Washita (4 page)

SOLACE

What am I meant to miss, the long thread the swallows pull

through the water when they drink on their wings?

Is it the rattlesnake in her new skin in the sun, spring on the drifted rocks

where the mountain flares her skirts above the buds of the paintbrush,

the heat fooling the flower into a month of early frosts, too soon?

Or the snake having come up from her winter den where she lay,

her skin still damp, curled like gauze fallen from a wound

around a flake of pine bark, the scant red turned pale

enough to see through? What are my eyes now, kneeling by the bed

in the sun, you sleeping, the flush above your wrist,

the faint hairs worn thin by your golden bracelet,

against your neck a jade earring dangling, closed now, seeing?

Is it the chickadee with a pine seed under its claw

chittering at me from a branch above my head? No,

I am not there. That was years ago.

I am not grieving as I watch the snake,

the first of the long shadows touching her, retreat into the earth

as the swallows slip from the lake, the water quiet, the cutthroats

in the creek mouth feeding in the runoff come down from the hills.

SOLSTICE COMING

Typing with my left forefinger today. The poem is immensely slow,

one letter, one word, one line at a time. This and then this and …

amazing how the images slow to an intimate crawl,

each word a salamander peering from beneath a stone.

The fish this winter are wraiths, the pond's perfect thoughts.

I have tried to love this quiet as the hours pass through me.

It is rare to feel anything deeply. My life is a feast if I allow it to be.

The slow rain falls without cease. It eats the ice, one drop at a time.

These days my body breaks down and I cannot lift my right arm.

My poems now are thin as I was when I lived in the mountains.

I tried to believe the lake when I came down from the high snows.

I watched the water for a long time from the safety of the trees.

It was a trout rising made me see what a day is, a ripple only.

SUBMISSION

It is not dark, just blurred, distorted by the retina rotting at the centre.

Not yet, he said, sitting on the stage while a stranger read his poems.

In wonder, his struggle in the dark, which it wasn't, not yet.

He thinks of Borges listening to a woman turn the pages

and hears a hunchback in Paris cry out:
Sanctuaire!

Outside the swans pass against the last of sky.

They sing of a salt marsh in Texas, warm water on their breasts.

You will see the peripheral
, the doctor said, the nurse smiling.

Penumbra.

Years ago he watched the moon blot out the sun,

a terrible ring of light,

the bats coming out into the uncertain cold, the new night,

and the blind panic he understands now, in dark submission raging.

SUNYATA

My dead brother casts into the shadow of a pool on Six Mile Creek.

A trout swims to his hook and I drown, thrashing in the air.

SWARF

My father pointed to the redtail on the yard pole.

How beautiful my eyes among imagined feathers.

My first teacher, young and gentle, told me I couldn't see.

That's when the work began, one letter, one word at a time.

The art of diminishing returns: a humble birth and then the dictionary.

I sharpened my father's axe head through years of fallen trees.

Was I the blade or the stone?

Going blind twice: this cup a private beauty, crazed lines.

I sip my tea and stare into the net of things.

Yesterday the sea lions fed on the herring shoal in the bay.

Today gulls worry the corpses.

A mother vomits into the scream of her young.

I began blind. It will end so.

Warp and weft.

I have nothing left to offer but a worn Washita stone,

wood and water in the ceremony of the dark.

TEMPLATE

As the mouse seems with its bundle of maggots to breathe.

Rice grains among my fingers, tiny mouths suckling as their mothers cry.

The belly is a cleft, the fur a desert, bared teeth, the eyes gone gaping.

As the dead steer I saw as a boy in the blue bush hills.

The stone I dropped into the moil.

What is hell that I am drawn to that torn maw singing?

The flies dreaming in the seethe, their blue bodies heavy with eggs.

What choir keening cleans a world without a need for death?

Those savage songs that call the angels to our rest.

Where the mind goes when there is no way to find the way.

The mouse sits in the cup of my hands.

There is no music sweeter than dark mothers in the night.

THE ECSTASY OF NO

He told his wife he lived in the ecstasy of no

and she told him to write that down. The last

he saw was her going into the airport, brightly.

Home, he digs at dawn in the garden, turning

the old earth, giving its buried face to the sun.

Around his neck is the new timer on a cord,

the bread in the stove waiting for its ring.

The noise reminds him he is old, the
tic, tic, tic,

an ant tap dancing on his chest.

His wife is afraid he will burn the house down.

Some days he wants to burn his new poems.

He thinks he will return to the kitchen, and then

tries to resist when the timer rings.

In this he resembles the aging fighter who tries

to avoid the blows by hanging onto the ropes.

It is a terrible wanting, this being alive.

THE POET, WANTING MORE

It means little to me now, this confusion of poets, the everywhere of them.

I think if I walked back into the blue bush country

I would find one of the caves, the ones where I used to sit in the dark, waiting.

