Ishtar Gate: Last and Selected Poems 9780773574441

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The Ishtar Gate

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The Hugh MacLennan Poetry Series Editors: Kerry McSweeney and Joan Harcourt Selection Committee: Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, Allan Hepburn, and Carolyn Smart titles in the series Waterglass

Jeffery Donaldson

All the God-Sized Fruit Chess Pieces

Shawna Lemay

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 Credo

Aurian Haller

Carmine Starnino

Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees

Brian Bartlett

Before We Had Words Z.P. Zitner Bamboo Church

Ricardo Sternberg

Franklin’s Passage The Ishtar Gate

David Solway Diana Brebner

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Th e I s h ta r G at e Last and Selected Poems Diana Brebner edited and with an introduction by

stephanie bolster

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

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© Estate of Diana Brebner 2005 isbn 0-7735-2835-0 Legal deposit first quarter 2005 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (1oo% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program ( bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Brebner, Diana, 1956– The Ishtar Gate : last and selected poems / Diana Brebner; edited and with an introduction by Stephanie Bolster. (Hugh MacLennan poetry series; 15) Includes poems previously published in Radiant life forms, The golden lotus and Flora & fauna. isbn 0-7735-2835-0 I. Bolster, Stephanie II. Title. III. Brebner, Diana, 1956– Radiant life forms. IV. Title: Brebner, Diana, 1956– Golden lotus. V. Title: Brebner, Diana, 1956– Flora & fauna. VI. Series. ps8553.r3732i84 2004 c811′.54 c2004-905565-8

This book was typeset by Dynagram Inc. in 10.5/13 Baskerville.

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contents

Considered Passion: The Poetry of Diana Brebner ix radiant life forms Snow Angels 3 Immolation 5 The Children in That Country 6 Awake in the Morning Room, Newly Painted 7 You, of All White Women I Have Loved 8 Radiant Life Forms 9 The Sparrow Drawer 10 What is Homeless in Me, and Sightless 15 Desire, Mother and Child 16 The Radiant Lady Poems 17 the golden lotus Open among the Lilies 25 The Golden Lotus 26 Karuna 30 Head of a Girl 36 The Perfect Garden 51 Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt 52

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flora & fauna Flora & Fauna 73 The Black Swan 74 Poison Dart Frogs 80 The Green Canoe 84 Facing Buddha 86 Prints of Love 87 Pictures of an Eclipse 88 Polycarbon Butterfly Unfurled 90 The Pictures of My Heart 92 At the Schwarzschild Radius 97 The Blue Light of the Neutron Pool

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the ishtar gate (last poems) The Trout 109 My Hope 110 Porthole 111 Port 113 For the Poet Who Told Me to Think Less and Feel More 116 Frozen 118 Waiting 120 Morning on the Guitar 122 The Bridge 124 detonation/notation 125 Variation on John Thompson’s Ghazal xxxviii 128 The Narrow Lens 130 Venus Velvet 6557 hb 132 vi

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The Variable Swans 133 Listening to Winterreise 135 A Stranger 137 The Isis Rattle 138 Access the Calm Serene 139 Concern for My Soul 141 Karma’s Girls 142 Servant of the Muse 143 Gaia Reclining 144 Our Kate 145 Orange Marmalade Keiller Recipe 146 Slicing Oranges in Kim’s Kitchen 147 Blood Oranges 148 Silence 149 Silence ii 151 The Nature of Weapons 152 That Blue Is All in a Rush 153 selected prose The Trout in the Well: Ideas on Order & Poetry 157 Acknowledgments 165

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considered passion: the poetry of diana brebner

In 1996, the League of Canadian Poets held its annual general meeting at the National Library in Ottawa. Amidst the string of poets launching their books, each reading a single poem, a woman stepped onstage; slightly stooped, neither short nor tall, in a long, dark dress. Her hushed voice made us lean forward a little. The voice strode and queried; it lulled and awoke us. The poem, “The Green Canoe,” not only transfixed but transported. “We are back, each in a green canoe. Old Night / descends. Or do we ascend, touching the / stars?” The poem’s speaker didn’t fear vulnerability. Nor did this woman, poised and free of banter. There was no mediation between poem and audience, no apology. Take it or leave it, she seemed to say. If you find this too sentimental, too elemental, that’s fine; there are other poets to come. Even without her presence, Diana Brebner’s poems radiate this assurance. In an unpublished essay, “The Instrumental Case,” she described herself as “an instrument for the Muses,” who felt their pull “into the strange netherland of neither-here-northere.” An ordinary woman with an extraordinary calling, she chose no less than the giants as mentors. If these were the usual choices – for a poet writing in English (The Bible, Shakespeare, Donne, Vaughan, Herrick, Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Auden); for a

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North American poet (Whitman, Dickinson); for a Northern poet (Brodsky, Heaney, Rilke); for a woman poet (Plath, Akhmatova); for a Canadian woman poet (Atwood, MacEwen, Hébert, Waddington, MacPherson) – their influence coalesced into a distinctive poetry, alive with the tension between intellect and emotion, between rhetoric and lyric. This writer, who, according to Ann Diamond, “gives the impression of being a visionary in her spare moments,” lived a life that appeared innocuous enough (Arc, 1992). Raised in small towns and suburbs in Eastern Ontario and Quebec, she discovered poetry at a Catholic girls’ school (where she, a Calvinist anglophone, had been sent to learn French), earned a ba in philosophy at the University of Ottawa, fell in love, married, raised two daughters, wrote and taught poetry. However, her challenges – among them abuse, cancer, divorce, and the pursuit of financial sustenance – made urgent and essential her search for a visionary state. Though her first poem appeared in print in 1974, her book publishing career lasted merely six years, from 1990 to 1996. Yet during this time her work garnered almost all of Canada’s major awards: the League of Canadian Poets’ National Poetry Competition (1990), the Gerald Lampert Memorial Award (1990), the cbc Literary Competition (1992), the Pat Lowther Memorial Award (1993), and the Archibald Lampman Award (1997). Her voice, admirers and detractors agreed, was singular. Her techniques, distinctive and transparent, began x

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in her earliest surviving work – written in high school – and varied little: the dramatic caesura, the heavy initial stress, the comma splice, plain language, primary colours, full rhyme, repetition. Traditional in the deepest sense, her subjects risked appearing unfashionable: life and death, gods and goddesses, art and nature. She fashioned her poems of earth, fire, air, and water. God was there, but not in the details; largely abstract, the language, when concrete at all, tended to the general rather than the specific. Despite critical acclaim and a slew of prizes, Brebner remained relatively unknown beyond the Ottawa region and parts of southwestern Ontario, where she had loyal supporters (among them, the editors of The New Quarterly). Perhaps this is because her ambitions were for her work only. For herself, she sought simplicity. Though at intervals she advanced her career strategically (reviewing for Books in Canada during the late 90s in an attempt to renew her visibility), the energy writing demanded left little for selfpromotion. Intense, mercurial, she resembled other poets too much to find their company sustaining; most of her closest friends were not writers. Even among writers, she mingled with those whose company nourished her, not simply those with connections. To my knowledge, she never gave a reading west of Winnipeg, and even her Ottawa readings – dramatic performances, often with musical accompaniment, that left her drained – occurred rarely, particularly in her last years. That she published with a small, xi

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specialized press, Netherlandic, which ceased operation in 1997, presented an additional obstacle. Her predilection for traditional verse forms, deemed retrograde by many Canadian poets during the 80s and 90s, heightened her isolation. Yet her perverse playfulness was such that one wonders if she chose this path in protest – the “traditional” as a daring opposition to the norm of free verse – and to ensure the marginality that granted her independence and privacy. Certainly she acknowledged some degree of contrariness: “[W]hen I first started writing there were definite limits put on what was acceptable – that’s why I started writing sonnets. There would be little footnotes at the end of calls for submissions saying ‘all submissions welcome. No rhyme. No sentimental. No religion’” (The New Quarterly, 1993 [tnq]). Brebner called structure “a nuclear containment device” (tnq), a view her unpublished poem, “Sylvia” (numbered 133 – she numbered all her finished poems – and dated 20 June 1984), advances: Let all the madness be, but to the page commit considered passion.

This tension between chaos and control spins at the core of her work. She recalled that, “[E]ven as a young child, I kept seeing contradictions. There would be an inside and an outside. There would be the clothes you wear to church, those pretty little things, and then there was the reality of your life” xii

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(tnq). Conceptually, two crucial dichotomies were art/nature and old world/new world. “The daughter of Dutch immigrants,” as her book covers declared, she spent vacations canoeing in Algonquin Park. Of Canadian poets, she most resembles early Atwood, cerebral yet attuned to the earth and prone to vacillate between the rarefied and the irreverent – though Brebner’s irreverence veered toward goofiness rather than irony. After writing, during cancer treatment, “Eleven Paintings By Mary Pratt,” she, along with a friend, performed a good luck dance around the mailbox when she sent the poem to the cbc competition. Tension between the life of the mind and daily life preoccupied her. Though she admitted, “[T]he children and marriage and all the other things that I do are a cover for what I really do; what I really do is write and think most of the time,” she also claimed to feel “very integrated ... the two ways of being are so connected and give each other meaning – there’s a sense of symbiotic relationship.” (tnq). Brebner valued integration and connection, often citing Margaret Laurence’s vision of a “tribe” of writers. Reliant on epigraphs, dedications, and borrowed lines, her work frequently refers to other media, particularly the visual arts. Exchange – literal or imaginative – with these individuals and their work opened a doorway out of the cloister in which her poetry might otherwise have existed and situated her within the tradition of ekphrastic poetry in Canada. This doorway led to some of her strongest xiii

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poems, including her League of Canadian Poets and cbc competition winners. She likely felt as close to the late Joseph Brodsky, a writer she’d never met – whose words provide the epigraph to her poem “Snow Angels” – as to her friend John Barton (a poet who happened to have studied with Brodsky and to whom the poem is dedicated). The Ishtar Gate, for which she had written some thirty poems at the time of her death at the age of forty-four, was one of three planned collections (the authors were titled Saffron Walden, and Starry Messenger). Her last poems may be her finest – yet, dissatisfied with them, she told me that she hadn’t been an active writer since the publication of Flora & Fauna, celebrated on the evening we met at the National Library. Beginning in 1996, with our participation in a mentoring programme through the League of Canadian Poets, she began to devote much time to teaching, a new vocation which granted her companionship and a meaningful sense of agency. The following year, frustrated and disheartened by her lack of professional recognition, distressed by her continued inability to generate income from her writing yet unwilling to compromise that writing for monetary gain, she decided to contribute to civic life by running as a regional councillor in the Ottawa area elections. Against two candidates with considerable experience, she met with overwhelming defeat. After the break-up of her marriage, she accepted a “day job” and found some sustenance in independence. Her last dated poems – two undated, unfinished xiv

