Rail 9780228000334

Citation preview

r a il

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t h e h ugh m ac len n an poetry s eri es Editors: Allan Hepburn and Carolyn Smart Waterglass Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold John Mikhail Asfour Particles Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier But for Now Gordon Johnston Some Dance Ricardo Sternberg Outside, Inside Michael Penny

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The Winter Count Dilys Leman Tablature Bruce Whiteman Trio Sarah Tolmie hook nancy viva davis halifax Where We Live John Reibetanz The Unlit Path Behind the House Margo Wheaton Small Fires Kelly Norah Drukker Knots Edward Carson The Rules of the Kingdom Julie Paul Dust Blown Side of the Journey Eleonore Schönmaier slow war Benjamin Hertwig The Art of Dying Sarah Tolmie Short Histories of Light Aidan Chafe On High Neil Surkan Translating Air Kath MacLean The Night Chorus Harold Hoefle Look Here Look Away Look Again Edward Carson Delivering the News Thomas O’Grady Grotesque Tenderness Daniel Cowper Rail Miranda Pearson

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Rail Miranda Pearson

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  Miranda Pearson 2019 ISB N 978-0-7735-5894-6 (paper) ISB N 978-0-2280-0033-4 (eP DF ) ISB N 978-0-2280-0034-1 (eP UB) Legal deposit third quarter 2019 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Rail / Miranda Pearson. Names: Pearson, Miranda, author. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series. Description: Series statement: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series | Poems Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2019012394X | Canadiana (ebook) 20190124350 | IS BN 9780773558946 (softcover) | ISB N 9780228000334 (P DF ) | IS BN 9780228000341 (eP U B ) Classification: L CC P S 8581.E 388 R35 2019 | DDC C 811/.54—dc23 This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 9.5/13 Sabon.

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For Gillian Tregidgo and Carola Ackery

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Contents

Wool-Gat he r i ng Camber Sands  3 Trail Closed for Winter  5 Kentish Winter  7 Wool-Gathering 9 Fox 10 Whitby in the Rain  11 Inside the Cornfield  12 Train through London  13 The Southern Line  14

A bac u s Kindergarten 19 The Frieze  20 Time, Telling  22 That Way  23 There’s a Name for It  24 The Mask  25 Financial Planning  26 The Answer  28

A n othe r Gi r l Jet 31 Stones, Scars  33 Another Girl, Another Planet  34 Lifestyle 35 Brighton Pier, Reprise  36 ix

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Chai 37 On Considering Jumping  38 The Kiss  39 Salt-Bed 40 Woke 41 Reclining Figure  42 Degas Women  43 Bones 44 The Printing Press  45 Morning 46 Monologue 47 Brothel Museum, Alaska  48 Bowl 49 Paint Box  50

Ma r in e Lif e Alaskan Cruise  55 Marine Drive  59 Bowen Beach  62 Swim, Late August  63 Harbour Seal  64 Divers 65 Faroe 66 Comfort Me  67

The G r eat Ma p R e a de r Rail North  71 Birds 74 Chorus 75 Clock Change  77 Apples 79 The Ringers  80 Visiting Our Grandparents  81 x

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Bonfire 83 School, Traces  84 En Pointe  85 The Hunter  87 Magdalene 88 Driving Instructions  89 Stroke 90 Falling 91 Notes 93 Acknowledgments 95

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Wool-Gathering

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Camber Sands

The sand drifted on to our shoes and into the corners of the Kit-Kat café. Like small shipwrecks, buried fences slung themselves across the dunes, so deep the sand it half-carried us, and we felt safer, as if floating or drunk, staggering on its ripples and buoy. I thought of my father, how he went off to take photographs – here, it would be the fence shadows, close-ups of birds or beach grass. Hoof-print patterns on the sands, how they became worn by wind. And sometimes us kids; our heads bent to examine shells or running towards the sea. Props, arrangements in his still life. Or gathered around our mother, who did everything.

3

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From his distance behind the camera, though, he taught me to observe. A strange gift. Often I’m awkward, shy like him. Often I’m neglectful, disinterested. I’d rather be reading, or walking apart, making notes, thinking. But here, look. Here it is in black and white: The beach grass and long-beaked curlew, sharp ribs of fence. The café boarded up for winter. The sand.

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T r a il C l o s e d f o r W i nter

Now it’s all purchase and brace. It’s penguin-walk and grip and        pausing to consider. Rivulets of snow-melt can be safe or slick as egg white; stones matte, set and sound for foothold, or loose, rickety scree. Ice – only ok if gritty slush, and depends on camber. Avoid the seeping, glossy, the thaw-busy. Blue floe stitched and flickering in flow, like minnow or stretch-marks. Or young mud that’s all skid and shine – your wary shoes read its type. Judge by others’ ridged and chevron footprints – Measurement + intuition = diagnosis.

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You mourn the off-the-cuff, the heedless, easy stride before The Great Knee Fiasco of ’15. Curse again that Dr.Misery, supposedly “the best” – God help us. Switchbacks are tough. Even with smoothed wooden rails, lilac-dark ice dogged and moody and hanging in there – trees help. Chivalrous dance partners, they provide as you moor from each   to each. Watch for stray brittle deadwood – but as rule, trees are heroic. And the kindness of other hikers astounding in its generosity (kindness easier to accept now). Human hands, human arms. Rueful, grateful, laughing.

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K e n t is h W in t e r

1 The copper beech gleams naked, stripped of the possibility of leaf. England in January, then. The mud, black-blind morning’s reluctant nudge toward dim day. All is silhouette: birds, they own the place, hunker on wire and branch-beam or swerve the inky spine of hill as you walk home, beckoned to – then beyond  fog spire or floating

witch’s hat

7

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2 The boney oak and ash conduct their mad, mimed symphonies. You’re thinking spring mud-luscious, Bunyan and the Slough of Despondency, of barbed wire hung with shreds of wool, and whether these boots are waterproof. Of dog shit, of Brexit, of opalescent skies. Bottle-strewn hedgerows – a selection including-but-not-limited to: Red Bull, Vodka, dud lotto tickets –

or, that morning’s moment of grace as you stood before a slim green birch and a white bird suddenly rose from it. Of thanks. Of thanks.

