Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Read online

  while the elsewhere brings rain, pours bright

  ore into our always darkening day.

  Lead

  Don’t kill me, father!

  —Euripides, Herakles

  Freshly cut, it is bluish white.

  It tarnishes in the moistness

  of air to grey. The grey allows

  the black to show through. The first dose

  drowns the original anger

  in bright bliss. The next doses take

  the anger, hide it, increase it,

  make it indistinguishable

  from what is now the dark; is now

  the brother of need. No way back

  to try to stand and see that change.

  Or imagine I will save you,

  my father, before or after

  you are like a man whose eyes roll

  in his head and who releases

  lead-tipped arrows into his sons.

  Those sons move like slow birds and fall.

  The sky they look out at narrows

  and then there is no sky. No way

  back to where I see clear, intact,

  even my memory of you.

  I am neither cursed nor favoured.

  I drink what you drank in my heart

  that drinks blood and time, while it stays

  lodged in me, lustreless metal,

  hate not mine and mine, resisting

  corrosion, conducting nothing,

  and I carry the weight of it.

  I simply carry it, with eyes

  that carry light. I carry it.

  The Envelope

  The thrilled, cold arm flying. It finds the slid-

  open living room window. The hand takes hold

  of the set of blinds and bangs the metal

  again and again against the main pane and sill.

  It is my father. He has not visited me in years.

  He brings horizontal rain, numerous blades

  that he allows to snick and swipe and flash.

  Whatever I think years are for, years swerve

  through on the entering wind he brings. Whatever

  my hearing is for, I hear nothing but wind.

  He has gotten into the building and is in the corridor.

  All night, he knocks and bangs on the door. Father,

  I hear myself say, I am now a middle-aged man,

  with young children in my care, and it is too late

  for me to answer. And father, if I let you in,

  I would crush your skull the way some men will

  an intruder’s, some an enemy’s, some a boy’s.

  The blinds, the wind and rain, are actual

  banging blinds and wind and rain—before I fall

  more asleep, I know it. Still, I want with all my heart,

  whatever my heart is, to go to the door,

  and am laid out and paralyzed. The knocking stops.

  He slips an envelope under the door and is gone.

  It stays in my dream, and stays unopened.

  The Work of the Creek

  The rain falls delicate, cold. It touches to the creek—

  twinklings swaying out across water

  as if rays have arrived from a womanly star.

  There in the creek depths, in the runoff

  that has crushed itself into a clear, calm flow—

  dark, wavering reflections, bough on bough.

  Now I know how, if I have been anywhere,

  I have been full of another—that person

  and no other. It is a place and is an instant

  pouring with a perpetual prophecy—

  two people may meet their twin essences

  in each other, terrible, tender ones,

  who turn together in the deep green beds

  at the end of all that separates them,

  and are the mirror in front of which they disappear.

  The sound of the rain falling meets the sound

  of a prayer unfamiliar to me rising

  within my spine into my skull. I touch my brow

  to the trunk of a fir. The prayer leaves me

  and is the stand of bright, black creek-bank trees.

  The quickening creek mist moves over my face.

  I watch the water slide past, something in it

  of every love that has ever been—

  the creek a raindrop the creek counts, forgets,

  counts, forgets again. What two people know

  to be all there is, is what they cannot know.

  My eyes are the bandages of my eyes.

  Triangle

  My child points and points, and makes her baby sounds.

  Her first cry rang the hospital room air

  and entered my skull and stayed there, echoing.

  I lie in bed and feel my chest seize up, besieged

  by time, my senses multiply and my memories

  leave me as if I have become one of my dead.

  The apartment is a raft. There is limitless wind,

  directionless vast rising and collapsing waves,

  and enough to eat and drink but no arrival

  at any shore. I hear my child cry and I turn

  to listen for her first Daddy as if that word

  could comfort both of us. A gull cries, my child points

  out the window glass into the dark, her cry joins the wind,

  and she turns to me the crushed clear quartz of her eyes.

  The gull and me and herself, she makes this her triangle.

  For me there is her, the world, and my dead

  among the dead, and this is my triangle. Her cry

  rings it like the musical instrument but invisible.

  And some of the dead will sing and not be heard

  except as gull cries. And some of the living

  will lose the way to their own pain, forget it,

  know as if for the first time the pains in the world

  in the midst of its appetite and slaughter, know

  the child’s name they say points to all they see.

  North Vancouver Snow

  Out the window the grey-blue air. Elation in the sheen.