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poems were written afterwards – were completed in 1999, two years before her death. These disappointments and compromises, and her increasingly poor health, more than explain her diminished creative momentum. But deeper issues figured, too. In her heightened awareness of mortality, she sought happiness – she treated herself to a baby grand piano in her last year – and writing did not always bring her pleasure. Distrustful of her facility, she believed she needed to advance within her poetry and confessed wearily that she could write “Diana” poems in her sleep. Yet her list of future poem-ideas teems with Diana subjects: lemons, Welsh tunes, the work of van Gogh, Wallace Stevens, and Gustav Holst. Perhaps, had circumstances differed, she would have transformed these ideas into poems. Perhaps, in setting them down, she’d freed herself to move on to other subjects, ones that would have surprised her and her readers. Perhaps, for the time being (just a month before her death, she referred in a note to her “hopefully future writing life”), she’d said what she had to say. Just as it is tempting to exaggerate the darkness of Brebner’s work, particularly given her early death and the tragic accident that killed her younger teenage daughter shortly afterwards, it is frighteningly easy to ascribe a foresight to the poems – to believe that, “visionary” as she was, she might indeed have been granted devastating knowledge. After all, she planned to write a series of poems drawn from Schubert’s song xv

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cycle “Die Winterreise” (Journey in Winter), which the composer, already a loner, wrote in strict seclusion the year before his death, while suffering from an incurable illness. Yet her final poem, “That Blue Is All in a Rush,” is an affirmation. One wonders if she believed that her work would ultimately find a larger audience – that the qualities that alienated some readers would allow her poems, unlike much Canadian poetry, to transcend eras and national readerships. She may have trusted that, as was the case with John Thompson, with whom she felt a kinship, her poetry would find its most significant audience posthumously. Diana Brebner understood that creativity, like the fire that is such a central element in her poetry, both generates and destroys. That she chose to make herself subservient to this work, as did many of those she honoured with her words, was a gesture not of naïve hope but of strength, not unlike that made by religious ascetics. She did not always possess that strength, but when she did, her subjugation was conscious, if not chosen, and at once selfish and selfless. It did not really matter what that National Library audience thought of her work because the real stakes were far higher. Stephanie Bolster

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radiant life forms

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snow angels for John Barton “in white camouflage like Finnish marksmen” Eclogue IV: Winter, To Urania, Joseph Brodsky

They come across snow, white & camouflaged, and, from our point of disadvantage, who can tell what they mean? Or even, what colour they are, beneath snow robes, wings, feathers, the primitive coverings weighing their light bodies down. Friend, I hope you have seen: at least one, up close; no more terror in that than in white marauding bears with their fanged cavities, black and blood, red, naturally seeking you, food, but never victims. Snow angels come. Across darkness you see them at their best, holy ghosts of their kind. Maybe they are as lost as we can be in snow. Something, 3

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deep and hungry, swallows them. And in the shaped holes we find: remains, some celestial parts, and a last message, desperate, marked in the snow.

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i m m o l at i o n

So, you wondered what your children would remember? Here is the image of a buddhist burning, his self-ignition is always present, protesting against my childhood, against the pictures we carry of buddhas and naked children. What is a picture for but to remind us of what we have seen. Those children did not choose to be set alight, to be the human fireworks against my dark imagination: children, angels, running before flame-throwers, body parts falling in an absurd rain. Now, substitute the child of your choice. Your child remembers combat, wars always unwon, and, unforgotten, your toy soldier’s falling from the heavens, like one bird, shot, or stone, your lost manna in a hail of power.

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th e c h i l d r e n i n th at c o u n t ry

In that country the children have no sense of humour. They are uneducated to subtle torture of word layered on word. They know only their dead languages. Language is for the genteel among us, we who are distant from their countries of blood. Their laughter is laired beyond sense, waiting in a green place we have never had need to find.

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aw a k e i n t h e m o r n i n g r o o m , n e w l y pa i n t e d

This winter fiction we always knew would happen. Another room, yellow paint, white doorways and windows, and the two of us asleep on the floor, which has become our tradition. Not exactly drunk, in an empty room, but surely, hardly sober. You look upon me, awake in your arms, remembering lunatic laughter as we fell, into sleep, each other, the congruent dreams of room upon room, of lovers on wooden floors awakened into other bodies, into other yellow rooms with white doorways and white windows, and all that snow outside, just waiting to be carried by you, back into the real world.

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y o u , o f a l l w h i t e wo m e n i h av e l o v e d

You, of all white women I have loved, I have loved least gladly. You have no eyes, but white cranes floating to water, in your fields full of snow. My loved one, if only once I could touch the embroidered silk kimono you wear so carelessly, I would be warm as the earth. As fields are after the long winters so you might be, lovely white bird. My loved one, of all women I have found, you are the yellow lily as it floats on the pond, a wet green stone, the white egg in the grass where this crane walks, listening to the river.

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radiant life forms

These are the radiant life forms. We always said they were like us, but something about them was altered. And I’m not talking about halos and lambent auras (although they’ve also suffered from those afflictions). This is more saturation with death than incandescent holiness. Light carriers. Demi-monde and half-life irradiate from them: strange, leperous light we refuse to bask in. We can admit their bodies. They fit into ours as brethren. Still, we do refuse them. So, they sustain themselves, all fulgor and lucid with curious life. Glad we will die comfortable deaths, safe from all lingering life, rather than share their radiant catastrophe.

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t h e s p a r r o w d r aw e r

i

The Sandhill Crane

The sandhill crane, in his glass case, performs his nuptial dance. Jumping, bowing, and wildly flapping, reads the museum description. Well, aren’t we all the same in love? This dead male is frozen in the pose, on a bed of stone. Thus, the museum welcomes us to its permanent exhibit: Birds in Canada. When I bring my daughters to the museum, because it is cleaner and easier than a day in the bush, they always ask to see the birds, or the big animals. And I tell myself: this will do them good. They know enough about mud, rain, being hungry, no toilets, and wanting to go home. In the real world, a bird is always gone before my two-year-old can look. Or, alternately, I can never find the great blue herons they insist are really there.

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ii

Birds by Number

In the Eastern Hardwood Forest thirty-three birds are mounted on log pedestals, each in a pose that is meant to be life-like. I remind myself these are dead bodies. I have no memory for useful things, but I can remember my first sighting of migrating snowbirds (Junco hyemalis) in Algonquin Park, the Rose-breasted Grosbeaks at the feeders near the cabin, the enormous black and white Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) with its blood-red crest, up near the cliffs at Luskville. I can tell you where, and who was with me, down a great-list of the birds I believed forgotten. My daughters learn birds by numbers, matching a numbered body with a name on a list, given in three languages, as if that will make them real. The fact is, my girls enjoy this. They call them doll-birds. And the bird names are repeated solemnly, as if each name were part of a spell. And I do it too. For who can say this is not reverence, a litany, 11

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a prayer, a wish for something promised. The name of one woman who died finds its way to the list, and I remember my first sighting of a rare old man I loved.

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The Sparrow Drawer

It is time for us to be leaving; somehow we find ourselves before one final display. It is the same forest, rearranged by seasons, and including the ducks, herons, owls, and hawks, that are familiar to The Forest, as they call the example of hardwood forest that is local, and ours. And then, beneath the glass cases, my eldest daughter finds two drawers. Above them a simple label reads: Would you like to know more about birds? How many times did I bring that other child to this place? We never found these boxes. And they are not hidden, merely unexpected. The first lights up as we pull it out. Eggs. Large and small. Blue, green, mottled beige, brown. Great

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white goose eggs, the hummingbird’s egg glowing, a white pearl, all in rows, labeled, an old child’s collection. And the second drawer opens quietly, and as easily as the first, lights up, displays its contents. This is the sparrow drawer. No-one has gone to any trouble to make this look pretty. Dead sparrows lie in an uneven row, their bodies in disarray, frozen on snow, which is also synthetic batting, with black plastic arrowheads stuck in strategic areas to accentuate their differences. The caption tells us: all sparrows look alike to the untrained eye. They are difficult to tell apart in the field. Chipping Sparrow. Savannah Sparrow. Lincoln’s Sparrow. Song Sparrow. Swamp Sparrow. And alone, beneath the line of identical bodies, a Pine Siskin, just to show us how even one species can be mistaken for another. And what have I seen hovering in a field? I could swear it was the child I have lost. Love I have learned the hard way; how many hovering boys in schoolyards look just like him. Of course, I don’t

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want to see this, or the dead birds, and I close the drawer. But my girls will not leave it alone. They open it. I close it. They cry. So, we open it again. We say the names of the different sparrows. I tell them that any creature, once named, cannot be forgotten. This, I believe. You see, there are no numbers there, only names. The Pine Siskin trembles at the bottom of the drawer, as we roll it shut.

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wh at i s h o m e l e s s i n m e , and sightless

What is homeless in me, and sightless, not without love, but blind to your world? If I insist on love, or sight, something not brought by insisting, who will still cherish my eyes, kiss them with tenderness, with darkness? All of those places within me, somewhat lonely, and foreign, where I am homeless, still remain to be seen. The terror that fills me is one dark place. The fear of sight is another. I would like to believe love is blind; blindness is something to fight for, to believe in. Dear man, when I leave my eyes open, I see nothing, in this world we call real, but you: you and darkness.

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desire, mother and child

Desire, mother and child, brings you to cradle each other, to call comfort love, and make being held a union, a way to pray against passion turned brutal. Child of mine, when your blind fist reaches up to find my breast, this face, the crossed eyes you will inherit, what is your desire? And what kind of fist is your small heart, beating, until we are both broken, and blood holds the two of us together? Can you see how love moves, from the eyes to the heart, like a blind person, and back to the eyes, with their blue, calm pupils, searching for ways out of compassion? The fist opens, and I find a hand. Your heart opens, and eyes that will always be with us, have no sight to kill.

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th e r a d i a n t l a dy p o e m s

i I will come to you softly, if you believe in softness. Or, I will come with glory, if you believe in glory. I will come with smoke in my hair, all silver and gleaming, if that’s how you want it. To be radiant is not easy now, if it ever was. But, back then, a few things were simpler. I could say: love, and everyone knew I meant: love. Now, who knows what love means? And this light, that gathers around me when I appear, what has light got to do with love? I just want to be with you. So, how can my radiance make you so afraid?

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ii What are these spirits, that move within the earth, about the earth? Who are my companions? I am near. They are near. Spirits are all abounding. This is the earth, so mere and still. I am the lady, shining. We are here, held in quietude, and evening is descending. I am the lady, bright and wild, free from all your bindings. But I remain to be with you in all your sadness, shining. Darkness may cover the sere earth and deserts fill green places. But spirits continue to abound, and leave their subtle traces. I am the lady, bright and wild, shining.

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iii Who can tell what is coming? All I know is that I must remain. Do not say: stay behind, that’s not how I see it. I want to be with you, through all this terror; death is a word I have put aside, until I need it. What does any of this have to do with death, after all. Whenever I hold you, it is always your life that I am aware of. Little love, little love, when you are taken from me, how will I manage to survive you? And, is there anything left in this world when all these radiant places cease to be found? So, when you are gone, who will know what love is, or where on earth to find it?

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iv They call me: the radiant lady, and I come when they call. How can I refuse? The voices floating on air, hovering near me, are not exactly sad, or insistent; perhaps a little despairing, for so few ever hear. And what they say is not difficult: we are here, we are with you. Oh, my lovely companions, joy without bounds is still possible, and the dance, and laughter of heaven, on earth is still found. So, when I shine, the uncanny radiance of a believer in love, do not chide me about reality, what is possible, what cannot ever occur. And, when they gather around me, can you say: what is really there?

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v So, I will be with you, and I will not leave you: it’s been said before. I am not trying to be different, to say something new. New things are not what you need, not what I have to give. Come, be with me, two bodies, of one kind or another, creating warmth, and a kind of glow-in-the-dark, so we finally see each other. What you see is one version of love, but there are many; and I am not for you only, made only to one image. Thus, many radiant ladies have come, and gone, into the dark, the air, green graves, always with the heavens singing about them, light around them, touching you one last time.

