Treading Fast Rivers 9780773584464

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TREADING FAST RIVERS

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Treading Fast Rivers

Eleonore Schonmaier

HARBINGER POETRY SERIES an imprint of CARLETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Carleton University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-88629-361-8 (paperback) Printed and bound in Canada Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Schonmaier, Eleonore Treading fast rivers (Harbinger poetry series ; 8) ISBN 0-88629-361-8 I. Title. II. Series PS8587.C4585T74 1999 PR9199.3.S34T74 1999

C811'.54

C99-900817-X

Cover photo: Pas au Ventoux, 1982, by Jean Luc Deru. All rights reserved. Design and interior: BCumming Designs Poems in this book have appeared, often in different forms and under different titles, in The Antigonish Review, Dandelion, Event, Fiddlehead, The Gaspereau Review, Ink Magazine, Loose Connections (Roseway Publishing Company), The Nashwaak Review, Pen and Ink (U.S.), The Pottersfield Portfolio, Prairie Fire, Quarry, Vintage 97-98 (Quarry Press), Vintage 99 (Ronsdale Press), The Kingston Whig Standard, White Wall Review, Whetstone, Words Out There-. Atlantic Women Poets (Roseway Publishing Company) and Zygote. Carleton University Press gratefully acknowledges the support extended to its publishing program by the Canada Council and the financial assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. The Press would also like to thank the Department of Canadian Heritage, Government of Canada, and the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation, for their assistance.

Harbinger Poetry Series, Number 8

CONTENTS LIFE SPINNING THINNER When Angels Ride Bicycles 2 Life Spinning Thinner 3 Skating Lessons // A MAP FOR LONG DISTANCES Between Trips 19 Crete. Kreta. Krita. 21 A Map for Long Distances 23 TREADING FAST RIVERS Treading Fast Rivers 36 Full Moon 39 The Bush Pilot and the Census Taker 40 The Little Mermaid Rewritten 41 On a Sargasso Sea Island 43 Bed and Breakfast 44 Fireflies 47 Kayak 48 Traveling Through Storms 49 Sky dive jo Medieval Thoughts j2 Lost Letters j j Conversation 60 The Glide Path 61 POLISHING STONES What We Don't Think of Packing 63 The Names We Carry 64 Stone-Ginger 66 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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For Bruce

Swimming as sensuality transcends suffering. — Olivia Mayer

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LIFE SPINNING THINNER

One day I grew taller than the tallest plants in the garden. The world looked in and my eyes said yes And then after I had said good-bye, something told me I had been in the garden. — Steve Smith

WHEN ANGELS RIDE BICYCLES

Bearskin Air drifts me through pillowed layers. The sky's blue rags are scattered over the forest. A week ago, a priest was the only passenger on his flight when he witnessed the midair collision. The angels must have pressed their faces too close, peering in to view the fabric of his suit and finding him wondering what the white clouds really were they handed him the homespun answer. I believe in angels' gowns until I touch the ground and remember that the forest crowds the land where the homes of friends once stood, that the slender trees stand as matchsticks in the northern heat and the houses are paper boxes where sound travels room through room as though a single whisper could cause the past to fall in on itself. As I stand on my father's front step, a girl, hair long over her shoulders, rides her bicycle down the gravel street and I wonder how she can bear to live in this vanishing town until I realize I've just watched myself cycle past.

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LIFE SPINNING THINNER 1

My father in the stern. I have abandoned the bow to rest my head in his lap. He dips, swings. My body stilled by stars, motion—the drone of mosquitoes a halo for my thoughts. The sky emptied, far-reaching, so filled with Stardust that my life is a pebble on all galactic shores— skipping over this small lake, this puddle, hush. The apostles were not alone when they cast their nets, for their lines touched my father who teaches me that prayer is a poem; the wake of words still rouses us. I place the hooks through the minnows' eyes, their body for my body, tomorrow's dinner laid on the table: bread, butter, fish.

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2 My father's body carries me deep as I hold my breath, clasp onto his shoulders for as long as I can. His arms strong strokes. The lake an amniotic fluid until my head breaks the surface.

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The strawberries are summer beads, on a stalk of grass; my father loops the chained fruit around the brim of my hat. Buckets and buckets: raspberries, blueberries. In October he plucks cranberries where the sandpit forms a slide as I throw my blanket and coast away. My seasons are preserved in small jars that line the basement shelves: berries, heat, blue sky, insects, sugar, glass. I colour the bread with jam and run toward the playground where the swing is a slingshot aimed at the sky, my body soaring higher and higher.

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Frost on the nails in the bedroom walls. I wear a mohair sweater over flannel nightgown. Wool socks. The white sheets—I stick my feet through fragile fibers, worn from kicking in winter to keep warm, from kicking in summer to stay cool. Cool, cool frost. Kicking. I'm wearing new mukluks and my soles are as weightless as my summer-bare feet, the feathered snow easier to walk on than stone. My father tells me as we stand at the logging road's end, "This is the edge of the earth" and I believe him.

