A Dream of Sulphur 9780773568112

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A Dream of Sulphur

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Nathalie Cooke and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Jane Everett, Carolyn Smart, and Tracy Ware TITLES IN THE SERIES

Water glass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body To Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.R Zitner The Thin Smoke fo the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O'Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino

A U R I A N HALLER

A DREAM OF

SULPHUR

M c G I L L - Q U E E N ' S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© Aurian Haller 2000 ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2000 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Haller, Aurian A dream of sulphur (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series) ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. PS8565.A4547D74 2000

c8n'.6

000-900963-9

PR9199.3.H3176D74 2000

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10.5/13 Minion.

pour Baba

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CONTENTS

I

DEEP

CREEK

Perimeter 3 Irrigation Ditch 4 Teddy Tweed 6 Burnpile 8 Sand 10 Gasoline 11 A Dream of Sulphur 12 Reservoir Haiku 13 II

THE GROUND UP

The Ground Up 17 Home Again 18 To the Plateau 20 A Portable View 21 Crossing the Narrows The Crew 23 Eagle Bay Stone 25 The Sum 27 III

22

WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ?

The Stanley 31 Under Hudson's Bay 33 Downtown Eastside 34 Replacing Ties in the Roger's Pass 35 Trout Lake Mines 37

Mt. Swansen 39 Fire on the Mountain 40 IV

IN P R A I S E OF ISLANDS

Tofino Sub Marine 45 Nightfall: This Side of Port Alberni 47 Off Saltspring 48 Planted: 1988 50 Port Renfrew: Thanksgiving Weekend 52 Pod 53 The Cottage 55 Island Elegy 57 V

THE L O N G E S T S T R I D E

East 61 Arc 63 La bicyclette 66 Postcards of an Old Vienna 68 Late Lunch 69 Tous les hommes sont morts 71 Things We Know 74 Mirage 75 Hungarian Brandy 77 Beauharnois 79 Laval 81 Matin rouge 84 Sleight of Hand 85 A Motorist's Elegy 86 The Bends 88 Apology 90 West 91 vin

I DEEP CREEK When for the first time I swam across the lake it seemed immense, had I gone there these days it would have been a shaving bowl between post-glacial rocks and junipers. - Czeslaw Milosz

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PERIMETER

We walked the low lead trails through our neck of woods to adulthood - shoulder checking back over the years: the way you remember which side of your old bed faced the ravines, the green of spring in every bed you've slept in since: how you arrange furniture in unconscious parody. Late fall, the clean lines of branches (nature's calligraphy) rattle out the bearings of the trunks beneath, where a bunk-bound logging trailer leaned over onto its side in exhaustion, its twisted rails left to rust, its load salvaged, dreaming. I lean off the same slope twenty years later counting four hubs in the fireweed, cobwebs spoking out to the remotest limb. 3

IRRIGATION DITCH

Three inches taller in my skates, I can just see beyond the bank over couch grass and thorn bush poking through snow the wintery plain. So much hoar frost I can bite it off twigs, duck under and away carving long feather strokes in the ice push-glide, push-glide. Here, even standing still takes you downstream under cowbridges snapping icicles sweated from rotten wood. The ice bleeds, under my steel toe I can smell the black soil brooding with cattails.

4

I know about the lake sinking to a swamp a million years ago, and this ditch draining sulphur and water so that wheat can grow instead of burrs and devil's club. Straight down the valley, past cows steaming in a circle, past the leaky barn and the coyote kill, a red smudge under the barbed wired fence, I could glide out of the country, follow the Fraser to the sea where salt water takes longer to freeze and tankers wait ready to cut through the arctic. Long ago, salt water covered all leaving clues in the Burgess Shale, what was it like before land, before the early snow last fall? Summer is still green, roots beneath the snow for foraging deer. It's all here, in the rusted plow obsidian arrowhead the ease of my skates. 5

TEDDY TWEED

The boy on the motor-cross, peddling mad between his s-turn and our gravel stretch, invited me to my first slaughter around the time they painted the yellow line down the valley, as if the two sides were tough to tell apart. They sawed the legs off short before hanging the carcass from a rafter; the belly, hung vertical, sagged like a man's before spilling its guts dirty laundry, unsorted on the straw. We found the stomachs innocuous as a lawnmower bag beside the bright pink flesh, and cut fat off like warm snowballs, ducking behind the nervous bulwark of the next cow. A week later, he split my nose open like a ripe tomato, juice down my collar; said he'd come and finish the job after school before my mother came home where I waited with my collie-dog and garden hoe.

6

We ended up smoking in the woods, settled over my marbles for a rusty knife with a headdress on the blade, and buried my dead rabbit under a tamarack because its needles are soft as fur when they fall, yellow to the ground. Heavier than me by half, they found him in the basement swinging warm - his mother who made moccasins, his father at our door for cancer donations; death moved under the house where we wouldn't see it, lonely as a lost boy in a man's body. I heard him cry once only, fallen off his bike on the pavement, his voice too deep for skinned elbows we were suddenly uneasy with tears. On the road, we buried starlings under crosses along the new blacktop, and cursed the cars, so clearly in the wrong.

7

BURNPILE

The only way to be rid of stumps is to burn their dirty trunks and leave them smoldering in the clearing among new stones, turned up like last year's potatoes. All winter the rag-smell of snow and topsoil hangs its ratcoat over the valley; the smoke, trailing its severed tail one grey morning to the next, refuses to draw up the sky's cold chimney. The winters, my brothers and I stoked the embers on the heat-bleached soil, enough to toast marshmallows, the butt-end of a cattail cigar, were spent light, like pocket-change, all in one place, afternoon shadows about our ankles in the midwinter sun.

8

There was no regret in the field's new acre, the interrupted sleep of roots, no one called out like an ailing parent determined she is no longer who she appears, that old photos better represent the living, that we read too much into place. These long February nights, the trees can't hold their weight under wet snow, and lose their limbs to Chinook winds.

9

SAND

The older you get, the closer to redcedar roots reclaiming from beneath sand boxed in by your dad for the orange crane, where the green finger of a cricket's back crooked words from their helter-skelter into the grammar of trunks bearing up, from the ground, small satisfactions, like shadows flushed from behind trunks of parked cars. For the rest of your life the cricket's will be the saddest, most comforting song, surprising you in a wintery country where a rusty door has perfected its pitch. In the end, the years will swallow each other by the tail, taste familiar as porridge in a wooden bowl, without a single word to describe the memory of sand.

10

GASOLINE

You looked so unconcerned, gassing up your chainsaw with the cherryend of your cigarette kittenstring-teasing from your lower lip, the spark-hungry fuel, your knee spiderstiched together where you dropped your guard while juggling, behind your back, the cold wedge of hatchets, under your leg, triple spin and home like a hinge in the stiffest joint to the ground. You had no respect for gasoline - it was a way to start a fire that wouldn't start, roast a colony of red ants before topping up the lawnmower. Always easier to burn through a stump than look for leverage around the tap-root, lower a torch than to rake up last year's fallow meadow. Some people go with a hand in the handle of the big red jerrycan, but as a child you arced it into the coals as if you were peeing into a fountain's basin; everyone thinking your last thought would be a beacon, you stuck to the right end of the hotdog stick, ignorant of grace, crematoriums, while roasting slow, the ruddy flesh ripe as a highsummer plum.

11

A D R E A M OF S U L P H U R

Most valleys around here have lakes where glaciers dug out corrugated bottoms like an inverted roof, or a half-pipe feed trough. Along banks the double line of traintracks irons out the no-passing-lane from highwater to couchgrass bog beyond. Between these rails and black ties are sulphur nuggets dropped from cars carrying things dug up or cut down. It doesn't matter which lake, let's say it was the Shuswap, we gathered up the sunflower-yellow mineral because we heard sulphur is used on match-tips and were keen to set the whole box alight in a matchgirl dream of voices rustling red tongues. We melted the contents of our pockets in an old can of beans over the barbecue; first the Libby's label, then the metal turned black, the sulphur melting like crayons into dull grey. When it hardened, we shucked it out of the can, as warm and unassuming as a new meteor in the hand.

12

RESERVOIR

HAIKU

bent by refraction dead birch sink between rushes last winter's goal posts the motion of skates still in the green dregs after a summer of drought

13

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II THE G R O U N D UP This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground. - Rumi

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THE GROUND UP

Beginnings and endings are born out of a hole in the ground, steel toes on the sudden edge, loose roots dripping sap, needles on the red soil below out of this space, the years unfold, a pine cone gone to seed where it rolled to a stop beside the bull rush ponds.

17

HOME AGAIN

I

You're used to settling a piece of land: the garden, sown a season before the house, sprouted last year's bulbs and learned to live between buckets of pond water carried through the hot weather. Autumn, you were surprised again with what it could grow, taking heart in its habit as though it were your own, knowing also how board feet and cubic yards, skidded from the woods, dug up from the bank behind the mill, tufts of grass still nursing shallow roots - promise comfort in their mathematical tongue: how a roof's slope answers in numbers to the heavy snow pack, shrugging clean its icy load in a fracas of sheet metal and frozen gutters; the chimney's long arm draws smoke up cold flues, coaxed by newspaper twists lit above the damper where the geometry of space works its dark magic. 18

II

The morning after the move across the valley to stakes, binder twine and overturned earth, I drove up to your bed, planted in the middle of the driveway you had just woken up to. The quilt was covered in moss and needles like confetti, as if it had rafted off the old summer porch, bent for the toolshed where it would wait for a new bedroom. Your sense of home is something you can draw your dangling legs up onto, no larger than the space between two sleepers, cradled, like fingers cupping water; your damp wool blankets, outdoor sheets smelling faintly of hay or smoke, bodies bundled close against the cold, leaving a longing in us for geographies bounded by skin and shared silence, places you have to find your way to - blind.

19

TO THE PLATEAU

Still half asleep, we gear down the long climb to the plateau, diesel pistons droning under the weight of the fifth wheel; the road, high-bladed and potholed, stops dead in a field where someone from Vienna wants a fence around a retirement home with an Okanagan view. Best moment of the day, when the lake recedes into its reflection, and the windows still cool enough to fog up with the heat of two coffees on the dashboard. This summer - gully to gravel pit - we take our bearings, one hand on the hydraulics, the other propping up half a kilometer of mushroomed ends waiting to be joined together like a puzzle's letters, too large across the land to read. On site, we don't dream, brain numb as machine-fingers drilled to the job, like piano recitals played out from the wrist down the rest of me in the audience, half pleasure, half needles. Without evidence of work done on the ground, the days run together; we could be driving anywhere into last summer or next, where German warm bloods wait to butt against corrals we leave leaning inward like a half-slipped noose. 20

A PORTABLE VIEW

The drive's black boughs haven't yet come to bud, except for one spec lot whose green foundation cures, expecting its transplant, due down the trans-Canada at four o'clock this morning, teetering with a "wide load" on its porch hanging out over the passing lane. Grown in the Okanagan, the lawn waits in rolls beside piles of Boston Bar river cobbles, planned to give the impression of water as if the tide could reach a mile inland to Washington cedars still cowled in burlap. When it arrives, the house will look natural enough, a second spouse expecting less; having lived down other streets, it takes little for granted in the drying backfill, bits of brick turn up like shells in the midden, or an epidemic - nothing but pockmarks in the sod to prove an architectural precedent. 21

CROSSING THE NARROWS

Before gaining the far bank, utility van part of the procession up the newly shingled hillside, he watches the current fold like a beaten egg into the tide. There is movement in the air when he reaches the middle of the bridge, sudden as a knot on smooth rope through a loose hand, passing a freighter disengages and makes for open water, trailing gulls and bilge-water like old yarn through an island labyrinth; coffee time and shirtless on the tar gable, he'll trace it out of the bay with his chisel still covered in meatballs. This far west is knowing you can drift out like a boom log, the eye of its steel dog, a periscope sighting the slow, strait current out.

22

TH E C R E W

High on the city's west bank, we sit for the twelve-thirty break; stud walls offering enough privacy to eat lunch by: Sinks on paint cans, bent over tupperware, the tiler and his Hungarian son on boxes of grout, Nigerian Joe-boy on the grass next to the dumpster, and us on the stucco-crusted balcony, dangling legs over the seawall where dark smudges stroll dogs and children. When you're sub-contracted, you take meals how you work one trade at a time, a pyramid of bit-parts fixed together with construction glue, nails, lag-bolts; each begrudging the owner his God's-eye view.

23

Every morning we pass the slope's locals on their way down - the silent exchange marking the lapse of an eight hour day, something between meetings setting us apart the difference, loud as paint cans, slams the back door of the van. We're up here because we bid low enough, some drive two hours to find the concrete delayed until tomorrow, an entire day like ripe fruit too long in the sun, useless on the languid stem, while all around us, spec-lots branch off the new street, million-dollar squares of dirt. By summer's end we'll start over, down the street where a factory-size hole, we're in no hurry to fill, yawns like a new year we've already seen the blueprints for. Meanwhile in the basement, break's over and the Joe-boy's back in gear, singing in the empty pool, piling the morning up like scrap wood into the wheelbarrow. He gets hired a day at a time and wants to work tomorrow.

24

EAGLE BAY STONE

I

She shovels sand and cement, washes the hearth rocks free of the muddy cove she found them in, (as if stooping to the beach, she'd planned to string them together like giant beads) while I fish the trowel from a bucket of limewater and spread the mortar she passes up the ladder, its extendable rails just long enough to reach: like Michelangelo's God and Man stretching fingers out across a smaller universe, we hold between us a molten world.

ii

Wood before stone. Our chimneys need something to stretch to: suggestion of a wall, thirty taut feet of string-line dividing up the air.

25

Firebox corbeled over, there is no way out but up. The space within waits, like the belly of a new guitar, its first taste of pitch. When the flue's passed the peak, we light a fire and shine a flashlight across the mantel - what escapes tells us we stopped short, that the kindling will have to be set deep to compensate. There is the wind to consider, the hollow of this place, the smoke's fickle loyalties.

in

Between the two of us, we cast the shore on its side and let it set there tracing unexpected patterns along its seams: a man's stooped frame above the mantle, a nose a mouth, the keel of a canoe. What we make grows taller than imagined, is more irony than intention. Tonight with the unfinished walls open to the dark, wind over the ridge, the living room spills into the woods, trees lean in to the light lapping oiled stone, this warm cove at our feet. 26

THE SUM

High noon slips cooly through windows, doesn't do justice to the work's exquisite flaw. The angles diverge, oxbow lakes lonely in the landscape. He learns to sculpt with spare time. "Downsizing" was the word used to cut him off, filings and rock dust piled on the floor. "Let go" by the company leaves a man unarmed, responsibility, grown heavy in the hips like his wife, resounds dully when it's gone.

27

How have his arms grown so thin and that lump under his rib, he can almost pinch it. A dollar bill is collectible, worth more than its exchange. Even the ugly spoon set is worth something. He could live with less, have a garage sale, keep track. (Extra space is always an asset.) Suddenly this need to see the Grand Canyon: sit in the car stare off the hood tires on the edge trust the emergency brake sit back and look up,

where the sky is not remarkable over so deep a drop.

28

Ill WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ? Not for a day do we live only in space, where wind/lowers open without history. - George Bowering

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THE STANLEY

"Most arts attain their effect by using a fixed element and a variable." - Ezra Pound

Once a month, Saturdays were doled out in dimes: at the barber's, candy store, and eight blocks to the palace for the Matinee, bronze sconces, ice-cube chandeliers fixtures against a true-to-life newsreel, stuck between cartoon and feature presentation. Royalty was cheap: silk-pantalooned usherettes selling peanuts, suddenly exotic where giant urns brimmed with Arab sand, Moorish hangings stretched to the ceiling, light-shades scalloped from the sea the world larger than made out to be. We cracked open Toffee bars on the armrest, a Macintosh drum-roll, greasy hands prying apart the curtain while the organ wheezed through its last verse, raised the picture's dusty ghost in clock-face numbers, erasing themselves with a second hand.

3i

We'd found our magic wardrobe with the false back, and its velvet curtains parted into a black-and-white wilderness more colourful than our own in its one hour bloom. Afterwards in the alley, we landed hard, where pigeons waited for scraps, downing them with pebbles, and we thought we'd been had. "I wish we could live in a tree house," I remember my brother saying as we neared our brick, bar-grilled apartment, "I wish I were Tarzan, or Dick Tracy. How do they get them that big for the screen?" Unaware that, when lifting him onto my shoulders beneath the lianas of the trolley wires, we threw shadows large as a centaur's, or any jungle metaphor's.

32

U N D E R H U D S O N S BAY

The speed and flux of the metro refines crowds and billboards into a single apparition - waifs brooding in denim, giant cans of Coke sprouting from their shoulders. Across the line of tracks, stretching into the dark where no one walks along their dank corridors, spraypainted buffalo gallop. Sitting on my pack, feeding french-fries to the blind woman's seeing-eye dog without asking, I string it together like tin cans, cupping one ear for the sound of a poem. The train arrives, doors open, close. A bell sounds.

