Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY RUSSELL THORNTON

  The Fifth Window (2000)

  A Tunisian Notebook (2002)

  House Built of Rain (2003)

  The Human Shore (2006)

  Russell Thornton

  Copyright © 2013 Russell Thornton

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

  Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

  P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

  www.harbourpublishing.com

  Edited by Silas White

  Cover art by Golya Mirderikvand

  Cover design by Angela Caravan

  Print edition text design by Mary White

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Thornton, Russell

  Birds, metals, stones and rain / Russell Thornton.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-55017-601-8 (paper)

  ISBN 978-1-55017-657-5 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8589.H565B57 2013 C811'.54 C2013-900212-X

  Birds, metals, stones and rain

  are mother, father, daughter, son,

  birth, death, heaven, hell,

  prison, rescue, blindness, sight,

  the only time, the only place,

  birds, metals, stones and rain.

  I

  Squall

  The clinking becomes a ringing,

  solid and clean. The spikes go straight

  into the wide earth, the four poles

  into the sky. The canvas bells

  and flaps, and stays taut in the wind.

  That is the tent in a lost camp.

  The drumming deepens and quickens.

  Wild and intricate, it allows

  a melody to break from it,

  a mist to lift off it and through.

  That is the wet ghost that will ride

  along the edges of the flesh.

  The plane surface stands brilliant

  within the vastness of metal,

  and a winged drop of a small bird

  flies chirping out of a keyhole.

  That is the newborn that unlocks

  the clear mirror door of the rain.

  The Oldest Rock in the World

  A news item: Oldest rocks in the world found on barren Quebec shore

  And brought my hand down on the butterfly

  And felt the rock move beneath my hand.

  —Irving Layton, “Butterfly on Rock”

  In memory of Irving Layton

  They look as if they are in mid-tumble

  out of the bare and windswept swathe

  of outcropping bedrock on Hudson Bay’s

  eastern shore a one-hour canoe trip

  south of Inukjuak. These boulders

  of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt—

  four and a third billion years old,

  dating back to a mere three hundred

  million years after the globe formed

  out of a cloud of cosmic debris and dust.

  When the planet was being pummelled

  by meteors, comets and asteroids,

  microbes interacted with iron

  in the primordial seas and emerged

  as Earth’s very earliest life,

  and nestled in sediment and wrote

  their bio signature in the rust that fills

  these boulders’ creases. Now beyond

  the treeline, beyond houses, the boulders

  have sat longer than the combined lifespans

  of countless generations of animals—

  far longer than human history

  and any dreaming of the way within rock

  or of a dying back to when only rock

  framed what would be wind for human breath.

  Now the microbe might bless us. Allow

  us to stand trembling in bright, bright light.

  Witness our core, the one annunciation.

  Hear us: from out of the depths have we

  called thee, from out of our will and wonder—

  the doors in us so closed, we think the door

  to rock is shut. We cannot die or love enough—

  and love, though it brings us to its door

  and unlocks it for us, will not follow—

  and our signatures nestle in time and we

  forget them. Wind is in a hand of force

  that wraps around wind, and the rock has moved

  and taken our hand, our hand made of nothing

  other than what the rock is made of—

  in death we lose nothing that is not

  of the death and life of this rock. The wind

  moves endlessly, and the rock moves around

  the wind, and the planet moves around

  the wind and around the sun, and around

  everlasting cosmic debris and dust.

  Wind is rushing through the oldest place

  we have named. The song it sings is learning

  itself, beginning and ending with Earth.

  More names than we can know are rushing through,

  and within the names the rock is opening.

  Burrard Inlet Ships

  At a window overlooking water—container ships

  and bulk carrier ships lying at anchor

  framed in front of us. They’re always there,

  I hear a voice say. As if the ships were the same ships

  that sat there twenty-four or forty-eight hours ago.

  As if, in the middle of the night, the ships did not

  arrive and drop anchor at exact latitudes and longitudes.

  And tugboats did not come and bring the ships to dock,

  and other ships not arrive and take the first ships’ places—

  in the middle of the night. As if the ships were not

  emptied of what they brought here and loaded up again

  while the ships’ sailors took their hours’ shore leave

  to go to a bank, visit a doctor, talk with a priest,

  buy a blouse or bracelet for a woman back home.