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5

My father knits me a sweater. A loose end from the ball of wool winds up the inside of my pant leg, eases into my blouse. Its roughness tickles my arm as it travels on to exit at my wrist. I cut the strand of wool where it sneaks under my pant cuff. My father looks up, walks over with his needles and pokes them into my eyes. I wake up, answer the telephone. My father asks what colour my sweater should be. I tell him I don't want him to knit me any more sweaters. I sleep with the window open and the cold air forms its own comforter, though the neighbours complain when the snow drifts into the hallway.

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6 Tante Elsa shuffles toward the lake, barely able to walk. Smooth, smooth motion as her arms sweep under the water's top sheet. She glides away toward the opposite shore, her yellow swim-cap bobbing, her skin cells a sprinkled message of dust on the surface. Crawling out she tries to stand and stumbles, falls twice before my father reaches her. She dries her hair, now only wisps of soft down. She laughs, calls it her dandelion fluff, pushing away her worries as though they were small seeds, not deeply rooted. In her garden the flowers she planted while lying on her side blossom.

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7 Biting into moist softness, my bare toes feel the garden. It's the carrots with their reckless hairdos that I like the most. I can release them and rinse the soil—the snake-coil of the hose. My father crouches between the rows plucking yellow beans and I sit shelling peas. In the metal pail the sound of the peas is the rain I long for; I imagine in a downpour I could walk away from his garden. But during the storm I watch from behind the windows. My hair is weed-wild as I help preserve the vegetables. My father's over-steamed cauliflower face drips from kitchen heat. At sunset I open the front door and hurl jar after jar back into the earth, all the laboured produce smashing, splashing among the tidy rows.

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8 The tent sprouts from the ground, a pod that will shelter this vacation. My father drove us further north on the logging road. For five days the only sounds are the trees growing where vegetables don't pry with their roots. The trees sway, stoop, straighten, their breath more certain than my own.

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Mortality creeps in. I am not able to keep the windows closed. My father hands me keys: the old car. While I drive, my girlfriend scrapes flakes of frozen art from the inside panes. In the backseat, a bag of extra-warm clothing. We don't want to end up like the women in their new truck, stranded on the lake ice road. They had worn light jackets, summer shoes. In the hospital their feet reincarnated as stumps. Summer bumping over a gravel road, my girlfriend shouts, "The rear window fell out." "Yeah, sure," but I stop, just in case and run back to retrieve the unbroken pane. We travel the one road out, the nearest city six hours away. In sight of the Sleeping Giant we reach the end of day. They told us in drivers' education how to avoid an accident and nothing about arriving there. My girlfriend and I call the cops. She recites the number while I put my finger into the holes in the plastic dial, round and round. The gas attendant refuses to be a witness—he has witnessed too much. A black sports car turns donuts in the middle of the intersection, pink letters on the rear window, "Newly Married" and we understand the gas attendant who has to watch his life spinning thinner every day.

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10 Mine Accident In the grocery store I overhear that a man has been killed. It is easy to believe the news that a stranger has died. But at home my dad says the name, my girlfriend's father— buried in muck, only his hand showed, as his partner watched the motion cease. The mineraled earth heaves against our conversation; my father's words are almost impossible to hear. I have the strength to hold a gold brick, but only for a moment as my father snaps the photograph. When I place my hand over my father's mouth I palm his breath but not fast enough to lock the exhaled air into a jam jar and he says, this is fine, that the force of a single breath, if held in the human hand for a second, would send the earth far from its own orbit. Yet on that day I knew my girlfriend wanted to travel with the earth to the place where her father's captured breath had been stranded.

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On the surface we labour while our fathers, brothers and lovers go underground—Women Not Allowed. There's only one change room through which the men walk, dust on their bare white skin. Our strong arms are tanned from the biceps down. Halter tops and cut-offs are out of bounds since we might fry the foreman's eyes if we show too much golden skin. The whistle blows as we walk through the wire gates, punch our time cards in, out and the gap between is filled by the beams we saw and lift, which will or will not hold the underground drifts firm, prevent the absence of sky from falling in. At night our hard hats push their headbands into our dreams, our steel-toes are memory weighted, and the sawdust flavour clings to our skin.

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My father smells the sulfurous gas piped down the shaft into the drifts when there's an emergency drill. He knows he has to run to the cage fast. Crowded in the lift riding up, he assumes it is a drill. He doesn't want to smell death too closely— it is always better on the surface diluted with fresh air. I awaken in the darkness under an open window forgetting for a moment that I'm still alive, gasping in the salt-stained air.

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My father traveled to the new world, planted deep roots and no longer travels. For my tenth birthday he gave me a world atlas, my name embossed on the cover. I planned different routes but forgot to weed the garden. I write him postcards from all my trips. They decorate his fridge. Each Christmas he sends me a ticket to my destination of choice. Each time the distance is farther.