33

DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

Where streets' medusa cables, constrictor and conductor, marked an older frontier, their backalley limbs and brokenwindow grins have been weeded out, run underground. On the blue map, one way glass, rubber tire streetcars, new antique gas lamps, brass plaques commemorate the shiny heritage. And all the while the wilderness held at bay by Grizzly security systems, free syringes, green areas. Pioneers want new names for places grown moldy - using old brick they graft fresh wings to a dogeared hotel and send the locals inland to shells of younger buildings. Summer sprouts a bumper crop of tourists come to see historic sites restored to original splendor. Everyone remarks how, with the northern weather front, even the air is fresher, the mountains like scrubbed bannisters the necessary proof that getting down to natural wood is the only way to preserve the original; as if lifting folds on a face, could keep what it's seen from showing through. 34

R E P L A C I N G TIES IN THE

R O G E R S PASS

Kneeling ear to rail for the approach of prairie oilcars, you hear only the jug-sound of clam-holes sudding up. A head shake, and the other ear, but it's been breached like a diver's, trilobites in the rock around here. It must be something you ate, or took in slow: the breadth of mountains through your lungs which, like a smoker's, are coated with landscapes that have stuck with you. Synesthesia is a disease of the soul, like hibiscus under the tongue, fuzzy and familiar as a dream, where ties sling together two shores under its gunbelt, the approaching oilcars beat out a prehistoric sea's lapping shore, mountain winds break fresh as a mango after a fast.

35

The longer you stare, the more you recognize dismembered bodies hidden beneath the ranges' stony profiles: clavicle-ridge, kidney-pool, the glacier's cold club-foot. It must be the time of day, too hot to work, flies flap buzzard-wings, waiting for you to tip up one end like a deer surprised by lead, or perhaps the body is tired of sizing up such expanses into something small enough to pack inside your bedroll, and has succumbed to the green temptation of roots, devouring new slide-zones bones crunching, hair delicate as moss on rocks, it has given up old loyalties stopped believing in objects decided to remember everything at once and nothing at all shown little sign lately of being human.

36

TROUT LAKE MINES

The bear left shortly after the floor got damp, now damp has grown further up than you can roll a pair of jeans, tendons taut as cold chops in the mine shaft, whose boarded mouth sags over mossy gums. You've come looking for leftover echoes of picks and ponies; the stalactite's drip, lime-heavy and speculative, is the only miner still angling for minerals, the big catch just below the surface; you might as well be hiding out from the rain, along with cardboard boxes and tin cans stolen from camp sites, innocuous as abandoned prisons, with their lids missing. The tailing's steep slope would have taken a rawhide train to drag ore to the landing after the first snowfall; the untanned cattle hides bloated with veined quartz, nose to tail behind the packhorse, catching the coyotes' interest, puzzled over the heavy animal who didn't lift its feet, who left tracks that were lost on you, intent on hand-held history.

37

All those mines dead-ended, you emerge pale without having seen your ghost, like the bear who comes to sleep, leaves to gather berries in order to sleep again, where his shed fur still floats like a blank page.

38

MT. SWANSEN

There are pockets of rain cradled in granite every surface a reflection of the stone beneath carrying the stench of old flowers or a vague taste in the mouth.

39

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

August sheets hung over windows like gauze against the Fly Hills's fire by day a dark cloud, by night x-ray limbs stretched towards Ida in phosphorous embrace. Lost if the fire gained the ridge, the old house and its outbuildings crept back into our conversation; across the valley we packed boxes, listened to the radio. I spent two days fixing the fountain which leaked into the beet-patch. Dressers, lamps, paintings crouched in trailers like children to a new school where they wouldn't know where to sit; the neighbors, having once come home to a chimney stack smoking alone like a cairn to mark the site, said to take everything; our belongings leave a trail to fall back on when we lose our place, look up suddenly from the page to find an emptied room, or a mountain side's aching sockets.

40

On the radio: trees crowned gold like a spirit across an altar of candles, the army had arrived empty-handed, bombers overhead made a chain of buckets, displacing the lake one scoop at a time, rumours of a charred scuba diver surfaced up north after ground crews had moved in. Every hour another evacuation, another report from the front declaring a ten minute window before a house, like an empty dog collar, went missing from its address. One farmer saved his barn with a manure spreader, another with irrigation pipes from the river. After midnight, a bale wagon of belongings flashed warning lights down the gravel road, a house hiking up its skirts to the far side of the bank. Someone's funeral stayed indoors with its ashes, waiting for the cemetery to go up in smoke, while a flyer from Silver Creek landed one valley over, announcing the sale price of barbecued chicken. Monday's forecast often o'clock winds, turned bodies into barometers; drew them like a noose around their neck of woods, cricket-dry in the wake of the fire.

41

No one was sure how to perform this sudden leave-taking was for prisoners, refugees from stricken islands carrying the negative weight of the missing: ordinary slides and silver spoons being paperweights and doorstops for past events which otherwise blow away or shut tight. Kilned clean by fire, someone's bare foundation is too brittle to support a new floor. Across the yard, an outhouse is exposed, untouched on a carpet of fine grey ash. While we sit intact on our porch reminded that irony is just something that happens: how a severed stem develops roots; almost transparent, they're enough to get by. Weeks later, we're still here watering the lawn, the fountain unconcerned as the dog treeing chipmunks. Apart from the smoke, the sky has remained brilliant blue since it first struck the mountain. The furniture creeps back on little oak feet and finds its place less permanent than before. It has not yet rained.

42

IV

IN PRAISE OF ISLANDS Or, was it through waves he sent the boats to fly with gulls so that out of care they all could play in a wonderful gull-boat-water way up in a land of air? -Phyllis Webb

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TOFINO SUB MARINE

I

Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is much the same as any other: meeting the boys at the bakery, swapping who's mortgaged their boats, or started hooking tourists on whales. Larry walks in all skinny like he hasn't eaten since he left, waves a red innertube so he doesn't have to hide it wants to know the news, but nobody bites. You got tubes in there? is the only things conies to mind; have to know the score beneath his grey jump suit before we carry on. He says he's all hooked up: Enough pipes for a submarine, that's what I am now, a submarine, laughing, so we can too. And we tell him Rick's boat got holed just above the waterline - can't be stuffed with repossession papers. Everybody knows who done it, some guy in a drunken yacht, but no one has proof.

45

II

We stick to Rick because he's big and his wife's tiny the humour of logistics, anything not to sink deeper into Larry's metaphor. What about the cannery, become a corrugated whale, beached between dry docked boats? This town is changing face. When you're standing still, he tells us, you can't count on where you left off. Sitting on his tube makes him taller without his beard, more like a sleep-wrinkled boy shaking his head have we really been here that long? And that impact crater on the hillside where they're building, are they going to plant new trees in the yards before they slide into the sea? At least he's home where he's recognized the landscapes that hold us in place, do well to keep up with the times: storefront windows smashed jagged as the shoreline, a single motor roars away into the night with the streetlights calling foul, foul. Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is where we come to shoot the shit, rubber deck boots, good for nothing now but the rain; and all this time his wife leaning against the counter like she's got all day, keeping watch from a distance lighthouse in the shoals where we walked ankle-deep, between the ribs of boats sifted through. 46

NIGHTFALL: THIS SIDE OF PORT A L B E R N I What is it makes a house a home, puts onus on the ridgepole to stand straight or else we'll all walk slanted into the street, laugh at those who think Pisa leans too heavily to the side. What is it makes a guest stay on; these gardens which are good enough to die in, smell of leather garden gloves on the firebrick, chamomile and dill, and the bishop's chair in the foyer worn to a rounded seat, gives airs of just desserts, excuses the guilty-minded afraid of wearing out their welcome as if it were a doormat. What is it makes a house a home, like good seed to his soil, lends a poor man richer, makes lonely streets pine through windows at mantles and kitchen tables, crockery roosting on the shelves, cold feet under flannel. There is a saying in the country: hang your hat in the hall where you'll be sure to find it should the lines go down by night.

47

OFF SALTSPRING

It was at the observatory, staring through ground lenses, which are really microscopes turned backwards from the smaller denominator, he saw that a star's shape is dependant on its scrum of planets, orbiting like a potter's hand the soft clay; the way his wife beams from behind her busy stall at the Ganges market, surrounded by seashells she's drilled and wired into jewelry setting bits of herself afloat. He told her later it looked like a long highway lit up every hundred kilometers - nothing of note but a cup of coffee and a bag of doughnut holes, the way

48

nights, from the truck cab's vaulted seat, stretch like a dark blanket, worn thin where light seeps through - the trans-Canada trailing after, its dry cobbled bed; every road spoking out from the island's green hub, proof that it's not water makes an island, but the desire to take a boat out from the mainland. Once on board the ferry he's not passing through on the way to somewhere else, double-lane divvying up the countryside, ditches leaping back from the high-beams he's sprawled flat out on a box of life-jackets, watching a stray comet fly down the darkening strait, wider than the best telescope can focus - island to coast, and in the flickering veil between, a random icy tail burning to touch down.

49

P L A N T E D : 1988 From Sooke to Port Renfrew clearcuts grow back wispy as an adolescent armpit among the bones of giants where bears wander aimless. Here is where I built down near the shore with the sea as a moat and a mountain high wall. It is safe, at least for another eighty years, until skidders shake me free, urge me further north into the hinterland. Lumber is groomed for salvage while young tendons already burn with the promise of inflamed joints, young men carry old backs around; things keep slipping out of place.

50

Smooth as an amputated limb, a round table is only so because someone has cut off the corners; how many things have come apart in the night, which intruder smashed the window who took nothing that I could immediately account for, but left a hole as cold and heavy as a pistol's.

51

PORT R E N F R E W : T H A N K S G I V I N G W E E K E N D A blackbird beats his wings against the deck window eyes bearing dumbly the beam of a car headlight. Events are sudden desperate things on the road out of overgrown ditches, slipping away the blur of winter shorelines, easy to slip into carrying relics to the family: kidney stones intact, children's teeth shown at weddings. The neighbours, who keep their mother on a shelf, argue on occasion, Bury her for Chrissake! These battered pines grow thick from bending.

52

POD

Fiddleheads slip underground to the drip of threaded faucets, dogs whimpering by the stove. The two of us asleep, murmur woodenly at the thin shield of ice muffling steam off the lake. Tomorrow to Anchorage, then south as we leave the cabin behind, dark windows retreating under the eaves and early snow: albino shell a hermit crab's borrowed. Our awkward migrations from the city, over five thousand miles of wilderness, are small and sad, restless as wolves pacing the shoreline, waiting for a crossing. In the northwest passage tankers sink quickly one end at a time, 53

while you dream of iceflows pressing layers of sediment that can be dated from the life still visible in the grain and how, when it reaches the ocean decks of ice break off, drift to sea like a great ship.

54

THE COTTAGE

While Ship's Passage, just off Winter's Point and Samuel Island, flowed seven knots either way twice a day with the tide, the Ken Kon Maru loaded with barbed wire, railway ties bound for Russia, bared its belly to a reef like a choking man folding onto the back of a chair. Local island events: one white woman raped one tribe's genocide sudden cheap beach frontage inclusion in provincial ferry route on the top of the only mountain, a helicopter pad a heron beat straight waters in lift-off towards the lighthouse the islands moved one inch closer to main land.

55

Inadvertently, a man buys a cottage, paints it a blue match of the sky.

56

ISLAND ELEGY

That was the summer the west coast was invaded convoys of Korean sports equipment washed up like beached whales; newly manufactured and hardly the worse for wear, runners found themselves mismatched on the feet of island dwellers who are used to making do. Children bartered at school while the hot weather held off and mushrooms, grown large as pancakes, poisoned two greedy dogs who crept quietly into the thimbleberry to die, only to surprise themselves by regaining their appetite, and returned home to drink. That was the summer people were as prone to melancholy as a hill settling into its slope. Mornings lasted until sunset and even journalists wrote poems in praise of islands. On the river there were eddies so slow a wet dragonfly could regain its wings while cows watched, dumb eyes glazed over, wet tails cracking at flies.

57

When it rained even the cedar trees could not keep their trunks dry, the lee sides of smaller islands grew lush and the deer were fearless, gathering on patios and public parks, eyes in their bellies, their muzzles dripping green from clover juice. It seemed the whole world had given birth and the streets echoed the crooning of parents wiping half-digested milk from their collars, the eaves of umbrellas. They opened the doors to hospitals, and the elderly, who had been tucked away like travel diaries, were parked along the duck pond with croutons and sunhats. Conversation was supplied by winds in the sea of Japan which forced more overloaded ships to claim insurance on the cargo tossed overboard, and washed into pubs and supermarkets where folk were curious. Could a hermit crab make its home in the finger of a hockey glove, like an island in the worn, tawny mitt of the sea?

58

V

THE LONGEST

STRIDE

I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all fitted out, tugging against its rope. - Raymond Carver

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EAST

Fresh from a myth of cedars, we're an hour late for everything east: the barbed wire sky reddens too early; with its stomach sucked in, the land settles like dark honey, slow to peak. After the pass and foothills, nothing tall to rest your eyes on clouds disguised as snowcaps sham-out home ranges like fridge magnets on the horizon. We're standing still at one-twenty, dodging jelly rolls in the meridian, watching for oil-wells and elevators a one-hose station pulls up onto the shoulder and parks, asking after the majestic coast they want assurance is really as grand as they say, and then roars off in a prairie watercolour of abandoned outbuildings clustered together along a disappearing highway.

61

These clues along the train tracks: deflated pincushion of a porcupine, saltbergs melting in the ditch, stone house with no driveway and a face full of brick, an urban island in the thick of the wheat, make the prairies up like a postcard makes a holiday pinhole-view every thousand miles.

62

ARC

The rain started when we met. Our umbrella a spilled clam, streets awash with kelp, curtains, the roots of trees we drifted into the fluid dark like halves of a green apple. You had left San Francisco and your husband, draped like a slicker over a bus seat when summer dried the city out 'til it rattled loose its pip, a season's flower and fruit reduced to the bare essential, hand-luggage on the plane. You had no furniture. Your apartment like a hotel, clothes folded under the bed, as if you planned to leave, as if what you had left in your pocket would grow by itself, and save you the trouble of sending for the rest of your things. Meanwhile it continued to rain, and you grew attached to the earth breathing under your running shoes, lighter and covered in clay.

63

Backs against the glass in the totem dark of the museum's dry pond, wet nights welled beneath us, the layers of till sprung back after glaciers shed their cold weight were still lifting. Months later, the highway to Centralia swamped its ditches onto the far bank. I found you in a motel, marooned since two a.m. on an island of books, furniture like driftwood dogging the shore. We bought a motorcycle that summer and rode beneath the quays, picked mussels from the harbour's heavy branches. We grew gills and learned to speak through them, reedy as the mouth of a slow river. When we left on holiday, it was grey as dusk under drizzle. We took a ferry through mist to the cabin, wading in rubber boots, and dove off the slick board, the pond dimpled its round grin.

64

Even in Montreal, the weather drew its grey coat, mild as ocean spray, around us. In the streets, people wondered how winter could bridle its bite so late into the season. When it did come, we hardly noticed its slow drop. We wore scarves and took hot baths. In the end, seasons change finally without changing us faster than we are ready for. We realize slowly the sun's even path, lower on the horizon.

This morning, half-shuttered by frost, cat prints after shadow pigeons, it has begun to snow.

65

LA BICYCLETTE

These days, speaking your mind is like riding a bike - it's not that you forget how to pedal, but that streets, once familiar, leave you poised and uncertain, fenders rusted from winters under the plum tree's drip. Halfway between one language and the next - all four slowly taking back their words - you wonder at old letters written in the full bloom of syntax, effortless on the page, while even your mother tongue is now spare with the present. Words belong to the time and place you lost them - the bakery where you broke your arm when you first arrived from Europe, towing two children, a fleet of trunks, has given up its name.

66

So you keep them on hand in poems learned by rote, checking on them like people take the measure of their oil: Milosz for cold weather, Szimborska for catnap afternoons. You'll be the first to know when stanzas grind their hip joints. Careless the way to the library pannier rattling down the narrow walk, a cargo of books together with broccoli and bread - you roll titles off your lips like the names of cities you've absorbed: Krakow, Paris, Montreal, Vancouver, pages you've found yourself in, you're a constellation stretched thin between smudges of light, hands gripped tight to the handlebars, determined white helmet leaning into the curve.

67

POSTCARDS

OF AN OLD VIENNA

Dead people smile on your dresser, so many strings tied to your fingers they've knit into gloves secured with a cord along the inside of your jacket. The Stock im Eisen, where soldiers hung their colours signifying safe return, stands alone and bare in Vienna, where even the woods are clean. Everyone knows Polaroids fade in time, something in the chemicals makes them suspect, something in the events themselves has played Judas, like postcards bought at the station changing hands.

68

LATE L U N C H

Frying spinach and eggs late afternoon in May, sluggish with the rains hardly over, you caught yourself preparing your mother's last light meal over again, calling up with your hands what the heart shelved short years after to make room for dried sprigs from this fall's walk in the endowment lands. Limbs count back their revolutions, odometer numbers, turning together a watch of circles. She leapt with her green belly off the sill, two stories to the asphalt abandoning a moving ship to keep from drowning, while you felt the apartment cast off into the harbour, a sudden arctic front securing a temporary bridge behind you

69

thick enough for birds and the false assurance of snow, bearing you to the point where memory is incidental, sits with green spinach water on your plate as the ground rises up to meet her body a question repeating itself in the preparation of food.