  The mountains and new-made clouds gather and gather.

  The baby being born pauses. The sky casts itself

  in precise quietness. Four in the afternoon. Five.

  The hour is tracing itself back through the whorls

  of the fetus fingertips to all hours. Finally he’s here,

  making the voices in the hospital room rhyme

  in his presence, bringing with him the clue that finds us,

  the dark blue metal of his eyes. The fine cold

  is organizing the water within the clouds. His eyes

  are half-designing the sight of what is now out the window,

  though he can see only the blur of the close faces,

  the day’s late light circling through the metal

  and searching through the invisible forge of the air

  and finding the falling flakes of the year’s first snow.

  January 14, 2012

  II

  Rain Wolf, West Coast Trail

  It is standing at the edge

  of a clearing, pale glacial

  eyes narrow and lined in black,

  the wolf’s kohl. The entire wolf

  the thick kohl of my own eyes,

  it brings jagged grey trees, stones

  lying alive on the ground, rain

  like a bead-curtained doorway,

  steel wool cloud and the dark’s sheen

  sharp into my eyes. Without

  any flaw in its fury,

  a wolf of antimony,

  eater of impurities,

  it eats the decrepit king

  of my eyes and a reborn

  king emerges from a fire,

  the burned wolf hissing like rain

  and shaking away the ash.

  The trees have burned up, the wolf

  lifts its nose to smoke,
charcoal,

  and licks the visible clean,

  leaving the two pinpoint lights

  of its eyes in the dawn air.

  Palomino

  Light angles in through a block of bramble

  and the small horizontal rectangle

  ground-level window. Rough rock to the glass,

  rock ledge layered in dust. I work here

  in the dimness at a bench with a six-

  by-three-inch stray piece of half-inch-thick steel

  and a plastic toy horse in mid-high stride.

  Glue the hooves to the pedestal. Paint black

  the entire body, let it dry, paint on

  metallic silver patches. Then the rays

  entering the basement slender and pale

  halt, gather in the animal outline,

  grow brilliant, and complete a first horse,

  its colouring and proportions exact.

  When we were with my father, I would take

  down his encyclopedia volume

  and find colour plates of horses. Trace them,

  pencil crayon in the palominos’

  tawny patches. I descend now to hunch

  like an old man half-ghost and see a horse

  hardly ever visible in the sky

  appear in front of me, an offspring foal

  flashing as distinct and bright a silver

  as the stars that show winged Pegasus

  the father in flight. See the horse, the hide

  the black of space, harnessed only in light

  decorating it wildly with splashes,

  take the new gift of itself to the sire,

  to the farthest away reaches of life,

  and appear again, a painted plaything

  held in a workbench vice. The air the bit

  of death in its mouth, that Equuleus,

  that little horse of the constellations,

  flits with the rays into the basement dark,

  dust falling deep over the long roads home.

  Andean Flute

  The breath of light in my bones when I write the word earth.

  —Alejandra Pizarnik, “In a Copy of Les Chants de Maldoror”

  The same way small winds come,

  new air out of the dark, discoverers,

  voices of first ones, chirpers,

  only through the dense core, mantle, crust,

  only through the bulks of animals

  and their roars and cries, through

  the circle of mountains rising

  to Machu Picchu, only through

  these could they have come—

  the birds beyond our sight in the sun,

  singing for no reason but to sing,

  the singing a travelling of a song

  with no beginning and no end.

  Only through our falling lives

  could they have come, our lives made

  of the words we most want to say,

  and the words made of the knowing

  that there is more love in matter

  than we can utter, only through

  the bones within us writing the word earth

  to no one, nothing, but the earth,

  only through these could they have come—

  birds arriving and departing

  and arriving and departing, wing beats

  keeping time with heartbeats, the pause

  between heartbeats the breath of light

  that stays and is the earth and is the flute.

  River Rainbow

  My two-year-old is standing on the swath

  of pebbles piled alongside the pale green

  and the bright white of the river that rides

  down out of the canyon to run level

  and free to the inlet. She’s throwing stones

  into stray pools and eddies. Looking up,

  saying to the air boohewun, boohewun

  for the dozens of gulls. Dipping her hand

  into the cold water for coloured stones,

  throwing them, watching them splash. Then saying

  again, boohewun. Looking up at me

  with the grey-blue of the river heron,

  one of its feathers fallen into her eyes.