  As if, between sundown and dawn, the ships did not depart.

  And every two or three days, a new ship and new crew

  did not sit at each terminal wharf. As if it was not

  now a new ship visible outside the window.

  All night, out on the water, the ships’ horns send out

  sound signals for their arrivals and departures,

  and all night, in inlet-filling fog, the ships’ horns

  send out long blasts, long repeating notes—accompaniment

  to the circuit of sleep in the houses along the shore.

  New ships and crews come, new products are brought

  from faraway locales, and new loads of coal, sulphur,

  lumber and wheat are taken to faraway locales.

  All night, when gulls come up from the inlet

  through cloud and rain, gull after gull takes up

  the same insane-sounding cry of unfathomable

  emergency in a wilderness of water, and circles with the same

  single message that seems wound and unwound

  as on a wire anchored somewhere unknown to any
gull

  in the inlet circling and circling through its tides.

  All night, the outsized ships come and go—all night.

  As if they were not, each of them, the same ship powering

  over the glowing deep blue water-globe. As if the voice

  at this window had not been with me all along,

  waiting inside my hearing. As if it was not

  the voice of one more myself than I can know.

  As if this one’s home had not always been here

  where he could see an anchor-place and hear gulls.

  Nest of the Swan’s Bones

  She will build a nest of the swan’s bones...

  —Robinson Jeffers, “Shiva”

  High in the blue air above the dumpster in the back lane,

  between the mountains and the tidal flats,

  on the thermals and updrafts a summer hawk does slow turns.

  The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.

  The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life

  in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught

  trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives

  and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild

  baby fish run, they run the gauntlet of penned fish. They are eaten alive,

  their eyes popping out as sea lice feed inside their heads.

  The hawk dances. Circles, dances. Its shadow flits

  unnoticed across men, spreads over a rodent or bird

  it dives to, inserts claws into, and clamps large feet on, stomping it

  as if beating time. It splays flesh and flies

  away with it into sunlight. The hawk takes up an owl’s hoot

  and a sparrow’s last chirp, a heron’s bill-snap and a smelt’s silence

  into its disinterested scream. The swan

  glides in beauty in the hawk’s sight, and fills all the hawk sees

  with brilliant, blinding whiteness. Moment by moment,

  the men go back and forth. They search out anything they can trade

  for a full bottle or syringe or pipe. In my room with the lit-up screen,

  I lie and dream my dream. I feel it must also be God’s,

  this dream of the person of persons. Where the dream comes through,

  it punctures me, and I breathe dark air. The air thuds

  into pockets like a plummeted elevator. O monster home. O

  specialty wine outlet. O auto mall. The wild white swan

  is dead. The hawk hunts and kills the swan for love. It will build a new

  nest of the swan’s bones. It will keep this nest unseen.

  I am a person. I soil the cage in which my heart flings

  and flings itself against the bars. I try to own

  the view of every murderer, and yet I try to sing

  the way out through the hawk’s claw-holes to the repose

  in the nest of fire at the tip of the hawk’s wing.

  The Man Who Sleeps in Cemeteries

  Refuse recyclable paper yard-bags. Refuse gloves.

  Collect yard trimmings the way you know how—

  I’ll do likewise. My friend, don’t hurt your head.

  Afternoons, slide down the avenue. At every intersection,

  karate kick crosswalk buttons. Show up mornings

  a very macho character, a little threatening. Show up

  fawning, a little flirtatious. Talking religion, bitches.

  Going on about your lady—in the mirror, lipsticked.

  Gang boy in Colombia. Gang man. You left that life.

  Yes, they found you in Miami. They killed your wife,

  your two kids, they threw you off a balcony. Now lay

  down your head. With strands of yourself off in the trees,

  running quiet and clear in the quick creek water.

  With your arms wrapped around surgical scars.

  With your collection of scars. Miami to Vancouver? I think

  I walked. Lay down your English. Por favor! Scowl

  and explain to me in Spanish that you don’t speak

  Spanish anymore. Or Portuguese. Or the Quebec French

  that jumps out of you. Explain to me that North Vancouver

  has the most beautiful cemetery you’ve ever slept in.