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Have I forgotten to mention the birds?—their song pushing hard against the kernel of my sleep. I hold only their notes in my muddied hand for I left all the seeds in the garden, buried so deep that I spend my life sifting through soil for songs.

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SKATING LESSONS

Backwards we skate, until we're absolute strangers again. The music tumbles history. This could be the fifties—the decade when our fathers fled Europe. Skaters mouth—come back, come back as we circle farther into the past. What is truth but water hidden beneath ice? We chisel an opening and dive deep, only to long for the surface or lose sight of it completely. We create and imagine our stories, word by word, memory opaque, our blades carving a clearer calligraphy. Visible at our feet a few patterns. How many years does it take to write a book? My father though he knew me before I was born, remains a stranger. His letters fill a gingerbread box. We wish each other well and this may yet prove to be enough.

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A MAP FOR LONG DISTANCES

Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place. — Susan Sontag

BETWEEN TRIPS

I come home just long enough to hand-wash my clothes to spend nights emptying my stomach over and over like a wet sweater wrung for the last drop to sit awake listening to the air twist too tightly through my lungs. I return with photographs fish bones, island maps avocado pits and a fatigue so large it travels with me to the post office where a woman notices when I collect the cards I sent to myself. Already the suitcase is half packed. If I leave often enough I'm sure there will be a time when I forget to pack the diagnosed illness and like a missing sock it will remain behind. My elderly neighbour says I lead the life of a movie star but I suspect he's failed to notice when checking for broken windows and burst pipes that all the clothes I own fit into a carry-on bag that the furniture is made from grapefruit crates and that the small squares of newspaper in the bathroom are not for taking notes. 19

He is aware only of my absences and believes my dreams are filled with orange blossoms that only cold air can harm you and that travel lets you escape from yourself. As I leave I pin my photograph to his house door. In the picture I am standing in an olive grove. If he looks carefully he will notice that in my fists I am holding emptiness.

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CRETE.

KRETA.

KRITI.

1

Your mouth is open in an expression of blank pain. Fatigue and nausea linger as auras around my face. The waiter from the seaside taverna invites us in saying, "Are you ill? Are you tired?" He too reads the signs. Below us the calm Mediterranean, the vast open darkness. On the table a tiny kerosene lantern, a miniature vase of carnations. "It's so romantic," you say explaining how you started reading a sentimental novel that you could not finish. We sip La Passion and Fuzzy Navel cocktails knowing it is our grandparents and not our passion that binds us. I wait for my husband to return from sea while you watch the women bathing topless. We are both living the wrong novel, the one that went unwritten. 2

We dare not whisper the diagnostic names whose syllables are tangled snakes that writhe at our feet. We walk on their heads even while their venom travels our bodies and minds. We are surrounded by lemon and orange trees, oleander blossoms. Because our passes are stamped with illness we know we are barred entry, but still we watch. The Easter fireworks, the stars. 3

During childhood you were always on the photographic edges. The top of your head or shoulder was often missing. Even then a part of you was placing us at a distance. But reaching past your dry lips, your glazed eyes—in adult conversation I find you. As we walk along the beach you quote poetry to me. You turn my thoughts into mazes as you discuss civil law, your degree work clear in your mind. Evenings you hear voices through your nose. You say if you recorded these sounds nothing would appear on the tape. You laugh at the absurdity.

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You laugh at me when I choose the lounge chairs so near to the water that the waves lap under them. "How much closer to the sea are you going to take us?" We lie still like two boats waiting to float away while the tide creeps higher and higher. You tell me how you were robbed in France, arms held behind your back as they removed your watch, the hotel concierge looking on. As I observe your slender wrists I have to pull my straw hat over my face to hide the fears. 5

We follow the man wearing a sheepskin jacket, up the steep cobbled trail. Far below the brush-stroked fields and windmills. At the cave entrance our guide lights a lantern and we are led among the stalactites, and smooth water-worn stones where Zeus was born and hidden. We breathe in his cool air. You still believe in your Christian God while for me life is a place where I find ancient icons covered in dust, but no light to show me the images. Only your optimism briefly illuminates. 6

Your hands shake and it is difficult for you to open the butter packet. The photograph you take of me is blurred. You walk so quickly through the crowds that you bump into strangers and I dodge them to keep up. Crete for me is all fast-forward. I do not touch or smell the hibiscus or oleander. Instead, exhausted in the tour bus, I fall asleep with my head on your shoulder dreaming of your voice: "You must never lose faith in yourself."

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A MAP FOR LONG DISTANCES 1

Through the square windows the view is all water. Only when I move close, framed by glass, do I witness the seashelPs ridges and the girl in the purple bikini playing with a frisbee. Her mother reads a book and I glimpse the print as she turns the page. I lie still on the daybed where the waves skim over the blankets and retreat leaving me dry. The water washes clear the slate of sounds. I do not hear the girl giggle or the fluttering of turning pages.