8

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W o o l - G at h e r in g

Weather-shreds. Teased cloud. The crimp and kemp of fleece, sheep-hankie. Calling-clip. Hentilagets. Pulled fence-smoke. Tattered grey veil, wet and daggy. Frosting wire and hedge, where we stood and rubbed there, wandered. Snagged. Left.

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F ox

At hill’s brow a fox glides along a fence, hides at ear-level, waits in its tense, hard-earned mistrust. Beauty you wish you could touch but it breaks away, a sprinter in cinnamon or rust, flag of tail with its brief white mark. Over the green contours of the field, her supple canter. But silent, silent. Answering the dark.

10

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W h it b y in t h e R a i n

Swept up there on the cliff the jagged abbey, spectral and still, haughty as a ruined dowager. Her rose window floats intact – a high brooch – its bitten angles make a white star of sky. Bedraggled bunting drapes the cobbles, blackbirds gossip on a stone wall. A stray dog sidles by, meets your eye. Black horses stand mute, raindrops gem their lashes. The graves at St Mary’s hunch wet in their dark cloaks while far below on the beach, the fossil hunter and the jeweller wait for the rain to pass, low tide and the gleaming seams of jet.

11

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In s id e t h e C o r n f ie ld

Coordinated by agitation, a dry dark rustle – taffeta or heavy silk. Flat green tongues, regiment of stalk. Wind instruments that sizzle the air. The paths we make; push aside bundled rows of blond bead – hybrid of mouth organ and abacus. We’re child explorers, bent within jungle-frond. Whispering ghosts. A low-murmuring choir, swaying surrounds our flattened bed with its tall green walls while overhead      crawls a plane.

12

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T r a in t h ro u g h L o ndon

– sway on through spires, these monoliths and shards pale and bloodless, like a dying coral reef oh London, take courage as the light grows dim, after the wrong won and are abandoning you anyway. Take courage fragile landscape, yellow lamps glow in blocks of flats that crouch under a geometry of cranes, giant rods that fish the city, the river a shining python slow curling, grinding its royal skulls. We still have our fierce persistent faces, not death masks that erase the personality, we still have our tiny flags to wave. Our unwritten, unsaid, our open and available – or grabbed for and missed. Our end of.

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T h e S o u t h e r n L in e

Here’s London’s edge, where the oak and thicket begin and quiet lowers, allows itself. Skies poppy red for November, cloud-fleece: a thrown shawl. The impossible beauty and bravery of trees: one alone there, or as congregate, banking the fields with their chevron furrows of tire-track: and a broken fence bowed, swooped like a Degas dancer’s bend,

arms curved.

Sheep stand in unison, led by beauty then

turning from it.

A red-dressed pheasant, lonely and strutting as a politician. Cloud-kites or pink party streamers, the sky this evening

14

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a scored and looped ice rink, trailed brush-sketch and smoke-hued, the horizon peaked with roof-cliff and oak bronchial. Now deeper Wedgwood blue. The woods, Delphic blue. Trees like the dead, their language red along branched capillary, leaf meal: the unconscious. Stump: a scooped and towered castle with its pinnacles of fern.

And here’s the bridge, the river, its emerald reeds soft as fur, linking and plaiting downstream to the cathedral, beckoned

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Abacus

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K in d e r g a rt e n

Set aside to dandle the abacus, while the others gathered round the blackboard, you accepted it was best to quietly slide the red and yellow beads along their wires, hard and shiny like sweeties. Knew it was a baby toy and you were fivefingers but you liked the clack and the families you could cluster, separate. Make teams. Hide this green one from bully blue or make a clearing so friends red and yellow could wave. Punish blue by pushing it aside. So it went. 1 2 3 not, in fact, as easy as A B C.

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T h e F r ie z e

  1 Proud, lonely. Sister poised in First Position. Neck slightly tilted, turning away.   2 A swan. A wave. No, a hook. No, a beheading. Definitely unresolved.   3 Comedic Sergeant Major Moustache, a Carry-On bosom, incomplete circles. Things could fall out, therefore worrying.   4 Relief of even, contained. This one makes sense. The wish for a younger sister or brother.   5 The size of your family. Mother kneeling to fix the fire. Or looking forward, out to sea. Also, a wheelchair.   6 This one has a tummy pain and is sitting down. Perhaps it’s getting old or having a baby. Or praying, repentant and kneeling like Henry’s wives.   7 Goes to heaven. Jaunty, gamine. Yellow. A sailor. A salute. Cute. Likely French.

 8 Feminine, an ice skater. A kind, older girl you could safely be in love with. Admire her loop and glide, her rapt smile, her arms outstretched. The eternal gesture.

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  9 Upside down six. Makes absolutely no sense and verging on frightening. Dark green. A boxing glove. Male.

10 And that’s all the fingers unless you’re Anne Boleyn. Also, end of childhood. Except it wasn’t.

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T im e , T e l l in g

There are 365 days in a year and 360 degrees in a circle. This is actually cruel. Clocks are round like wheels but unsmiling as teachers. A spindly long spoke and a chunky short hand, pointing at you. Spidery, they move in a slow circle. After twelve, it gets worse; you’re expected to manage a wholly unreasonable twenty-four. By the time you can read and tie your shoes you have to tell the time.



And if you can’t, don’t tell.

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T h at W ay

Left and right also need tricks: L of thumb and finger, the friendly and the unfriendly. Left is yellow and disdainful. Mocking. Right: more gentle, less judgmental. A reassuring pinky-coral.