  She looks back to the water. Throws a stone

  and adds circles within widening circles.

  Throws another stone and her irises

  halo the river flow. Throws another

  and in her pupils the heron opens

  its wings and lifts to arc through the blackness

  lit blue. Now airborne over the water,

  draws the halo out into a rainbow.

  The gulls hosanna with their shrieks. She throws

  a new stone, a new rainbow, a wild iris

  of continuous colours. Any name

  she utters is a rainbow, any bird

  she sees is a boohewun, a messenger

  carrying to her a name for a rainbow,

  a heron, and bringing her a heron’s blue.

  When the Big Hand Is on the Starfish

  When the big hand is on the starfish

  and the little hand is on the crab, you’re looking up

  at the lobby clock. It’s six o’clock. Now a flock

  of sea-green Canada geese, the sun’s rays

  blazing over it, flies past a mass of sea life—

  lobsters, turtles, sea snails, skate, make their way

  through forests of seaweed. This is outside,

  within the arched entranceway. Seahorses, pufferfish,

  traced in terracotta, swim the front wall face

  as they would along inlet shore rock. The same biplane

  flies by twice, three times, then the same Zeppelin—

  here, it is and always will be 1930,

  when this was the tallest edifice in the entire

  British Commonwealth. When the big hand

  is on the starfish and the little hand

  is on the lobster, it’s three o’clock. Boats and ships

  go by—the Resolution, the Golden Hind,

  the HMS Egeria, the Sonora, the Empress of Japan.

  Inside again, at the five brass elevator doors,

  above which sailing vessels burst out of waves

  with lighting in their prows, stand five female

  elevator operators, chosen for their beauty,

  wearing sailor uniforms, female usherers

  into hardwood interiors like ships’ cabins—

  1930 is also 2009, and now they’re the flowing light

  that chooses the lobby’s stained glass windows

  for their beauty, and the zodiac pictured

  on the polished marble floor. When the big hand

  is on the starfish and the little hand

  is on the turtle, it’s two o’clock. Terracotta

  Canada geese fly along the building’s sides

  to meet above the brass-framed main glass doors.

  This is the Marine Building, address 355

  on a street named for Sir Harry Burrard,

  ex-shipmate of the captain who, at the behest

  of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, sailed here

  to find a mysterious sea route, and failed,

  yet mapped the area’s every intricate coastal mile.

  When the big hand is on the starfish

  and the little hand is on the sea snail, it’s nine o’clock,

  and I’m nine, or is it seven, years old, turning

  the page in Haig-Brown’s Captain of the Discovery

  where the captain and a dozen of his crew

  sail in the ship’s yawl through the tree-branch-

  overhung narrows into the inlet. People

  from the nation whose home is the north shore

  put off in canoes to greet them and offer

  freshly cooked smelts. The Englishman at once

  orders his men to shorten sail and allow

  the canoes to keep pace. Now he looks out

  across the inl
et—which he will name for Sir Harry.

  The geese that fly across his sails, and past

  the bright brass buttons on George Vancouver’s

  blue naval coat, fly now through the brass rays

  brightening the Marine Building entranceway

  and framing a Discovery. When the big hand

  is on the starfish and the little hand is on the crab,

  it’s six o’clock again. For an instant,

  or is it a lifetime, terracotta geese pass

  into living geese and back again—art deco.

  They pass through where illustrious ships

  sail by and famous buildings stand. They pass

  through to living geese like the seahorses pass

  through to living seahorses, like the starfishes

  to those with feet fastening onto rock,

  purple arms slowly decorating time.

  The Young Ravens that Cry

  The trees here twist the ocean up through the night of their roots

  and let it burn away out of their arms into the day.

  The raven rides the repeating croak and call

  of its shining-eyed need and demand. The animal that hates

  carries his old expulsion as far as he can,

  and arrives at a new paradise. His God loves him

  even when he lays down pipelines, launches tankers,

  exudes sadness and shame. His God keeps in sight

  the huddled fledglings, touches the slenderest hair,

  while the raven turns its young early out of its high nest,

  and the young call for food from a mother that does not exist,

  vanished into the blackness of their wings.

  The raven’s other call, a rainforest’s soft, rhythmic bell,

  Elijah heard when the flock fed him near a brook.

  Tales retell themselves like returning waves—

  here tiny-skulled shore birds wander bitumen-slicked.

  The heirs of eternity eat royal food, cry

  thinking the Holy Spirit is speaking in them. Unclean