Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain Page 3

  flesh, blood, bone and black feathers, the raven

  tries to see everything on the shore, scavenges, cries alone.

  The raven that flew off with the ball of light

  that it found hidden in black box within black box

  tears open a bewildered black shore bird,

  picks through to the heart and finds food. The animal

  that hates looks out over the ocean at the sun

  and sees into the black boxes of his heart. In the last box

  the dark-raying bird of the sun, the God turned out of the nest,

  is feasting on him like carrion. He hears no grieving cry

  for the gap he makes in the creation or for the shore

  beautiful as at its first sunrise when he darkens it.

  * Cherith Brook is where the prophet Elijah was fed by ravens (1 Kings 17).

  * The black box containing the ball of light that illuminates the world, and the old man’s daughter as beautiful as hemlock fronds at sunrise—are elements of the Haida myth of the raven who steals the light.

  Cormorants at Lonsdale Quay

  Black flock, long curved black necks, long black beaks,

  torsos belling out against the cold grey-blue,

  they roost along the SeaBus dock roof,

  feast on the small fish in the inlet. They drop in groups

  to the water, dive, reappear, lift and sit

  on top of the large shore rocks. Each is a device

  with wings turning on a cardinal point in the back bone,

  opening and closing as a pair of bone leaves

  joined through a knuckle by a smooth bone pin.

  Each is a set of hinges allowing doors of air to swing wide.

  Producing a sound like that of construction work,

  they cannot sing like other birds but simply cry

  their labour, carrying an axis inside

  as if carrying the earth’s cardinal point

  to countless locations. They fly down and back—

  wings hinging wave spray that flashes blinding bone-

  white across the black rock. The spray is a door opening

  while gravity holds the waters around the earth

  and the tides move in and out, in and out.

  Lost Rain Casting of a Deer

  I

  The waters of the runoff surge through the ravine, an unending succession of lightning strikes, the mist drives down between the steep banks and the trees, the rain shuts its vault. The creek shakes the skeleton of its rock course shooting along skull after skull. The waters become a liquid natural wax. The wax moves smooth and quick into mouths open to receive it, letting it fill the mould.

  II

  Curved white edges of creek ripples cut away the confine. The entire creek pulls itself into the body of a leaping raincloud-coloured animal. The moments that animal of wax is encased and melted out are the moments the iron oxides, charcoal and oils of the first paintings run wet on the walls of caves illuminated by fires, the colours still deepening within the bounding outlines.

  III

  Dark grains of the unencumbered musk pod flow out with the creek’s lost and shapeless wax, and over the waters faceless as the first waters. The creek mist thickens. The musk it is carrying of ravine leaves, glacial till and ozone thickens. Metals present at the beginning melt, and the alloy rushes again into the mould it finds, and that finds it, within the shifting vacancies and probabilities.

  IV

  The living deer stepped out into the envelope of a clearing in the mountaintop mist, its eyes glittering soft black, the way a sculpture arrives, the mould removed, the polished bronze undraped. But this deer melted into mist leaving the blackness that poured in its eyes, and in the blackness its scent, the sweetness of copper, the nullity of tin, and the musk of the rain that was always the traveller.

  Men Fixing a Roof in the Rain

  Up on top of the stack of window squares

  each with a person at a desk and screen,

  two men in yellow slickers and hard hats,

  weighty toolkits strapped around their middles,

  work with measuring tapes and lengths of steel

  on the flat roof of City Hall. Wind, rain

  and seagulls veering past, the two workmen

  do what they do. Like quiet windup toys,

  they go to and fro, turn at right angles,

  power-saw the lengths, place them down, figure

  the spacing between the rows, and set out

  the support frame for a new roof surface.

  The wind and rain increase, the travelling

  low heavens press down on the men’s hard hats,

  the men fix the frame in place. The seagulls

  continue to veer, crows flap, past. The men

  now stand side by side and survey their work.

  They have measured, cut, put in the right place

  what they were supposed to put in place; they

  intend their work to stay. The two of them

  look like little children gazing out across

  a play mat or a park sandbox. Except

  children will assemble a world with blocks

  and shape fantastical grotesqueries

  with sunlit mud and immediately,

  gleeful and laughing loud, topple it. When

  the roof fails of its own accord or when

  the poison winds arrive and the window

  glass explodes and hot rain flies, the chances

  are that somewhere men will be performing

  this same rooftop work. Somewhere other men

  will be walking back and forth and standing

  proud in costly suits or archaic robes

  handing out or reaching out for awards

  in front of crowds. And as from the beginning,

  the real parts of the world will be whispering—

  but now they will be whispering more and more

  of how all this while it is being destroyed.