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There’s a Name for It

Now we know there’s a name for it other than stupid, and it’s a pretty one too: Meet my gifted daughter, Dyscalculia, she is dismissive, calculating, and a genius at chess. Crackly home movies from the thirties – floating scarves, pan pipes, girls dancing in sun-dappled beech woods.

Or,

Dyscalculia! Wife of Dracula.

Once considered a great beauty, now envious and bitter, crafting poisons in the cellar while her husband is out all night doing God knows what. Again.

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T h e M as k

And so you become secretive, a skilled copyist. Nodding in poker face, best I-get-it mask through budget and banking. It’s serious, the privilege of this – a tight-rope walk between frugality and disaster – don’t slip –

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F in a n c ia l P l a n n in g

Money, it protects us, gives us indifference to desire as we perform a more fortunate version of ourselves. Money, a beautiful woman who craves attention but can’t give it. Money, the narcissistic, entitled man. The King is in his counting house counting up his money, the Queen is in the parlour eating bread and honey. – but money was once something else and it will become something else again. The coin: a halo, a crown. Sacred discs of the sun and moon, of a blue and green planet, a fragile marble. We curate our precious collections, our buffers against grief.

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Call it Terror Management, a shield to the Death Anxiety that surrounds us and is with us. But denial is never absolute, so at least try and get some sort of advantage, some glinting arrows in your weaponry lexicon.

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T h e A n sw e r

Meanwhile, unresolved patterns attract like magnets. They say the good news is it responds to treatment but show me how you arrived at this airy nothing. I don’t know the answer – is it nothing? My nephew John says mathematics are beautiful, poetic. I believe him, I’m sure he’s right. Odds are I’m wrong.

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Another Girl

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Jet

Praise for the monkey-puzzle tree, then. Crushed to shining jet by the sea, gathered from Yorkshire beaches at low tide. Sea, what is more intimate than living in another’s mind? The wearing of necklaces, talismans, rings. Also, flowers as lovers, the messy generosity of dahlias, paradise of rose. Or look, the birds – escape of geese across the harbour, a kite tail. These wordless gifts that can and do speak for themselves. But what of the held weight of a human lover, what of touch? Those short weeks of summer when we swam off the West Coast, tossed and lifted as wrack, woman and sea one body keenly aware of each other, that close meet. But it’s not enough. You still grieve the body, what you had.

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Your grief a Resignation Syndrome, a passive falling away from the world and all its meat, its bloody beauty we were surrounded by and so ill-equipped to meet. All ashes in a grey jar. Widow’s jet. Remember the clinking chains of sea, warmth of sun on stone, swim back to that joy, that take-off, that flight.

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S to n e s , S c a rs

We find the stone ruin, a tumbling glen of small caves, terraces – maybe part of an old mill or bee boxes – mossed and abandoned, the waterfall splashing near, early bluebells rising up in their fresh deep mauve and wild garlic overgrown. Your beautiful skin is covered in scars. Perhaps it was forty years ago and I never noticed, in candlelight, in the Whitechapel squats where we lived. We laugh about it now, walking the bridle paths of West Yorkshire – though it’s painful to think of the places we put ourselves in to try and become free. Such pioneers! Making it safer for the artists that came after us. I am growing up, I am losing some illusions, perhaps to acquire others. But still your nightmares of being cut to pieces – What does it mean? Old friend – perhaps you still feel scattered, homeless? In your dark living room you speak of her, and on the train moving away from you I look it up and there, the murdered girl, Hartlepool. Her mother’s ruined, outraged eyes. A snapshot of the little girl. She looks like you, her round face, her spectacles. A body can be held together by scars. You showed me a ruin. A beautiful ruin, a tumbling glen of caves, terraces – maybe an old mill or bee boxes – mossed and abandoned, the waterfall splashing near and early bluebells risen in their solemn mauve. A holy place, where ferns and mosses and wild garlic grow.

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An ot h e r G ir l , A n o t h e r P lanet

Stepping over the undulating graveyard it seemed a sea, choppy – or the slate fluttering plates of a torn book, pushing up, some almost levitating. We searched, scanned the engraved names, her plot hiding itself at the outskirts, small and shabby. The headstone decorated with offerings of pebbles, agate, rose quartz, like a girlish window sill. Amongst the tangle of grass and rotting yellow roses lay sheaves of felt pens, crayons, and oddly, a jar of nail polish. Why those? For her ghost to paint her nails of a night? Or colour in her silvery name, scratch out Hughes’s? I sat by her, like a friend visiting a sick bed. Read her “Winter Trees,” for anyone would be proud to have written: The wet dawn inks are doing their best dissolve… Afterwards my friend and I danced amid the arches and ruins of the burnt-out church, like ageing Isadoras or heroines from a Lawrence novel. We laughed and flung ourselves about as if nineteen again and dancing to “Another Girl, Another Planet,” and for a moment the time machine worked, the sun lit up the Yorkshire hills and the dead pushed up the living, pushed us on, urging us: live, girls, live.

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L if e s t y l e

Some ink is indelible, a palimpsest of past misadventure. All those lost rings – the Shetland diamond, the stolen one, the necklace lying somewhere on the bed of Lake Trasimeno. You’re so careless. After a few nights of it death seems reasonable. You’re flailing like a fly in a drink. Stuck in an eternal present, suspended in the heat-haze of your life in a daily duet that pricks then spreads. Splashing in a bath, you like it best when the tide is high and all is covered up. Public drinking is pointless. Isn’t that when you should be most on guard? Keep cozy at home, keep it between the two of you, times’ rope let out, daily, hand over hand. Your bed innocently draped in late September sun. Don’t wake the baby. Quietly snap the bottle’s neck, let’s trot again around the park: you are the pony, you are the trap.