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th e g o l d e n l o t u s

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open among the lilie s “Stars open among the lilies.” Crossing The Water, Sylvia Plath

What does this mean, being open? Among lilies, in a blood red canoe, all things can be simple, and pure. A paddle hung in the green scum, duckweed, lily pads, brings its own perfect violence to disturb the water. Open can be a wound, or a door, a trap, or the explorer’s verb. Cutting a path to the water’s edge, or dipping a blade into water, your back glistens. Love we make, sooner or later, is open. Among the lilies you hack from their moorings is one thing, a splendour that is nameless, white, yellow flower, now the water, stars exploding at the bow.

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th e g o l d e n l o t u s “The pears fatten like little buddhas.” The Manor Garden, Sylvia Plath

i

The Golden Lotus

We are always surprised that pears survive so far north. Driving north, we watch the day shrink in trees. It’s behind us. We arrive. Will it always be difficult to say: I love you: caught at the cabin door, latch unhooked? Yes, there are pears on the tree. And a dead mouse in the sink. Bright fish to catch, like kisses, in a lonely heaven. Hand in hand. First things first. We go down the grass stairway to the water. This is the blue I would die for, the colour of tenderness, and your forgiveness. Fish jump: silver, new. In blue lakes, the golden lotus appears. We sink our teeth into the yellow pears.

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ii

Yellow

Sleeping in the open, the long grass bends, the weight of bodies bends, the lovers: arc and archetypal, do bend the heavens. The yellow stars exert their power. A dark glow pulses in the night. A golden hole, empty promise, inverted sun; this is your hard justice, beginning and end, toll you exact. And now, we have come to this: inevitable entropy, dying away. Love’s suicide is natural, hot as stars. Yellow sun. Yellow, lying stars. Deep, deeper, dark, and black nocturnal man. I will love you, forever. Hard star, you are hard to touch. You are hard. You are.

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iii

Blue

The lake moves closer to me, like sleep, or some lethal comfort. The blue mist drags itself. This, the great nothing, invoked for anger’s sake, rancour, the sustained dark, snags. Beneath the water, conspiring against you, blueness: everything closes in. Your hands are turning blue, and cold. What strange adieu is their greeting? O hands that rise: the plans for love held, withheld. O hands in retreat, to some watery heaven: give me peace. Make some sign, as you disappear: entreat, engage, empower me. Give me surcease from pain, a little sursum corda prayer, as I lift up these hands, still blue, still there.

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iv

The Spider

In the morning, I go out on the lake nudging the canoe past: golden lotus, yellow lilies, blue, open water. Make me believe: I will survive. God help us, we are cruel to each other; the spider in the red bow, so patiently spinning her floating web. And I, calmly, cast her upon the water. Now, who is winning this war? Spider: small, hopping, dancing girl. When did you learn how to walk on water? She makes her way across: webs, small feats, whirl on the cosmos. Contentment. Calm. What are we moving towards? The spider crosses water, takes her chances, bears her losses.

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karuna for R. B. “‘Karuna. Karuna.’ And a semi-tone lower, ‘Attention’.” Island, Aldous Huxley

There are some women that you tell your life-story to. The things you were never going to say. The things you would never remember. And all along you are afraid she will hurt you, hurt you with what she knows. Karuna, you pray, compassion.

i There was something wrong, even in the beginning. A little girl in a white dress sits alone on the pine floor of an empty room. And she knows, even then, she knows: love is gone: wrong, quite wrong. Pain has entered her life through the wrong

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door. And there is no compassion. Pain is not there, she is told. There is no pain. You are lovely, and innocent, and no-one would ever hurt you. Did you hurt yourself? Children do, hurt themselves. That is the door pain comes through. And I will take the pain away, close the door. See, it is shut. And the hurt has been kissed away. The door closes. And you are alone in a room.

ii Some rooms are the rooms you wait in. He will come. He will come. To tuck you, and fuck you. Even then, in his way, he was screwed. And little girls learn that the best way, is the way out. Find a place you can escape to, a room of your own. In your room you can lock the door. In your room you can kick the floor. In your room you can dance, naked if you want to. And that is lovely, and innocent, and 31

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no-one can stop you. Naked, bare-boned. And if the room is somewhere in your mind, it’s better than nothing. He can’t find you. Some rooms are the rooms you go to. He can’t get you there. It is a room that is white, and cold, and absolutely bare.

iii Some rooms are the rooms you wait in. The place you go to where people will be kind. They promise: he will never come here. We love you. We love you. We will not let him hurt you. But, of course, he gets in. He is gentle and kind. He is quiet and good. He has always done all of the things that he should. And you are alone, in a room. He is there. If it comes to a choice between me and you, I’ll save myself, he says: for your own good. I’ll fuck you, because I love you. And I’ll beat you, because I love you.

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And I’ll call you a liar, and prove you’re a liar, just to save you. I’ll save you. And someday you’ll thank me. You will. You will.

iv Some rooms are the rooms you wait in. Yes, you’ve been here before. But you come back, and hope, this time you will find the door, the way in, the way out, someone who will believe you. I can’t break the circle of pain, you tell them, again and again. And because this is the real world, and a real door, a voice says: you’ll never do anything you don’t want to do, never leave anyone you don’t want to leave. And you leave, and don’t go back again.

v This is the beginning, not the end. Pain has a way of working its way round, in 33

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circles, and circles, wheels and wheels of pain. And the room is a place you go back to, to find your pain. And the room is a place you wait in, still full of pain. And the pain is something you can bring to someone. You can carry it in a bag, or a song, or a picture, and you can find someone to give it to. To give it up to. To say: take this picture, this song, this thing in a bag I have brought to you. You keep it. You know where to put it. And, because she is generous, she gives it back to you. I don’t want it, and I don’t need it. I give you this pain. Now, we can keep giving it back and forth, like some dumb present. Or we can just forget it. Big deal. Pain is pain. Pain, even a big, fucking pain, is just pain. And now it’s over, and the wheel is broken. Karuna. Compassion. Karuna. Compassion. 34

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vi And, a little bit lower: Attention. The thing you have to pay. Karuna. Karuna. Attention. Compassion. Break the wheel. Some rooms are the rooms you wait in: It’s over. Now you are free. Free to go.

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head of a girl for Peter

i

Witness

– At the baptism 31 October 1632, in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft, of Johannis, second child of Reynier Vos alias Van der Meer, a weaver, and Dymphna Balthasar, among the witnesses was a certain Pieter Bramer –

Seventeen years of marriage, and now: a son. When a child is born, and a bloody crown emerges, who can say what life this is: head of a girl, head of a boy? And who knows what goes on in the head of a girl, when she imagines: marriage, love, childbirth? A child grows inside her. The men still talk of war, murder that goes on forever. And women talk: travail, labour, the work and mess of birth. So every golden child is borne, with pain which is a punishment for:

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sin, for whatever goes on in the head of a girl. But I, Pieter Bramer, free man of Delft, baptismal witness, pray for peace, God willing, peace for you, and, for your child, a golden age.

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ii

War of Independence

– 5 April 1653, Jan Vermeer, aged 22, married Catherina Bolnes, aged 23, daughter of Reynier Bolnes and Maria Thins. Catherina’s parents had been separated since about 1640. Catherina’s brother, Willem, was violent and suffered from severe mental illness –

Dear Catherina, now you have married him, your Jan Vermeer. But I, Maria, am still afraid of love, of giving myself over to any man, or God, who may choose to rule me. Yes, the apostle says: There is no fear in love, but perfect love casteth out fear. You’ve never known those cruel hands. My counsel of troubles, I’ve kept to myself; I fought my war of independence, and I found peace. Just you and I, Catherina, and poor, mad Willem, no comfort to us. Peace, so hard come by, has been mine, but peace without love. Still, I go through the motions of believing, for your sake,

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and my prayers are real. This painter, Leonardt Bramer, has assured me, he has never known so kind a boy as Jan Vermeer, so quiet, full of light, full of promise.

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iii

Vanitas

“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life …” I. John 3:16

Muse and madonna, Catherina, vrouwtje, smiling girl, laughing lover, little mother: woman I love. I think I will paint you forever. Beauty and believer, you are my world. Everything that we have, and all our love, shall be taken away. But this: our life of quiet, and my adoration, is a stay: vanitas, eternity. My love, you will live forever. You, and all this peace, and gentleness, it cannot wholly pass away. Mothers, and children, and our love, shall carry on. Silent, I will paint you, kiss you: blue, immaculate, eternal, perfect, always new. My lovely Catherina, I love you.

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iv

The Goldfinch, 1654

(after a painting by Karel Fabritius) – 12 October 1654, 80,000 pounds of gunpowder in the arsenal at Delft accidentally explodes. The explosion kills hundreds, and destroys over 200 houses. The painter Karel Fabritius and his family are killed in the disaster. Fabritius is thought to have been Vermeer’s teacher –

We are the survivors of disaster. All Delft wanders, stupefied, damaged. Men and women are trying to explain to one another how this could happen. Why does God’s thunder, and all this terror, come among us? Karel, Fabritius, master, fellow-believer, you are taken from me. Goldfinch, bird in the light, one morning they found you buried; then you were gone. Bird of the bloodied face, and the fearless flight, you died among thistles and thorns, fettered, like Karel’s painted finch, briefly alive in this world. Saviour, you were meant to rise, in this world of passion, drawing us to peace, with blood. Sacrifice, you gave me: love, a painted reverence, life eternal, light in the world, life of a bird, head of a girl.

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v

Head of a Girl

“There is very little of the work of Fabritius anywhere; but his ‘Siskin’, a small picture of the little bird, painted with the breadth that is commonly kept for more august subjects, hangs near ‘The Head of a Young Girl’ at The Hague.” Vermeer The Magical, Edward V. Lucas

You look over your shoulder, like a bird, or an angel, some lost creature, all made of light. The best I can do is to picture you, looking towards me. Forever, that is the promise we made, long ago, and I meant to keep it. Siskin, girl, you turn to me, again and again, suddenly, and always with your solemn eyes, and your mouth, opening, eternally asking: Why? Why has love made me afraid? Little bird, how can you know, so certainly, that you will suffer? Some hand will strike you; an eye, or a cheek, will be damaged, and then you will be: abandoned, worth nothing, another girl, bird to be gotten rid of. One voice comes, across centuries, comforts you, calls you,

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so tenderly, speaks your lost name. All those years, when you struggled to survive, who was with you, always near? Whose voice do you turn, again and again, to hear?

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vi

Stilleven

– 15 December 1675, “Jan Vermeer, an artist living in Oude Langendijk” is buried in the Oude Kerk at Delft –

There is still life, after death, a way of carrying on. Dear Lord, the life we had together cannot be taken from us. We knew so much love, and fear, and even death, together. Still life, stillbirth, being born again, into new life, believing in things that cannot be held on to. Now, what I have is an image of you, and the way we were: young, happy, alive, in love, in each other’s arms. And also the peace you achieved, the pictures we made, all the ways God’s light found to make things come alive, little cries, in our life of silence. You made life stir in me. Stilleven: hardly a dead thing, but instead, how you give me life, forever.

