west here to Perth, where we didn’t recognize our

  cousins from only a few thousand years ago, had forgotten all our

  shared stories, our old gods, except in sorrowful turbulent dreams.

  HOW DISTANT THINGS FEED THE HEART

  That small breath jolted out seeing clouds and

  land suddenly gathered into bison or deer,

  shining in them—aahhh! An adoration gasp.

  Pleasure returned to the pleasure-givers

  in gratitude. A caress reaching out from

  under the larynx—this was so well understood,

  it had its own word, as one might say “a laugh,”

  “a shudder.” We don’t know how the word

  sounded, but there are many carvings of it,

  of the creatures that caused the sensation

  the much-loved word described. Carvings

  in bone and ivory. Also paintings on rock,

  and a few models in clay.

  WINTER QUARTERS

  from the goatpath ledge over the frozen river,

  with paints, scraper and brush in a bag on my back, shielding

  a lamp,

  I wriggle into the mountain

  inside is the heart’s sky

  what am I? a sign for hunger. sticks held together by bawling

  or jokes

  my bared hand burrows under her coat’s cold leather

  beyond daylight, beyond wind, beyond the slither-escape you touch in slit bellies-nose and ears find the deer’s passageway, the route summer takes to her winter quarters, across plains and plateaus, over glaciers and passes, down into a valley where the sun lives,

  where bison are born

  flame-light staggering under the shoulders’ onroll, the dark animal-honey flecked with gold eye-glints pours through my paint-stained hands, taking the black-manganese and red-ochre flesh I offer them

 
daubing ankles and lips, I sop their heat into my starving

  space

  SINCE LIFE VALUES NOTHING HIGHER THAN LIFE

  and because animate matter always has at its core

  a soft quick, and brains and hearts need to be nearly

  mush, the great currencies have all been versions

  of flint. (Even the earth favours gladiators over

  poets, limestone makes its bullion from thick

  skulls and teeth, only once in a lucky while we find

  fossils of flowers or tongues.) But those pure

  hard tools for cutting and smashing survive the millennia

  still clearly describing their vanished opposite,

  the hot flowering beauty their makers fed and defended.

  I claim this, that all the axes, spears, arrows,

  swords and daggers were for guarding tender life, not

  ripping it. I claim this. I claim this. I claim this. Shut up.

  I claim this claim this claim this claim this claim this claim this

  WALLS

  Through the damp whispering draft, through

  my ringing ear and the echoed plink, plink

  of a distant waterdrop, I hear the people’s faint

  blended voices seep through the cavern’s walls.

  They are talking or singing in a neighbouring

  chamber, their voices close but blurred through

  thousands of years. I think they are here to

  honour the animals’ birthplace in the earth’s

  night. I hear them come closer. Just on the

  other side, they reach toward me brushes

  dipped in ochre and black manganese and

  paint my shape on the thin surface between us.

  LIMITS

  If language has learned to live in the mind

  the way racoons have learned to live in the city,

  maybe words can go feral again, smother in vines

  the sign saying City Limits and make me

  dream when I think I’m awake.

  Come on, trees,

  I’m waiting to take dictation!

  I have no idea what you’re going to say

  or if it will sound anything like birdsong or boulders.

  Boulders?

  Fewer and fewer things fit

  in my hands. Something the size of a steer or small

  car is brushing the backside of whatever I’m

  seeing and hearing—

  like that huge

  carp I once felt sliding against my

  hand in the cold muddy water I reached down

  into until my ear and cheek lay

  under the surface

  TREO

  What man with a framed licence and a ring engraved with a compass and ruler

  has laid out the boundary lines of the oak’s estate? Its soma, its miyaw. In what

  charter is the border between bark and aer, ojiibik and aki, wrot and erd set

  down? The oak spreads into the streaming light phos, giisis and climbs

  the condensed code right to the sun’s brink, it’s that tall, swims up a radiant

  sugar cascade millions of miles high, the sky pneuma, lyft streams through

  the oak’s pores, pours through the tunnels and galleries waanzh, bloma, miskwi

  the street map, metro and hallways of Mexico City and all its traffic are simple

  and small compared to this oak grown into the wind, into the suburbs of air, the

  commerce of breaths and whistles kreas, carnem, wiiyass carbon and oxygen

  bales, tanks, pouches, veins and aerial alleys, wrens’ routes beyond the ken of

  London cabbies widu, xylo, mitig, wod, vates while roots drink from the heavy

  dark, the depths under old words, sleep gast, manidoo the roots are not afraid

  to enter every room, every thought you have, your dreams and faint rememberings,

  drinking the knowledge into its growing reach gikendaasowin, manas, munih,

  mantis you would never explore this one oak’s forest if you had all the lifetimes

  from Lascaux to Mark Rothko. And the light? Who has measured out its border

  with the sun, counted the eyes it employs, the forms it paints on nothing? Who

  has set the sun on one side and the sky on another? And the water, the earth,

  the heartwood and me heorte, giiyoon, gaia, erd—my looking and being here—

  who has put a percentage to each of them? To the heartwood in me and to me

  in the oak’s roots? treo, truce, truth, bimaadan, zhiibine, du, duer, endure.