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2

It is all sharp edges and heated weight—the pain as wide-ranging as the winter night. The house, a blue cottage in the dark woods, empty—my love away at sea. Only the wind against the window and my fear make noise. There are twenty-seven steps from the bedroom to the kitchen door. The blue-green glow of the microwave clock— The kitchen floor cold against my face—my damp nightgown. Is this what it means to be alone during the body's abandoned journey through the earth? Pain dissolves in vanished moments. The floor has turned to stone and I, a light feather drift on its cool breath.

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3 The hanging fern entangles my lover's hair as he waits on the other side of the curtain these thin layers that divide us more delicate than skin. The doctor says "a deep breath" and the biopsy needle slams into my side. He shows me the pink jellyfish: my piece of liver, floating in the tiny jar. My lover holds my hand and says "If I could close the gates to all your pain I would" instead it binds us.

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4

Engraved on my lower right rib: a dragon tattoo. The liver its three hundred billion cells purify a liter of my blood every minute. Time an unmarked distance as I try to push the glass-blown pain away. I visualize sparkling vases on their rods blue and burning as they enter the furnace. The heat fires beneath my skin. My lover's hand cupping my breast, spooning sustenance into long days, long nights. Sleep, this unpackaged gift. The glass of water and tablets he holds to my morning lips the virgin wool brush of his beard and when he is fully dressed the erotic winter heat of his ears.

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5

Where is Emma? I ask. I've entered the wrong hospital room, empty except for the flowers in the wastebasket, the ones I bought at the market this afternoon. The nurse words a map I have difficulty following, corridors and directions that lead such a long way. In the Intensive Care Unit I discover rainbow curtained cubicles, pink walls. Even the angels here wear pink. Onkel Simon stooped at the bedside. We watch Tante Emma woven into a web, lines and tubes, delicate patterns, a cartographical landscape of heart and lung. The hiss, rasp and gurgle. The corrugated tubing moves, marking each respirator breath. Breathe. Tante Emma reaches for Onkel Simon's shirt pocket— gestures words in the air. He hands

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her pencil, paper. Her scribbles crawl and bounce—I love you with all my heart—drawing life into Onkel Simon's eyes. Her doctor in his lab coat whispers behind clipboard paper layers, We're surprised she has lasted this long. I want to ask this young man what he knows about distance. It takes days before Tante Emma's breath is her own. Weeks training toward first steps. She finishes a sixty-foot stretch down the hall, wheeling her walker alone.

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6

Tante Emma vacationing in Florida grows dizzy and hits her head on a palm tree. Her doctor reduces her dose while I under Nova Scotia winter spruce find an increase on my prescription slip. With the same medication physicians try to rescue Tante Emma's lungs, my liver: sheltered like soft boiled eggs in our thoracic cages. It's 4 a.m. and I know Tante Emma is also awake in southern time. "You'll overcome sorrow" a Hansel and Gretel myth where we crumble our suffering into a vanishing trail.

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Instead the taste lingers. A single whiff will always lead us back, most often at night when our minds open and the pungent odour of what we have survived hangs spicy in our rooms.

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7

I listen to the brush and rustle: the trees. The movement of the blades of grass and birds make faint the soft sounds of white pills placed on my cereal spoon. Thoughts of illness and this aging shred thin as the sea breeze pushes loose the tangled winter days.

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The rise and fall of this narrow trail. I slip on wet rocks, stumble into mossy holes and never think of the distance back. If I could choose a setting to slide into dust this would be the place: the sea an orchestra to the cranberry beaded path, the timbre of water and wave thundering into a deep crevice, the trickle and bubble over small smooth stones.

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9

The world is much larger since I rediscovered clouds. The sky is no longer a dark blue bowl dropped over my head but a deep cup to drink from. I lie in the tall grass feeling a vast lightness and let thoughts drift amidst this island's wild winds. The purple autumn asters, white gull bones and feathers are pieces of my own skin. The biting pain, a moray eel nestled beneath my rib cage stayed, tucked snug for five years. Trapped for too long it has crumbled, decomposed. Only its clean skull remains. I refuse to bury it, but hold it tight in the palm of my hand like a stolen gem or an egg-shaped stone. As I walk down the vanished pathways—the old boardwalks now powdered wood—I feel the human and animal ghosts breathing like faint kisses at my ankles, sleeves. The keeper's house stands empty, the paint and stories faded. As I climb the lighthouse stairs, I let the rope railing guide me. The thick stone walls press memories close until at the top, next to the rotating light I view both ocean and sky. The keeper

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who polished the glass, cast light and sound into darkness and fog, guided me clear through illness and storm, kept me away from cliffs, showed me the cloud formations instead, and whispered that it was time to row myself to shore.