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vii

The Peace of Delft

– 30 April 1676, Catherina declares personal bankruptcy. She continues to struggle to keep her husband’s paintings from compulsory sale. On 25 September 1676 Maria Thins declares Catherina and her children as her heirs, her son Willem having died in May 1676 –

We are widows: mother & daughter. We find our own ways to survive, to create quiet, peace in our lives. Oh yes, those men have their peace: Peace of Munster, Peace of Westphalia, treaties meant to be broken to pieces when it suits them, whenever greed, or blood, calls up all their old excuses for destruction. What we have is this Peace of Delft, the reason we loved him, and what I would give my life to hold onto. Do you see how he painted us in, himself out, made us beautiful & eternal? And our children, grandchildren, what will they know of his love, and the way his hand moved, so quietly, making a piece of Delft come alive, with light?

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viii

Catherina Vermeer

– Also listed among Dutch painters of the late seventeenth century is one Catherina Vermeer, a woman painter. Jan Vermeer and Catherina Bolnes had fifteen children, among them a daughter named Catherina –

And her name, as far as I can tell, is all there is to know. At least she existed, was known enough to deserve mention. But that maker of lists felt, obviously, that a woman’s name was not enough to call attention to her state. A woman painter: what on earth could she paint: wild finches, the old explosions of childhood? The small, deliberate wonders she laid claim to before madness, or marriage set in. Catherina, what comfort was there for you, when you began to paint? Was it possible, even then, to paint pictures, be a woman, to be happy?

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ix

Restoration

– 1882, A. A. des Tombe acquires the Vermeer painting Head of a Girl for the low price of two florins, thirty stuyvers. The painting was damaged and also in poor condition due to changes in the chemical composition of the paint –

The art books say she was damaged, and sold in the nineteenth century. We’ve all heard that expression “damaged goods”. What kind of a man would pay for a girl like that? Her eyes injured, hole under the left eye, the left cheek damaged, also the left ear, skin cracked, her clothing needing repair. There must still be men who have suffered enough, or learned some things about love, and do not care about perfection. Protection is not what we need, but the recognition that we are all beautiful beyond injury. Retouch me. Repair me. But let it be known that when you see me, I will be restored.

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x

Mauritshuis

– 1903, A. A. des Tombe bequeaths Vermeer’s painting Head of a Girl to the Mauritshuis in The Hague –

They say the Royal Picture Gallery, Mauritshuis, is a small museum, a quiet place, and that amidst all the treasures of the Golden Age, Vermeer’s Head of a Girl fills one room with peace. Also, a small picture of a fettered bird, The Goldfinch by Fabritius, hangs nearby. My visitor tells me what she has seen, all the memories of her many travels, the paintings in Paris, London, Vienna, Russia and Holland, and yes, the Mauritshuis, The Rijksmuseum, and all those famous Vermeers. Then we talk about my children, her daughter’s life in Scotland, her young grandchild, and curiously, not a word this time about her difficult son, or her marriage that did not last. Only new stories about the war, things even my mother never knew. And then, suddenly, as if remembering some small

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loss, or regret, she turns to me to say, quietly: I’ve always wondered about you, buried away here, I’ve always wondered: What goes on in that girl’s head? What goes on in the head of that girl?

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xi

The Golden Age

Well, I have taken to counting my blessings, now that I have some: my golden children are living, my husband continues to love me, to be happy with me. I am still alive in this world. Now, is having been beaten a blessing, something to remember, to always be thankful to have survived? When will all the terror subside, the memories of torture, of “love” that was made to happen again, and again? And the worst was the old confession, that yes, you believed that everything in those days of horror was as it should be. Now, who can tell if this is our Golden Age, the lost time when love triumphs, when beauty is restored, when nobody is perfect, and everyone is good enough, just long enough to remember.

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th e p e r f e c t g a r d e n for Blaine

Nothing grows in asphalt. But here I am trying to grow something, as well as nothing. Each year some hibiscus appears, either side of my doorway: blood-red soldiers, or are they angels? And the violets, quietly given to my little daughter, by her dying friend (a woman of my present age) three years past. They appear in cinder-blocks again, and again. Some things will not forget how they came up from emptiness: bluebells (called weed and torn up), lily-of-the-valley (between concrete wall and asphalt plane) green asymptotes never quite giving up the ghost, never blue morning-glory on the Frost fence, and Siberian irises up against invisible walls, and old lilac invading the thick black lie which says: death, which says: nothing is perfect, or even close.

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e l e v e n pa i n t i n g s b y m a r y p r a t t for Susan

i

Christmas Fire

I think of the wives in India consumed in flames, the pious, or the unwanted. One throws herself upon the pyre (because she knows life is now not worth living). The other is thrown, or set upon. But each one burns, her own sweet self goes up: in flames, in smoke. And, after Christmas, the tinsel and paper, the packaging we disdain, all the barriers that keep our mysteries under wraps, everything goes to the fire barrel. Now a second celebration can occur: the drum, all rusty, all lettered with ancient names, glows in the snow, a body that burns with a life of its own. How we feed it, all the things we would have disappear. And it burns, it burns the fierce light of the dying but undeparted. 52

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ii

Salmon between Two Sinks

Between heaven and earth, this gasping space I leap: free, of your hands, free, even of death’s clasping. You never could hold me, and now you know: the silver, salmon feeling slipping between old times, and new. Now, our life has been gutted. A knife removes every false move, every wish for bright things easily come by. O, I sink, deeper in history, and into all the doctrines promising: ascent, eternity, and the flashing joy of the obvious pleasures. Deep in a pool of stilly light everything comes back. Your hands, cold, and the words I mouth, mute as a fish, all speckled in its story. Come to me. Be with me. If I leap, one last time, let it be, into your open arms, all gory, with birth and love, such messy, bloody glory.

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iii

Silver Fish on Crimson Foil

This is the river of blood, the salmon run; so ruthless, in their dark bed, the dusk years bring to bear, upon anything, or all things that we care to call dreams. You want to believe it will be easy, clear & fluid; life looks you straight in the eye, and you flourish. You want to believe: if you swim like crazy everything turns out right at the end. Now, I ask myself: What bloody river is this? I set my mouth (that wants to gape) stubbornly shut. I carry on, one silver creature on the heraldic field, companion to lions and unicorns, worthy of shields. I carry on. Up the river I go to my crimson foil, the river, and bed, that I am carried on; and the blue heavens will move, reflected in all, and the silver fishflash of my joy will shout, and then every good thing will be words in my mouth.

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iv

Salmon on Saran

I really don’t understand how you can slide down water and yellow plastic, the children screaming, with this wild world slipping to higher speeds. You call it fun. I say it is unreal, how you can substitute one pleasure for another. Don’t you feel like the salmon on saran, all dressed, and silenced, and moving towards the ultimate consumer. Fish can remember the way the river moved. When no-one is looking, they inch their way along plastic and try to go home. But the world in air is a perplexing place. Nostalgia displaces memory, and only the dead, or the brave, risk the dark place beneath their necks, the shadow that opens, and reveals black, guttered space. Reality opens, and the shimmering wake of dreams, ripples, splits, and streams behind the body, moving forward, virtue all upstream.

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v

Red Currant Jelly

Everyone has their own method, their recipe for happiness, for life filled with beneficent light. All I ever wanted was to stay alive, and be happy; every small joy a triumph, every day without violence my gift to myself. Do you remember the day you found yourself laid out on the kitchen floor, your pristine kitchen splattered, the glass shattered, and you, passed out, with the red jelly and jars like the evidence of murder, so hard to wash away? “Pass the jelly” we say (only in this family it is grape, with chicken, at Christmas, which I endure, but never get used to). So much happiness in ritual civility, the small things that take years to learn, currant jelly in jars, our gleaming jewels, the paraffin carefully poured and cooled, from a battered metal pot, the old wax washed and melted, used again

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and again. Like the stories they tell, the ones you have become part of, the silver spoons and great-uncles, and an old telegram from the war when everything was lost, everything hoped for.

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vi

Preserves

Where do you turn to open your life? (It’s not like a stuck jar you can ask someone with a better grip to open.) Get a grip. Or, these days: Get a life. After twenty-odd years who can say: I was right. You were wrong, but stronger. And all of it such a waste: the years of trying to save, to preserve, whatever was there. Small winter children, sleds, skates & skis, marshmallows and cocoa, clothes dried by the fire, a dinner and then diapers, at Christmas. And later, nursing real wounds, and slicing bitter Seville oranges for marmalade, cooking the peel, with the pulp and the pips in a bag. Orange steam & sweet heat you hoped would heal you, preserve you from all this relentless pain. What a curse, to be raised British and happy, and for your first blow to be marriage. No-one ever said it would be like this, or thought to give a recipe for self-preservation.

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vii

Eggs in an Egg Crate

After the great debate (over whether it is called an egg carton or a crate; a crate, according to the dictionary, being made of wooden slats) I’ve decided to call it a container, and get on with it. Who cares what a thing is called when, after all, we all know what it is. And we might also question whether they are even eggs, being empty, or are they merely shells, remains of what eggs might have become? And even here we encounter the question of fertility. For was there ever a chance that these might have become the living creatures that we hope for? I think of the children we have lost, the ones we choose not to have, and those born dead, or dying. A baby boy, alive to the end, then stillborn, the only one with red hair like his father’s. And another child, the first-born, so deformed and broken, that even his mother can now call 59

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death a blessing, And all the children we bore, who did not survive, but are remembered. Into what fragile containers we are thrust, each made of love, biology, and dust. What little coffins we create, from wooden slats, and o, what delicate bodies we cremate. Now, with the words said, tears shed, we carry on, celebrate birthdays, cracking the perfect eggs, one at a time, for an extravagant cake, the glistening shells, small bodies that we break.

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viii

Roast Beef

History is filled with stories of severed heads: of Holofernes, his head hung on the parapet of the walls of Bethulia, and gorgeous Judith, head-hacker, triumphant over the Assyrians. Women can butcher as well as men, something we tend to forget. As women, we get to practice as we slaughter: chickens, rabbits, turkeys, as we tie up roasts with string. So often, violence and power go together, in the circles we gather within. Not nice to think about, but isn’t it the truth. We learn to: cut, stuff, rack and truss, to carve and quarter. But what I like to remember is how Judith burnt the golden canopy (that fair flynet from Holofernes’ bed) as a votive offering in the Jerusalem temple. I’d like to believe she hated everything about that time, that all those years later, retired to her estates, she carried her regrets, paid the price in fame, abhorring every accolade, remembering always the weight of his sword, how she had to strike

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twice, how her whole pious life hung between the neck, the uncut nerves, the head still shaking, as she struck again. With her maid, she gathered up the head, stuffed it in a food bag, and then, demure & quiet, they carried it through the enemy encampment, two pious women going out for prayers.

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ix

Paperwhites in Crystal on Tin Foil

Against the black gusts of winter, we bring things to light. What can I say to prove: I believe, I can see: all the lights buried in paper, in foil, in our small, white hopes. They conceal their green blades, the brightness of roots in a crystal bowl. Bulbs coil, and bury themselves, in what’s there, even into nothing, if that’s all there is. When I force paperwhites, at Christmas, and the smell of them is heavier than the flowers, when what is real comes out of nothing, into thin air, filling the house with bodiless joy, what can I say but: miracle (out-of-season), miracle (out-of-nothing), miracle (incredible birth)? In the Christmas window, the tottering paperwhites do a little jig. In the glass-split light multiple blossoms sing their wild songs with strong breath, light-headed and simple-minded. Which is what

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I’m glad to be, when the years open up, like a holiday door, and I look into them clearly expecting someone to be there, all years ahead, or years ago, greeting me warmly, shaking snow.