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B r ig h to n P ie r , R e p r i se

The brick wall – a sheer cliff – as the train pulls in. The usual splats and flares of graffiti. Pulling me back to the early ‘80s when I lived here, when we’d never heard of Prozac let alone therapy. Today I wear dark glasses to cover an eye injury, am brought again to passivity in the face of pain, of having to wait for healing. In my bag, a little bottle of Rescue Remedy for shock; it tastes of nothing but cherry and alcohol. My friend’s son is waiting. In a blue Mercedes he drives us along the shore past facades of soaring houses, their creamy Georgian ­grandeur. He’s about to become a father. We can see the future from here. The wind turbines are new but it’s the same grey waves and shingle, the same fish and chip and kebab shops, alleys and crying gulls. We can see the future from here, and the past. All our b ­ roken marriages, our children having children. So many lovers you can’t remember and yet you feel nothing but loss, grief for the girl who walked these lanes, trying on clothes, trying on men, women, homes; addiction and d ­ epression a backpack you have never really put down. Your friend finally gave up drinking and took up potting and sculpture, says she’s happy for the first time in fifty years. The west pier’s a giant spider now, bedraggled and marooned. Cheaper to let it fall apart as it will, tumble gracefully into the waves. I wrote about it a decade ago, when it was still ­attached to the land. Now it’s an installation, a lonely Louise Bourgeois. The windmills ghostly on the misty horizon, slowly waving. 36

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Chai

By the lake a woman sits reading, gold buttons a trail down her back – there’s always beauty despite our despair. We joke that next time we meet we’ll be scavenging on seagulls, soot gently falling from a granite sky, the dim sun a crimson dot. You tell me of speed-walking through Golden Gate Park, gesticulating and cursing the news in your earphones. We can’t look away as horror piles on horror, we’re exhausted though the trees today try to brand themselves into your mind and the air above the lake is milky. Children run at gulls and the chai tea is comforting and sweet. The trees so especially red this year – in case we hadn’t noticed them before.

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O n C o n s id e r in g J u m pi ng

– into the clouds, the air, as if it would hold you for a minute, a second. Below, smoke from forest fires, geysers from the pleats in the hills. Or, you’ve fallen into a crevice and have to climb out, pray that art will save you as it has so many times before. Drink gin, a double, a triple – ravenous ghost, ration yourself. The man next to you is talking about the ceramic masks he makes. You wonder if he’s noticed you’re wearing one.

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T h e K is s

At their age, of course they know better, but not just yet. Last-ditch desire to desire, to be desired aside, to shed mortality. Hotel rooms are sanctuary, theatre and cage; they get dressed, walk to the museum to see – secluded in a shadowy room – Klimt’s The Kiss. The real thing, square under its blanket of glass. More frail than the gaudy reproductions, and smaller than they’d expected – those golden gods clinging together. Only human.

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S a lt- B e d

I’m interested in the knuckles that string your backbone, I like the way they wait for the ordinary miracle. Expert, authority on rare china, I’m speechless at the small bowl that fits into the crook of your arm. Rinse my fingertips. We’re strangers in an underwater city. Run blind hands over elegant horizons of ruined walls. Georgian doorways. The arched necks of statues, their salt, their naked, muscled backs.

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Woke

It hung over us like an alien spaceship and while under its massive oval shadow we spoke and moved in its spell. For years it hovered above our lives so we grew quite used to it, its hum and clicks and strange commands. After it passed, moved away, we could hardly speak of what we’d seen, of what had happened to us. Changed, and yet the same. Of this earth.

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R e c l in in g F ig u r e

Modigliani’s famous painting on the wall of the Italian restaurant – glowing earth-russet, lit from within. You are unchanged, beloved. Iconic as Venus but more true – need no other reference and the opposite of coy. Endlessly reproduced, you accept it. You are calm, present, you are near. Relaxed and charged, you stretch, span the whole canvas. You take up space. You are all there is, beloved, and it’s everything.

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D e g as W o m e n

As if through a keyhole with his diminishing eyesight. Yes, spying, but also recording us at work, stretching, yawning. Or bathing – thick, preoccupied. Ungainly, un-pretty, unseen.

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Bones

In the museum we look up at the triceratops, its ribs bellows or the scaffold of a courageous boat. We live on distant coasts now, as land will separate, then fit together in new ways. Bone as fence, bone as instrument. Eye sockets large as satellite dishes knuckle the Toronto sky, solid frill around the collar – stone Tudor ruff or petals on an anemone. Adaptability key to survival. Under glass, the fossil in its cinnamon bed, revealed like a winning deck, corrugated scarab, older than anything, small and persistent – key. Into the ceiling the spokes of rib arch; bone as chapel, real and found, bone mapped and preserved. Our living fingers, linked.

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T h e P r in t in g P r es s

Parked in the studio, like a tractor or some enormous crouching beast, the flaring black wheel stalwart on its flank. For isn’t to print to place faith in the future? Last night we lay like shrouded saints in our overheated hotel room. We don’t have bodies anymore, we accept that now. Talk about elephant. The ungainly machine toils in the centre of the room like an iron stove, a container of endless cargo, expanding with all we were – even all we have thought. For isn’t to print to understand the negative, trust in colour, its saturation and emergence, in remains and what may yet emerge? Isn’t it to live in possibility, to both control the image and set it free? Who are we kidding. That thing weighs a ton. We’ll never get it out of here.

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M o r n in g

– and I prefer coffee in the white mug. Soda bread and loganberry jam. A three-legged greyhound, how carefully she carries him up the stairs. I prefer the colours as they are in the common sense of morning – more muted. Her eyes not in fact blue but river-green. Silence – not of regret but of listening. Held like spring water, clear in a scallop shell.

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Monologue

Yes that would be no. I’m asleep. Like a dormouse. Impassive, like a mountain range best seen from a great distance. I’m covered in snow. Taken a vow of silence. I may or may not be imitating a beheaded Queen. I’m on sabbatical. On leave. I’ve gone abroad with a small suitcase. In recovery. Retired. On long-term disability for PTS D. That might be me wearing dark glasses in the back of a very long car with blacked out windows – but it could be anyone.