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TREADING FAST RIVERS

Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse. —Jeanette Winterson

TREADING FAST RIVERS 1

Birth You were born an hour ahead; our mothers, friends in the hospital. My mother thought I was twins but I emerged alone. Your mother hoped for a boy, after eight girls, her oldest already having babies. 2

Third Grade I was drawing stories about my minnow in its jar, turning it into a goldfish in a store-bought aquarium. You were kissing boys at the water fountain, casting real nets. 3

Sixth Grade You danced with the boys and tried to show me how, your beauty and your breasts already exotic blossoms pressed against my flat chest. Health class we learned about our eggs slipping down narrow rivers. You calculated sperm travel rates, the pluses and minuses of pregnancy while I gave the boys mathematical answers.

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Grade Seven You played games at night after my curfew where you were the loser and had to eat sperm swimming on baby biscuits, told me vague lessons of tops, bottoms and all the way, as though you were the sum of your fractions. I had my flashlight and my books under the covers, knew only the anatomy of arms and legs. 5

Grade Eight Your party room in blue light while I was eating birthday cake in the yard and you treading fast rivers under the Ping-Pong table, measuring returns and serves. The day after, the boy laughing at you, and my mother instructed me I was lucky I had braces, wouldn't get caught in kisses. 6

High School You gave me words to help me fathom depths, and a dictionary for my fourteen birthday which provided no definitions. I gave you a maternity dress and watched your belly swell as I formed the sounds of spermatozoa and ovum in biology class touching their surfaces to my lips. 37

7

University I came back in summer, a nursing student and again you were my first lesson. At twenty-one you had your third baby, sucking milk from your breast, your abdomen held together with stitches, tubes tied. 8

At Thirty-Five Nights in REM sleep you visit me, ask me how I'm doing. You're a grandmother and I still haven't given birth to my first child, have strayed so far from your front steps to find my own definitions: 9

Penis to you is a blade tearing with words—fucking under an eighth-grade table—men, the three fathers of your three children. Cocks which entered and then exited. Penis to me is a root entering soil, sent by a man's warmth in my bedroom's light. The planting of a salt water garden together where kisses float sweet and wet.

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FULL MOON 1

In the city the full moon is a hollow circle on the calendar, a street light illuminating the sky. 2

In a fishing village I count down the days until the next full moon when the light streams across the harbour into my bed, coating my lover in a bright shroud through which I reach out and touch him.

3 In a northern hospital nursing through a full moon I revert to superstition. Each time the ambulance phone rings, I think it's my lover, mother, best friend they'll bring in. More deaths, more drunks. The guy in the trailer court who shot himself but was able to walk into emergency. He tipped forward, died without knowing his mouth grazed my breast.

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THE BUSH PILOT AND THE CENSUS TAKER

1 He tells people he met her by flying over her house. "I saw her sitting on her roof writing me a letter." Though no one believes him. They merge first on business in his plane forming a bird's shadow over Cat Lake where they land at the outpost tourist camp. The owner stares at the two teenagers and says to the pilot, "Last time you brought beer," and he smiles. The pilot chats while she interviews the camp help and then he flies her to an island for a coffee-thermos break where he shows her the wind and its directions.

2 Lying on her roof she spots a small fleck of silver over the treetops, a float plane. She restrains herself and doesn't write three words in grey on her parent's black roof shingles, even though it might be weeks before her father finds the missing paint. She waits instead for freeze-up, when the frigid lakes are not yet firm enough to form a runway. Then for a few weeks the only flight they'll know are the down feathers fluttering in his comforter.

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THE LITTLE MERMAID REWRITTEN

At every step it will feel as if you were treading on a sharpedged knife, so sharp that your feet will seem to be bleeding. —Hans Christian Andersen (i)

I strolled out of the sea, and its summer frostiness. I climbed out of the pool and its pale astringency. I rose out of the bath, and its steamy orange heat. And each time my lover kissed my toes and even swallowed my knife-bladed pain away.

(ii) I sweat in my neoprene suit. The tank is heavy on my back and the weights pull at my waist. I stumble, using my foreign flipper feet with difficulty. Slip off the rocks, enter weightless space. Float and descend. Soft bubbles sparkle like glass spheres and move towards the surface. On the ocean floor are lobsters sea stars. I find a sand dollar with its five petaled pattern of tiny holes and am instantly rich. My neoprene mate kisses my mask.

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(iii)

Waves make curved patterns of light on the pool floor, like transparent scythes. There is a palm tree painted on the wall which my short-sighted eyes view as blurred green. It is the Saturday evening lane swim and only one other person does laps. Toys from the previous parent-and-tot swim litter the water. I bump into a beach ball a small plastic boat. Kick a green pail with my foot. A man in a blue bathing suit comes toward me in my lane. Dives under me. Watch his body pass. Toes last. I hang onto the pool edge with my hands as he returns. Nudges my chest gently with his head. As I wrap my legs around the man's waist a baby's bottle bobs in the water's undulation.