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x

Venus from a Northern Pond The Birth of Venus

Nothing ever happens quite the way you think it will. When she appeared, more beautiful than imagination, real and womanly, emerging from our pond, she was no Botticelli maiden, Venus Pudica, rising from the still warm foam of the severed genitals of Uranus. Good God, the stories those Greeks could tell. Goddess, her first words were: “Grab me a towel, I’m freezing!” Though, of course, her nakedness was regal, all decorum, amidst the weeds, algae, the dank, dark pond. Somewhere the silver trout were whispering to each other, speaking a language she understood; they curled round her ankles and even the goldeneye settled the water near her. No dolphins, or swans, to greet her, that’s true, but here in the North we can open our eyes, can also believe the old Muses will sing:

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What is. What was. What will be. Cosmos over Chaos, constantly. From oceans, or from northern ponds, what can appear? Goddess. Venus. Bright Star. Black Muse. Nothing to fear.

Venus Coelestis Ishtar Terra. Aphrodite Terra. Lakshmi Planum. I learn the names of the landmarks of Venus. Like birthmarks, in Greek tales, this way I will always know it is you. Bright Torch of Heaven: you shine: Morning Star, Evening Star, in the water bright hand mirror of women, gleam in the pond, all the stars in your hair, and the mystery of the heavens, and even a halo, iris of light. Beautiful White one, errant twin (Though I ask: Who erred? And why is Earth the good twin in the stories?). In the heavy Cytherean atmosphere, every good effort to know you is crushed, Venera probes brushed like flies from your thighs. O, men never know when to quit.

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Think of the trouble it brought Galileo, and all he said was you went through phases, had a mind of your own, not centered on the Earth. Lady, I look into the pond and, always, I see you there, one heavenly body rising through cold air, that black glistening, water in your hair.

Black Venus Now that you have seen me, you know there is no turning back, no wishing the waters had never been broken, as your wish fell in, as I broke the surface. I am Venus, and you will love me, or die. My terrible eye will follow you. You will never be alone. And my hands will be gentle, or cruel. It’s all up to you. Beauty will reign, anyhow. How many can say: “I saw my Muse, and lived. And every day was a miracle, each crust a feast, each troutfish at least a dozen, and every tale taller than the last. Now, this is the life, free from grief,

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exalting in your chorus.” Who danced with the Graces, the Muse, Star of Women, in the radiant home of the gods? Who sings that memory is truth, that no one man can crush art, or order it to live, everything being in my black hands, my heavens painted in swathes and bands.

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xi

Bonfire by the River

Together again, I can imagine why some women throw themselves in flames, burning for love. I’d burn for you, travel flames. Under fire, we’d find ourselves, lost to the world, but remembered into: each other’s arms, the things we seek, and why I will always love you. How many times have we watched the flames, both of us shivering in wild places? Hot drink in hand, the stars surround us, and our voices travel out across the water, into the night. I was never afraid of the dark, only of being alone with my thoughts, having no-one to talk to. You take my hand, the sparks fly, the logs break, like old bones, cracking in the fire. After all we’ve been through I can say: I’d die for you, or take my heart in my hands, plunge into flames like the rivers we cross, or the paths that we seek when moving our burdens from one watershed to another. So, up the rivers we go, wading into the fire, past the lilies, northern lotus, and into the golden flames, all forgiving, still believing, something in flames is worth saving.

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f l o r a & fau n a

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f l o r a & fau n a “Look at the flora. Look at the fauna” Away, Jane Urquhart

You say that what women taught you was: to move slowly in wilderness, to think, stop (Solomon’s-seal, earth star, worts and mosses, the leopard frog on the path), not to care about distance, or weight. Here’s the beginning of another movement, the one that brings you closer to me. All the holy places, the sacred groves, the woods that have, language, history, cries and calls to: arms, longing, the place where time began, they are: here & there, never & always, flora & fauna returning to earth, to water, to bones and burial, to fire and song, the blue dances in air.

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th e b l ac k s wa n “Literature be the tongue you do your lovin’ in” George Elliott Clarke

1 The black swan writes these letters on water, in water. The blue, black surface incised with poems reflects on the swansfeet intruding, on a beak that scars words with kisses, and those perfect nostrils breathing serene unfathomed passion. Underwater, the view is swansbreast, paddling feet and the occasional dabble of swansface, appearing quite disconnected, a satellite moon 74

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tethered by invisible force, a neck or the gravity of her bearing. Black swan: give me that word you have saved, hoarding the letters through muted centuries, waiting for love to have its say.

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2 Listening to old Irish music, Dragon Lady Jig, I ignore the black swan as it struggles between us. Not brother or sister we, and the harp of poetry hangs between us. Will you ever know how it troubles me, never to touch you? Ritually, once a year, our eyes avoid what poetry reveals. Love is always forms of trouble. Formal and lyrical, the oracle pen scrapes away where we have buried courage. Who watches over us? Who calls out, her hand full of stars or a sword? Who calls: “Gospodin: Help me!” Who calls? The domes of the Kremlin glisten in her eternal evening. No-one to carry 76

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her away. Always enough time then, when you are higher up, to consider your position, to wonder: How long will it take for one voice to carry? Or for an old Irish tune to bury itself in a heart, that dark swan silenced, gan ainm, no name or author for: broken, wordless, touch.

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3 The genetic memory of swans is visible in their eyes. All that they have seen, in myth and history, is voiceless, pure visual. So they preen and shape their feathers letting time’s bloodied river flow through breasts of night and snow, dominion of down, poems, lice. Truths out of nowhere embodied in song, timbre & pitch, and even, sometimes, the wrong story, damned lover or ordinary swan. I think the good muses take their chances. Like the rest of us, they win some, they lose some. Can you believe the Novodevichy swans you feed are theirs? Every Russian feather of them bristling with poetry and art? And, on ice 78

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or snow, if those enchanted mistresses of air come waddling towards you, you are their man.

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poison dart frogs

1 Red Variation Out eco-shopping in the city mall deep in a nature store things crawl: peculiar, strange, the rubber beasts and plastic bags of fossils (trilobite and leaf) that died or slowly came to grief or disappeared (all in the past financial year) and in a centre island, singular or piled together, are squeaking frogs (endemic to the island) now, without mercy, hunted down by Moms and Dads with eco-frowns. Green child (all wonder) reaches in and from the poison dart frog bin lifts out a specimen (strawberry version), icon for her small collection: toads and roaches, snakes and bugs, centipedes, frogs, flies and slugs. 80

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2 Blue Variation Far from home, blue frog sings creation (at night when the store is closed) and remembers incarnation. Alone, alone, blue Kali-ma brought you into the world: malleable, plastic, for her own reasons. A spell was cast; now you are rigid. Small dancing frog, poisonous only when afraid and provoked, do you dream of a factory, molds and dye? Can you believe you were once mistress of your own green world? Fragile. Fierce. Hidden. Brilliant. Dancer & Singer. Little Mother.

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3 Yellow Variation Your cousin, Phyllobates terribilis, has enough poison to kill a human. Overkill, you say, like having a nuclear arsenal and a fool at the red button. Defense, you insist, is a delicate matter. And what is the difference between fear and respect? Golden girl, you say, carry your chemistry proudly, a gift or talent. I prefer to dance in the old emerald air. I wish to make love and grow old among my own kind. Peace is getting on with your singular life, saying yes, thank-you, and laughing under a black night sky, sending kisses to the earth and the heavens. Sometimes yellow light fills you. Let it. Sooner or later we die for love, expire in a yellow cloud, toxic, terrible and beautiful, alive.

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4 Green Variation Green lusts and green lusts again. Frogs in the night leap, congregate. Sing sometimes, and sometimes join: leaves and water, forest, pond. And southern sky (all blue & gold & ancient) rolls & wheels above this awe. Some creatures dream with their eyes open. They know they’re not long for this world; also the photographer’s model, the purchased boy, the wild dancers with chemical names are among the extinguishable stars (a star blinks out). Still, the frogs with big eyes stare, into their world whose green variation is this: Why? Now?

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th e g r e e n c a n o e

We are back, each in a green canoe. Old Night descends. Or do we ascend, touching the stars? We have learned to name them: Orion, and the dog Sirius, at heel, Cassiopeia’s curious bent chair, the Bear, the constant blessing of the Northern Star. We’re in deep, taken aback, by meteors. The bright bursts fall, and we are under fire. Our hands can’t hold, nor our four eyes, made bold by love, endure, the multiplying sights. Too much, far too much love, for our pairs of arms, or eyes, or hearts. If I stepped out now from the encasing cedar, would I float up from the memory of water (that sees all) into the skittering path of I’s and souls, catching the burning hieroglyphs, all fired on my open palm? I think this is where we learn to pray: that some things will never end (though they did), that we remember (though we will not) the gifts of our lives.

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Look up! Look up! How many burning wishes fall: to lust, greedy lovers, just like us, leaning out too far for love, who break in time, and starry water too? I fell for you.

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fac i n g b u d d h a

Facing Buddha this is your big chance: to be holy, even holier-than-thou. Wild children with a red lipstick play with God, defacing the Buddha. You could kill them, but they will kill themselves laughing. So, why bother? You try to put a name to a face, come up with nothing, and call: Don’t I know you from somewhere? Facing Buddha you can hear the lotus screaming: Idiot! Get your act together! Don’t I know you from somewhere altered (volte-face) where time’s akilter, with no particular path? Now is no destination. Still, in contemplation you can bring yourself to nothing; to speak, believe, possess, the strange power the possessed possess.

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prints of love

Your daughter will give you a gift, a card imprinted with her hand, in red paint, handiwork you are meant to cherish. Perhaps you will, but more than likely the prints will disappear with kindergarten junk, in some future, some ruthless cleaning-out. And the clinging hand, as you walk your son to school, the damp shape left in your palm as you release & he runs ahead. It will disappear. And the one time you are angry, or frightened enough to slap your child; that red hand print will fade. And the memory of it, most likely, will fade. Who knows, when you touch me, what small mark is made, how much force it takes to make your mark, to leave something permanent, visible: prints of love on my hands, face, your heart?

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pictures of an eclipse

What I have are pictures of an eclipse taken against counsel, in the sun, before the darkened minutes held time still and I become a girl to be undone. Then, I knew power and held it to my face, the camera eye looked straight into the fire and saw two shining creatures, and then one, the great corona, and a blazing pyre. See the black pallet on the sun, there for a moment, praised, mourned a little and then gone, Daughter, what shadow moves across your face? The telescope holds Saturn and you see: the rings, the colours, the planet’s little light. And then m31, Andromeda, is caught, and a man says: “To see her in the sky, you must look sideways to where you know she’s not. Practice eye aversion and you’ll see the grey smudge.” Not one star, a nation of stars. What remains there are float out

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in heavens. I have no pictures of their ancestors. I give you these. I took them when I believed no light could hurt me. Little ember, now I burn and know better.