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Bro t h e l M u s e u m , A l aska

The women were allowed to decorate their rooms – French silk wallpaper – or approximation of. They could lie on their narrow beds and consider the lilies, the curling fern fronds, the art deco trellis. The wall has eighteen layers of wallpaper. Peeling stories of “good-time girls”, who also came out here for gold. Out here, to this God-forsaken place, when they’d far rather be in Paris – even Whitehorse – their tools the rustling lace of their petticoats, a peacock feather, a red lamp. They weren’t allowed to get pregnant or diseased, and if they did they had to move on. But to where? Into the dark forest? Along the railroad? Jesus! Into the sea?

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B ow l

– Cast the small loaf of clay into the eye of the wheel’s spiral and it’s beginning. We quiet. Forget the rain, forget our other work, our various sadnesses, the callous politics of outside. Here is the alert trance of an intimate exchange – so easy, so difficult – and the wheels’ swish and rhythm. We forget our bodies, forget gender – though craft’s a feminine, subordinate term for this involved physicality and ritual. Clay forgives but has its own soft memory and when you handle it, it lives. It cannot be false. The finished bowl a nest for the thing with feathers.

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P a in t B ox

1 First, a thin wash. Decent paper and brush, masking tape. Radio 3 or 4. Paints from the charity shop. The entire dining table. Lay the light down first then build up the dark. Step back: What’s it about? The curve in the road? Arc of the bridge? That shape, that contrast? Be brave. Keep your glazes clean, your water clear. One line better than many, don’t fudge, don’t smudge.

2 Early May, Hawthorn bursting bridal – Hockney calls it “Action Week”, Yorkshire when summer barges in, full, lush, as if on display but in fact not, just hot. Shade light shade light. This is my place – not “rightful” – random luck.

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But I was born here and it feels like home like nowhere else. Madly, intoxicatingly beautiful, this place, those trees, those bird calls. Friendships still wick, still able to bloom.

3 (And the woman in a white dress disappears into the shadowed garden, Monet’s skies billowing, heaven-blue crowning the hills, lime green after rain.) Turns out diamonds are not that rare, turns out they’re everywhere. The shadow on the edge of stair, road’s curve to vanishing point – line, the line of beauty. Painting grows out of poetry as green will fork from a tree and the adult emerge from the child – though our eyes remain the same. Line, line – I have forgotten how to feel sorrow. 51

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Marine Life

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A l as k a n C ru is e

Dawn, a Peace rose in bloom. Day opens pale, cold, perfect. Sea charmed to stillness – July by lotus-light.         * Find a corner where they’ve forgotten to install canned jazz and all is the swish of the sea we move through, the engine’s low growl.

Nimbly, porpoises curl

the air.

        * The tug and shift of the ship, people scuttling up and down, relentlessly social, corporal, multiplying, swimming, eating, attending to our bodies. We are all animals, basic and social. Moving through the strata of the boat its eleven layers of romance:

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promenade, stateroom, observation deck, forward and aft.

        *

On either side, blue-grey mountains slip by; rocky heart monitors, stage sets. Around ten o’clock this evening we will arrive in Alaskan waters. Wind your clock back by six minutes. An elegant peak drifts    into view

then slides past.

The wake converged like train tracks – dazzling as death. You’re the vanishing point.

        *

Land’s curve holds the memory of the glacier, it shifts like a sleeping animal, a hungry animal.

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This is a world on its way to becoming something else, a world remembering itself.

        * Dirty slope. Grey scree. Forlorn chunks of ice flecked with luminous eggshell blue. Blue like a boy’s eyes, and clear. Toothpaste or chlorine blue. Vertical shards of ice, a close forest. Ice with pointed ears, a witch’s hat. Ice of lacey spires, Gaudi-like and not multiplying.    How fragile the glacier; its wedges clustered together – a frightened crowd facing us, unarmed – we the onlookers who cheer and click this collapse, this ice porn. The glacier slumps in on itself, a grieving in blue and white. The broken turquoise tiles of Istanbul.

        *

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And the sea breathing, its throb and push. Whales that wisely hide from our human need to record, to duplicate.

Never think of this place as static, says the guide, through static. Black-tipped seagulls flutter over the ship’s khaki sludge that eddies. Fuel from the ship unraveling into the water, a spooling thread casually inscribes



a future.

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M a r in e D r iv e

1 You thread the mountain, road curved to scythe, to half-moon. Can architecture make a person happy? Empty houses of pale grey steel and glass, driveways steep as ski-jumps or paved waterfalls, cascades of sumac and rowan. Blind bunkers watchkeeping the swathes of gem-glittered sea. Even the sea is expensive. Only the maids and gardeners that arrive from somewhere else to polish and clip, trying to tame the blackberry’s tangle, the scarlet roses that throw themselves over our neighbour’s fence

as if swooning, or escaping, or demonstrating that all they have to do   is be.

2 The happiness question perhaps the wrong question where everything is enormous, cars are muzzled tanks or low-slung satin sharks. We are in the mountains. It gets very black at night, people go missing, but it’s

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good to be so small, so human. Skies grow hazy with smoke. Come, let’s stand on the burning deck. Watch a speedboat’s wake, the white lace from one of those imperial weddings where the bride’s train lays itself along the long walk down the aisle, her past unfurling behind her:

it parts, reveals, and then closes, as if it were never there. Perhaps she carries calla lilies, an O’Keefe bouquet, the chambers in their creamy flutes empty of any song. Perhaps she carries roses.