(iv) Childhood I splash Kick Am wet Immersed Controlled Emerge cold

Adulthood The candlelight casts my shadow as the tape recorder plays wave sounds. One more drop of water and a river will flow into the carpeted hallway. The space heater hums its message of warmth. Floating on my paradise sea, a boat blows bubbles out of its smoke stack. A naked man brings me a bowl of ice cream to balance the heat.

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ON A SARGASSO SEA ISLAND

she cups her skirt and fills the cloth with kumquats. He knows the name of the Woman's Tongue Tree. All their thoughts slither. The vines and fronds drape the citrus stains on their bodies as she shapes the weight of her breasts in his palms. Outside the garden gates knowledge is the only thing they possess of each other and this is never enough. Again and again they sneak back to the garden where their bodies become the treefrogs' songs.

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BED AND BREAKFAST (i) Arctic Oranges Nights I fall asleep as fingers, yellow with tropical aromas, peel back my arctic layers. I wake from my nightmare, covers tumbled to the floor, and can't understand why the ice in my permafrost dream smelled like citrus, until I find the blossom at my bedside: an orange, its rind arranged like petals.

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(ii) Breakfast in a Round Room We thread supple words over the lace tablecloth until the innkeeper informs us of breakfast choices. My thoughts curve to your side the morning's salt on my skin. I taste past your flavours toward fruit salad, carrot muffins knowing as I lift my cup that the sheets are being straightened by strangers.

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(iii) Melon On Flowered Plates Eszter who smuggled them out of Hungary, tells me to enjoy to perhaps serve a piece of melon on them when my husband and I have breakfast. I look at the coloured patterns as I wrap them in newspaper. They belonged to my great-great— and what if they break? She says they could have been smashed by the boot of a Russian, that they are fragile like marriage but until now have survived. Her wish is that we too will become faded, antique and pass our memories forward on a plate.

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FIREFLIES

We step carefully, for the smallest lights capture us most securely— the fireflies held low by the winds all along the coastal barrens. If we were to trap affection in a shell it would fail to flicker but along this vast cliff-edge we could read love letters by the phosphorescence— if words were equal to the trail of stars, the strewn lights of hard-winged beetles.

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KAYAK

He paddles, the flash of wood slices air and water. Kayak, a smooth arrow through. She slides onto the kayak's stern, slim her torso fits precisely, legs pointed straight off the end. Together they know how to move and how not to, balancing through the water.

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TRAVELING THROUGH STORMS

In an aluminum canoe during a summer electrical storm her father told her to keep paddling. Instead of talking about danger he taught her how to overcome fear and more importantly he showed her the openness of the sky when the lightning passes through—a silver chain dragging away all those grey clouds. The gentleness of her lover's touch—this too affects her like a wondrous storm, but there is more to this than the erotic wind on her skin. She has tasted her lover's patience, intensity and the wisdom with which he travels. He says, "There is sadness and searing beauty beyond telling" and like a new paddle he hands her this rediscovered gift.

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SKYDIVE

She steps out—the map of fields forests unfurl beneath, her body a wisp of exhaled

air. Her feathers caress her skin. In a whipping wind-wave the parachute sprouts a fleck of frivolity in the vast untouchable blue. If only she could drift above ponds pathways rooftops for long moments away from the world —the same

JO

weightlessness as when she rests in his arms, the same bliss peacefulness and risk —but the descent happens so quickly— The roads remain a map she must follow. Only at night do dreams cling feathered.

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MEDIEVAL THOUGHTS (i) Dartmouth, Nova Scotia The burning lights, you whisper, as I search the red street light for flames, the neon fast-food signs, until I too glimpse the daily fire from the tall stacks, the falling soot, the smell of brittle air. I signal and turn down a rutted single lane. The metal pipe contortions, flues and vats, the oil refinery to our left and on our right two shoebox houses, one green, one yellow, their torn kitchen curtains back-lit with frail human shadow. A high metal gate looms and from a speaker a voice Get out of the car and talk to me as though the empty air desires conversation. Your name and my license plate number slides the gate aside. We drive around a narrow bend, breathless and lost. Gradually the silhouette of your grey ship appears. I open the trunk, lift out your green duffel bag. You kiss me, your gentleness the only purity in this night. As I turn the car around I'm trapped in this metal landscape on the vanished edge of ocean. Who designed a hell as original as this? The gate opens of its own accord. Your footsteps echo on the hard, cold jetty, and the entire full-moon night exhales and flickers.

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(ii) Outer Space Sometimes I forget you are not an astronaut on your way to Planet X. My world is not a blue-green tennis ball orbiting in your peripheral view. Instead your ship floats on the saline that separates the continents. When I travel I fly through air where my thoughts become white clouds. The time zones change so often my electronic organizer loses days. We don't even exist on the same calendar page. Is this what they mean by time travel?