  Aluminum Beds

  When he pulls up in a truck and hefts new beds

  into the house to replace our camp cots,

  we see the dark in a metal’s dull sheen

  is the dark displayed in his beard. The sound

  rushing through the hollows of the square posts,

  the frames, guards and rails, is the sound rushing

  through the spaces he has made within us.

  He sets them all down, the pieces he measured,

  sheared, and welded together in the evenings

  in his father’s factory, while I, half hidden

  in among the machines, gathered up scrap

  fallen to the cement floor. The four beds

  stand in our shared room, one for each of us—

  with this he fulfills his unwanted office.

  He leaves us soon after, and I keep vigil.

  Nightly I allow not one of my brothers

  to speak or even audibly breathe. I know

  that the sound of any of our young voices

  will distract the light trying to make its way

  through the fitted substance of the metal. I know

  at the same time that this light is my father

  searching for his sons. He does not know it—

  long before he left us, his love began travelling

  to us apart from him. If I memorize him,

  I will be able to see the love. If I cut

  from myself all that is not my love for him,

  the right set of rays will find us. My brothers

  fall asleep one by one. I lie and wait

  for my dream. There is no space not swirling,

  no fire with its core of blackness not burning,

  within the beds’ angular emptiness

  because of the love meant for us. Through the night,

  the metal embraces me. It is a skeleton,

  unending silver, pure and cold, and I become it,

  the light of my father’s l
ove arrived at last.

  How the Alley Crow Ends

  The outsized crow flaps down its purple-black,

  it caws down past a power-chiselling man

  and puts its feet onto spat-up asphalt.

  The cawing speeds up. The alley keeps on breaking,

  the cawing keeps on describing the crow,

  it speeds up. The crow circles, arrogant, eye

  angled at the jackhammer, wings the colour

  and sheen of an oil spill. The overfull

  dumpster stinks in the hot sun. The crow comes

  with its jerking, cawing head down the flyway

  of birds dead and living. It comes bowlegged,

  fluffing up its feathers into a mane

  to show off. Comes with its black breast ragged

  as if it has garlanded itself in the pelts

  of the sparrows and robins it has eaten.

  The chunks of asphalt keep on rolling up. The crow

  vacates its ground for a telephone pole,

  goes now from pole to pole, cable to cable,

  high gutter to high gutter. It flouts the rows

  of the alley crosses as it would the trio

  on any storied hill. Its own iridescent

  darkness in the middle of the day. The cawing

  speeds up, it increases to full volume

  the brute static of its beating signal,

  the alley flow of horrible noise. My daughter cries

  for music—CD! CD! The crow caws

  with wet strings dangling from its beak. The rot

  drifts up and down the alley. While the lids

  in the good yards stay closed tight. My daughter cries

  for me to lift her up. The crow observes us

  from a pole opposite. Men file down the alley

  with supermarket carts and look oil-slicked

  in the burning receipt of the sun. The cawing

  speeds up. The sun nails the men to the alley,

  breaks their legs at the knees and pulls them down

  off the crosses of its rays and they disappear.

  My daughter repeats Up! Up! to see the heights

  of the swaying trees. The alley crows nest there

  in rough rings of sticks. Now I see my father

  hurt out of the reach of repair. It was if a crow

  took and held him in its beak like garbage

  and uttered him, death hilarious. I recall

  the last I was to hear of his voice, the insult

  issuing down a phone line, the caw. My daughter

  cries again for music. Music of running,

  almost flying, on soft grass green beyond green

  and the sky deep-glowing blue, the sea rocking

  and the clean sand silver in the wash of waves.

  The crow’s caw jackhammers the heat-laden

  alley air and now the dark comes and the crow

  is gone. The silence after the final caw

  is the silence inside my daughter’s cry.

  Flowers

  for Dora

  No one could resist the charm in her bright black eyes.

  The townspeople called her Little Maria.

  You explained how her parents sent her out

  to steal flowers she would then sell in the streets.

  Now she was circling lightly through the bar

  like an emissary, holding out a bouquet.

  Had I drunk too much Greek wine, or had I seen

  the same vivid Aegean-coloured flowers before—

  left by the relatives who had come before us

  to the graveside I visited with you that morning.

  It was a year ago today, you had told me,

  that you leaned over and closed your grandmother’s blue eyes.

  III

  Book of Sparrows

  I

  Fly, fly, okay, okay, she says.

  I lift her up to the cold

  window and she sees sparrows

  appear and disappear.