3 Sudden water hisses from its socket, a spangled scatter and the sea’s white noise exhales a soft collapse, logs washed up on the shore solid as beached orca, or slender and elegant in their bleached mammalian ribs. I lay a warm grey stone against your cheek – there are flickers and dragonflies and helicopters, the ferry trudging by on the hour. All is close and far away –

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reach for an island or a yacht; look up through bramble and vine, hewn shoulder of rock and steel tendon of a highway in the sky, its steady stream of tiny cars. Bridges and distance made elastic, made mirage, the living sea a bolt of indigo silk, a magician’s throw over this place of secrets, of vaulted arch and floating heron. A beautiful shape is its own consolation. A road that dreams itself river, that loops and leaps to arc, to dark tunnel – and on, on

to vanishing point.

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B ow e n B e ac h

Through foxgloves and tall dry grass we clutch the reaching arms of arbutus that lead us to the secret beach. It’s empty and we become nine again, or you are nine and I perhaps five or six – we balance on rocks, step into warm pools, you in shorts and the tee-shirt with the white dog on it, me in my new bathing suit with the blue ripple-pattern, light bending on water. Flip flops – of course unsuitable for hiking, their squeak and crunch over mussel shells and it’s as if our bodies are complete again, not torn, not anxious – but silently investigating the inter tide: shells, a floating feather, black rocks with their crochet of lichen. I offer you a pebble; it shines, inlaid with its fine white staves. You show me a curling page of arbutus and the wind stipples the sea – a lettering we’ve yet to understand.

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S w im , L at e A u g u st

After dinner I went to the shore, the man with a black poodle said it’s already set, but the sky was deepening to grenadine, the coastal mountains doing their best Toni Onley. I waded in. It was easy, for once. I thought about Heaven, how maybe this was it; the sun’s weave on water, the dark jade. While entering Heaven I began to think about war, a war those small men were pushing for. Then thought became prayer – as evenings are meant for, evenings like this, the last few of summer, bayonets of masts at the marina, wildfire smoke draped in loose grey banners to the east. As if across an open plain I swam, swam out as far as I could to where the freighters paused and the sea – it ran red.

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Harbour Seal

Not the glossy wet-suit of bobbing head, snout and marble eyes we’ve seen – and have seen us – in the harbour. Blue-grey, supple in water, shimmy rise and dip, or graceful in corkscrew romp. And further yet from the circus or children’s book; the balanced red ball, clapping flippers and bark, the herring reward. Now, it’s dredged up here on shingle, bequeathed – no, dumped – by tide, with plastic bottles, an auburn swatch of seaweed and the driftwood. This one’s a bull: barrel-chested, penis centred low on his mottled belly. Long slab of torso streamlined like a missile. Fur jacket stiff and dirty, peppered with sand, whiskers spiked as beach grass. Leaning down, I can even see his tongue. His bared peg-like teeth, yellowed – appalled that I can get this close.

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D iv e rs

The divers wear black rubber, hardly any of their humanness remains. They’re goth spacemen of the underworld in their bondage garb, their tanks and tubes and goggles. They aspire, they learn the drill, the technical secrets of being fish. Shed lung-ly limitation and see what we cannot – what lies beneath. At night they re-live it, the heavy hug of water. Naked, they sprout tails and fins; shimmy and glide amid rose-gilded ruins, glittered aquatic-discos – the distant blue archway of a whale.

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F a ro e

– here the land’s a choppy sea, green, gorgeous, held at break. Hills cleaved, scored by gjagv. How to represent them? Their terraces of striation coal-dark as old stains around a bathtub, or layers on a stately gateau. Domestic references too exotic and insufficient both, for these eighteen islands that seem more giant floating pyramids rising up from the sea. Tucked in: a few huts and farms, mossy roofs merge with the land. All is studded with stone, cairns as signs or stray like sheep. Fossa threads its white smoke trails down the cliffs and in the end it’s the sea, the wolfish sea. Resolution and pause, the woven, living plait, the hungry narrative of sea.

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C o m f o rt M e

– with whale-sound, a distant didgeridoo. Subterranean mooing, blood-drum in the creatured veins of the sea. Comfort me with hard rain, the roil and smack of waves shredding stone, their inhuman pulse. Or indoors, with laundry’s jolt and tumble the light clatter of claw on wood. Another breath within a breath, then another. Open wide the window to tree and wind’s old debate. The sill pooling with rain, with salt. Let curtains gust

– dear ghost! Make sail.

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The Great Map Reader

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R a il N o rt h

Birds arc the ruined walls of the priory. Tracks and ley-lines pull us, carry us past Lindisfarne – or an imagined glimpse drifting holy in the distance,

another reality running through it.

Train feeding through towns, muttering its incantations – sulphur-neon riots the hills and smudge of early heather. Bracken and gorse dash by so fast, they’re a

green and yellow blur…

On the hills, stag stand solid against the wind. Pale-furred, balancing their fantastic candelabra. The coffee trolley jangles past, we recall Eliot’s painted deer, reduced to miniature, trapped to dance for eternity around the camber of a tea tray. Stone-walled graveyards, cormorants on guard. Mum says,

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she’d like to come back as human if possible, but if not, a bird. For the flying. Below, another continent of jade-green loch. Stately viaduct, stone farm with allotments, hutches, little pens. Copse of small-leafed birch. They’re all dancing, even the deer and the lamb’s kick-back as the train gathers by, hoots its cry.

        *

Mum tells us of knowing when embroidery is finished, and stopping. She hopes that life will be the same way, when the desire to go on simply reaches its end.

        *

Tracks, lines, rows. Train slows its gallop, capillaries of glitter-stream hurry to convene. Now we’re at the point where river and sea finally join. 72

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Men in waders stand in the sun-flittered stream and salmon jump – God never sleeps but patterns the morning, scatters a new light. Mum says, You have to see the funny side. You have to keep dancing, keep leaping, like the salmon. The deer, the lamb.

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B ir d s

Me: What a lot of magpies there are around here. Mother: Yes. Horrid birds. Handsome but horrid. Me: Dominant, aren’t they? Mother: But all birds are fairly horrid really.