  No landlords, no need to pull a knife. With the different

  parts of your brain in the right places, explain it.

  With your jumble of words, lay down your head.

  With your jumble of words. With your single joint

  per day and the pain gone out of your skull. Let

  the sections of your head click into a proper machined fit.

  Yes, killed so many times, scattered in so many places,

  you can’t say—say a loud Fuck you! in the direction

  of your every past boss. Say it at your every Refugee Board

  hearing, at your every income assistance interview.

  Consult the cemetery’s visiting bear, coyote and deer.

  Consult the community of the dead flowing in unison

  beneath your head. Then make your many decisions

  and rule the parts of your head. My friend, my co-worker,

  here’s a coffee, a set of garden tools and plastic yard-bag.

  Come do your expert work. Whistle all day the songs

  that came to you in the night through the cold clean dirt.

  Greenness

  What am I now that I was then

  —Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

  I turn to grass tufts and see unsullied

  clear greenness displaying its steel. I see

  what I should see, simple close-mown spring grass

  like that of any suburban house lawn.

  I turn again and decades disappear

  and I see the dark grass all down the block—

  I wake, run out of a basement and go

  reeling across yard after wide yard. Here,

  I unlock a gate. Swing it open. Go

  to a neighbour’s front door. I knock, and ask

  for help. But I am still half in the house

  where I crouch, and we gaze at each other,

  my mother and I, while my father holds

  her so she will burn in the fireplace flames—

  it is only a pretend me who asks.

  Here, a woman blankets me and leaves me

  in a den. The simple grass I turn to

  is of the same greenness that pierces me

  where I sit in a deep plush chair and hear

  a man on a phone, sink and right away

  begin to dream of grass. Lawns touch my bare

  feet with cold dew and make me swift, shoot me

  full of starlight the grass stores in its maze

  of roots and make me shine bright. Here, I slip

  out of the blanket, the den, and go back

  outside and down the rows of blades all

  waiting to take me in. What I bring,

  I bring to grass to help it find its way

  beyond every house. I turn to grass

  that is close-mown, sunlit in the morning,

  and turn to the grass that rinses my eyes

  wide for the dark. When the soft spring rain flows

  busy through grass, the always houseless night

  helps continue this beginning. When grass

  lengthens and men come to cut it, I laugh

  with the laughing greenness. Unknown heaven

  in its depth in the grass, once here cannot

  be unmade. What I am now that I was

  then can only be what is in grass—here

  in what reaches breathing, reaching nowhere

  but from blade to blade. It breathes and is iron

  that is not cast by anyone but grows.

  The Rain Bush

  ...and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush

  was not consumed. And Moses said,
I will now turn aside,

  and see this great sight...

  —Exodus 3: 2–3

  I heard kindlings, full flames, a furnace fire

  and singing ore. I turned aside and saw

  rain blowing into the branches of a bush—

  the molten metal cooling, magnetic,

  its memory of directions, its brilliant

  dream of Earth come back. The bush stood—

  living, intricate, a hollow sphere lit

  in a theatre blackness with circling

  mirror-drops. New wind arrived, and the array

  of branches swerved on the stalk, and the bush

  caught new rain, was still again, and the mirrors

  continued circling, losing their silver

  and becoming glass. So whatever a mirror

  displayed through the air was as soon released,

  whatever memory it let appear

  in any image as soon disappeared—

  in the mirror a rememberer could meet

  himself in immediate new transparency

  haloed in haze and glitter. Each mirror,

  as it arrived, resolved itself in multiple

  weddings of gazes, in gazes dying

  into waiting gazes. The entire bush

  was a changing mask, radiant with desire,

  charged with identity, and turning aside

  with what is given to us. The mask said:

  our unremembering, when we turn aside

  to what turns to us, and are nothing

  of what we have been—that is the gift of all

  we can desire. That is to hear our names

  spoken clearly, and look and see no one.

  That is to know a voice, and know the voice

  is an elsewhere saying we are what is not us,