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(iii) Obidos, Portugal I rescue you from your warship, lead you toward stone pathways. I lift a tiny closed-fist knocker and with laughter and expansive gestures obtain a room. Out our window: the castle, crenelated walls, tiled roofs and white houses. Geraniums hang in clusters over the balconies, their fuzzy red paws intent on climbing down, as this century's only Obidos invasion. Queen Leonor owned this town and her forgotten whispers pry open our dreams. As I lie in your arms I hear the irregular clip-clop of footsteps on the cobbled street. Two sets of church bells chime the hour. For brief days we hide in calmness as though the world were not beating down our arched gates.

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LOST LETTERS (i)

Corrie stands invisible beneath the window sill. Her father's voice, "I won't be back until your birthday." Winter—spring—summer. She knows only that when her father rows to the mouth of the harbour in an hour he'll be back. The map of her world ends at the breakwater. Your atlas unfurls with many worn pages. Corrie watches you pack your canvas seabag, measuring days. Your grey warship's stern shrinks beyond distance, the open ocean a concealed page. "When will Daddy be back? Tomorrow?" We have only the promise of your letters to fold into origami ships that sink in a child's bath.

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(ii) You hand me your seabag full of my letters along with the empty envelopes of your unwritten ones. While you traveled the circumference of the earth my love letters to you became the fiction I forgot to write during the winter. "Can't you turn the letters into stories?" Corrie asks. This then is the story: it took all winter for me to collect the pieces of my soul. I placed the fragments into the laundry hamper and I gave it away on the summer solstice to a seamstress who has more scars on her body than those on my heart. She knows the meaning of stitches and is turning my soul into a warm quilt.

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(iii)

I forget completely to make the bed and it becomes a tumble of sheets where lost letters are slipped between the covers. The grass grows at a faster pace and though the months are long, the days vanish before I have even captured the hollow moment of your absence. The only touch is that of my friends stroking, admiring my blue silk coat. Your voice on the answering machine invites me to leave a message but I have just called our old number to hear the precise music of the one memory you have left me.

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(iv) Already it is cool enough that when I close all the windows there is scarcely any sound, only the fridge thrums. Last night was full moon, hidden behind cloud. While walking along the beach I find a drowned shrew, its mouth wide open. It takes effort to notice the colours of the asters, rosehips and children. The lighthouse has vanished behind fog. I walk through seaweed tossed up by the storm. Can thought itself be thrown too far? Those who stand closest to me no longer capture the meaning in my words and I forget to write poems, letters, grocery lists. But I have not mentioned the dozen robins that bathed this morning in puddles in the backyard, the deer that stood at dawn by the apple tree or the fact that it is possible to take a ferry ride in the summer as a direct route to the heart. Though none of this eases the autumn. The leaves continue to fall even though you were much more than a single season.

;*

A message thrown into the sea would become lost. I lift my arms to feel the wind. In the rush of whispered air I might yet hear the true direction: the whistling buoy that warns when rocks are near.

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CONVERSATION

Are my thoughts so noisy they murmur outside my body?—keening like distant voices, like wind through buoys. Each moment carries its own frame. On the shoals I count fifty seals, their grey pod-bodies entwined. Is it their thoughts or mine that I hear?—a longing so ardent and spacious. The past and its regret talks back to me: panting, insistent, it holds my hand. I eavesdrop in the lapse between one wake-up call and the next. What language emanates from the seals as they pleasure in the sun? A vibration shuddered in the air that lures me back to or away from myself, a conversation fetched home.

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THE GLIDE PATH

We are grey-haired women, well worn, my neighbours and me. Together we walked to this tiny crescent of sand where we are sheltered, for the windows of our homes lie on the other side of the peninsula. Our floral bathing suits and laughter create the colours and music of this isolated beach. During the one week when the sea is warm enough we never find a man who enters the water. But we dare the waves—frothy, wild and unpredictable—to wash over our heads. Our bodies wing-glide, all fluidity, smoothness. The pleasure possible—our bodies in sky-filled water—for our will diving through the shuddering wet world, carries us.

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POLISHING STONES

O shooting star that fell into my eyes and through my body—: Not to forget you. To endure. —Rainer Maria Rilke

What We Don't Think of Packing but take along anyway: the shoes on our feet, the fifty-four bones in our hands, the memory of the colour of the sheets on our beds. We prepare for flight as if we and the customs officers are the only ones who will ever open our baggage. Nightshirts close to the suitcase's zipper so when we arrive we can quickly begin to restore what we thought we'd lost. Certain kinds of loss we bargain for in transit: eight hours of sleep, the memory of where we parked the car— In Canada a man stands at the end of his driveway talking to a neighbour: / received the call—search and rescue. There was no screaming,, no arms hanging loose. The helicopter shone light on the water and we picked up what there was— When I walk the beach with the kids I know what Fm looking for. I found a piece of plane and slipped it into my pocket. Didn't tell the kids—a scrap the size of a two dollar coin. Loss jangling, except it's in a currency no one else understands even if they were on the boat when he cupped the child's sneaker in his palm, insisted the police promise to return it to the family—We never anticipate losing the memories of what we have already lost—