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C h o ru s

Your room is cool with spring. Leave the window open and before sunrise the warble and syncopated notes will begin to enter, circle the room, ricochet between tree and wall. Some unvaried, monotone. Insistence of a name you’d rather forget: Joan, Joan! or David, David. Pressing and repressing a doorbell. Others ambitious, best Debussy trilling up and down the scales, off-key, out there, piping flamboyant in the cherry. No polite chit-chat for these neighbours who visit each day at inky hour

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with their broadcast that builds and tiers its shout-y dialogue with your dream, while in the east the crimson line rises like a curtain.

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Clock Change

The light springs forward tomorrow – a reluctant step this year, arthritic, wary. Skies are bruised and moody, trees still bone-sharp. It’s been so long, this grey season, snow on snow on snow. Ice and potholes jagged on the streets. Chilly again, says the weather girl, and my mother tuts – why can’t they just say cold? Staying with her all winter I’ve had her to myself, indoors, forced hyacinth and daffs in vases all around. The clocks hesitate. We drink tea, play Scrabble. Watch the garden birds squabble and circle the stone table. The gathering dark and the fire. In the woods, spring is tuning up, rough and eager. Overnight bluebells will rise,

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a silent hand passing over the ground to cast the green blue. The cool damp air. Tomorrow I’ll open windows, open doors to longer days, to others. To roads, trains, a long dark flight around the world. She’ll stay in the lush garden with her tea, with the birds. The roses – shaggy, blousy pink – and the willow. Look up and scan the planes, shielding her eyes.

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Apples

Clustered, bulging in pairs or threesomes. Faintly obscene, says my mother. (More than faintly.) Saintly, she places two together on the pulpit for the Harvest Festival. Waxy, blushing, buxom. Best of all they smell as I’d hoped and remembered – then some.

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T h e R in g e rs

The round of bell-ringers pull, wait, let go. Let go the belting call to – and from – church, and beyond to the woods and hills. Few of us believe in God, aside from the standing circle of each other and the joy-clamour we make together as we watch, wait, pull, hold, pause. Release the pealing, urgent sound – fling out broad its name – around and around and around and around and around.

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V is it in g O u r G r a n d parents

Topiary close clipped, the dark yew a round vessel or jar – In heaven as it is in earth. We are the worm, lamb, tree. We are earth, thistle, poppy. The medieval wooden carving found in a stable, eased from its hiding place and carefully restored. Imagine, cleaning the narrow feet of saints, their red draped robes and graceful hands that gesture both sorrow and praise, Jesus frail and naked in the centre. The gravestone’s overgrown with lichen’s pale coral. Earth rising up, moles burrowing. We place a wild burst of dandelion, daisy.

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A child’s posy. And a cross, rough-fashioned from dried grass, tied like the ones we used to make for St Brigid’s Day.

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B o n f ir e

Now, said my sister and we tossed it on the heap of broken picture frames and laurel. It leant there daintily for a moment till the heat began to bulge the canvas and his white face turned lime-green. Flame bit his small mouth and, doily-like, fringed his head. His face burned like a cake. Only the eyes remained, ice blue, bemused by what we were doing, this witchcraft, this hideous disrespect. Then they too blackened and shrivelled away. This man who hurt children, snapping them like matches. Who lorded-it with our po-faced ancestors lining the corridors as if they gave him permission for the bad life he never veered from. The ash is toxic. We clap and applaud the black smoke, the wind that carries it away.

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S c h o o l , T r ac e s

Still, the slim blue flame and soft the hiss of Bunsen burners. Snake-belts, vests, berets. Hymn books battered blue. Sudden confiscations. A hundred cursive lines: walk don’t run. Misery literature: “delicate orphan survives cruel governess and ends up rich simply through the power of virtue.” Compasses, crushes, ink. Boiled cauliflower and cabbage, their stink long after. But girls, girls! Along the dark polished hall, two pianos are audible and in a distant swimming pool, the heavy creak and thud of a diving board – the momentous splash.

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E n P o in t e

Bend the shape and then she’s ready to stand up en pointe and she feels like she could do anything – she balances there, she turns there. She balances, she turns.

After the performance she stores them in the shoe-room. It’s floor-to-ceiling with pale pink satin, smeared ashy with stage-dirt. Blunt toes stitched rough with thread, stiff with dried blood and dentistry glue.

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She tucks in the ribbons; she loves these tools of the trade, these little coffins for her feet.

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The Hunter

Mice are eating the parquet, moth the cashmere. The green velvet ball gown stands stiff as a suit of armour, empty but ready to dance. Pie crust collars, frilled sleeves – all blessed by Diana, Patron Saint of Wardrobe. A row of dusty handbags looks abashed and lopsided, as if they all had strokes. One contains a pound coin, one a knife. A choir of family photographs stand on the grand piano, mid-song. Silk curtains fray, you touch them, they tear, they weep, but still gather and swag in bouquets of lilac and rose, still beautifully frame the winter garden, and beyond: the fields, the dark and fleeing cloud, the ancient Weald of Kent.

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M ag da l e n e

The muttering of wind inside church towers, empty and full, each to each. Birdsong in the dark yew. Tower as centre, tower as twisted thread, many pieces interwoven. A gathering place where wealth is kept. Towers confused, replicated. Made low. Mothers twist to myth. This winter the trees have lost their minds, branches fling their boney fingers, shake their wild grey hair. Busy dialogue of birds builds inside the singing trees. Bird as word, invisible in the air.