/o

TOUS LES H O M M E S SONT MORTS

Churches, bookstores and the public pool confirm your suspicion the men have given up or died, no use to anyone at all you say, and shake your head. Tous les hommes sont marts. Pacific Street, that's where the French stayed, seven young men living a la Boheme and dancing until morning, sleeping late. Even on Nelson Street in their two rooms, they talked and laughed at Mounties in the park. Les garfons you called them, and like children they went away, grew old somewhere you wouldn't see them. Tous les hommes sont marts.

7i

When they left it was Edmund asking, May I seduce you tonight, so polite in his young skin, half a mind set on jazz and cigars hiding his penchant for an older woman. You left him when he started wearing rubbers over his leather shoes and couldn't tap his feet. Tons les hommes sont marts. You found men at the Masonic Hall on Commercial, Quifonfaient sur nous comme les tigres, only after the music covered their tracks. The hall became part of Chinatown and the music got lost like an old tune whistled through false teeth. Tons les hommes sont marts.

72

The last partner was Filipino with connections in Thailand all through the night, sleeping days to be fresh in immaculate suits smelling of naphthalene, for the ball at the Bayshore with its three orchestras. He was young, and you were not; you left him with his soupe de riz, cold on the table, and told him your rhumba would never be perfect. You were leaving him for the silence of your patio and the great sorrow of restraint tangos that play unexpectedly on the radio in the evenings; you circle on the carpet resting one arm in the air, like a coat hook still dizzy from the Vodka in Krakow seventy years ago. Les hommes sont comme lesfleurs, nedatent quune seulefois, et lesfemmes vivent uniquement avec la paille de leurs passions. 73

T H I N G S WE KNOW

Things we know are an index in a volume where important passages are marked out, isolated for future reference: how grass blazes in the corner of a mirror, how cucumber rubbed on a burn soothes, how a spidercrack in a windshield weaves across the countryside separating the fields from the sky, how small and silent the place between two navels, the short stretch between the river and the ocean, how reticent the voice on the first word spoken after prickly sweet obscenities have surfaced, made the mark in the throat.

74

MI RAGE

In the desert you discovered a city seen at certain times of day by those who, wandering among changing dunes, yearn for palisades of mud brick to keep the wind out, a preserving calm in. All these books explain how soil mixed with straw is kilned by the sun, with the notion that knowing how the thing is made will help keep it in sight, this small comfort setting you offeven while dreaming - watering can thirsty for the overlooked, the somehow neglected, waiting in its cold clay pot on the edge of green. When you're really old, you'll wear a notepad around the neck as a reminder of where it is you set out on so beautiful a morning. Upon arrival, write down your own address to be free of the nagging feeling you'll end up other than where you'd planned.

75

Until then, you are woken by dogs, early in the morning, the sharp cough of whippets. There is nothing to read or write down that will put a muzzle on them; their sudden appearance like veins on the backsides of palms, calcium deposits fusing the vertebrae. Every mark on the body has its corresponding event. As if you were being written on by things that touched you. But you have suspicions. It seems there are not enough fingers to point with. Aging is the practice of blame. Which member is acting up out of turn, the anonymous ache calling more often, enjoying the confusion in your voice, hesitant before the click, it is depending more and more on the solidarity found among books whose authors have given up pretending they are someone else they too have gotten dirty making molds, and waited for the sun to do its work. 76

HUNGARIAN

BRANDY

Your homeland stays with you under the fingernails It's hard to take root with the miracle of escape still fresh on the sleeve, dirt from the steel barbed border, recounting how maps were stapled to abandoned buildings, the new nation cored out of the old a violent red apple. My country is now so small it does not have its own weather After Versailles and Communist tanks ploughed up the muddy plain, you fled in the dead of winter, through the shelled-out villages of the liberated, a family of ghosts, under the guarded fence. It is the face of the horse I remember most, staring up at its flanks, hardly dead and already steaming in cold mitts 77

Here on this warm coast, forty years later, you are still unused to the sea at your door, the malaise of friends who prefer more topical poems than what brings you to your feet, wildeyed and staring between the twisted tram rails and red brick rubble of an empty street. Living in a new country where a blackout is only a tree across the power line, you have to be your own witness the two of you light a grim candle, watch it sputter and spark.

78

BEAUHARNOIS

I leave the island in the morning and go looking for you in Beauharnois. Expecting to find it draped, queen-sized like a sheet you'd hung for the old projector back home, I see the lake which had flooded our living room, is only a river's hernia looping out and in again towards a narrowing. Where the grand dam and canal locks barely foam the water, a freshly painted burger stand serves ordinary fries. At the service station they tell in French how les Anglais left with the factory, a jumble of bricks under grass, but that four blocks down, their houses have weathered well. I arrive as if I'd been away these thirty-odd years. The duplex stares blankly on, its half-shuttered eyes, only the cracked lower lip admitting it was your brother dropped a stone there.

79

Your father's maple tree is trimmed level with the lawn this constant urge to count its rings, a habit picked up from tombstones, index cards, the space between periods. I've come ready to recognize, or be recognized, looking for landscapes to slip out from hiding and show me parts of you grown out of and left behind: under trees where you played along the tracks, in glass insulators on power lines wary of creosote stones, across the wake of a plywood boat stretched thin between river isles. They say that land is in the blood, that the heart leaps up at the sight of familiar features like Solomon's lover's, waiting at the gate. But the sun here is warm as spring in any other town. Nearby a ship lowers itself into the bay and rejoins the current. In a moment the water it displaces will reach the shore and collapse back into itself, like a sheet folded flat and returned to the closet-dark particles of light still glowing in the cotton. 80

LAVAL

Backyards under Laval's yellow banks, have kept their neglect about them; their owners, tired of picking up where last summer left off, are still here. You name them easily as the five flavours of snow: sugar, powder, hail, sleet, slush, melting into the season of your life when you mouthed street names to know where you were. It all had to do with snow then, and waiting. Your sister has practiced since you left, at the kitchen table, with the same patience. Only men had cars. The parts of town you know best are bus stops, south-bound across the river into Montreal. You point them out to me like landmarks, lonely exits in the plexiglass wind.

81

After your father left, you had the same address as the fire department, but no one hurried towards anything. There were no visitors to the apartment above the mall, on birdcage balconies roosting above the alley, abandoned rink drifted over, plastic Tempo garages waiting out the cold. And now you've returned, slipped into your accent like an old coat worn out of respect, even though it fits a body you'd rather remained anonymous. Places you return to taste of rusty pipes and chlorine, more strongly themselves after they've had time to steep. You pass through quickly, guilty of not being able to recognize yourself in them, like idioms slipped out of your conversation, suddenly on your lips.

82

We become tourists of our pasts, walk out a summary of their streets and pause to read the inscription before continuing on, focused on the map, the outline of things half buried in the snow.

83

MATIN ROUGE

your lips are dark red swallows in the toilet bowl paper wings unhinged

84

SLEIGHT

OF HAND

Pointing to a pile of boulders, she traced their mossy humps from where she stood, Do you see the camels? as if she'd painted them there, huddled against the wind. I waited for them to give themselves away, like hungry stomachs growling for food. And when I looked again, four loaves of bread rose from the gravel oven. So I lied and kissed her finger • magic leavening wand.

85

A MOTORIST S ELEGY

I knew the power of men who push buttons to maim a hundred miles away, when I turned the key and heard screaming. Part of me would like to drive off and hope a dried cocoon of fur drops through the rest of the fanbelt's guillotine before I'm forced to check the oil a hit and run I drive around, a still-born waiting to dislodge. Mornings, I hit the floor running, but am too weak to make it as far as the fridge, as if the body were a factory, shutting off its lights a window at a time. The janitor mops the halls clean into the dark.

86

Afternoons are like baptisms or funerals -1 sit on the pew between them, an old glass fuse, clouded over the failed connection. By evening I've gotten used to it, like alcohol numbs a wound or senses, but not desire. If only I could choose which switch: my fingers on the key / half a circle / click / release / no harm done this time, engine purring through its pedals.

87

THE BENDS

The river tests its banks, looking to shorten its path a prisoner, muttering at the foot of a wall. I've watched you stand over the hole all this pacing has worn, and cast kitimats and roe over the troubled dark, until it's a sign for the source of a hunger you've only begun to read; weekdays on the mountain, the emerging damp of fresh-cut saplings smells of eggs between river cobbles. Until the day you land it on the counter, where we witness the frozen arc, gaff-hole along the gill, oyster eyes staring blue, like a tv screen's frosty residue, its body lost all sign of passage: jolted out of its riverskin, furious at the barbless hook, red bags of reeking oil,

88

how you bruised the stone with its blunt head, scales on your sleeve, the black garbage bag drive home shimmering. You threw it in the freezer beside green beans and ice-cream to chill the vertigo of whose displacement? Yet you return to leaves rusting on the backwater, aping softly a churning in the shadows, and phone me late at night, asking what I know of loneliness, (as if you'd just been introduced) the air full of bubbles between us.

89

APOLOGY

white icicles chime under trees - all this morning last night's brief downpour

90

WEST

A star falls sideways, follows the earth's curve like a pitcher's arm into the swing, below its bright streak, the car pursues a broken trajectory, setting its sights on half-moons of torn truck tires, fingernails left in the sink. On the move again after a night in Spanish, early morning breakdown in Blind River. The cats are hunting wipers; mistaking the blur of trees for wallpaper, they've gotten used to a world, distilled from nine months in our blue apartment. Strapped to the roof, soggy cardboard peels off the diningroom mirror, flashing signals into space, (all it has seen at our table).

91

We are motion even time depends on how far we have driven between zones, where no one can say for sure how long to the next town, without a reason to have gone. Every day accumulations we are accustomed to: how the seamless plain stacks itself a quarter section per row, (four jellyrolls high, six wide) rotting in the spring rain, and the northern forest on its side in bundles, ready to fence in new highways against drivers hypnotized by trees left standing, blue population signs remark how many trucks come home to drip oil, a black census pooling in the gravel.

92

Far ahead on the coast, our boxes arrive first; like lizards backing into new shade, afraid of emerging tailess, we check off their contents in our sleep, anxious the cats might slip through the car door, across the highway into the woods. The next morning they're back, skinny and strange in the cage, eyes full of roaring, like the dead moose's we wake to a world hurtling from the night, still molten, still unformed.

93

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these poems have been published in the following magazines and anthologies: The Greenboathouse Reader: An Anthology ofOkanagan Writing, Scrivener, Honest Ulsterman (Ireland), Imago (Australia), Prism International, Ariel, Scarp (Australia), Yalobusha Review (USA), Queen's Quarterly, Redoubt (Australia), Zygote, Dandelion, Antigonish Review. Special thanks to George McWhirter for editing the first half of these poems, Ian Rae for the second half, Nathalie Cooke for helping me weave them together, my grandma, Evelyn Curtis, for supporting me financially while I spent the winter in Montreal writing them, and my companion Caroline Desbiens for encouraging and inspiring me to their completion.

95

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DEDICATIONS

"Teddy Tweed" is in memory of Teddy. "Arc" is for Caroline. "Beauharnois" is for my father. "The Bends" is for Joel. "La bicyclette," "Late Lunch," "Tous les hommes sont morts," and "Mirage" are all for my grandmother, to whom this book is dedicated.

97

A Dream of Sulphur

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Nathalie Cooke and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Jane Everett, Carolyn Smart, and Tracy Ware TITLES IN THE SERIES

Water glass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body To Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.R Zitner The Thin Smoke fo the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O'Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino

A U R I A N HALLER

A DREAM OF

SULPHUR

M c G I L L - Q U E E N ' S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© Aurian Haller 2000 ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2000 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Haller, Aurian A dream of sulphur (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series) ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. PS8565.A4547D74 2000

c8n'.6

000-900963-9

PR9199.3.H3176D74 2000

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10.5/13 Minion.

pour Baba

CONTENTS

I

DEEP

CREEK

Perimeter 3 Irrigation Ditch 4 Teddy Tweed 6 Burnpile 8 Sand 10 Gasoline 11 A Dream of Sulphur 12 Reservoir Haiku 13 II

THE GROUND UP

The Ground Up 17 Home Again 18 To the Plateau 20 A Portable View 21 Crossing the Narrows The Crew 23 Eagle Bay Stone 25 The Sum 27 III

22

WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ?

The Stanley 31 Under Hudson's Bay 33 Downtown Eastside 34 Replacing Ties in the Roger's Pass 35 Trout Lake Mines 37

Mt. Swansen 39 Fire on the Mountain 40 IV

IN P R A I S E OF ISLANDS

Tofino Sub Marine 45 Nightfall: This Side of Port Alberni 47 Off Saltspring 48 Planted: 1988 50 Port Renfrew: Thanksgiving Weekend 52 Pod 53 The Cottage 55 Island Elegy 57 V

THE L O N G E S T S T R I D E

East 61 Arc 63 La bicyclette 66 Postcards of an Old Vienna 68 Late Lunch 69 Tous les hommes sont morts 71 Things We Know 74 Mirage 75 Hungarian Brandy 77 Beauharnois 79 Laval 81 Matin rouge 84 Sleight of Hand 85 A Motorist's Elegy 86 The Bends 88 Apology 90 West 91 vin

I DEEP CREEK When for the first time I swam across the lake it seemed immense, had I gone there these days it would have been a shaving bowl between post-glacial rocks and junipers. - Czeslaw Milosz

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PERIMETER

We walked the low lead trails through our neck of woods to adulthood - shoulder checking back over the years: the way you remember which side of your old bed faced the ravines, the green of spring in every bed you've slept in since: how you arrange furniture in unconscious parody. Late fall, the clean lines of branches (nature's calligraphy) rattle out the bearings of the trunks beneath, where a bunk-bound logging trailer leaned over onto its side in exhaustion, its twisted rails left to rust, its load salvaged, dreaming. I lean off the same slope twenty years later counting four hubs in the fireweed, cobwebs spoking out to the remotest limb. 3

IRRIGATION DITCH

Three inches taller in my skates, I can just see beyond the bank over couch grass and thorn bush poking through snow the wintery plain. So much hoar frost I can bite it off twigs, duck under and away carving long feather strokes in the ice push-glide, push-glide. Here, even standing still takes you downstream under cowbridges snapping icicles sweated from rotten wood. The ice bleeds, under my steel toe I can smell the black soil brooding with cattails.

4

I know about the lake sinking to a swamp a million years ago, and this ditch draining sulphur and water so that wheat can grow instead of burrs and devil's club. Straight down the valley, past cows steaming in a circle, past the leaky barn and the coyote kill, a red smudge under the barbed wired fence, I could glide out of the country, follow the Fraser to the sea where salt water takes longer to freeze and tankers wait ready to cut through the arctic. Long ago, salt water covered all leaving clues in the Burgess Shale, what was it like before land, before the early snow last fall? Summer is still green, roots beneath the snow for foraging deer. It's all here, in the rusted plow obsidian arrowhead the ease of my skates. 5

TEDDY TWEED

The boy on the motor-cross, peddling mad between his s-turn and our gravel stretch, invited me to my first slaughter around the time they painted the yellow line down the valley, as if the two sides were tough to tell apart. They sawed the legs off short before hanging the carcass from a rafter; the belly, hung vertical, sagged like a man's before spilling its guts dirty laundry, unsorted on the straw. We found the stomachs innocuous as a lawnmower bag beside the bright pink flesh, and cut fat off like warm snowballs, ducking behind the nervous bulwark of the next cow. A week later, he split my nose open like a ripe tomato, juice down my collar; said he'd come and finish the job after school before my mother came home where I waited with my collie-dog and garden hoe.

6

We ended up smoking in the woods, settled over my marbles for a rusty knife with a headdress on the blade, and buried my dead rabbit under a tamarack because its needles are soft as fur when they fall, yellow to the ground. Heavier than me by half, they found him in the basement swinging warm - his mother who made moccasins, his father at our door for cancer donations; death moved under the house where we wouldn't see it, lonely as a lost boy in a man's body. I heard him cry once only, fallen off his bike on the pavement, his voice too deep for skinned elbows we were suddenly uneasy with tears. On the road, we buried starlings under crosses along the new blacktop, and cursed the cars, so clearly in the wrong.

7

BURNPILE

The only way to be rid of stumps is to burn their dirty trunks and leave them smoldering in the clearing among new stones, turned up like last year's potatoes. All winter the rag-smell of snow and topsoil hangs its ratcoat over the valley; the smoke, trailing its severed tail one grey morning to the next, refuses to draw up the sky's cold chimney. The winters, my brothers and I stoked the embers on the heat-bleached soil, enough to toast marshmallows, the butt-end of a cattail cigar, were spent light, like pocket-change, all in one place, afternoon shadows about our ankles in the midwinter sun.

8

There was no regret in the field's new acre, the interrupted sleep of roots, no one called out like an ailing parent determined she is no longer who she appears, that old photos better represent the living, that we read too much into place. These long February nights, the trees can't hold their weight under wet snow, and lose their limbs to Chinook winds.