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p o lyc a r b o n b u t t e r f ly u n f u r l e d “She had once watched a butterfly emerge into the world” Count Zero, William Gibson

When you came into the world you were: red, wrinkled, soft, and clinging to me, butterfly to leaf. I saw it all in a mirror, like magic, and in a room of lights and metal, a voice calling for the butterfly is what I remember. Aristotle studied butterflies and souls and called them x in his equations, the small white ghost, quite nameless, that transforms. In his day they believed that souls escaped from the mouth while human bodies slept. O, small Psyche, did you roam then, as you do now, from here into bright futures, and return? I call you daughter, but you are not mine. Once we found a butterfly in your room. “A moth” someone said. “No, she’s my sister” you said, all drama. “If she

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dies, I will die.” Nothing but capture and release would do. And then, at the moment of flight, the small fist closed and swallowed her. “What on earth!” but too late. Now, with each year, you seem to shed a skin. One day, poupée, I will listen to you speak of butterflies, how small white ones fly off with memories, how, if you disturb a tree covered with them in migration, they say you can lose your mind. In that future you are calm and only your hands betray your butterfly nature, opening and closing, like wings as they dry, nervous as you flutter into life. The polycarbon butterfly unfurls, mind and machine, some image, some small words. Your head bends forward. Golden, intent and shivering, you make your move, lift up all white memory from the screen.

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th e p i c t u r e s o f m y h e a rt

1 When you enter the research wing there are no signs, nothing tells you that here your body is necessarily an object of study. There are no plans to weigh your soul. No-one gives a damn (for the purpose of clinical trials) if you believe in anything, or even yourself. The drugs have a cardiotoxic effect and machines will measure how much you can take. I wait while my heart fills up with light. I imagine angels with their research wings, beating like test flight pilots, crashing and rising up, hitting walls of despair. The walls are

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mounted with hypotheses, results, and names. There are little brass plaques on the doors. What would you think about if your heart was pumping glowing particles? May and Mary argue with a stubborn computer. Karen small-talks while Sharon Ann checks the iv. We wait for the pictures of my heart. They will look like dogfighting planes in a war. Wreckage and bodies wash up later.

2 At the heart institute the hearts, and their companion bodies, all hold sway. Everyone runs when one heart stops. Now, in the research wing, hands are still at my side (some of them mine) preparing for an out-of-body experience. In the silence of panic I become a Hindu

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god, ornate and many-handed, each hand with a life of its own. One clambers up the air, temple monkey in a tree. One lifts, benediction, to your face. Some hands remain beside themselves with imagination. Some are imagination. One turns a face to the light and begins to speak sign language, the hands of girls dancing in their jewels and headdresses (their gold clothes fitting like gloves). Some hands wave good-bye, sadly with hankies. Some wave swords. One black hand reaches out for the pictures of my heart, lifts them to the blue light and shows them to its companions. They pass from hand to hand, like photographs of a birthday, a baby or a vacation. Every hand stares in recognition. One by one, like ribs of a chinese fan, they fall, folding into my arms, the pictures splayed in a hand, like old cards.

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3 Polaroid pictures of my heart are pinned on their white storyboard. Other pictures of hearts are sappy valentines compared to these pointillist mug shots, strictures for love’s centre patiently constructed out of dots. The heart’s a shadowed pear, a city by satellite, computer imaged memory, blemished fruit, a sunspot flare. The colour pictures of my heart confirm a world: bizarre, disorderly, but calm. Terminals show lurid blots that squirm pink, orange, red and blue. Each is a balm, the bright carnal and carnival of the expected. Now, when I send you some message of love, it won’t be a Parzival call to amor. A grailed heart’s

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not true enough for that. I think I’ll just call on your hands for love. I’ll leave the masque of despair to the heart: an old dance, heartbreak, a suitable task.

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a t th e s c h wa r z s c h i l d r a d i u s

1 This is your version of the restaurant at the edge of the universe. The menu always features destruction. I have a favourite chair from which to view our event horizon. A sip of a drink seems to take forever and the rest of the world is wet and dark on the other side of the glass. Now no-one sees a green life split apart, and anything you might call meaning has none. Can you feel yourself at the imaginary radius, words crumpling in on themselves, and

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our life going forwards and backwards before it stops? Not dead. Just gone. Out of some white vortex will you reappear? “I just need some time, a bit of space.” Sure. And when we get into the descriptions of black holes (as if we know what we’re talking about) I know where I fit in.

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2 At The Point-In-Space Café (now/not-now) love-letters compose themselves (on the white, photocopied backs of Albeniz’s España Prelude) in my hand. Meanwhile you are explaining fractal geography. Chaos is sweet bedlam of the unpredictable tracing circles on my knee. Boolean logic means nothing to me & my knees. We believe in the body’s categorical, the natural geographic. In infinite fiords & peninsulas of imagination, Narcissus and Mathematics have fallen in love. They listen. Multiple

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strange moons rise (crescendo/ decrescendo) in an alien landscape (music and promises) the speech of the right hand.

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3 The beautiful long-haired boys walk the streets in their black great-coats. In ancient boots, with beads plaited in their hair, they are like luminous fish. The art schools cannot contain them. The crazy people they love cannot contain them. I will not try to keep you from floating, high in the winter air. Little fish, I love how your hair streams behind you in the urban afternoon. If I am brave I will touch it and rob the shoals and the studios of their hour. Black boots. Golden boy. Our time will cost me one life (gladly wasted) so briefly to brighten the city’s air.

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th e b l u e l i g h t of the n eut ro n po ol

All the generations of me go up with you, past Petawawa and the military convoys, past Chalk River, Deep River, Rolphton, and the rivers of nuclear power, past the quiet churches: Our Lady of the Snows, St. Andrew’s Among the Pines, and the spires in Mattawa where we turn. This is when we are most together, driving the highways that lead to our wild places. In an old car, loaded up with: packs, boots, a borrowed canoe, we go up to Kioshkokwi, leaving the city and the everglowing sky behind, hoping to see the darkness in each other, the black joy of an empty night, the little cries of the hidden stars as they become visible and beloved. When we were leaving Cally shouted “Have a good trip” and then, unexpectedly, “We love you.” So many people are left behind, the ones who will not, or cannot be with us. I bring them with me and carry their eyes, old lamps in the dark. Who are we to travel over water to the islands of pines and spirit? Portaging in mystic green worlds, the red leaves warning,

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the winter coming, and wading small rivers, leading the canoe in the turbulent waters, I remember my friends and take their peace with me. And you, constant man, who changes shape with the days, with the weather: raven, brother loon, river merganser, holy fish as you leap in the water, companion, silent comrade; be assured, I could never leave you. First early hours in the north of Algonquin: we are listening to freight trains rumbling on to North Bay. We see the eerie glow of settlement to the northwest. Later, the loons will greet us in the grey morning, the clouds on the water. Then small rain, like a blessing, dampens the day. A moose and her calf browse in the shallows where our next portage begins. We can wait. The baby canters on the surface, confident, kicking its heels like a small horse, and the mother, benign madonna, watches and chews. In the forest we will encounter silence, a man and his dog, the cathedral green of lichen, moss, and the emptying gothic of the columnar trees. Winds are up at the beach at Manitou Lake;

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a pair of ravens stand guard at the shore. I, who have lived as a mind, cogito’s captive, must submit: this is a world of body and spirit. In purity, or violence, the water receives you, and you become it. Thunderbird roars overhead and the drumbeats of the spirit pound, detonations in the heart. There is no turning back from fear, or joy, and our moment of salutation. Every green branch and living thing springs up, every fish becomes a silver word. On the island of pines, unmapped on the lake, we come home to the animate universe, the breathing earth. I’m alone. So, how can I explain: in all my prayers, I am with you, and you are here. In the morning we will walk among stones and broken shells, naked as children, in the living water. I will think of my friends, the lovers and the beloved, the believers and the quiet companions. The scientist lives for the moment of light, to have one night when the code unravels, or to spend a life without politics or worry, her face alive in the blue light of the neutron pool. My friend,

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the believer, asks for enlightenment; my friend, the painter, for vision; my friend, northern boy, for the green country of childhood that his heart cannot forget. As for me, Thunderbird, I ask that you take me with you, in a boat that crosses to the world of spirits. I want to dance at my death, to make a little thunder the earth will hear.

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th e is h ta r g ate (last poems)

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t h e tr o u t

Patient, Poetry is waiting for the fish to jump, the body arced over, or for Mister Right to appear. When you least expect it happens: your heart stops, the fish curves space; the world, for a moment, is perfect & good enough. At the bottom of a pail, a lake, a life, something squirms and moves upwards, a stay against indifference is no match for trout (caught or free) or for the luminous whorl, or Poetry, regular & white-capped as a lake. Storms are written upon the nothingness of you. Syncopation wails like a loon. Time & Poetry. No before or after in the eye of the holy leaping trout.

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my hope “Spem in alium nuquam habui praeter inte” – after the motet Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis –

Did this sound of forty voices flood Arundel’s octagonal hall, eight choirs, one motet calling forth devotion & allegiance to God’s peculiar power? All these years & my hope founded in you, yet always foundering. One lonely poet, Elizabethan queen, crosses the threshold (now, then) forbidden or forbidding, like faith. What can we believe in, who listen to old voices and weep? Everything we might have loved, given up, gone to thee, who will be angry & gracious, polychoral, mindful of our humility, lifting us from song, sorrow, our history written only as it happened, not as we would wish.

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porthole “I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square porthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half-believing what I’d just read ...” “To Please a Shadow,” Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky

In the old movies, the ones with black and white sailors rolling on decks, storming through Hollywood studios, there are scenes with water and portholes and ships sinking or maybe a wartime submarine. The point being that disaster comes towards you and the porthole at about the same time and when it rushes through, you are swept away with emotion, the watcher, safely seated. These days: the same illusions, disaster seems real as the starship evades detection and jumps through computer animation, kaleidoscope blurs, into a lost hole in the universe to some safe place where poets and lovers have calm and boring lives and cannot, in all honesty,

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fear for their words, or be bullied into brilliance. What a grand moment, to look up then, to know that in any place we can be everything does depend on red wheelbarrows, white chickens, the rain. The mud and rain will always be with us and windows of imperfect glass, squaring the world to our particular vision, about to be broken through.

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port

Sometimes the tricks you learn as a child are useful later on. When I was beaten or raped I learned to move myself away to a place without pain or degradation, to stick it out and watch at a distance, and never to vomit. I have been lucky in joy, and have felt exultation. I have been moved to tears and, nowadays, I am hardly ever beside myself. I’ve read that there is a science of pain management. I think I could be an expert. When the surgeon removed my port, small metal disc implanted just under the skin of my shoulder to make delivery of chemotherapy less painful (and which, by the way, was never used by the tired nurses in a hurry who could just stick an intravenous in a good vein and get on with it), he was doublebooked and did the procedure

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during his lunch hour. I liked this man, he spoke honestly and listened to me but everyone has their bad days and this was one. In the outpatient surgery he began and I wondered, idly, why I could feel so much, my shoulder deadened with anaesthetic. We talked and he worked and I said I could feel his hands and the instruments as he worked and he said: No, you cannot. Can. Cannot. Can. Mutual panic as the pain increased and he knew he was alone, had to proceed, could not call for help and I said: ok, Listen up. I have gone to the top of a mountain where it is very cold, so cold I am frozen and cannot feel, but I can see. And way, way down at the bottom of the mountain there you are, tending a fire. I can see the red flames and imagine the heat but here I am, up at the peak, feeling nothing. He looked at me strangely and was silent, worked quickly and then left me, quite alone.