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D r iv in g In s t ru c t ions

Along the lane: daffodils that were not in bloom two days ago and now are. Swerve to miss a puddle that’s fast promoting itself to ford – tree-antlers mirrored on its shine. Past a woman selling flowers at the side of the road, pause at traffic lights, look up at the arches of a viaduct, its bold Victorian corsetry and storied brickwork. Its elegance. Fields, horses. Still a lot of mud. A white plastic bag tumbling itself across an empty village green. Slow down for several indignant pheasants – never the brightest when it comes to road sense. You’ll be held up by road works – finally mending those ­potholes maybe. More fields, sheep – some lambs kicking about now – you might think of that Nash print we framed, the one with the spiralled hills and the plough. There’s a grass circle at a traffic roundabout sprinkled with purple crocus like a fancy cake or an Easter bonnet. See that white house – Georgian with the lacework railing? Add to dream list. Turn into the modern hospital and park. Walk along the long corridor through the zones to the last ward on the left. She’ll be asleep. Sit next to her bed in the dark.

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S t ro k e

She stares at the snow, its floating pixels. She the great talker, puzzle-solver, poetry enthusiast and speech-giver. Muted now and watching – or rather with – the gauzy snow. We try Scrabble: The blank tile can mean anything, Mum, anything you want it to. She puts down Nart, then Gumb. The clever river has no name. She the great map-reader, the land’s shifted now, its signposts smudged or gone. The river flows on, smoothing and smoothing its stones, they slip between my fingers like lost money. It doesn’t matter. At night, our roof tiles will loosen and fall away. Let’s say we both won. Put the letters away in their soft bag.

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F a l l in g

From a high flat roof, my son simply steps backwards and is gone. Then a poet friend – older, a mentor of sorts – falls from a ladder down a mineshaft. Their sudden falling – as if from the edge of a world that is, as we now understand it, flat. Night after night they disappear. Down a trap door. Off a cliff. Gone. Being human, I look for pattern, choreography. The self making its stage-y whisper – it’s behind you – ignore it and it shouts louder, miming frantically, making a cartoon of the thing. The Death Card means re-birth, freedom – the drawing aside of one veil to reveal another view. Freud teaches us to look at opposites, our own aggressive, unacceptable wishes. Fear and anger, then. A deep, unchartered river churning with our inability to control the inevitable chaos and loss that sweeps us along,

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bashing against ships with names like “Greed” and “Ambition.” Tossed in guilty renouncement of responsibility and yielding to sensual free-fall (see “fuck it”), loss of temper (see “anger”), all cultural status and – ultimately – consciousness (see “life style”). Or, simply, an infantile memory of falling, falling from a parent’s arms. I want to discuss it with my mother, but she’s gone, she’s in a tunnel. She with her fear of caves has gone in. I’m at the entrance holding the rope, its fray, its inevitable slippage

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Notes

References and quotes are made as follows: “Kentish Winter”: Line 18: “in Just,” ee cummings, 1920. Line 19: The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan, 1678. “Wool-Gathering”: Line 4: Shetlandic dialect “Financial Planning”: Lines 8–11: “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” Mother Goose, 1780. “The Answer”: Line 6: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare. “Stones, Scars”: Line 8: Orlando, Virginia Woolf, 1928. “Another Girl, Another Planet”: Line 8: “Winter Trees,” Winter Trees, Sylvia Plath, 1971. Line 11: “Another Girl, Another Planet,” The Only Ones, 1992. “Morning”: Line 6: The Time Machine, H.G.Wells, 1895. “Monologue”: After the play, The Vagina Monologues, Eve Ensler, 1996. “Bowl”: Line 18: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson, 1891. “Faroe”: Faroese: Gjagv – a cleft or valley in rock. Cairns – stone markers. Fossa – waterfall “Rail North”: Line 38: God Never Sleeps: Songs from the Iona Community, John L. Bell. “The Ringers”: Line 13: “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877. “Visiting Our Grandparents”: Line 3: The Lord’s Prayer, Book of Common Prayer, 1549 version. “School, Traces”: After reading Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding Schools 1939–1979 by Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Little Brown Book Group, 2016.

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A c k n ow l e d g m e n ts

“Alaskan Cruise” was previously published (as “Holland America”) in the anthology, Refugium, Poems for the Pacific, edited by Yvonne Blomer. Caitlin Press, 2017. “Comfort Me” appeared in the Ware Poets 21st Competition Anthology 2019, published by Rockingham Press, u k. “Camber Sands” and “Woke” (previous title: “Desire”) were previously published in The Malahat Review. My thanks to the editors. This book was written with the financial assistance of the Arts Council of British Columbia and the Canada Council for the Arts. I am very grateful to these organizations and their continued support of my writing. Fond appreciation goes to the Banff Centre, Alberta, where I began Rail, and to my beloved mother, Rosemary Pearson, for hosting me at Westerham, Kent, while I finished it. Or, in her words, for putting up with me. Aislinn Hunter and Alan Jamieson were early readers for this book; I very much appreciate their skilled eyes and ears. Thank you Eve Joseph, Kathleen Jamie, and Jen Hadfield for kindly reading and responding to these poems. Thank you Carolyn Smart, Mark Abley, Allan Hepburn, Lisa Aitken, and all at McGill-Queen’s University Press for their close attention, patience, and skill in bringing forth this book, and to David Drummond for the brilliant cover design.

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“Inside the Cornfield” is for Sarah Gull “The Southern Line” is for Denyse and Richard Anstey “Another Girl, Another Planet” is for Caroline Smith “Chai” is for Julie Bruck “Bones” is for Adam Pearson-Currie “Alaskan Cruise” is for Olivia Wroth. “Brothel Museum, Alaska” is for Kate Wroth “Marine Drive” is for Sharon Thesen “Bowen Beach” is for Alan Jamieson For their creative companionship, I thank: Adam Pearson-Currie, Sarah Gull, Lizzie Gull, Betsy Warland, Arleen Pare, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Abby Wener Herlin, Chrissie Gittins, Ali Blythe, Tanis MacDonald, Mark Cochrane, Sheila Stewart, Caroline Smith, Suzan Ross, Paul Seesequasis, Denise Ryan, Jennifer Van Evra, Robyn Harding, Dill Anstey and – especially – Alan Jamieson. www.mirandapearsonpoetry.com

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