9

SAND

The older you get, the closer to redcedar roots reclaiming from beneath sand boxed in by your dad for the orange crane, where the green finger of a cricket's back crooked words from their helter-skelter into the grammar of trunks bearing up, from the ground, small satisfactions, like shadows flushed from behind trunks of parked cars. For the rest of your life the cricket's will be the saddest, most comforting song, surprising you in a wintery country where a rusty door has perfected its pitch. In the end, the years will swallow each other by the tail, taste familiar as porridge in a wooden bowl, without a single word to describe the memory of sand.

10

GASOLINE

You looked so unconcerned, gassing up your chainsaw with the cherryend of your cigarette kittenstring-teasing from your lower lip, the spark-hungry fuel, your knee spiderstiched together where you dropped your guard while juggling, behind your back, the cold wedge of hatchets, under your leg, triple spin and home like a hinge in the stiffest joint to the ground. You had no respect for gasoline - it was a way to start a fire that wouldn't start, roast a colony of red ants before topping up the lawnmower. Always easier to burn through a stump than look for leverage around the tap-root, lower a torch than to rake up last year's fallow meadow. Some people go with a hand in the handle of the big red jerrycan, but as a child you arced it into the coals as if you were peeing into a fountain's basin; everyone thinking your last thought would be a beacon, you stuck to the right end of the hotdog stick, ignorant of grace, crematoriums, while roasting slow, the ruddy flesh ripe as a highsummer plum.

11

A D R E A M OF S U L P H U R

Most valleys around here have lakes where glaciers dug out corrugated bottoms like an inverted roof, or a half-pipe feed trough. Along banks the double line of traintracks irons out the no-passing-lane from highwater to couchgrass bog beyond. Between these rails and black ties are sulphur nuggets dropped from cars carrying things dug up or cut down. It doesn't matter which lake, let's say it was the Shuswap, we gathered up the sunflower-yellow mineral because we heard sulphur is used on match-tips and were keen to set the whole box alight in a matchgirl dream of voices rustling red tongues. We melted the contents of our pockets in an old can of beans over the barbecue; first the Libby's label, then the metal turned black, the sulphur melting like crayons into dull grey. When it hardened, we shucked it out of the can, as warm and unassuming as a new meteor in the hand.

12

RESERVOIR

HAIKU

bent by refraction dead birch sink between rushes last winter's goal posts the motion of skates still in the green dregs after a summer of drought

13

II THE G R O U N D UP This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground. - Rumi

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THE GROUND UP

Beginnings and endings are born out of a hole in the ground, steel toes on the sudden edge, loose roots dripping sap, needles on the red soil below out of this space, the years unfold, a pine cone gone to seed where it rolled to a stop beside the bull rush ponds.

17

HOME AGAIN

I

You're used to settling a piece of land: the garden, sown a season before the house, sprouted last year's bulbs and learned to live between buckets of pond water carried through the hot weather. Autumn, you were surprised again with what it could grow, taking heart in its habit as though it were your own, knowing also how board feet and cubic yards, skidded from the woods, dug up from the bank behind the mill, tufts of grass still nursing shallow roots - promise comfort in their mathematical tongue: how a roof's slope answers in numbers to the heavy snow pack, shrugging clean its icy load in a fracas of sheet metal and frozen gutters; the chimney's long arm draws smoke up cold flues, coaxed by newspaper twists lit above the damper where the geometry of space works its dark magic. 18

II

The morning after the move across the valley to stakes, binder twine and overturned earth, I drove up to your bed, planted in the middle of the driveway you had just woken up to. The quilt was covered in moss and needles like confetti, as if it had rafted off the old summer porch, bent for the toolshed where it would wait for a new bedroom. Your sense of home is something you can draw your dangling legs up onto, no larger than the space between two sleepers, cradled, like fingers cupping water; your damp wool blankets, outdoor sheets smelling faintly of hay or smoke, bodies bundled close against the cold, leaving a longing in us for geographies bounded by skin and shared silence, places you have to find your way to - blind.

19

TO THE PLATEAU

Still half asleep, we gear down the long climb to the plateau, diesel pistons droning under the weight of the fifth wheel; the road, high-bladed and potholed, stops dead in a field where someone from Vienna wants a fence around a retirement home with an Okanagan view. Best moment of the day, when the lake recedes into its reflection, and the windows still cool enough to fog up with the heat of two coffees on the dashboard. This summer - gully to gravel pit - we take our bearings, one hand on the hydraulics, the other propping up half a kilometer of mushroomed ends waiting to be joined together like a puzzle's letters, too large across the land to read. On site, we don't dream, brain numb as machine-fingers drilled to the job, like piano recitals played out from the wrist down the rest of me in the audience, half pleasure, half needles. Without evidence of work done on the ground, the days run together; we could be driving anywhere into last summer or next, where German warm bloods wait to butt against corrals we leave leaning inward like a half-slipped noose. 20

A PORTABLE VIEW

The drive's black boughs haven't yet come to bud, except for one spec lot whose green foundation cures, expecting its transplant, due down the trans-Canada at four o'clock this morning, teetering with a "wide load" on its porch hanging out over the passing lane. Grown in the Okanagan, the lawn waits in rolls beside piles of Boston Bar river cobbles, planned to give the impression of water as if the tide could reach a mile inland to Washington cedars still cowled in burlap. When it arrives, the house will look natural enough, a second spouse expecting less; having lived down other streets, it takes little for granted in the drying backfill, bits of brick turn up like shells in the midden, or an epidemic - nothing but pockmarks in the sod to prove an architectural precedent. 21

CROSSING THE NARROWS

Before gaining the far bank, utility van part of the procession up the newly shingled hillside, he watches the current fold like a beaten egg into the tide. There is movement in the air when he reaches the middle of the bridge, sudden as a knot on smooth rope through a loose hand, passing a freighter disengages and makes for open water, trailing gulls and bilge-water like old yarn through an island labyrinth; coffee time and shirtless on the tar gable, he'll trace it out of the bay with his chisel still covered in meatballs. This far west is knowing you can drift out like a boom log, the eye of its steel dog, a periscope sighting the slow, strait current out.

22

TH E C R E W

High on the city's west bank, we sit for the twelve-thirty break; stud walls offering enough privacy to eat lunch by: Sinks on paint cans, bent over tupperware, the tiler and his Hungarian son on boxes of grout, Nigerian Joe-boy on the grass next to the dumpster, and us on the stucco-crusted balcony, dangling legs over the seawall where dark smudges stroll dogs and children. When you're sub-contracted, you take meals how you work one trade at a time, a pyramid of bit-parts fixed together with construction glue, nails, lag-bolts; each begrudging the owner his God's-eye view.

23

Every morning we pass the slope's locals on their way down - the silent exchange marking the lapse of an eight hour day, something between meetings setting us apart the difference, loud as paint cans, slams the back door of the van. We're up here because we bid low enough, some drive two hours to find the concrete delayed until tomorrow, an entire day like ripe fruit too long in the sun, useless on the languid stem, while all around us, spec-lots branch off the new street, million-dollar squares of dirt. By summer's end we'll start over, down the street where a factory-size hole, we're in no hurry to fill, yawns like a new year we've already seen the blueprints for. Meanwhile in the basement, break's over and the Joe-boy's back in gear, singing in the empty pool, piling the morning up like scrap wood into the wheelbarrow. He gets hired a day at a time and wants to work tomorrow.

24

EAGLE BAY STONE

I

She shovels sand and cement, washes the hearth rocks free of the muddy cove she found them in, (as if stooping to the beach, she'd planned to string them together like giant beads) while I fish the trowel from a bucket of limewater and spread the mortar she passes up the ladder, its extendable rails just long enough to reach: like Michelangelo's God and Man stretching fingers out across a smaller universe, we hold between us a molten world.

ii

Wood before stone. Our chimneys need something to stretch to: suggestion of a wall, thirty taut feet of string-line dividing up the air.

25

Firebox corbeled over, there is no way out but up. The space within waits, like the belly of a new guitar, its first taste of pitch. When the flue's passed the peak, we light a fire and shine a flashlight across the mantel - what escapes tells us we stopped short, that the kindling will have to be set deep to compensate. There is the wind to consider, the hollow of this place, the smoke's fickle loyalties.

in

Between the two of us, we cast the shore on its side and let it set there tracing unexpected patterns along its seams: a man's stooped frame above the mantle, a nose a mouth, the keel of a canoe. What we make grows taller than imagined, is more irony than intention. Tonight with the unfinished walls open to the dark, wind over the ridge, the living room spills into the woods, trees lean in to the light lapping oiled stone, this warm cove at our feet. 26

THE SUM

High noon slips cooly through windows, doesn't do justice to the work's exquisite flaw. The angles diverge, oxbow lakes lonely in the landscape. He learns to sculpt with spare time. "Downsizing" was the word used to cut him off, filings and rock dust piled on the floor. "Let go" by the company leaves a man unarmed, responsibility, grown heavy in the hips like his wife, resounds dully when it's gone.

27

How have his arms grown so thin and that lump under his rib, he can almost pinch it. A dollar bill is collectible, worth more than its exchange. Even the ugly spoon set is worth something. He could live with less, have a garage sale, keep track. (Extra space is always an asset.) Suddenly this need to see the Grand Canyon: sit in the car stare off the hood tires on the edge trust the emergency brake sit back and look up,

where the sky is not remarkable over so deep a drop.

28

Ill WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ? Not for a day do we live only in space, where wind/lowers open without history. - George Bowering

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THE STANLEY

"Most arts attain their effect by using a fixed element and a variable." - Ezra Pound

Once a month, Saturdays were doled out in dimes: at the barber's, candy store, and eight blocks to the palace for the Matinee, bronze sconces, ice-cube chandeliers fixtures against a true-to-life newsreel, stuck between cartoon and feature presentation. Royalty was cheap: silk-pantalooned usherettes selling peanuts, suddenly exotic where giant urns brimmed with Arab sand, Moorish hangings stretched to the ceiling, light-shades scalloped from the sea the world larger than made out to be. We cracked open Toffee bars on the armrest, a Macintosh drum-roll, greasy hands prying apart the curtain while the organ wheezed through its last verse, raised the picture's dusty ghost in clock-face numbers, erasing themselves with a second hand.

3i

We'd found our magic wardrobe with the false back, and its velvet curtains parted into a black-and-white wilderness more colourful than our own in its one hour bloom. Afterwards in the alley, we landed hard, where pigeons waited for scraps, downing them with pebbles, and we thought we'd been had. "I wish we could live in a tree house," I remember my brother saying as we neared our brick, bar-grilled apartment, "I wish I were Tarzan, or Dick Tracy. How do they get them that big for the screen?" Unaware that, when lifting him onto my shoulders beneath the lianas of the trolley wires, we threw shadows large as a centaur's, or any jungle metaphor's.

32

U N D E R H U D S O N S BAY

The speed and flux of the metro refines crowds and billboards into a single apparition - waifs brooding in denim, giant cans of Coke sprouting from their shoulders. Across the line of tracks, stretching into the dark where no one walks along their dank corridors, spraypainted buffalo gallop. Sitting on my pack, feeding french-fries to the blind woman's seeing-eye dog without asking, I string it together like tin cans, cupping one ear for the sound of a poem. The train arrives, doors open, close. A bell sounds.

33

DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

Where streets' medusa cables, constrictor and conductor, marked an older frontier, their backalley limbs and brokenwindow grins have been weeded out, run underground. On the blue map, one way glass, rubber tire streetcars, new antique gas lamps, brass plaques commemorate the shiny heritage. And all the while the wilderness held at bay by Grizzly security systems, free syringes, green areas. Pioneers want new names for places grown moldy - using old brick they graft fresh wings to a dogeared hotel and send the locals inland to shells of younger buildings. Summer sprouts a bumper crop of tourists come to see historic sites restored to original splendor. Everyone remarks how, with the northern weather front, even the air is fresher, the mountains like scrubbed bannisters the necessary proof that getting down to natural wood is the only way to preserve the original; as if lifting folds on a face, could keep what it's seen from showing through. 34

R E P L A C I N G TIES IN THE

R O G E R S PASS

Kneeling ear to rail for the approach of prairie oilcars, you hear only the jug-sound of clam-holes sudding up. A head shake, and the other ear, but it's been breached like a diver's, trilobites in the rock around here. It must be something you ate, or took in slow: the breadth of mountains through your lungs which, like a smoker's, are coated with landscapes that have stuck with you. Synesthesia is a disease of the soul, like hibiscus under the tongue, fuzzy and familiar as a dream, where ties sling together two shores under its gunbelt, the approaching oilcars beat out a prehistoric sea's lapping shore, mountain winds break fresh as a mango after a fast.

35

The longer you stare, the more you recognize dismembered bodies hidden beneath the ranges' stony profiles: clavicle-ridge, kidney-pool, the glacier's cold club-foot. It must be the time of day, too hot to work, flies flap buzzard-wings, waiting for you to tip up one end like a deer surprised by lead, or perhaps the body is tired of sizing up such expanses into something small enough to pack inside your bedroll, and has succumbed to the green temptation of roots, devouring new slide-zones bones crunching, hair delicate as moss on rocks, it has given up old loyalties stopped believing in objects decided to remember everything at once and nothing at all shown little sign lately of being human.

36

TROUT LAKE MINES

The bear left shortly after the floor got damp, now damp has grown further up than you can roll a pair of jeans, tendons taut as cold chops in the mine shaft, whose boarded mouth sags over mossy gums. You've come looking for leftover echoes of picks and ponies; the stalactite's drip, lime-heavy and speculative, is the only miner still angling for minerals, the big catch just below the surface; you might as well be hiding out from the rain, along with cardboard boxes and tin cans stolen from camp sites, innocuous as abandoned prisons, with their lids missing. The tailing's steep slope would have taken a rawhide train to drag ore to the landing after the first snowfall; the untanned cattle hides bloated with veined quartz, nose to tail behind the packhorse, catching the coyotes' interest, puzzled over the heavy animal who didn't lift its feet, who left tracks that were lost on you, intent on hand-held history.

37

All those mines dead-ended, you emerge pale without having seen your ghost, like the bear who comes to sleep, leaves to gather berries in order to sleep again, where his shed fur still floats like a blank page.

38

MT. SWANSEN

There are pockets of rain cradled in granite every surface a reflection of the stone beneath carrying the stench of old flowers or a vague taste in the mouth.

39

FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

August sheets hung over windows like gauze against the Fly Hills's fire by day a dark cloud, by night x-ray limbs stretched towards Ida in phosphorous embrace. Lost if the fire gained the ridge, the old house and its outbuildings crept back into our conversation; across the valley we packed boxes, listened to the radio. I spent two days fixing the fountain which leaked into the beet-patch. Dressers, lamps, paintings crouched in trailers like children to a new school where they wouldn't know where to sit; the neighbors, having once come home to a chimney stack smoking alone like a cairn to mark the site, said to take everything; our belongings leave a trail to fall back on when we lose our place, look up suddenly from the page to find an emptied room, or a mountain side's aching sockets.

40

On the radio: trees crowned gold like a spirit across an altar of candles, the army had arrived empty-handed, bombers overhead made a chain of buckets, displacing the lake one scoop at a time, rumours of a charred scuba diver surfaced up north after ground crews had moved in. Every hour another evacuation, another report from the front declaring a ten minute window before a house, like an empty dog collar, went missing from its address. One farmer saved his barn with a manure spreader, another with irrigation pipes from the river. After midnight, a bale wagon of belongings flashed warning lights down the gravel road, a house hiking up its skirts to the far side of the bank. Someone's funeral stayed indoors with its ashes, waiting for the cemetery to go up in smoke, while a flyer from Silver Creek landed one valley over, announcing the sale price of barbecued chicken. Monday's forecast often o'clock winds, turned bodies into barometers; drew them like a noose around their neck of woods, cricket-dry in the wake of the fire.

41

No one was sure how to perform this sudden leave-taking was for prisoners, refugees from stricken islands carrying the negative weight of the missing: ordinary slides and silver spoons being paperweights and doorstops for past events which otherwise blow away or shut tight. Kilned clean by fire, someone's bare foundation is too brittle to support a new floor. Across the yard, an outhouse is exposed, untouched on a carpet of fine grey ash. While we sit intact on our porch reminded that irony is just something that happens: how a severed stem develops roots; almost transparent, they're enough to get by. Weeks later, we're still here watering the lawn, the fountain unconcerned as the dog treeing chipmunks. Apart from the smoke, the sky has remained brilliant blue since it first struck the mountain. The furniture creeps back on little oak feet and finds its place less permanent than before. It has not yet rained.

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IV

IN PRAISE OF ISLANDS Or, was it through waves he sent the boats to fly with gulls so that out of care they all could play in a wonderful gull-boat-water way up in a land of air? -Phyllis Webb

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TOFINO SUB MARINE

I

Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is much the same as any other: meeting the boys at the bakery, swapping who's mortgaged their boats, or started hooking tourists on whales. Larry walks in all skinny like he hasn't eaten since he left, waves a red innertube so he doesn't have to hide it wants to know the news, but nobody bites. You got tubes in there? is the only things conies to mind; have to know the score beneath his grey jump suit before we carry on. He says he's all hooked up: Enough pipes for a submarine, that's what I am now, a submarine, laughing, so we can too. And we tell him Rick's boat got holed just above the waterline - can't be stuffed with repossession papers. Everybody knows who done it, some guy in a drunken yacht, but no one has proof.