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I waited a long time up on that mountain but gradually the fire went out, and he never did come back. I got up, and walked home, was a body but not wholly connected. As the afternoon wore on, the cold wore off. I began to shake: my hands frozen, my teeth chattering. I couldn’t stop shaking and imagined someone lost in a storm, perhaps at sea, hoping like crazy to make it to port, to the safe place that is calm, and the first thing to do when you arrive is to be sick to your stomach, to know you have survived but also to know that out there, in the dark centre of destruction, someone you loved, and had known so well she might have been yourself was lost, irretrievably, at sea.

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f o r t h e p o e t w h o to l d m e to t h i n k l e s s a n d f e e l m o r e

I will not assume that you are an expert about feeling. Nor will I believe that the quiet & orderly among us have not been thrown against walls, that they write from imagination and not from experience. If I have not shed tears onto your pages perhaps it is only because I would not hurt you with your indifference. When you saw me, and asked how I was doing, the kindest thing I could do was to say I was fine. I think of all the women with bad teeth, the ones who walk into doors, the women with holes in

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their walls and their lives where pictures & memory hung in the balance and how that empty square on the wall is a target for good intentions that have become holy banners. I will not assume that you think less of me, nor will I.

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frozen

Broken Aphrodite, in a field of snow wonders how she came here and where her body goes. Does it piece together, shatter, flow? Does it move across the field: glacier, traveller, road? Her colours are clean and Greek, white and blue, but the blank light angles in from the north, with a vengeance. Is this a body, so frozen the cold has snapped arm from torso and buried her at the knees, in snow? Or was she made, from the beginning, of water? A voice chants, like a dark chorus: The solid state is transitory. Embodiment never lasts past the heat of passion. I turn to you, neither goddess nor ice, and remember that warnings abound about the effects of warming, how

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the progress of love is irreversible. Love moves, with or without us. Love, what a terrible choice, when the last part of you that remains is your face, wet, shining, and anywhere I can touch you, we are melting.

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wa i t i n g

Lying awake in the light of midnight all the sources of light become obvious, insistent. The red bar across the base of the phone is a slash that says our child is talking, quietly, late in the night. The clock beside me tells me, in a red, dangerous glow, how late it really is, how the minutes move by without emotion. The green lights on the printer and monitor tell me they will be waiting for me. The keyboard, out of view, has its own green light that whispers: ok. ok. Connect. ok. And here I am, waiting for you to call me, my midnight voice insisting it is your turn, that if you love me you will know, you will call. I am alone in a room of wires and software and books, with only my human voice to console me, to tell me I have

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been here before, staring at the baroque frost on the window backlit by streetlights. There, in the corner, the unseen hand has drawn a beautiful pattern that I cannot, for the life of me, interpret. By the window, with its messages written in ice, I look out and talk to the stars, the moon, the black, empty arms of the heavens. One hand reaches out, sees itself reflected in the mirror lit by the moon, and picks up the phone (now silent) with its glowing screen saying: Message waiting. The hardest thing is to call you, to say: I am lonely. I need you. Will you come home? Now, I awake in the light, past midnight, waiting for the lights of a car and the sound of your key in our door.

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morning on the guitar

Ragged, in jeans and your father’s plaid shirt, there you are, at the end of my bed, typical you, turned away. You won’t even let me look at you as you play your new piece, “the first one that really sounds like music” you say. It is “Morning,” for the guitar. It is late, later than either of us can know, and silence and darkness have settled in circles around us. When I try to reach out there are always things unspoken, deep & bass, blue & heavy, that I must get past. You are beautiful & insular, just learning to play, and slowly emerging from childhood into this place of music & balance. Your right hand, still awkward, is near the neck, your left hand floating near the bridge that will make the notes uneasy, metallic. Your head of long brown hair swings, just slightly, in concentration, as

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an old melody emerges, cantabile, a voice singing between us. Now, I find you have turned, face to me, still, not speaking. When you look up is it you or the room that glows with faint light?

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th e b r i d g e

The child dreams of bridges that break off suddenly; the leap across familiar space that has been repeated with so many different versions of the inevitable end. There is always a fall, something held onto slowly loosening its grasp. Has it held you or you it? And the child falling but never screaming, she is looking at this page, frozen in panic, constricted and breathing her pain that is always with her. She wants to be free from pain but also to live to look back at the bridge.

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detonation / n otation

* sometimes I feel myself explode on impact or slowly after a fall from great heights i did not even know i was on / i am shattered no shards but soft pieces of me torn each from each the community of the body disrupted for a moment sometimes / i feel myself explode then a voice calls out: move along / stay calm / move along / stay calm / do not be alarmed this is not your concern everything is under control there is a service concerned with dismemberment & there is a great cloud of knowing and unknowing it rises from our ashes as we burn sometimes i feel myself explode with beginnings and endings / of all the things i have always found the beginning and end the most lonely

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* sometimes i feel myself explode and i think: what a mess but this time someone else will pick up the pieces and mutter like a madmother: what a mess / what a mess / what a mess / i have made of some things in my life that grew up / blew up in your face and left you alone picking up pieces and trying to pull things together while entropy and the unwinding years insist that despite good intentions we all fall apart & who among us hangs around to hear the curses & blessings at our departure

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* sometimes i feel myself explode & i walk a fine line between detonation / notation, devices and desires implanted in fields or vision or the place that was always supposed to be green / safe / subtle / this instant is violent and blatant as any piece of time pinned down, unpinned, caution thrown to the wind where it explodes leaving what breaks / aftermath is too good a word for inevitable fictions / broken line / destination of hellbend words working their way through fire besieged / beautiful / outside fury

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va r i a t i o n o n john th ompson’s g ha zal xx xv iii “Should it be passion or grief” John Thompson

Both come unasked for. Grief (not that I have) has a sweetness to ist that cuts as fine as any knife. Sweet edge to the blade, you say. I am being followed by grief (and it skulks as I turn unbidden) just a sense of being. Passion, as well, is overwhelming the air that a knife cuts through. Should it be passion or grief 128

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that we release? What did you hold by nerve, or a string? Hands. Fingers. Fist.

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th e na r r ow l e n s

Under the chestnut tree in Grange Park I am remembering how you said the word: loneliness. Twice now that word has appeared like a goddess or a colossal angel, dark and alive, where, a moment before, I could have sworn I was living a normal day. The white chestnut flowers fall into my hair and Memory plays her tricks: making you seem closer than you are, and the other, farther away. Last night, in another city, a small girl held up the binoculars you made for her. “See” she says, lifting two cardboard tubes held together with grey loops of duct tape. “I can see you. I can see you and everyone is smaller, like dolls.” Yes, everything is smaller seen through the narrow lens; your hands, at the edge of vision, flutter,

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just slightly, like the new fan-leaves of the chestnut tree, but farther away. Now, I see how the world diminishes and diminishes, words appearing in the likely and unlikely places to remind us that nothing is as it seems.

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ve n u s ve l v e t 6 5 5 7 h b

You must pursue. In the pursuit Be captive, capture, captured; Only this can save you, only this. I see you. In the intense, black Empty word, I see you. I see you in the body exploded In the street (where everything Is happening so quickly). The explosion is a peculiar silence And also particular shame. You Cannot run from me. You may not Come to me proud, or erect, Or even dignified by ceremony. You will find me washed in blood. There will be no mercy in your Life, only this: inevitable approach, A field exploding in circles Of light, the sound of the birth Of stars, incendiary planets, Black worlds that mean something To me, next to nothing to you.

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t h e va r i a b l e s w a n s for Bill & Mim Maust

In this world the swans exist on one axis; no need for y for those who only feed and float and send up dreams to the watchers in air. All the time you were gone they remained: invisible, hypothetical, and I thought: They are creatures of bread and water, the things we believe in, sight unseen. So I sat, silently each morning as the geese dropped down like questions from the y-axis world. I always imagined the place with the answers would be complicated, impenetrable. But the swans dip in and out of the one line that exists, like a river, undulating, ancient, the straight road bending itself into a perfect world. Can you feel the earth, on its axis, stop for a moment

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and then everything, including us, cease hurtling? So briefly space extends between eternal cedars and the swans and we are written on the waters before why, and how, and where, and who, in the one place we all will remember, in our numbered perils, as pure and clear. And the swans? Black or white, they float in their quiet mathematics, still points in the Irvine or imaginary stream: slow, steady arrows of creation.

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listening to winterreise “Ich kann zu meiner Reisen Nicht wählen mit der Zeit, MuB selbst den Weg mir weisen In dieser Dunkelheit.”

Listening to Winterreise And translating French poems I can feel the cold days Of a new season approaching. How to be happy and sad Of a moment? I think of you. There’s no recovering Even one day we have lost. I hum along with the voice Of another time. Only With Schubert can I repeat The best part of the things We have made. No piano To play now. It only breaks My spirit to hear the Distance between my hands

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And my imagination. But a path Opens. The sound of a train Drifts across snowfields Into this music’s sharp chasm. Time is the fool’s game Our gods have made for us: To have us wander the darkness Remembering old comforts.

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a stranger

A Stranger comes like a Thief In the Night. With old Stars Bearing mute and immutable Witness, my Heart is seized. Stranger, who visits across Empty Space, between Minute And Minute, between All & The Time it takes to declare: Love. Death. Resurrection: Who are you? Whose Face Is this, pressing Eternity Against Glass? And your Eyes: Absolute Darkness. Do you bring Messages, or Hope? And these Kisses Falling into my open Eyes, Are they yours? I claim them. Dark Dreams, old covenants, Carelessly scattered I claim in My own and a stranger Name.

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th e i s i s r at t l e

The rattle she shakes is selfsame now as it was then. In an image from Apuleius, Isis hovers before me (as she hovered before you) and insists that nothing ever stands in the way of the gods. I wish your sweetness could have survived. I like to imagine you, in your Black Hole of Calcutta, with her image, large & terrible, haunting your days. This power that holds us is fierce, intractable, allowing no wavering into words but one hellbend excursion taking us to both glory & demise. Sweet girl: What she knows is how to gauge the temper of the brave. She smells it on us and anoints us: the unafraid. Small consolation in the grasp of grief. May her blessings find you, even now, bring you peace.

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access the calm serene

Access the calm serene. Equivocate With no-one. Dream. In dreams Old boundaries (the barricades thrown Up in haste) smoulder & burn Rebelliousness. The charred remains Remain. What to make of these: The lost, the broken, and all so Impossible? Dreams are like this: Anything can happen here, and did. In dignity they begin and end. And, In integrity, these are the places We wake up from when no more Can be borne. Their escape is Not into themselves, but outwards, Planetary, hugging the elliptic Path, from which we neither Waver, nor wish to, but move, Constant immovable, through Every grace, or will, or considered Wrong, until we are flung out, Thrust into a species laden world.

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You are the one beloved force To hold me steady. Light streams, And then, emerging from the calm, Serene and sleepless, you are hope. Illuminata: inner constellation wrought in Darkness, promised, fairest of dreams.

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concern for my soul

My only concern is for my soul. Not the dogmatic bird caged in the heart, nor the big soul admired because it includes you in its embrace. This, my soul, is private matter, which you may neither access nor own. Whatever possesses you, it is not my soul. It has enough to do being mine (not that I own it, or claim to). It broods like a mother and consults with conscience. Daily, they tell me I am their difficult daughter. Thus am I loved and misunderstood in equal portions. No, I cannot be concerned with your soul, though your struggles trouble me. Friend: Seek out the honey nectar of affection. Let things like love surround you. Sometimes they are.