It wasn't hiding because there was no one looking for me.

I was waiting. That was it, the hours in the dark.

And then the coming out into the clear light of August

to the blinding. That was the best part, the quick pain in the eyes

and not closing them to what they couldn't see.

It is almost enough not to write anymore, the exceptional being

the ones who watch, the ones who watch, carefully.

If there is a metaphor it would be when I sat among the snakes

in one of the old hibernacula in spring, the thickness of their bodies,

the dense weight in my hands as I held one of the great fathers to my ear

so I could listen to the whisper of his breathing.

Like that, I think.

But it's not like that anymore.

THE UNBEARABLE BEAUTY OF DESPAIR ALBERT CAMUS WROTE OF IN HIS LAST NIGHTS

The song was of myself and beauty, paradise lost

in the light slipping away from the east window,

the sleep I had fallen into rousing me to wander

into old shadows, the splash of the waterfall by the pond,

the past, the crash of white water on broken stone

in the gorge of Sheep Creek, and the well my father made

so my mother wouldn't have to climb up from the ravine

with the buckets of water she needed to cook, to clean,

to wash her dark hair, our hands, my father's back

as he leaned forward in the tub that sat on the floor

he laid in that cabin just below the Kootenay Bell,

the raw boards he nailed, the walls he raised,

and the windows, their panes of glass scrubbed clean.

I can see my mother's hands lift from the water

to scour the quartz crystals from the curve of his white back,

her wishing she could wash from his lungs the crystals

that were eating him alive, tiny quartz animals

living inside the scars my father grew in his chest

and the bullet that killed him before the silicosis could.

And she was beautiful kneeling beside him

and he was beautiful in his weariness, the water

she carried up from the roaring creek

and, hot from the wood stove, poured over his back.

I was sleeping in the drawer she'd taken out of the bureau

and placed behind the stove to keep me warm

and though this is a story I have imagined again,

one I have told over and over until it has become a song

that has invaded me, the words repeating inside me,

it is the first where I've placed my father

in the corrugated iron washtub and my mother

washing him, her hands on his heavy body,

the whispers of quartz in his lungs, the war still to come,

and the ragged melody I woke into, a vesper sparrow

singing to himself among the laurel leaves at dawn.

TRADITION

They named the trees without asking the trees their names.

The shame of my people is without beginning, without end.

I tell you, the wren cannot be taught good manners,

nor the hummingbird to fly, the robin to listen to the earth.

Under the bridge on the Skeena

baby swallows fall from their nests on ancient wings.

Old boards are stacked upon old boards.

There is no other way. By the glacial river

I walked in the hollowed paw prints a grizzly bear left

ten thousand years ago this morning.

TREADLE

Streams slow in the mind, under the clay banks, pockets of fat trout,

browns and cutthroats in the late spring, their bellies thick.

The smoke in water that is an otter at play.

There was a man carried glass over these mountains on his back.

The clarity of imperfections, ripples only a thumb could feel.

The single pane I found unbroken in a cabin up Lost Line Creek.

Promises get lost. They are like paper scraps wedged in old bark.

How young I was to think I could remember everything:

a rusted old Singer sewing machine under a deserted cabin window.

Oiled paper gave light as if from drenched fire, yellow smoke.

But there are men who will do anything for a woman who wants to see forever.

The light still pours into my eyes through her glass window.

I can see her now watching him come up the trail from the creek.

He is holding a string of trout, browns and cutthroats.

He tells her he left a single fish on the stepping stone for the otter.

In the little sewing machine drawer was the nest of a white-footed mouse.

Her babies were tiny pink thumbs, blind as dreams.

UGUISUBARI

My hand on the winter bamboo.

The leaves are the sound of dry bones clashing under boots.

Walk the old way, every clod of earth holds blood.

Stillness of water, stillness of poetry.

The thief ant floats on its leaf toward paradise.

A shadow leaves its shadow on the earth.

Bamboo on bamboo, a leaf, a thought.

How we are of this world, this portal to yugen.

The cat places his paw on the corpse of a hermit warbler.

He lifts his head and asks me where I am.

Here
, I say,
here.

Yes and no.

The old artisan studied for years to make a nightingale floor.

WAR

My mother held her hand above the kettle boiling on the stove.

The steam surrounded her in the way a mist does

when a grouse flies into it, leaving only the flight song of wings.

My father walked away into the night.

Everything he left was quiet then, my brothers at the table

holding spoons to their red lips, and me

crouched behind the wood stove holding my breath, waiting

for whatever was going to happen,

the kettle screaming, and mother not moving, again.

WARBLER

I hold in my hands her yellow wings.

They are what bamboo leaves offer to the rake.

The tiny knuckles of her claws grip nothing.

They are the hands of my mother on her deathbed.

I place her beside the stupa of the fallen daisy,

cover her with a robe of white petals.