45

II

We stick to Rick because he's big and his wife's tiny the humour of logistics, anything not to sink deeper into Larry's metaphor. What about the cannery, become a corrugated whale, beached between dry docked boats? This town is changing face. When you're standing still, he tells us, you can't count on where you left off. Sitting on his tube makes him taller without his beard, more like a sleep-wrinkled boy shaking his head have we really been here that long? And that impact crater on the hillside where they're building, are they going to plant new trees in the yards before they slide into the sea? At least he's home where he's recognized the landscapes that hold us in place, do well to keep up with the times: storefront windows smashed jagged as the shoreline, a single motor roars away into the night with the streetlights calling foul, foul. Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is where we come to shoot the shit, rubber deck boots, good for nothing now but the rain; and all this time his wife leaning against the counter like she's got all day, keeping watch from a distance lighthouse in the shoals where we walked ankle-deep, between the ribs of boats sifted through. 46

NIGHTFALL: THIS SIDE OF PORT A L B E R N I What is it makes a house a home, puts onus on the ridgepole to stand straight or else we'll all walk slanted into the street, laugh at those who think Pisa leans too heavily to the side. What is it makes a guest stay on; these gardens which are good enough to die in, smell of leather garden gloves on the firebrick, chamomile and dill, and the bishop's chair in the foyer worn to a rounded seat, gives airs of just desserts, excuses the guilty-minded afraid of wearing out their welcome as if it were a doormat. What is it makes a house a home, like good seed to his soil, lends a poor man richer, makes lonely streets pine through windows at mantles and kitchen tables, crockery roosting on the shelves, cold feet under flannel. There is a saying in the country: hang your hat in the hall where you'll be sure to find it should the lines go down by night.

47

OFF SALTSPRING

It was at the observatory, staring through ground lenses, which are really microscopes turned backwards from the smaller denominator, he saw that a star's shape is dependant on its scrum of planets, orbiting like a potter's hand the soft clay; the way his wife beams from behind her busy stall at the Ganges market, surrounded by seashells she's drilled and wired into jewelry setting bits of herself afloat. He told her later it looked like a long highway lit up every hundred kilometers - nothing of note but a cup of coffee and a bag of doughnut holes, the way

48

nights, from the truck cab's vaulted seat, stretch like a dark blanket, worn thin where light seeps through - the trans-Canada trailing after, its dry cobbled bed; every road spoking out from the island's green hub, proof that it's not water makes an island, but the desire to take a boat out from the mainland. Once on board the ferry he's not passing through on the way to somewhere else, double-lane divvying up the countryside, ditches leaping back from the high-beams he's sprawled flat out on a box of life-jackets, watching a stray comet fly down the darkening strait, wider than the best telescope can focus - island to coast, and in the flickering veil between, a random icy tail burning to touch down.

49

P L A N T E D : 1988 From Sooke to Port Renfrew clearcuts grow back wispy as an adolescent armpit among the bones of giants where bears wander aimless. Here is where I built down near the shore with the sea as a moat and a mountain high wall. It is safe, at least for another eighty years, until skidders shake me free, urge me further north into the hinterland. Lumber is groomed for salvage while young tendons already burn with the promise of inflamed joints, young men carry old backs around; things keep slipping out of place.

50

Smooth as an amputated limb, a round table is only so because someone has cut off the corners; how many things have come apart in the night, which intruder smashed the window who took nothing that I could immediately account for, but left a hole as cold and heavy as a pistol's.

51

PORT R E N F R E W : T H A N K S G I V I N G W E E K E N D A blackbird beats his wings against the deck window eyes bearing dumbly the beam of a car headlight. Events are sudden desperate things on the road out of overgrown ditches, slipping away the blur of winter shorelines, easy to slip into carrying relics to the family: kidney stones intact, children's teeth shown at weddings. The neighbours, who keep their mother on a shelf, argue on occasion, Bury her for Chrissake! These battered pines grow thick from bending.

52

POD

Fiddleheads slip underground to the drip of threaded faucets, dogs whimpering by the stove. The two of us asleep, murmur woodenly at the thin shield of ice muffling steam off the lake. Tomorrow to Anchorage, then south as we leave the cabin behind, dark windows retreating under the eaves and early snow: albino shell a hermit crab's borrowed. Our awkward migrations from the city, over five thousand miles of wilderness, are small and sad, restless as wolves pacing the shoreline, waiting for a crossing. In the northwest passage tankers sink quickly one end at a time, 53

while you dream of iceflows pressing layers of sediment that can be dated from the life still visible in the grain and how, when it reaches the ocean decks of ice break off, drift to sea like a great ship.

54

THE COTTAGE

While Ship's Passage, just off Winter's Point and Samuel Island, flowed seven knots either way twice a day with the tide, the Ken Kon Maru loaded with barbed wire, railway ties bound for Russia, bared its belly to a reef like a choking man folding onto the back of a chair. Local island events: one white woman raped one tribe's genocide sudden cheap beach frontage inclusion in provincial ferry route on the top of the only mountain, a helicopter pad a heron beat straight waters in lift-off towards the lighthouse the islands moved one inch closer to main land.

55

Inadvertently, a man buys a cottage, paints it a blue match of the sky.

56

ISLAND ELEGY

That was the summer the west coast was invaded convoys of Korean sports equipment washed up like beached whales; newly manufactured and hardly the worse for wear, runners found themselves mismatched on the feet of island dwellers who are used to making do. Children bartered at school while the hot weather held off and mushrooms, grown large as pancakes, poisoned two greedy dogs who crept quietly into the thimbleberry to die, only to surprise themselves by regaining their appetite, and returned home to drink. That was the summer people were as prone to melancholy as a hill settling into its slope. Mornings lasted until sunset and even journalists wrote poems in praise of islands. On the river there were eddies so slow a wet dragonfly could regain its wings while cows watched, dumb eyes glazed over, wet tails cracking at flies.

57

When it rained even the cedar trees could not keep their trunks dry, the lee sides of smaller islands grew lush and the deer were fearless, gathering on patios and public parks, eyes in their bellies, their muzzles dripping green from clover juice. It seemed the whole world had given birth and the streets echoed the crooning of parents wiping half-digested milk from their collars, the eaves of umbrellas. They opened the doors to hospitals, and the elderly, who had been tucked away like travel diaries, were parked along the duck pond with croutons and sunhats. Conversation was supplied by winds in the sea of Japan which forced more overloaded ships to claim insurance on the cargo tossed overboard, and washed into pubs and supermarkets where folk were curious. Could a hermit crab make its home in the finger of a hockey glove, like an island in the worn, tawny mitt of the sea?

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V

THE LONGEST

STRIDE

I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all fitted out, tugging against its rope. - Raymond Carver

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EAST

Fresh from a myth of cedars, we're an hour late for everything east: the barbed wire sky reddens too early; with its stomach sucked in, the land settles like dark honey, slow to peak. After the pass and foothills, nothing tall to rest your eyes on clouds disguised as snowcaps sham-out home ranges like fridge magnets on the horizon. We're standing still at one-twenty, dodging jelly rolls in the meridian, watching for oil-wells and elevators a one-hose station pulls up onto the shoulder and parks, asking after the majestic coast they want assurance is really as grand as they say, and then roars off in a prairie watercolour of abandoned outbuildings clustered together along a disappearing highway.

61

These clues along the train tracks: deflated pincushion of a porcupine, saltbergs melting in the ditch, stone house with no driveway and a face full of brick, an urban island in the thick of the wheat, make the prairies up like a postcard makes a holiday pinhole-view every thousand miles.

62

ARC

The rain started when we met. Our umbrella a spilled clam, streets awash with kelp, curtains, the roots of trees we drifted into the fluid dark like halves of a green apple. You had left San Francisco and your husband, draped like a slicker over a bus seat when summer dried the city out 'til it rattled loose its pip, a season's flower and fruit reduced to the bare essential, hand-luggage on the plane. You had no furniture. Your apartment like a hotel, clothes folded under the bed, as if you planned to leave, as if what you had left in your pocket would grow by itself, and save you the trouble of sending for the rest of your things. Meanwhile it continued to rain, and you grew attached to the earth breathing under your running shoes, lighter and covered in clay.

63

Backs against the glass in the totem dark of the museum's dry pond, wet nights welled beneath us, the layers of till sprung back after glaciers shed their cold weight were still lifting. Months later, the highway to Centralia swamped its ditches onto the far bank. I found you in a motel, marooned since two a.m. on an island of books, furniture like driftwood dogging the shore. We bought a motorcycle that summer and rode beneath the quays, picked mussels from the harbour's heavy branches. We grew gills and learned to speak through them, reedy as the mouth of a slow river. When we left on holiday, it was grey as dusk under drizzle. We took a ferry through mist to the cabin, wading in rubber boots, and dove off the slick board, the pond dimpled its round grin.

64

Even in Montreal, the weather drew its grey coat, mild as ocean spray, around us. In the streets, people wondered how winter could bridle its bite so late into the season. When it did come, we hardly noticed its slow drop. We wore scarves and took hot baths. In the end, seasons change finally without changing us faster than we are ready for. We realize slowly the sun's even path, lower on the horizon.

This morning, half-shuttered by frost, cat prints after shadow pigeons, it has begun to snow.

65

LA BICYCLETTE

These days, speaking your mind is like riding a bike - it's not that you forget how to pedal, but that streets, once familiar, leave you poised and uncertain, fenders rusted from winters under the plum tree's drip. Halfway between one language and the next - all four slowly taking back their words - you wonder at old letters written in the full bloom of syntax, effortless on the page, while even your mother tongue is now spare with the present. Words belong to the time and place you lost them - the bakery where you broke your arm when you first arrived from Europe, towing two children, a fleet of trunks, has given up its name.

66

So you keep them on hand in poems learned by rote, checking on them like people take the measure of their oil: Milosz for cold weather, Szimborska for catnap afternoons. You'll be the first to know when stanzas grind their hip joints. Careless the way to the library pannier rattling down the narrow walk, a cargo of books together with broccoli and bread - you roll titles off your lips like the names of cities you've absorbed: Krakow, Paris, Montreal, Vancouver, pages you've found yourself in, you're a constellation stretched thin between smudges of light, hands gripped tight to the handlebars, determined white helmet leaning into the curve.

67

POSTCARDS

OF AN OLD VIENNA

Dead people smile on your dresser, so many strings tied to your fingers they've knit into gloves secured with a cord along the inside of your jacket. The Stock im Eisen, where soldiers hung their colours signifying safe return, stands alone and bare in Vienna, where even the woods are clean. Everyone knows Polaroids fade in time, something in the chemicals makes them suspect, something in the events themselves has played Judas, like postcards bought at the station changing hands.

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LATE L U N C H

Frying spinach and eggs late afternoon in May, sluggish with the rains hardly over, you caught yourself preparing your mother's last light meal over again, calling up with your hands what the heart shelved short years after to make room for dried sprigs from this fall's walk in the endowment lands. Limbs count back their revolutions, odometer numbers, turning together a watch of circles. She leapt with her green belly off the sill, two stories to the asphalt abandoning a moving ship to keep from drowning, while you felt the apartment cast off into the harbour, a sudden arctic front securing a temporary bridge behind you

69

thick enough for birds and the false assurance of snow, bearing you to the point where memory is incidental, sits with green spinach water on your plate as the ground rises up to meet her body a question repeating itself in the preparation of food.

/o

TOUS LES H O M M E S SONT MORTS

Churches, bookstores and the public pool confirm your suspicion the men have given up or died, no use to anyone at all you say, and shake your head. Tous les hommes sont marts. Pacific Street, that's where the French stayed, seven young men living a la Boheme and dancing until morning, sleeping late. Even on Nelson Street in their two rooms, they talked and laughed at Mounties in the park. Les garfons you called them, and like children they went away, grew old somewhere you wouldn't see them. Tous les hommes sont marts.

7i

When they left it was Edmund asking, May I seduce you tonight, so polite in his young skin, half a mind set on jazz and cigars hiding his penchant for an older woman. You left him when he started wearing rubbers over his leather shoes and couldn't tap his feet. Tons les hommes sont marts. You found men at the Masonic Hall on Commercial, Quifonfaient sur nous comme les tigres, only after the music covered their tracks. The hall became part of Chinatown and the music got lost like an old tune whistled through false teeth. Tons les hommes sont marts.

72

The last partner was Filipino with connections in Thailand all through the night, sleeping days to be fresh in immaculate suits smelling of naphthalene, for the ball at the Bayshore with its three orchestras. He was young, and you were not; you left him with his soupe de riz, cold on the table, and told him your rhumba would never be perfect. You were leaving him for the silence of your patio and the great sorrow of restraint tangos that play unexpectedly on the radio in the evenings; you circle on the carpet resting one arm in the air, like a coat hook still dizzy from the Vodka in Krakow seventy years ago. Les hommes sont comme lesfleurs, nedatent quune seulefois, et lesfemmes vivent uniquement avec la paille de leurs passions. 73

T H I N G S WE KNOW

Things we know are an index in a volume where important passages are marked out, isolated for future reference: how grass blazes in the corner of a mirror, how cucumber rubbed on a burn soothes, how a spidercrack in a windshield weaves across the countryside separating the fields from the sky, how small and silent the place between two navels, the short stretch between the river and the ocean, how reticent the voice on the first word spoken after prickly sweet obscenities have surfaced, made the mark in the throat.

74

MI RAGE

In the desert you discovered a city seen at certain times of day by those who, wandering among changing dunes, yearn for palisades of mud brick to keep the wind out, a preserving calm in. All these books explain how soil mixed with straw is kilned by the sun, with the notion that knowing how the thing is made will help keep it in sight, this small comfort setting you offeven while dreaming - watering can thirsty for the overlooked, the somehow neglected, waiting in its cold clay pot on the edge of green. When you're really old, you'll wear a notepad around the neck as a reminder of where it is you set out on so beautiful a morning. Upon arrival, write down your own address to be free of the nagging feeling you'll end up other than where you'd planned.

75

Until then, you are woken by dogs, early in the morning, the sharp cough of whippets. There is nothing to read or write down that will put a muzzle on them; their sudden appearance like veins on the backsides of palms, calcium deposits fusing the vertebrae. Every mark on the body has its corresponding event. As if you were being written on by things that touched you. But you have suspicions. It seems there are not enough fingers to point with. Aging is the practice of blame. Which member is acting up out of turn, the anonymous ache calling more often, enjoying the confusion in your voice, hesitant before the click, it is depending more and more on the solidarity found among books whose authors have given up pretending they are someone else they too have gotten dirty making molds, and waited for the sun to do its work. 76

HUNGARIAN

BRANDY

Your homeland stays with you under the fingernails It's hard to take root with the miracle of escape still fresh on the sleeve, dirt from the steel barbed border, recounting how maps were stapled to abandoned buildings, the new nation cored out of the old a violent red apple. My country is now so small it does not have its own weather After Versailles and Communist tanks ploughed up the muddy plain, you fled in the dead of winter, through the shelled-out villages of the liberated, a family of ghosts, under the guarded fence. It is the face of the horse I remember most, staring up at its flanks, hardly dead and already steaming in cold mitts 77

Here on this warm coast, forty years later, you are still unused to the sea at your door, the malaise of friends who prefer more topical poems than what brings you to your feet, wildeyed and staring between the twisted tram rails and red brick rubble of an empty street. Living in a new country where a blackout is only a tree across the power line, you have to be your own witness the two of you light a grim candle, watch it sputter and spark.

78

BEAUHARNOIS

I leave the island in the morning and go looking for you in Beauharnois. Expecting to find it draped, queen-sized like a sheet you'd hung for the old projector back home, I see the lake which had flooded our living room, is only a river's hernia looping out and in again towards a narrowing. Where the grand dam and canal locks barely foam the water, a freshly painted burger stand serves ordinary fries. At the service station they tell in French how les Anglais left with the factory, a jumble of bricks under grass, but that four blocks down, their houses have weathered well. I arrive as if I'd been away these thirty-odd years. The duplex stares blankly on, its half-shuttered eyes, only the cracked lower lip admitting it was your brother dropped a stone there.

79

Your father's maple tree is trimmed level with the lawn this constant urge to count its rings, a habit picked up from tombstones, index cards, the space between periods. I've come ready to recognize, or be recognized, looking for landscapes to slip out from hiding and show me parts of you grown out of and left behind: under trees where you played along the tracks, in glass insulators on power lines wary of creosote stones, across the wake of a plywood boat stretched thin between river isles. They say that land is in the blood, that the heart leaps up at the sight of familiar features like Solomon's lover's, waiting at the gate. But the sun here is warm as spring in any other town. Nearby a ship lowers itself into the bay and rejoins the current. In a moment the water it displaces will reach the shore and collapse back into itself, like a sheet folded flat and returned to the closet-dark particles of light still glowing in the cotton. 80

LAVAL

Backyards under Laval's yellow banks, have kept their neglect about them; their owners, tired of picking up where last summer left off, are still here. You name them easily as the five flavours of snow: sugar, powder, hail, sleet, slush, melting into the season of your life when you mouthed street names to know where you were. It all had to do with snow then, and waiting. Your sister has practiced since you left, at the kitchen table, with the same patience. Only men had cars. The parts of town you know best are bus stops, south-bound across the river into Montreal. You point them out to me like landmarks, lonely exits in the plexiglass wind.