  Hiding, hiding, she says,

  laughing, chirping, as if she knows

  they are taken care of in their lives

  in the trees and in the air.

  II

  I go get it, I go get it, she says.

  I let her down and she runs

  to a book and opens it to where

  sparrows sit on a summer branch.

  Light is finding her eyes, new,

  wise as an old woman’s. The one

  who calls out with her voice

  is only barely hiding in her.

  My Daughter and the Seagull’s Cry

  The cries come sharp, deep as the night and bright;

  they tear the dark in my ear. It is the gulls

  that have come up from the inlet through the still air,

  the first proprietors of the daylight. The cries

  rush out through the single narrow way of all their throats.

  My daughter’s favourite among her first words:

  seagull. Then I seagull. She remembered

  the white-winged ones that came clamouring and flocking

  where she stood on the sand at the sea edge. The sweet

  crystalline cry poured from her as she went up

  on her toes and flung her arms about and gull after gull

  arrived and circled close and cried into the circle

  of soft lightning they had made around her.

  My daughter’s first nightmare: standing at the crib bars,

  eyes fixed wide yet still dreaming, not knowing

  where she was, repeating again and again

  her bottomless cry. The cry as full of address

  as the cries of the lovers in the next apartment

  calling out wordless across the sudden distances,

  a calling almost unearthly. As full of address

  as the final cry of abandonment on the cross.

  The gulls’ cries come sharp, and gulls come wheeling

  up from the water as if on reconnaissance

  and searching for what they have lost, not knowing

  what it is they have lost though they carry it

  as they perform every wing-thrust, every glide.

  They fly their torsos, beaks, eyes; they are alive and yet

  they are desperate ghosts, their cries scavenging cries.

  They wake her now, one cry then another

  like wild beings in the room, and immediately

  my daughter shouts seagull, as if a dream

  has been waiting within her to put the word in her mouth

  at just this instant. In her two-year-old voice

  she takes her ecstatic run out to meet

  the gull’s sound with her word and runs out into all

  the words that will ever come to find her,

  even the word that is her own name. Like a hand

  through a window, they will come to snatch her away.

  The sea waves will arrive, hushed and radiant,

  rolling her first cry in their foam. The flock’s cries

  will collect up the world, opening it like a door.

  Mykolaiv Bells

  In the planted, tree-swayed back garden

  in the hot late summer sun—

  I hadn’t thought it would be hot here,

  or the fine, baked earth rich

  with ripe peppers, tomatoes,

  hazelnuts, walnuts, pears, plums, apples, grapes.

  I had imagined a cold plain,

  not a voluptuousness, not a subtle,

  various fertility, not a flirtatiousness.

  I thought now of vineyard-crowded

  corners of Bulgaria, Macedonia, Thessaly—

  this deep-lit air around the delicate vines,

  its flitting, swinging, insubstantial gold.

  I hadn’t thought I would hear bells here—

  rhythmic bell-clatter while I lay half-sleeping

  in the garden in the morning. Near-East-

&
nbsp; sounding to me—not East-European.

  And the earth itself

  keeping time. Clanging,

  calling the sun close, calling the grapes—

  so the wine could arrive, clear gold,

  in its cupboardful of old bottles.

  How did we find each other? you asked—

  on the poor bed and couch

  of that den-like house, and as you walked in

  through the low doorway, across

  the small, astonishingly bright threshold,

  tall and slender, hair draping you.

  The whole morning, a garden filling

  with echoing bell-ringing, bell-music

  I listened after, wanting more and more of it.

  While I lay and read in the afternoon,

  I looked up to see different-coloured cats leap

  lazily from a fence onto the house.

  Then, in the night, we heard weasels, come

  out of hiding in the garden, or out

  of some other garden—quick gong-drumming

  of their feet as they ran the sloped roof.

  Late morning, potatoes and wine

  on a rough kitchen counter—

  set out because it was what there was.

  Wine that seemed to be ringing

  within its gold—looking out

  at us from simple glasses.

  Arrivals, Departures

  First a guarded corridor, then fifty feet

  of floor and different glass walls between us—

  me arrived, waiting for you, you detained,

  passport and visa from the wrong country

  confiscated, luggage and plane ticket

  confiscated, flight back home changed.

  There you were in your multi-coloured

  homemade coat, a slender Slavic Venus,

  Tartar cheekbones, brilliant yet soft blue eyes,

  troubling the frontiera polizia.

  After a while, we were having a shared dream—

  a week of me on one side of a world, you

  on the other side, where all you could do