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THE NAMES WE CARRY

Syllables scuff low branches. "Do you really know where we're going?" Jen asks. "Hear the sea?" I say. On the stones a seal's leather coat. Clustered, cleaned: the vertebrae, ribs, pelvic bone. Jen collects sea parsley for our salad. "My son died two years ago," she says. Sonya bows to storm-petrel wings on the seaweed. The dog races, mouthing an unearthed bone. The four men: do they notice the coast strewn with abandoned imagery? The boughs a neighbour marked to trim for me still bend. He hiked his stretch of shore, slipped and plummeted. His name is one the men carry.

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I scrape away bark. Scarred trees border a sheltered path for we trespass by a cabin, the table set for the dead, but they dine only in our absence.

6j

STONE-GINGER

The sun slips into dinner's cast-iron pan. Winter's late afternoon. White gold, red gold: this rock pillar. Beach-stone slabs. Heave the layers. The legs. Pebbles balance bread-round stones. The sea curls, higher, higher and I build: fourteen strata. My youngest stands beside me— I match the pillar When I buried my first— to her height— menarche. I save stones always for the garden, never for our pockets. We rush

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into falling light. Polishing stones, the sea rushes to its work casting to shore a child's black shoe, a face-cloth, a lost man's bones. The deer rest under the gaze of all the dead—grass folds down in sheets—their cliff-top clearing spruce-edged. When the raven brushes the wing-cloth of air above our heads, we stay still. Even together we can not uncover what the sea buries. Our steps press hollow marks into the moss. My daughter says fear is a pebble curved in the palm, not a stone in our shoes. The deer path, tapered, woven. In the forest we find mussel shells they are empty open like a cup.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book would not have been possible without the kindness, support, and guidance of many people, including the following: Christine says, "Just let me know when you make things up so I can tell the same stories." Kathleen Tudor, Harry Thurston, Richard Lemm and George McWhirter taught with ardour, generosity and inspiration. The University of British Columbia Advanced Poetry Workshop (1990/1991) and the Halifax Poetry Group interwove essential dialogue and companionship. Stephanie Bolster, Susan Goyette and Brian Bartlett gifted invaluable manuscript feedback and encouragement. My father and mother sang to me; their words were poetry. Helen Ostrowski shared her poetry. Darien Watson edited the manuscript. Jennie Strickland of Carleton University Press provided thoughtful insight. Bruce MacLennan is my first reader. Nancy Creed is a friend of poetry and poets. These poems were completed with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Nova Scotia Arts Council. Regarding epigraphs ... that on page vii is from an unpublished text by Olivia Mayer; on page 1, from "The Garden," in Smith's collection entitled God's Kaleidoscope', on page 18, from Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, on page 35, from Winterson's novel, The Passion-, and on page 62, from "Death," in the Selected Poetry ofRainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. "The Glide Path" is for Dorothy Kiley. "Crete" is for Markus. "Stone-Ginger" is for Nancy B. "Kayak" is for Christine and Istvan. "Fireflies" is for Bruce.

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ALSO AVAILABLE IN THE HARBINGER POETRY SERIES

Holly Kritsch, Something I'm Supposed to Remember "Holly Kritsch is an immediately attractive poet, gifted with the stern voice of raw confession. Telling of harrowing blasphemies against childhood, telling of violation and irrepressible love, her poetry matters." — George Elliott Clarke Ronna Bloom, Fear of the Ride "Few poets write of grief and love with such a simple elegance and an impressive depth. Ronna Bloom writes clear and hard about what hurts, and gives us hope." — Susan Musgrave Anne Le Dressay, Sleep is a Country "Have you heard rocks keening? Anne Le Dressay helps us recognize the sound. Austere as ancient standing stones, her poems are perfectly shaped, perfectly positioned to reflect the wordless light." — Mary A. Wright Mark Sinnett, The Landing 1998 winner of the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award for the best first book of poetry in the previous year. "These poems [are] blessedly unphoney and clearvoiced ... quite often piercingly unexpected, moving, right." — Don Coles Craig Poile's collection, First Crack "By turns playful, ironic, elegaic, Craig Poile in this carefully observed first collection runs the gamut of human experience. It treats both historical and contemporary subjects in a sensitive, eccentric manner, capturing those moments where history and the present, art and the life of the observer, collide." — The Judges of the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award, 1999 Michelle Desbarats, Last Child to Come Inside "This is poetry full of quick and acutely angled insight, moving with great sureness to glimpse the raven's wing inside the ordinary." — Don McKay

David O'Meara, Storm still "David O'Meara offers a metaphor out of a rural kitchen as sure-handedly as he invites you ino a new-minted Rilkean gravity. What's writing you here is a poet whose first book this is, and I cannot remember reading a better one." — Don Coles