81

After your father left, you had the same address as the fire department, but no one hurried towards anything. There were no visitors to the apartment above the mall, on birdcage balconies roosting above the alley, abandoned rink drifted over, plastic Tempo garages waiting out the cold. And now you've returned, slipped into your accent like an old coat worn out of respect, even though it fits a body you'd rather remained anonymous. Places you return to taste of rusty pipes and chlorine, more strongly themselves after they've had time to steep. You pass through quickly, guilty of not being able to recognize yourself in them, like idioms slipped out of your conversation, suddenly on your lips.

82

We become tourists of our pasts, walk out a summary of their streets and pause to read the inscription before continuing on, focused on the map, the outline of things half buried in the snow.

83

MATIN ROUGE

your lips are dark red swallows in the toilet bowl paper wings unhinged

84

SLEIGHT

OF HAND

Pointing to a pile of boulders, she traced their mossy humps from where she stood, Do you see the camels? as if she'd painted them there, huddled against the wind. I waited for them to give themselves away, like hungry stomachs growling for food. And when I looked again, four loaves of bread rose from the gravel oven. So I lied and kissed her finger • magic leavening wand.

85

A MOTORIST S ELEGY

I knew the power of men who push buttons to maim a hundred miles away, when I turned the key and heard screaming. Part of me would like to drive off and hope a dried cocoon of fur drops through the rest of the fanbelt's guillotine before I'm forced to check the oil a hit and run I drive around, a still-born waiting to dislodge. Mornings, I hit the floor running, but am too weak to make it as far as the fridge, as if the body were a factory, shutting off its lights a window at a time. The janitor mops the halls clean into the dark.

86

Afternoons are like baptisms or funerals -1 sit on the pew between them, an old glass fuse, clouded over the failed connection. By evening I've gotten used to it, like alcohol numbs a wound or senses, but not desire. If only I could choose which switch: my fingers on the key / half a circle / click / release / no harm done this time, engine purring through its pedals.

87

THE BENDS

The river tests its banks, looking to shorten its path a prisoner, muttering at the foot of a wall. I've watched you stand over the hole all this pacing has worn, and cast kitimats and roe over the troubled dark, until it's a sign for the source of a hunger you've only begun to read; weekdays on the mountain, the emerging damp of fresh-cut saplings smells of eggs between river cobbles. Until the day you land it on the counter, where we witness the frozen arc, gaff-hole along the gill, oyster eyes staring blue, like a tv screen's frosty residue, its body lost all sign of passage: jolted out of its riverskin, furious at the barbless hook, red bags of reeking oil,

88

how you bruised the stone with its blunt head, scales on your sleeve, the black garbage bag drive home shimmering. You threw it in the freezer beside green beans and ice-cream to chill the vertigo of whose displacement? Yet you return to leaves rusting on the backwater, aping softly a churning in the shadows, and phone me late at night, asking what I know of loneliness, (as if you'd just been introduced) the air full of bubbles between us.

89

APOLOGY

white icicles chime under trees - all this morning last night's brief downpour

90

WEST

A star falls sideways, follows the earth's curve like a pitcher's arm into the swing, below its bright streak, the car pursues a broken trajectory, setting its sights on half-moons of torn truck tires, fingernails left in the sink. On the move again after a night in Spanish, early morning breakdown in Blind River. The cats are hunting wipers; mistaking the blur of trees for wallpaper, they've gotten used to a world, distilled from nine months in our blue apartment. Strapped to the roof, soggy cardboard peels off the diningroom mirror, flashing signals into space, (all it has seen at our table).

91

We are motion even time depends on how far we have driven between zones, where no one can say for sure how long to the next town, without a reason to have gone. Every day accumulations we are accustomed to: how the seamless plain stacks itself a quarter section per row, (four jellyrolls high, six wide) rotting in the spring rain, and the northern forest on its side in bundles, ready to fence in new highways against drivers hypnotized by trees left standing, blue population signs remark how many trucks come home to drip oil, a black census pooling in the gravel.

92

Far ahead on the coast, our boxes arrive first; like lizards backing into new shade, afraid of emerging tailess, we check off their contents in our sleep, anxious the cats might slip through the car door, across the highway into the woods. The next morning they're back, skinny and strange in the cage, eyes full of roaring, like the dead moose's we wake to a world hurtling from the night, still molten, still unformed.

93

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these poems have been published in the following magazines and anthologies: The Greenboathouse Reader: An Anthology ofOkanagan Writing, Scrivener, Honest Ulsterman (Ireland), Imago (Australia), Prism International, Ariel, Scarp (Australia), Yalobusha Review (USA), Queen's Quarterly, Redoubt (Australia), Zygote, Dandelion, Antigonish Review. Special thanks to George McWhirter for editing the first half of these poems, Ian Rae for the second half, Nathalie Cooke for helping me weave them together, my grandma, Evelyn Curtis, for supporting me financially while I spent the winter in Montreal writing them, and my companion Caroline Desbiens for encouraging and inspiring me to their completion.

95

DEDICATIONS

"Teddy Tweed" is in memory of Teddy. "Arc" is for Caroline. "Beauharnois" is for my father. "The Bends" is for Joel. "La bicyclette," "Late Lunch," "Tous les hommes sont morts," and "Mirage" are all for my grandmother, to whom this book is dedicated.

97

A Dream of Sulphur

The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Nathalie Cooke and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Jane Everett, Carolyn Smart, and Tracy Ware TITLES IN THE SERIES

Water glass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body To Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.R Zitner The Thin Smoke fo the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O'Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino

A U R I A N HALLER

A DREAM OF

SULPHUR

M c G I L L - Q U E E N ' S U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS

Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© Aurian Haller 2000 ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 Legal deposit fourth quarter 2000 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Haller, Aurian A dream of sulphur (The Hugh MacLennan poetry series) ISBN 0-7735-1908-4 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. PS8565.A4547D74 2000

c8n'.6

000-900963-9

PR9199.3.H3176D74 2000

This book was typeset by Typo Litho Composition Inc. in 10.5/13 Minion.

pour Baba

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CONTENTS

I

DEEP

CREEK

Perimeter 3 Irrigation Ditch 4 Teddy Tweed 6 Burnpile 8 Sand 10 Gasoline 11 A Dream of Sulphur 12 Reservoir Haiku 13 II

THE GROUND UP

The Ground Up 17 Home Again 18 To the Plateau 20 A Portable View 21 Crossing the Narrows The Crew 23 Eagle Bay Stone 25 The Sum 27 III

22

WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ?

The Stanley 31 Under Hudson's Bay 33 Downtown Eastside 34 Replacing Ties in the Roger's Pass 35 Trout Lake Mines 37

Mt. Swansen 39 Fire on the Mountain 40 IV

IN P R A I S E OF ISLANDS

Tofino Sub Marine 45 Nightfall: This Side of Port Alberni 47 Off Saltspring 48 Planted: 1988 50 Port Renfrew: Thanksgiving Weekend 52 Pod 53 The Cottage 55 Island Elegy 57 V

THE L O N G E S T S T R I D E

East 61 Arc 63 La bicyclette 66 Postcards of an Old Vienna 68 Late Lunch 69 Tous les hommes sont morts 71 Things We Know 74 Mirage 75 Hungarian Brandy 77 Beauharnois 79 Laval 81 Matin rouge 84 Sleight of Hand 85 A Motorist's Elegy 86 The Bends 88 Apology 90 West 91 vin

I DEEP CREEK When for the first time I swam across the lake it seemed immense, had I gone there these days it would have been a shaving bowl between post-glacial rocks and junipers. - Czeslaw Milosz

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PERIMETER

We walked the low lead trails through our neck of woods to adulthood - shoulder checking back over the years: the way you remember which side of your old bed faced the ravines, the green of spring in every bed you've slept in since: how you arrange furniture in unconscious parody. Late fall, the clean lines of branches (nature's calligraphy) rattle out the bearings of the trunks beneath, where a bunk-bound logging trailer leaned over onto its side in exhaustion, its twisted rails left to rust, its load salvaged, dreaming. I lean off the same slope twenty years later counting four hubs in the fireweed, cobwebs spoking out to the remotest limb. 3

IRRIGATION DITCH

Three inches taller in my skates, I can just see beyond the bank over couch grass and thorn bush poking through snow the wintery plain. So much hoar frost I can bite it off twigs, duck under and away carving long feather strokes in the ice push-glide, push-glide. Here, even standing still takes you downstream under cowbridges snapping icicles sweated from rotten wood. The ice bleeds, under my steel toe I can smell the black soil brooding with cattails.

4

I know about the lake sinking to a swamp a million years ago, and this ditch draining sulphur and water so that wheat can grow instead of burrs and devil's club. Straight down the valley, past cows steaming in a circle, past the leaky barn and the coyote kill, a red smudge under the barbed wired fence, I could glide out of the country, follow the Fraser to the sea where salt water takes longer to freeze and tankers wait ready to cut through the arctic. Long ago, salt water covered all leaving clues in the Burgess Shale, what was it like before land, before the early snow last fall? Summer is still green, roots beneath the snow for foraging deer. It's all here, in the rusted plow obsidian arrowhead the ease of my skates. 5

TEDDY TWEED

The boy on the motor-cross, peddling mad between his s-turn and our gravel stretch, invited me to my first slaughter around the time they painted the yellow line down the valley, as if the two sides were tough to tell apart. They sawed the legs off short before hanging the carcass from a rafter; the belly, hung vertical, sagged like a man's before spilling its guts dirty laundry, unsorted on the straw. We found the stomachs innocuous as a lawnmower bag beside the bright pink flesh, and cut fat off like warm snowballs, ducking behind the nervous bulwark of the next cow. A week later, he split my nose open like a ripe tomato, juice down my collar; said he'd come and finish the job after school before my mother came home where I waited with my collie-dog and garden hoe.

6

We ended up smoking in the woods, settled over my marbles for a rusty knife with a headdress on the blade, and buried my dead rabbit under a tamarack because its needles are soft as fur when they fall, yellow to the ground. Heavier than me by half, they found him in the basement swinging warm - his mother who made moccasins, his father at our door for cancer donations; death moved under the house where we wouldn't see it, lonely as a lost boy in a man's body. I heard him cry once only, fallen off his bike on the pavement, his voice too deep for skinned elbows we were suddenly uneasy with tears. On the road, we buried starlings under crosses along the new blacktop, and cursed the cars, so clearly in the wrong.

7

BURNPILE

The only way to be rid of stumps is to burn their dirty trunks and leave them smoldering in the clearing among new stones, turned up like last year's potatoes. All winter the rag-smell of snow and topsoil hangs its ratcoat over the valley; the smoke, trailing its severed tail one grey morning to the next, refuses to draw up the sky's cold chimney. The winters, my brothers and I stoked the embers on the heat-bleached soil, enough to toast marshmallows, the butt-end of a cattail cigar, were spent light, like pocket-change, all in one place, afternoon shadows about our ankles in the midwinter sun.

8

There was no regret in the field's new acre, the interrupted sleep of roots, no one called out like an ailing parent determined she is no longer who she appears, that old photos better represent the living, that we read too much into place. These long February nights, the trees can't hold their weight under wet snow, and lose their limbs to Chinook winds.

9

SAND

The older you get, the closer to redcedar roots reclaiming from beneath sand boxed in by your dad for the orange crane, where the green finger of a cricket's back crooked words from their helter-skelter into the grammar of trunks bearing up, from the ground, small satisfactions, like shadows flushed from behind trunks of parked cars. For the rest of your life the cricket's will be the saddest, most comforting song, surprising you in a wintery country where a rusty door has perfected its pitch. In the end, the years will swallow each other by the tail, taste familiar as porridge in a wooden bowl, without a single word to describe the memory of sand.

10

GASOLINE

You looked so unconcerned, gassing up your chainsaw with the cherryend of your cigarette kittenstring-teasing from your lower lip, the spark-hungry fuel, your knee spiderstiched together where you dropped your guard while juggling, behind your back, the cold wedge of hatchets, under your leg, triple spin and home like a hinge in the stiffest joint to the ground. You had no respect for gasoline - it was a way to start a fire that wouldn't start, roast a colony of red ants before topping up the lawnmower. Always easier to burn through a stump than look for leverage around the tap-root, lower a torch than to rake up last year's fallow meadow. Some people go with a hand in the handle of the big red jerrycan, but as a child you arced it into the coals as if you were peeing into a fountain's basin; everyone thinking your last thought would be a beacon, you stuck to the right end of the hotdog stick, ignorant of grace, crematoriums, while roasting slow, the ruddy flesh ripe as a highsummer plum.

11

A D R E A M OF S U L P H U R

Most valleys around here have lakes where glaciers dug out corrugated bottoms like an inverted roof, or a half-pipe feed trough. Along banks the double line of traintracks irons out the no-passing-lane from highwater to couchgrass bog beyond. Between these rails and black ties are sulphur nuggets dropped from cars carrying things dug up or cut down. It doesn't matter which lake, let's say it was the Shuswap, we gathered up the sunflower-yellow mineral because we heard sulphur is used on match-tips and were keen to set the whole box alight in a matchgirl dream of voices rustling red tongues. We melted the contents of our pockets in an old can of beans over the barbecue; first the Libby's label, then the metal turned black, the sulphur melting like crayons into dull grey. When it hardened, we shucked it out of the can, as warm and unassuming as a new meteor in the hand.

12

RESERVOIR

HAIKU

bent by refraction dead birch sink between rushes last winter's goal posts the motion of skates still in the green dregs after a summer of drought

13

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II THE G R O U N D UP This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up, while the real work is done outside by someone digging in the ground. - Rumi

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THE GROUND UP

Beginnings and endings are born out of a hole in the ground, steel toes on the sudden edge, loose roots dripping sap, needles on the red soil below out of this space, the years unfold, a pine cone gone to seed where it rolled to a stop beside the bull rush ponds.

17

HOME AGAIN

I

You're used to settling a piece of land: the garden, sown a season before the house, sprouted last year's bulbs and learned to live between buckets of pond water carried through the hot weather. Autumn, you were surprised again with what it could grow, taking heart in its habit as though it were your own, knowing also how board feet and cubic yards, skidded from the woods, dug up from the bank behind the mill, tufts of grass still nursing shallow roots - promise comfort in their mathematical tongue: how a roof's slope answers in numbers to the heavy snow pack, shrugging clean its icy load in a fracas of sheet metal and frozen gutters; the chimney's long arm draws smoke up cold flues, coaxed by newspaper twists lit above the damper where the geometry of space works its dark magic. 18

II

The morning after the move across the valley to stakes, binder twine and overturned earth, I drove up to your bed, planted in the middle of the driveway you had just woken up to. The quilt was covered in moss and needles like confetti, as if it had rafted off the old summer porch, bent for the toolshed where it would wait for a new bedroom. Your sense of home is something you can draw your dangling legs up onto, no larger than the space between two sleepers, cradled, like fingers cupping water; your damp wool blankets, outdoor sheets smelling faintly of hay or smoke, bodies bundled close against the cold, leaving a longing in us for geographies bounded by skin and shared silence, places you have to find your way to - blind.

19

TO THE PLATEAU

Still half asleep, we gear down the long climb to the plateau, diesel pistons droning under the weight of the fifth wheel; the road, high-bladed and potholed, stops dead in a field where someone from Vienna wants a fence around a retirement home with an Okanagan view. Best moment of the day, when the lake recedes into its reflection, and the windows still cool enough to fog up with the heat of two coffees on the dashboard. This summer - gully to gravel pit - we take our bearings, one hand on the hydraulics, the other propping up half a kilometer of mushroomed ends waiting to be joined together like a puzzle's letters, too large across the land to read. On site, we don't dream, brain numb as machine-fingers drilled to the job, like piano recitals played out from the wrist down the rest of me in the audience, half pleasure, half needles. Without evidence of work done on the ground, the days run together; we could be driving anywhere into last summer or next, where German warm bloods wait to butt against corrals we leave leaning inward like a half-slipped noose. 20

A PORTABLE VIEW

The drive's black boughs haven't yet come to bud, except for one spec lot whose green foundation cures, expecting its transplant, due down the trans-Canada at four o'clock this morning, teetering with a "wide load" on its porch hanging out over the passing lane. Grown in the Okanagan, the lawn waits in rolls beside piles of Boston Bar river cobbles, planned to give the impression of water as if the tide could reach a mile inland to Washington cedars still cowled in burlap. When it arrives, the house will look natural enough, a second spouse expecting less; having lived down other streets, it takes little for granted in the drying backfill, bits of brick turn up like shells in the midden, or an epidemic - nothing but pockmarks in the sod to prove an architectural precedent. 21

CROSSING THE NARROWS

Before gaining the far bank, utility van part of the procession up the newly shingled hillside, he watches the current fold like a beaten egg into the tide. There is movement in the air when he reaches the middle of the bridge, sudden as a knot on smooth rope through a loose hand, passing a freighter disengages and makes for open water, trailing gulls and bilge-water like old yarn through an island labyrinth; coffee time and shirtless on the tar gable, he'll trace it out of the bay with his chisel still covered in meatballs. This far west is knowing you can drift out like a boom log, the eye of its steel dog, a periscope sighting the slow, strait current out.