  A WORD FIGHTS SPEECH RIVER TO ITS HIGHEST POOL

  Put your boots on backwards, pull your shorts down over your

  eyes and let’s go over what you’ve heard and said so far today.

  Under the radio’s rope bridge, under the news site’s catwalk

  grate, the gorge’s torrent’s noise, treetop mist-you were here

  at four in the morning, your hands empty and nothing that showed

  in a mirror but your clear-hole eyes, your mouth time-lapse

  talking in reverse, back through childhood, through parents’

  parents’ cracked pale sloped thin muttering lips showing

  more lips underneath, mouths inside mouths saying “world”

  “wild” “wald,” back through the plush-lined gulletry, earth-

  tunnel-breath—all those long-dead selves are still thinking

  you. Clear-headed. Your world is what they see. Your eyes

  turned this way and that by a girl with red paint, two quail

  eggs and lamp, about to go into the darkness of Pech Merle.

  Er, ter, der, de, da, met, meter, mater. To be able to break all

  the furniture, axe down doors and walls, burn the roof, roll

  around outside with ants and asteroids and still leave a trail

  of words you can pocket one by one all the way to your front

  door-is its paint more weathered than you recall? Your chair

  thicker, heavier? Dinner does taste of some stranger’s touch.

  WHAT KIND OF TRACKS ARE THESE?

  This morning, is the interrogative the only working gear?

  Could we say it’s similar to reverse because operating in

  Why? or How? we can’t clearly see where we’re going or

  gain much speed?

  And don’t we find ourselves slowly reviewing a landscape

  we earlier passed through taking it in only subliminally if

  at all?

  And aren’t we now seeing the backside of what we took for

  the front?

  Is it stupid to assume that the first glimpse we have of a thing

  is its front?

  Does looking back at the way you’ve come make you realize

  you’re lost?

  Which European philosopher believed that asking questions

  delays or deflects the movement of time?

  Are you irritated by lists?

  If you could swivel your head like an owl would reverse be

  equal to forward?

  Likewise, if we refuse to accumulate answers, can a barrage

  of questions offer vertical lift?

  Are questions inherently more comical than statements?

  While a question clearly leads to a gulf that anyone might fill,

  is it not true that statements use their bulk or authority or

  menace or brutality or beauty or their intimidating confidence

  or blurred complexity to conceal the empty gulf behind where

  they started?

  Do you assume there�
�s someone inside you who could explain

  how you got where you are?

  CAGES

  Back and front I’m slung with empty

  cages for wild birds. House wrens,

  brown thrashers. Their long

  various songs and abrupt certainties

  are all around. I catch them

  and take them away with me,

  spelling each detail out until it’s gone.

  THAT THIS

  Reading Susan Howe’s thoughts on the writing of Hannah

  Edwards Wetmore, I have the impression she’s patronizing

  the eighteenth-century woman ever so slightly, moved but also

  charmed and a bit amused by her quaint naivety-that

  American notion that people from earlier eras were a bit

  simple and laughable, apt to be more histrionic and earnest,

  lacking in irony—and I build a case in my mind: how

  because people were more exposed to hardship and death

  in the past, living on closer terms with the slaughterhouse,

  the workhouse, slavery, facing the stark consequences

  of poverty, accident and isolation, without our medicines

  and securities, it was natural for them to express their

  struggle against darkness and annihilation with extravagant

  drama, and while this might make them look like morbid

  fire-and-brimstone yokels to some of us, it’s really we

  who are naive; our technological comforts have pushed

  catastrophes a little farther into the background or future,

  but since we’re still mortal and since it’s not clear how

  long our sheltering culture can last, at some point we’ll

  need to deal with some form of famine and plague. And

  yet, on going back over the pages of That This, I can’t find

  any place where Susan Howe patronizes Hannah Edwards

  Wetmore.

  IN THE COURT OF STEPHEN HARPER

  I paint my face white because I run a small theatre

  where you can watch things disappear. I paint