There are restraints and they are without fault.

The spirit leaves us slowly, forever.

It is the waiting I try to understand, the quietness of that.

WISHING NOT TO BE ALOOF LIKE STONE

I prayed for the doe this morning,

the other world come alive again in me, old songs and soft birds.

Like you I have carried the sorrows.

They are as small now as a koan carved on a grain of rice.

This morning I looked into the bronze mirror and found still water,

my face almost young again as I lifted her head,

cut her warm throat under the apple tree,

the blood flowing across my wrist.

GLOSSARY

“
Ars Poetica
”

• after Czeslaw Milosz's poem, “Should, Should Not”
  

“Assiniboine”

• title refers to a river in the southern prairie of Saskatchewan and Manitoba
  

“Barranquilla”

• title refers to a city in southwest Colombia
  
• Compadres
  (Spanish), companions
  
• Vete a la mierda, hijo de puta
  (Spanish), “Eat shit, you sonofabitch”
  
• Hermoso, sí
  (Spanish), “Beautiful, yes”
  

“Bokuseki”

• title from the Japanese
  seki
  , traces, and
  boku
  , ink; early Zen writings
  

“Bonsai”

• title from the Japanese
  bonsai
  , tray planting
  
• epigraph from
  The Analects of Confucius,
  Book
  III
  , Chapter
  XVII
  : “Ts'ze-kung wished to do away with the offering of sheep for sacrifice connected with the inauguration of the first day of the month.”
  

“Bya Jhator”

• title refers to sky burial, a Tibetan funerary practice in which the corpse is left out for vultures
  
• “volt” is a collective noun for a gathering of vultures
  

“Calligraphy”

• Basho, our cat, is named for Matsuo Basho (1644–94), a great poet of the Edo period in Japan
  

“Cowichan Valley Poem”

• dedicated to Richard Osler
  

“Eli, Eli”

• eli
  (Hebrew), ascent
  

“Hiragana”

• Hiragana
  are feminine brushstrokes in Japanese calligraphy, originally
  on'na de
  

“Iki”

• iki
  (Japanese), blunt, unwavering directness
  
• Bette Davis (1908–89), American movie star
  
• All About Eve
  , 1950 movie drama
  

“Incoherence”

• Persephone is the goddess of the underworld in Greek mythology
  

“Innocence”

• “Your poems are the disfigurement of innocence,” a remark made by the poet, Sharon Thesen, for which I am grateful
  

“Limbo”

• in Christian theology, limbo is the abode after death of the souls of unbaptized infants
  

“Little Hell's Gate”

• title refers to a dog-leg narrowing of the North Thompson River canyon
  

“Merlin”

• title refers to a small, pugnacious falcon,
  Falco columbarius
  

“Mujo”

• mujo
  (Japanese), impermanence
  
• Red-veined meadowhawk,
  Sympetrum madidum
  , dragonfly
  

“Off Valparaíso”

• title refers to a port city of Chile
  

“Partita in A Minor”

• title refers to a piece of music in four movements for solo flute by Johann Sebastian Bach
  
• dedicated to Martha Royea
  

“Qu'Appelle Hills”

• title refers to the region of the Qu'Appelle River and valley in southern Saskatchewan. The name is a corruption of a French phrase,
  qui appelle?
  (who calls?)
  

“Ryoanji”

• Ryoanji is a dry landscape (
  Karesansui
  ) rock garden created in Kyoto, Japan, during the fifteenth century
  

“Sabi”

• sabi
  (Japanese), the beauty and serenity that comes with age
  

“Scree”

• title refers to broken rock fragments at the base of mountain crags
  

“Slack Beauty”

• title phrase is from the text of an essay by the American poet, Jack Gilbert
  
• Blida, a city in Algeria
  
• Carrion crow,
  Corvus corone
  , a native crow of North Africa
  
• Albert Camus wrote of
  l'absence totale d'espoir
  (French), the total absence of hope
  
• Hoko-ji, a temple in Kyoto, Japan, containing the
  bonsho
  bell commissioned by Toyotomi Hideyori, last of a series of nine bells cast in August 1612
  

“Soft and Moist, Hard and Dry”

• “At seventy I followed my heart,” from
  The Analects of Confucius
  

“Sunyata”

• sunyata
  (Japanese), emptiness
  

“Swarf”

• swarf is grit from grinding metal or dust from sawing wood
  
• the Washita is a sharpening stone fashioned out of white quartz rock from the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas
  

“Uguisubari”

• uguisubari
  (Japanese), the ‘nightingale floor' designed to make chirping noises when walked upon to warn inhabitants of anyone approaching
  
• yugen
  (Japanese), the depth of the world we live in, subtle, mysterious
  

“Wishing Not to Be Aloof Like Stone”

• title is a paraphrase of the last line from Book
  I
  , Section
  XXXIX
  , of the
  Tao te Ching