22

TH E C R E W

High on the city's west bank, we sit for the twelve-thirty break; stud walls offering enough privacy to eat lunch by: Sinks on paint cans, bent over tupperware, the tiler and his Hungarian son on boxes of grout, Nigerian Joe-boy on the grass next to the dumpster, and us on the stucco-crusted balcony, dangling legs over the seawall where dark smudges stroll dogs and children. When you're sub-contracted, you take meals how you work one trade at a time, a pyramid of bit-parts fixed together with construction glue, nails, lag-bolts; each begrudging the owner his God's-eye view.

23

Every morning we pass the slope's locals on their way down - the silent exchange marking the lapse of an eight hour day, something between meetings setting us apart the difference, loud as paint cans, slams the back door of the van. We're up here because we bid low enough, some drive two hours to find the concrete delayed until tomorrow, an entire day like ripe fruit too long in the sun, useless on the languid stem, while all around us, spec-lots branch off the new street, million-dollar squares of dirt. By summer's end we'll start over, down the street where a factory-size hole, we're in no hurry to fill, yawns like a new year we've already seen the blueprints for. Meanwhile in the basement, break's over and the Joe-boy's back in gear, singing in the empty pool, piling the morning up like scrap wood into the wheelbarrow. He gets hired a day at a time and wants to work tomorrow.

24

EAGLE BAY STONE

I

She shovels sand and cement, washes the hearth rocks free of the muddy cove she found them in, (as if stooping to the beach, she'd planned to string them together like giant beads) while I fish the trowel from a bucket of limewater and spread the mortar she passes up the ladder, its extendable rails just long enough to reach: like Michelangelo's God and Man stretching fingers out across a smaller universe, we hold between us a molten world.

ii

Wood before stone. Our chimneys need something to stretch to: suggestion of a wall, thirty taut feet of string-line dividing up the air.

25

Firebox corbeled over, there is no way out but up. The space within waits, like the belly of a new guitar, its first taste of pitch. When the flue's passed the peak, we light a fire and shine a flashlight across the mantel - what escapes tells us we stopped short, that the kindling will have to be set deep to compensate. There is the wind to consider, the hollow of this place, the smoke's fickle loyalties.

in

Between the two of us, we cast the shore on its side and let it set there tracing unexpected patterns along its seams: a man's stooped frame above the mantle, a nose a mouth, the keel of a canoe. What we make grows taller than imagined, is more irony than intention. Tonight with the unfinished walls open to the dark, wind over the ridge, the living room spills into the woods, trees lean in to the light lapping oiled stone, this warm cove at our feet. 26

THE SUM

High noon slips cooly through windows, doesn't do justice to the work's exquisite flaw. The angles diverge, oxbow lakes lonely in the landscape. He learns to sculpt with spare time. "Downsizing" was the word used to cut him off, filings and rock dust piled on the floor. "Let go" by the company leaves a man unarmed, responsibility, grown heavy in the hips like his wife, resounds dully when it's gone.

27

How have his arms grown so thin and that lump under his rib, he can almost pinch it. A dollar bill is collectible, worth more than its exchange. Even the ugly spoon set is worth something. He could live with less, have a garage sale, keep track. (Extra space is always an asset.) Suddenly this need to see the Grand Canyon: sit in the car stare off the hood tires on the edge trust the emergency brake sit back and look up,

where the sky is not remarkable over so deep a drop.

28

Ill WHAT PLACE IS T H I S ? Not for a day do we live only in space, where wind/lowers open without history. - George Bowering

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THE STANLEY

"Most arts attain their effect by using a fixed element and a variable." - Ezra Pound

Once a month, Saturdays were doled out in dimes: at the barber's, candy store, and eight blocks to the palace for the Matinee, bronze sconces, ice-cube chandeliers fixtures against a true-to-life newsreel, stuck between cartoon and feature presentation. Royalty was cheap: silk-pantalooned usherettes selling peanuts, suddenly exotic where giant urns brimmed with Arab sand, Moorish hangings stretched to the ceiling, light-shades scalloped from the sea the world larger than made out to be. We cracked open Toffee bars on the armrest, a Macintosh drum-roll, greasy hands prying apart the curtain while the organ wheezed through its last verse, raised the picture's dusty ghost in clock-face numbers, erasing themselves with a second hand.

3i

We'd found our magic wardrobe with the false back, and its velvet curtains parted into a black-and-white wilderness more colourful than our own in its one hour bloom. Afterwards in the alley, we landed hard, where pigeons waited for scraps, downing them with pebbles, and we thought we'd been had. "I wish we could live in a tree house," I remember my brother saying as we neared our brick, bar-grilled apartment, "I wish I were Tarzan, or Dick Tracy. How do they get them that big for the screen?" Unaware that, when lifting him onto my shoulders beneath the lianas of the trolley wires, we threw shadows large as a centaur's, or any jungle metaphor's.

32

U N D E R H U D S O N S BAY

The speed and flux of the metro refines crowds and billboards into a single apparition - waifs brooding in denim, giant cans of Coke sprouting from their shoulders. Across the line of tracks, stretching into the dark where no one walks along their dank corridors, spraypainted buffalo gallop. Sitting on my pack, feeding french-fries to the blind woman's seeing-eye dog without asking, I string it together like tin cans, cupping one ear for the sound of a poem. The train arrives, doors open, close. A bell sounds.

33

DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

Where streets' medusa cables, constrictor and conductor, marked an older frontier, their backalley limbs and brokenwindow grins have been weeded out, run underground. On the blue map, one way glass, rubber tire streetcars, new antique gas lamps, brass plaques commemorate the shiny heritage. And all the while the wilderness held at bay by Grizzly security systems, free syringes, green areas. Pioneers want new names for places grown moldy - using old brick they graft fresh wings to a dogeared hotel and send the locals inland to shells of younger buildings. Summer sprouts a bumper crop of tourists come to see historic sites restored to original splendor. Everyone remarks how, with the northern weather front, even the air is fresher, the mountains like scrubbed bannisters the necessary proof that getting down to natural wood is the only way to preserve the original; as if lifting folds on a face, could keep what it's seen from showing through. 34

R E P L A C I N G TIES IN THE

R O G E R S PASS

Kneeling ear to rail for the approach of prairie oilcars, you hear only the jug-sound of clam-holes sudding up. A head shake, and the other ear, but it's been breached like a diver's, trilobites in the rock around here. It must be something you ate, or took in slow: the breadth of mountains through your lungs which, like a smoker's, are coated with landscapes that have stuck with you. Synesthesia is a disease of the soul, like hibiscus under the tongue, fuzzy and familiar as a dream, where ties sling together two shores under its gunbelt, the approaching oilcars beat out a prehistoric sea's lapping shore, mountain winds break fresh as a mango after a fast.

35

The longer you stare, the more you recognize dismembered bodies hidden beneath the ranges' stony profiles: clavicle-ridge, kidney-pool, the glacier's cold club-foot. It must be the time of day, too hot to work, flies flap buzzard-wings, waiting for you to tip up one end like a deer surprised by lead, or perhaps the body is tired of sizing up such expanses into something small enough to pack inside your bedroll, and has succumbed to the green temptation of roots, devouring new slide-zones bones crunching, hair delicate as moss on rocks, it has given up old loyalties stopped believing in objects decided to remember everything at once and nothing at all shown little sign lately of being human.

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TROUT LAKE MINES

The bear left shortly after the floor got damp, now damp has grown further up than you can roll a pair of jeans, tendons taut as cold chops in the mine shaft, whose boarded mouth sags over mossy gums. You've come looking for leftover echoes of picks and ponies; the stalactite's drip, lime-heavy and speculative, is the only miner still angling for minerals, the big catch just below the surface; you might as well be hiding out from the rain, along with cardboard boxes and tin cans stolen from camp sites, innocuous as abandoned prisons, with their lids missing. The tailing's steep slope would have taken a rawhide train to drag ore to the landing after the first snowfall; the untanned cattle hides bloated with veined quartz, nose to tail behind the packhorse, catching the coyotes' interest, puzzled over the heavy animal who didn't lift its feet, who left tracks that were lost on you, intent on hand-held history.

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All those mines dead-ended, you emerge pale without having seen your ghost, like the bear who comes to sleep, leaves to gather berries in order to sleep again, where his shed fur still floats like a blank page.

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MT. SWANSEN

There are pockets of rain cradled in granite every surface a reflection of the stone beneath carrying the stench of old flowers or a vague taste in the mouth.

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FIRE ON THE MOUNTAIN

August sheets hung over windows like gauze against the Fly Hills's fire by day a dark cloud, by night x-ray limbs stretched towards Ida in phosphorous embrace. Lost if the fire gained the ridge, the old house and its outbuildings crept back into our conversation; across the valley we packed boxes, listened to the radio. I spent two days fixing the fountain which leaked into the beet-patch. Dressers, lamps, paintings crouched in trailers like children to a new school where they wouldn't know where to sit; the neighbors, having once come home to a chimney stack smoking alone like a cairn to mark the site, said to take everything; our belongings leave a trail to fall back on when we lose our place, look up suddenly from the page to find an emptied room, or a mountain side's aching sockets.

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On the radio: trees crowned gold like a spirit across an altar of candles, the army had arrived empty-handed, bombers overhead made a chain of buckets, displacing the lake one scoop at a time, rumours of a charred scuba diver surfaced up north after ground crews had moved in. Every hour another evacuation, another report from the front declaring a ten minute window before a house, like an empty dog collar, went missing from its address. One farmer saved his barn with a manure spreader, another with irrigation pipes from the river. After midnight, a bale wagon of belongings flashed warning lights down the gravel road, a house hiking up its skirts to the far side of the bank. Someone's funeral stayed indoors with its ashes, waiting for the cemetery to go up in smoke, while a flyer from Silver Creek landed one valley over, announcing the sale price of barbecued chicken. Monday's forecast often o'clock winds, turned bodies into barometers; drew them like a noose around their neck of woods, cricket-dry in the wake of the fire.

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No one was sure how to perform this sudden leave-taking was for prisoners, refugees from stricken islands carrying the negative weight of the missing: ordinary slides and silver spoons being paperweights and doorstops for past events which otherwise blow away or shut tight. Kilned clean by fire, someone's bare foundation is too brittle to support a new floor. Across the yard, an outhouse is exposed, untouched on a carpet of fine grey ash. While we sit intact on our porch reminded that irony is just something that happens: how a severed stem develops roots; almost transparent, they're enough to get by. Weeks later, we're still here watering the lawn, the fountain unconcerned as the dog treeing chipmunks. Apart from the smoke, the sky has remained brilliant blue since it first struck the mountain. The furniture creeps back on little oak feet and finds its place less permanent than before. It has not yet rained.

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IV

IN PRAISE OF ISLANDS Or, was it through waves he sent the boats to fly with gulls so that out of care they all could play in a wonderful gull-boat-water way up in a land of air? -Phyllis Webb

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TOFINO SUB MARINE

I

Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is much the same as any other: meeting the boys at the bakery, swapping who's mortgaged their boats, or started hooking tourists on whales. Larry walks in all skinny like he hasn't eaten since he left, waves a red innertube so he doesn't have to hide it wants to know the news, but nobody bites. You got tubes in there? is the only things conies to mind; have to know the score beneath his grey jump suit before we carry on. He says he's all hooked up: Enough pipes for a submarine, that's what I am now, a submarine, laughing, so we can too. And we tell him Rick's boat got holed just above the waterline - can't be stuffed with repossession papers. Everybody knows who done it, some guy in a drunken yacht, but no one has proof.

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II

We stick to Rick because he's big and his wife's tiny the humour of logistics, anything not to sink deeper into Larry's metaphor. What about the cannery, become a corrugated whale, beached between dry docked boats? This town is changing face. When you're standing still, he tells us, you can't count on where you left off. Sitting on his tube makes him taller without his beard, more like a sleep-wrinkled boy shaking his head have we really been here that long? And that impact crater on the hillside where they're building, are they going to plant new trees in the yards before they slide into the sea? At least he's home where he's recognized the landscapes that hold us in place, do well to keep up with the times: storefront windows smashed jagged as the shoreline, a single motor roars away into the night with the streetlights calling foul, foul. Noon on a Sunday these days along the coast is where we come to shoot the shit, rubber deck boots, good for nothing now but the rain; and all this time his wife leaning against the counter like she's got all day, keeping watch from a distance lighthouse in the shoals where we walked ankle-deep, between the ribs of boats sifted through. 46

NIGHTFALL: THIS SIDE OF PORT A L B E R N I What is it makes a house a home, puts onus on the ridgepole to stand straight or else we'll all walk slanted into the street, laugh at those who think Pisa leans too heavily to the side. What is it makes a guest stay on; these gardens which are good enough to die in, smell of leather garden gloves on the firebrick, chamomile and dill, and the bishop's chair in the foyer worn to a rounded seat, gives airs of just desserts, excuses the guilty-minded afraid of wearing out their welcome as if it were a doormat. What is it makes a house a home, like good seed to his soil, lends a poor man richer, makes lonely streets pine through windows at mantles and kitchen tables, crockery roosting on the shelves, cold feet under flannel. There is a saying in the country: hang your hat in the hall where you'll be sure to find it should the lines go down by night.

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OFF SALTSPRING

It was at the observatory, staring through ground lenses, which are really microscopes turned backwards from the smaller denominator, he saw that a star's shape is dependant on its scrum of planets, orbiting like a potter's hand the soft clay; the way his wife beams from behind her busy stall at the Ganges market, surrounded by seashells she's drilled and wired into jewelry setting bits of herself afloat. He told her later it looked like a long highway lit up every hundred kilometers - nothing of note but a cup of coffee and a bag of doughnut holes, the way

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nights, from the truck cab's vaulted seat, stretch like a dark blanket, worn thin where light seeps through - the trans-Canada trailing after, its dry cobbled bed; every road spoking out from the island's green hub, proof that it's not water makes an island, but the desire to take a boat out from the mainland. Once on board the ferry he's not passing through on the way to somewhere else, double-lane divvying up the countryside, ditches leaping back from the high-beams he's sprawled flat out on a box of life-jackets, watching a stray comet fly down the darkening strait, wider than the best telescope can focus - island to coast, and in the flickering veil between, a random icy tail burning to touch down.

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P L A N T E D : 1988 From Sooke to Port Renfrew clearcuts grow back wispy as an adolescent armpit among the bones of giants where bears wander aimless. Here is where I built down near the shore with the sea as a moat and a mountain high wall. It is safe, at least for another eighty years, until skidders shake me free, urge me further north into the hinterland. Lumber is groomed for salvage while young tendons already burn with the promise of inflamed joints, young men carry old backs around; things keep slipping out of place.

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Smooth as an amputated limb, a round table is only so because someone has cut off the corners; how many things have come apart in the night, which intruder smashed the window who took nothing that I could immediately account for, but left a hole as cold and heavy as a pistol's.

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PORT R E N F R E W : T H A N K S G I V I N G W E E K E N D A blackbird beats his wings against the deck window eyes bearing dumbly the beam of a car headlight. Events are sudden desperate things on the road out of overgrown ditches, slipping away the blur of winter shorelines, easy to slip into carrying relics to the family: kidney stones intact, children's teeth shown at weddings. The neighbours, who keep their mother on a shelf, argue on occasion, Bury her for Chrissake! These battered pines grow thick from bending.

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POD

Fiddleheads slip underground to the drip of threaded faucets, dogs whimpering by the stove. The two of us asleep, murmur woodenly at the thin shield of ice muffling steam off the lake. Tomorrow to Anchorage, then south as we leave the cabin behind, dark windows retreating under the eaves and early snow: albino shell a hermit crab's borrowed. Our awkward migrations from the city, over five thousand miles of wilderness, are small and sad, restless as wolves pacing the shoreline, waiting for a crossing. In the northwest passage tankers sink quickly one end at a time, 53

while you dream of iceflows pressing layers of sediment that can be dated from the life still visible in the grain and how, when it reaches the ocean decks of ice break off, drift to sea like a great ship.

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THE COTTAGE

While Ship's Passage, just off Winter's Point and Samuel Island, flowed seven knots either way twice a day with the tide, the Ken Kon Maru loaded with barbed wire, railway ties bound for Russia, bared its belly to a reef like a choking man folding onto the back of a chair. Local island events: one white woman raped one tribe's genocide sudden cheap beach frontage inclusion in provincial ferry route on the top of the only mountain, a helicopter pad a heron beat straight waters in lift-off towards the lighthouse the islands moved one inch closer to main land.

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Inadvertently, a man buys a cottage, paints it a blue match of the sky.

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ISLAND ELEGY

That was the summer the west coast was invaded convoys of Korean sports equipment washed up like beached whales; newly manufactured and hardly the worse for wear, runners found themselves mismatched on the feet of island dwellers who are used to making do. Children bartered at school while the hot weather held off and mushrooms, grown large as pancakes, poisoned two greedy dogs who crept quietly into the thimbleberry to die, only to surprise themselves by regaining their appetite, and returned home to drink. That was the summer people were as prone to melancholy as a hill settling into its slope. Mornings lasted until sunset and even journalists wrote poems in praise of islands. On the river there were eddies so slow a wet dragonfly could regain its wings while cows watched, dumb eyes glazed over, wet tails cracking at flies.

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When it rained even the cedar trees could not keep their trunks dry, the lee sides of smaller islands grew lush and the deer were fearless, gathering on patios and public parks, eyes in their bellies, their muzzles dripping green from clover juice. It seemed the whole world had given birth and the streets echoed the crooning of parents wiping half-digested milk from their collars, the eaves of umbrellas. They opened the doors to hospitals, and the elderly, who had been tucked away like travel diaries, were parked along the duck pond with croutons and sunhats. Conversation was supplied by winds in the sea of Japan which forced more overloaded ships to claim insurance on the cargo tossed overboard, and washed into pubs and supermarkets where folk were curious. Could a hermit crab make its home in the finger of a hockey glove, like an island in the worn, tawny mitt of the sea?

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V

THE LONGEST

STRIDE

I go to sleep on one beach, wake up on another. Boat all fitted out, tugging against its rope. - Raymond Carver

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EAST

Fresh from a myth of cedars, we're an hour late for everything east: the barbed wire sky reddens too early; with its stomach sucked in, the land settles like dark honey, slow to peak. After the pass and foothills, nothing tall to rest your eyes on clouds disguised as snowcaps sham-out home ranges like fridge magnets on the horizon. We're standing still at one-twenty, dodging jelly rolls in the meridian, watching for oil-wells and elevators a one-hose station pulls up onto the shoulder and parks, asking after the majestic coast they want assurance is really as grand as they say, and then roars off in a prairie watercolour of abandoned outbuildings clustered together along a disappearing highway.

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These clues along the train tracks: deflated pincushion of a porcupine, saltbergs melting in the ditch, stone house with no driveway and a face full of brick, an urban island in the thick of the wheat, make the prairies up like a postcard makes a holiday pinhole-view every thousand miles.

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ARC

The rain started when we met. Our umbrella a spilled clam, streets awash with kelp, curtains, the roots of trees we drifted into the fluid dark like halves of a green apple. You had left San Francisco and your husband, draped like a slicker over a bus seat when summer dried the city out 'til it rattled loose its pip, a season's flower and fruit reduced to the bare essential, hand-luggage on the plane. You had no furniture. Your apartment like a hotel, clothes folded under the bed, as if you planned to leave, as if what you had left in your pocket would grow by itself, and save you the trouble of sending for the rest of your things. Meanwhile it continued to rain, and you grew attached to the earth breathing under your running shoes, lighter and covered in clay.

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Backs against the glass in the totem dark of the museum's dry pond, wet nights welled beneath us, the layers of till sprung back after glaciers shed their cold weight were still lifting. Months later, the highway to Centralia swamped its ditches onto the far bank. I found you in a motel, marooned since two a.m. on an island of books, furniture like driftwood dogging the shore. We bought a motorcycle that summer and rode beneath the quays, picked mussels from the harbour's heavy branches. We grew gills and learned to speak through them, reedy as the mouth of a slow river. When we left on holiday, it was grey as dusk under drizzle. We took a ferry through mist to the cabin, wading in rubber boots, and dove off the slick board, the pond dimpled its round grin.

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Even in Montreal, the weather drew its grey coat, mild as ocean spray, around us. In the streets, people wondered how winter could bridle its bite so late into the season. When it did come, we hardly noticed its slow drop. We wore scarves and took hot baths. In the end, seasons change finally without changing us faster than we are ready for. We realize slowly the sun's even path, lower on the horizon.

This morning, half-shuttered by frost, cat prints after shadow pigeons, it has begun to snow.

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LA BICYCLETTE

These days, speaking your mind is like riding a bike - it's not that you forget how to pedal, but that streets, once familiar, leave you poised and uncertain, fenders rusted from winters under the plum tree's drip. Halfway between one language and the next - all four slowly taking back their words - you wonder at old letters written in the full bloom of syntax, effortless on the page, while even your mother tongue is now spare with the present. Words belong to the time and place you lost them - the bakery where you broke your arm when you first arrived from Europe, towing two children, a fleet of trunks, has given up its name.

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So you keep them on hand in poems learned by rote, checking on them like people take the measure of their oil: Milosz for cold weather, Szimborska for catnap afternoons. You'll be the first to know when stanzas grind their hip joints. Careless the way to the library pannier rattling down the narrow walk, a cargo of books together with broccoli and bread - you roll titles off your lips like the names of cities you've absorbed: Krakow, Paris, Montreal, Vancouver, pages you've found yourself in, you're a constellation stretched thin between smudges of light, hands gripped tight to the handlebars, determined white helmet leaning into the curve.

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POSTCARDS

OF AN OLD VIENNA

Dead people smile on your dresser, so many strings tied to your fingers they've knit into gloves secured with a cord along the inside of your jacket. The Stock im Eisen, where soldiers hung their colours signifying safe return, stands alone and bare in Vienna, where even the woods are clean. Everyone knows Polaroids fade in time, something in the chemicals makes them suspect, something in the events themselves has played Judas, like postcards bought at the station changing hands.

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LATE L U N C H

Frying spinach and eggs late afternoon in May, sluggish with the rains hardly over, you caught yourself preparing your mother's last light meal over again, calling up with your hands what the heart shelved short years after to make room for dried sprigs from this fall's walk in the endowment lands. Limbs count back their revolutions, odometer numbers, turning together a watch of circles. She leapt with her green belly off the sill, two stories to the asphalt abandoning a moving ship to keep from drowning, while you felt the apartment cast off into the harbour, a sudden arctic front securing a temporary bridge behind you

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thick enough for birds and the false assurance of snow, bearing you to the point where memory is incidental, sits with green spinach water on your plate as the ground rises up to meet her body a question repeating itself in the preparation of food.

/o

TOUS LES H O M M E S SONT MORTS

Churches, bookstores and the public pool confirm your suspicion the men have given up or died, no use to anyone at all you say, and shake your head. Tous les hommes sont marts. Pacific Street, that's where the French stayed, seven young men living a la Boheme and dancing until morning, sleeping late. Even on Nelson Street in their two rooms, they talked and laughed at Mounties in the park. Les garfons you called them, and like children they went away, grew old somewhere you wouldn't see them. Tous les hommes sont marts.

7i

When they left it was Edmund asking, May I seduce you tonight, so polite in his young skin, half a mind set on jazz and cigars hiding his penchant for an older woman. You left him when he started wearing rubbers over his leather shoes and couldn't tap his feet. Tons les hommes sont marts. You found men at the Masonic Hall on Commercial, Quifonfaient sur nous comme les tigres, only after the music covered their tracks. The hall became part of Chinatown and the music got lost like an old tune whistled through false teeth. Tons les hommes sont marts.

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The last partner was Filipino with connections in Thailand all through the night, sleeping days to be fresh in immaculate suits smelling of naphthalene, for the ball at the Bayshore with its three orchestras. He was young, and you were not; you left him with his soupe de riz, cold on the table, and told him your rhumba would never be perfect. You were leaving him for the silence of your patio and the great sorrow of restraint tangos that play unexpectedly on the radio in the evenings; you circle on the carpet resting one arm in the air, like a coat hook still dizzy from the Vodka in Krakow seventy years ago. Les hommes sont comme lesfleurs, nedatent quune seulefois, et lesfemmes vivent uniquement avec la paille de leurs passions. 73

T H I N G S WE KNOW

Things we know are an index in a volume where important passages are marked out, isolated for future reference: how grass blazes in the corner of a mirror, how cucumber rubbed on a burn soothes, how a spidercrack in a windshield weaves across the countryside separating the fields from the sky, how small and silent the place between two navels, the short stretch between the river and the ocean, how reticent the voice on the first word spoken after prickly sweet obscenities have surfaced, made the mark in the throat.

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MI RAGE

In the desert you discovered a city seen at certain times of day by those who, wandering among changing dunes, yearn for palisades of mud brick to keep the wind out, a preserving calm in. All these books explain how soil mixed with straw is kilned by the sun, with the notion that knowing how the thing is made will help keep it in sight, this small comfort setting you offeven while dreaming - watering can thirsty for the overlooked, the somehow neglected, waiting in its cold clay pot on the edge of green. When you're really old, you'll wear a notepad around the neck as a reminder of where it is you set out on so beautiful a morning. Upon arrival, write down your own address to be free of the nagging feeling you'll end up other than where you'd planned.

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Until then, you are woken by dogs, early in the morning, the sharp cough of whippets. There is nothing to read or write down that will put a muzzle on them; their sudden appearance like veins on the backsides of palms, calcium deposits fusing the vertebrae. Every mark on the body has its corresponding event. As if you were being written on by things that touched you. But you have suspicions. It seems there are not enough fingers to point with. Aging is the practice of blame. Which member is acting up out of turn, the anonymous ache calling more often, enjoying the confusion in your voice, hesitant before the click, it is depending more and more on the solidarity found among books whose authors have given up pretending they are someone else they too have gotten dirty making molds, and waited for the sun to do its work. 76

HUNGARIAN

BRANDY

Your homeland stays with you under the fingernails It's hard to take root with the miracle of escape still fresh on the sleeve, dirt from the steel barbed border, recounting how maps were stapled to abandoned buildings, the new nation cored out of the old a violent red apple. My country is now so small it does not have its own weather After Versailles and Communist tanks ploughed up the muddy plain, you fled in the dead of winter, through the shelled-out villages of the liberated, a family of ghosts, under the guarded fence. It is the face of the horse I remember most, staring up at its flanks, hardly dead and already steaming in cold mitts 77

Here on this warm coast, forty years later, you are still unused to the sea at your door, the malaise of friends who prefer more topical poems than what brings you to your feet, wildeyed and staring between the twisted tram rails and red brick rubble of an empty street. Living in a new country where a blackout is only a tree across the power line, you have to be your own witness the two of you light a grim candle, watch it sputter and spark.

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BEAUHARNOIS

I leave the island in the morning and go looking for you in Beauharnois. Expecting to find it draped, queen-sized like a sheet you'd hung for the old projector back home, I see the lake which had flooded our living room, is only a river's hernia looping out and in again towards a narrowing. Where the grand dam and canal locks barely foam the water, a freshly painted burger stand serves ordinary fries. At the service station they tell in French how les Anglais left with the factory, a jumble of bricks under grass, but that four blocks down, their houses have weathered well. I arrive as if I'd been away these thirty-odd years. The duplex stares blankly on, its half-shuttered eyes, only the cracked lower lip admitting it was your brother dropped a stone there.

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Your father's maple tree is trimmed level with the lawn this constant urge to count its rings, a habit picked up from tombstones, index cards, the space between periods. I've come ready to recognize, or be recognized, looking for landscapes to slip out from hiding and show me parts of you grown out of and left behind: under trees where you played along the tracks, in glass insulators on power lines wary of creosote stones, across the wake of a plywood boat stretched thin between river isles. They say that land is in the blood, that the heart leaps up at the sight of familiar features like Solomon's lover's, waiting at the gate. But the sun here is warm as spring in any other town. Nearby a ship lowers itself into the bay and rejoins the current. In a moment the water it displaces will reach the shore and collapse back into itself, like a sheet folded flat and returned to the closet-dark particles of light still glowing in the cotton. 80

LAVAL

Backyards under Laval's yellow banks, have kept their neglect about them; their owners, tired of picking up where last summer left off, are still here. You name them easily as the five flavours of snow: sugar, powder, hail, sleet, slush, melting into the season of your life when you mouthed street names to know where you were. It all had to do with snow then, and waiting. Your sister has practiced since you left, at the kitchen table, with the same patience. Only men had cars. The parts of town you know best are bus stops, south-bound across the river into Montreal. You point them out to me like landmarks, lonely exits in the plexiglass wind.

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After your father left, you had the same address as the fire department, but no one hurried towards anything. There were no visitors to the apartment above the mall, on birdcage balconies roosting above the alley, abandoned rink drifted over, plastic Tempo garages waiting out the cold. And now you've returned, slipped into your accent like an old coat worn out of respect, even though it fits a body you'd rather remained anonymous. Places you return to taste of rusty pipes and chlorine, more strongly themselves after they've had time to steep. You pass through quickly, guilty of not being able to recognize yourself in them, like idioms slipped out of your conversation, suddenly on your lips.

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We become tourists of our pasts, walk out a summary of their streets and pause to read the inscription before continuing on, focused on the map, the outline of things half buried in the snow.

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MATIN ROUGE

your lips are dark red swallows in the toilet bowl paper wings unhinged

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SLEIGHT

OF HAND

Pointing to a pile of boulders, she traced their mossy humps from where she stood, Do you see the camels? as if she'd painted them there, huddled against the wind. I waited for them to give themselves away, like hungry stomachs growling for food. And when I looked again, four loaves of bread rose from the gravel oven. So I lied and kissed her finger • magic leavening wand.

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A MOTORIST S ELEGY

I knew the power of men who push buttons to maim a hundred miles away, when I turned the key and heard screaming. Part of me would like to drive off and hope a dried cocoon of fur drops through the rest of the fanbelt's guillotine before I'm forced to check the oil a hit and run I drive around, a still-born waiting to dislodge. Mornings, I hit the floor running, but am too weak to make it as far as the fridge, as if the body were a factory, shutting off its lights a window at a time. The janitor mops the halls clean into the dark.

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Afternoons are like baptisms or funerals -1 sit on the pew between them, an old glass fuse, clouded over the failed connection. By evening I've gotten used to it, like alcohol numbs a wound or senses, but not desire. If only I could choose which switch: my fingers on the key / half a circle / click / release / no harm done this time, engine purring through its pedals.

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THE BENDS

The river tests its banks, looking to shorten its path a prisoner, muttering at the foot of a wall. I've watched you stand over the hole all this pacing has worn, and cast kitimats and roe over the troubled dark, until it's a sign for the source of a hunger you've only begun to read; weekdays on the mountain, the emerging damp of fresh-cut saplings smells of eggs between river cobbles. Until the day you land it on the counter, where we witness the frozen arc, gaff-hole along the gill, oyster eyes staring blue, like a tv screen's frosty residue, its body lost all sign of passage: jolted out of its riverskin, furious at the barbless hook, red bags of reeking oil,

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how you bruised the stone with its blunt head, scales on your sleeve, the black garbage bag drive home shimmering. You threw it in the freezer beside green beans and ice-cream to chill the vertigo of whose displacement? Yet you return to leaves rusting on the backwater, aping softly a churning in the shadows, and phone me late at night, asking what I know of loneliness, (as if you'd just been introduced) the air full of bubbles between us.

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APOLOGY

white icicles chime under trees - all this morning last night's brief downpour

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WEST

A star falls sideways, follows the earth's curve like a pitcher's arm into the swing, below its bright streak, the car pursues a broken trajectory, setting its sights on half-moons of torn truck tires, fingernails left in the sink. On the move again after a night in Spanish, early morning breakdown in Blind River. The cats are hunting wipers; mistaking the blur of trees for wallpaper, they've gotten used to a world, distilled from nine months in our blue apartment. Strapped to the roof, soggy cardboard peels off the diningroom mirror, flashing signals into space, (all it has seen at our table).

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We are motion even time depends on how far we have driven between zones, where no one can say for sure how long to the next town, without a reason to have gone. Every day accumulations we are accustomed to: how the seamless plain stacks itself a quarter section per row, (four jellyrolls high, six wide) rotting in the spring rain, and the northern forest on its side in bundles, ready to fence in new highways against drivers hypnotized by trees left standing, blue population signs remark how many trucks come home to drip oil, a black census pooling in the gravel.

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Far ahead on the coast, our boxes arrive first; like lizards backing into new shade, afraid of emerging tailess, we check off their contents in our sleep, anxious the cats might slip through the car door, across the highway into the woods. The next morning they're back, skinny and strange in the cage, eyes full of roaring, like the dead moose's we wake to a world hurtling from the night, still molten, still unformed.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of these poems have been published in the following magazines and anthologies: The Greenboathouse Reader: An Anthology ofOkanagan Writing, Scrivener, Honest Ulsterman (Ireland), Imago (Australia), Prism International, Ariel, Scarp (Australia), Yalobusha Review (USA), Queen's Quarterly, Redoubt (Australia), Zygote, Dandelion, Antigonish Review. Special thanks to George McWhirter for editing the first half of these poems, Ian Rae for the second half, Nathalie Cooke for helping me weave them together, my grandma, Evelyn Curtis, for supporting me financially while I spent the winter in Montreal writing them, and my companion Caroline Desbiens for encouraging and inspiring me to their completion.

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DEDICATIONS

"Teddy Tweed" is in memory of Teddy. "Arc" is for Caroline. "Beauharnois" is for my father. "The Bends" is for Joel. "La bicyclette," "Late Lunch," "Tous les hommes sont morts," and "Mirage" are all for my grandmother, to whom this book is dedicated.

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