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karma’s girls

Nowadays, Karma could be a girl’s name, or a grunge band (their lead singer dies, and is resurrected, in a perpetual cycle). It might be the name of a new car, one guaranteed to give you the ride you deserve. Gaudy girl, I can imagine you at the wheel, on the wheel, happy and rising, to the top, your coloured lights skittering and body paint shining in darkness: the bodies, and music, and sounds of the fair. Beloved, I don’t want to see your small fate when the air drops around you, and a dark future flies up to greet you, hold you down, pinned to your place, like a bright moth, or a scream. I want you to know: through all this, you will never be alone. Even the worst night is a poet’s dream. Be with me. Delight in delight. Even when falling, Karma’s girls can dance.

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s e r va n t o f t h e m u s e

I called you: Servant of the Muse. I lied. Not to protect you. Brother, you are now beyond protection, believing you have no need of it. I lied to keep from her, a little longer, knowledge of the unforgiving Furies and their grasp. She is no more innocent than we were, only younger, but I would spare her every inevitable grief, if I could. What fools were we to believe we could escape those watchful eyes? Our only hope now is: to work without ceasing, and to be still in the holy places. The Old Voices speak their perfect verses, if we but choose to hear.

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gaia reclining

This will take some getting used to. That this voluptuous goddess, carved In black stone, is a true image: of Womanliness, Beauty, the Sacred Body We all carry. She is round and fleshy And big-hipped; nothing pretty to look At, but also, nothing to fear. I know Her as: mother, sister, daughter, aunt, & the craggy old women we will become. Right now, I want so much to reach out, To touch the sheen of black stone as it Erupts from a rough green-black base. A girl of great price, but what I can afford: To imagine taking her home, waking to Lovely Gaia reclining on my coffee table.

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ou r kate for Mary Merikle (after the painting “Child with Two Adults” by Mary Pratt)

Into this waiting world spilled, red and bloody, you, newborn, and all the rest of us, still wondering (between involuntary gasps, delight) if this then was the right place after all? Sometimes we are lit with the obvious flash, so photographic. Sometimes a sudden light, filling air like water, so quick, surrounds us: bright, thick, and clear. And then, dear Kate, some memory impels us in that light and we cry out, all fierce and alive, like you. Alive is what I am, again, your birth making me so. Every last place in my hollowed life, in inundation from that stream, is glisten, green and bathed, illuminate as you are bathed, in simple power and gifts and being held. I hold you, and hold onto you, clinging, to sweet baby smells: sweet milk, and soap and water, not slippery only in my remembering hands, but also in our lives. Dumbstruck and trembling, I am, that something such approaching perfect sees my hand and holds, in tiny clasps, so firm and sure, all questions, easy only in uncertainty and ecstasy and fearless grasp.

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orange marmalade, keiller recipe

Our voices fly, back and forth, yours thin as glass about to shatter, mine hazardous, a grenade. Our small fires ignite the empty wires. These days phone wires are not singular but multiple bundles, fibre optics, and our messages leap, like electricity running along a nerve and jumping across the microchasm, anonymous synapse, and also the leap to satellite, and then back down to you a few miles away. The distance, in light, and in years, is great; you were here once, now here I am: a woman at the end of the twentieth century slicing Seville oranges for marmalade, lifting my hands to my face and willing the smell of oranges to enter. What have I come to that this is a task, like another? Here my senses have left me and I am alone with the peel and the juice, pulp and pips tied in muslin, feeling nothing, looking for happiness in the small things I have lost. What is preserved that then leaps forth, from our buried places, our former lives, and says: This, this then was our one perfection.

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slicing oranges in kim’s kitchen

Each bright orange disk spins, a slow wheel, not here in my hand only, but in our one mind’s eye. Just think of that mind’s eye. What colour is it? Blue as our planet? And how does it see? What agile mechanics carries sight into the mind, still, after all our thinking, undefined? I think of you and how we talked, words slipping between words, standing slicing oranges in your kitchen; an easy task. An idea from a magazine, the simplest salad you had ever seen now spreading in circles, circle upon circle, plain and sweet and pleasing. And the conversation, also circling and returning to children, love and growing old. Nothing but the ordinary things somehow made over into suns and galaxies and all creation whirling ecstasy as we cut the spitting peel from diminishing fruit, sink knives into the pale white orbs, slice, flick out sprouting seeds, and lay out bright slices in concentric rows.

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blood oranges

When we talk on the phone, a black wire is strung between us, heavy with ice, and somehow we know we must speak the condensed code of last words, never referring, out of love, or fear, to the end. I’m in my kitchen with the phone caught, like a violin, between chin and shoulder, but with my hands freed. I listen. I cut into the pliant flesh of oranges, bought this past week at a store you will likely never see. Each fruit is identified, like a painting, with provenance, (Serena, Valencia). The Sicilian blood oranges (Portobello Società Cooperativa) are twisted in bright papers. When I slice open blood oranges they bleed into my hands. Each time, like the first, the shock of incising a bruise, cutting into a living creature, a mute egg flecked with red, is a reminder: this, too, was alive. Now, at the dark end of your day, you wonder, aloud, just how long all of this will go on. You tell me that you go out, in short shifts, to shovel snow, or chop the ice from your steps, afraid of a fall, or a surprise of gangrene in your feet, suddenly there like the soft blue-green mold on the oranges I find, at the bottom of the bowl.

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silence

I nurture my garden of candles and stone. Windows are open. Words jump from the sills. I go into silence, afraid, and emerge, afraid, but not of the same things. The candle burns, attended or unattended. In the end it explodes. Cheap glass and blue wax burst onto the carpet. The cat jumps back, scatters stones, scuttles away. I gather broken glass and wax in the silence

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after explosion. Something is expected; I give nothing. I nurture my garden of candles and stone.

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silence ii

The old combatants are at it again. Wars have become a rattle of metal inside a steel drum. The silent watcher never has much to say about battles. She pulls up her skirts and prepares to speak. She raises her hand: the bloodied fields fall as quiet as children assembled and waiting for release. A drum rolls.

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t h e n a t u r e o f we a p o n s for Julia

It is the nature of weapons to be lethal, to offer themselves over to sacrifice your raw newborn, or first believed. Imagination cannot help you here, or near grief seeking the still warm bodies hovering, zeroing in upon themselves, in grave and pitiless art. Who carries the burden of the close born, almost created, into the dark world, across the living water, or above our lives, all clearly beyond us? For Lethe, so far removed we cannot, even by most desperate wishing, attain it, or destroy it, or send our best loved or most vilified into it, and survive, is one natural perversion of heaven: impenetrable, invincible (but for death), and subtle in weaponry: a steel blade; misguided missiles; tears, calculated and numbered; our rage. And sorrow? Sorrow. Deadly riposte.

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th at b l u e i s a l l i n a r u s h for Roz “The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush ...” Spring, Gerard Manley Hopkins

That blue is all in a rush, I am assured by a leap in sky, by a solid blue sheet held with celestial pins: bright, electric. And if it falls? What gathers spattered sky fallen to ground? Words or air? Air, warming cold hands, bends down to earth, to gather up what fell. Here’s where the pear comes in. This singular fruit, our private marvel, has grown alone: spring to summer, and perhaps to fall. Small, out on a limb, the size of an enthusiastic plum, blushed green to burnished. Bronze ornament, still unassailed at summer’s end. As we two stand by the peartree (young and waist-high as a child waving its one flag) I see our words mist, go up in the air, and, from the corner of the roundness of my eye, a blue flame shoots from the blossom end of the pear. We now know how the sky is blue. 153

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selected prose

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t h e tr o u t i n t h e h o l y we l l : ideas on order & poetry She tosses stones in basins to the sun And watches for the trout in the holy well Medbh McGuckian, Gateposts

I was sitting in a laundromat a few years ago doing three things at once. Well, perhaps not simultaneously, but in channel-hopping rotation. I was watching a willowy and very worldly looking young woman transferring her large load of lacy black bras and very interesting underwear from washer to dryer. (It later occurred to me that in my less-thanperfect neighbourhood her laundry bill was most likely a business expense.) I was also listening to a conversation in creative broken English between two Muslim clerics and a more-or-less coherent young mother of two very active pre-schoolers about the position of women in Muslim society. The polite young men were adamant in their defense of Islam and insistent on their reverence for women, especially mothers. (Not long after, during the mediated unreality of the Gulf War, I would first hear the expression “mother-of-all-battles” and choke.) Thirdly, as part of my ongoing effort to maintain sanity, I was reading Joseph Brodsky’s book of essays, Less Than One, and had settled on a passage in an essay on Auden that astounded me then as it does now. Brodsky was writing about having read a translation of 157

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Auden’s poetry while serving time in one of the Soviet Union’s northern prison towns. He wrote: I remember sitting there in the small wooden shack, peering through the square porthole-size window at the wet, muddy, dirt road with a few stray chickens on it, half believing what I’d just read, half wondering whether my grasp of English wasn’t playing tricks on me.

What was Brodsky reading? The cause of his stupor, and somewhat in the manner of breathing in second-hand smoke, mine, was a passage from Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”: Time that is intolerant of the brave and innocent And indifferent in a week To a beautiful physique Worships language and forgives Everyone by whom it lives …

Time worships language. The implication, as Brodsky points out, is that in the ontological sequence language precedes time. And, as Brodsky says: If time worships language it means that language is greater, or older, than time, which is, in its turn, older and greater than space.

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With those words Brodsky had brought me to a dead halt and I was stunned, as he had been. For if language, and specifically poetry, subsumes space-time then poetry is not merely located in, or about reality, it is the primary reality and our ontological origin. Try telling that to the prostitute doing her laundry, the clerics defending their religion, the single parent coping with rowdy children, or the Cambodian seamstress sitting behind the counter far away from the country where she was once a college professor of literature. The truth is that many people struggling in our practical reality are sustained by a conviction that for the most part the construct we are located in is irrelevant. Such ephemeral concepts as friendship, solidarity, love, hope, faith, truth, all are deemed more important, and in fact a belief in the reality of such things is often why those people are in less-than-ideal circumstances in the first place. And what does all this have to do with poetry, especially order and poetry? Order implies sequence. Sequence assumes space and complex order requires time. As life forms we are necessarily located in a space-time paradigm. Perhaps we can push our perceptions to include a few added dimensions (although to go in the other direction, that of nodimensions, does not seem to hold the same attraction for intrepid explorers). And yet, it seems that something powerful exists outside of order & sequence. We can imagine it, though we cannot “be” in it. It is infinite and eternal, alpha & omega, where we are from and what we go towards. 159

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At the center of life, poetry, mathematics, art, music are mimesis (the memory or intuition of that which is beyond our grasp but which animates us), memory, energy or power, and language (the patterning or notation that defines us in our particular space-time paradigm). Whether it is a complex dna sequence, a mathematical construct, a Renaissance motet for eight choirs, African oral history, or Dante’s Inferno, ordered, particular, precise language is a vehicle that carries the potential for a glimpse of what lies outside of time. Poetry has a particularly valuable characteristic in that whereas mathematics and to some extent instrumental music, art and biology seem to, by way of generalities, eliminate metaphor and make themselves useful by addressing or limiting their notation to specific situations, poetry must necessarily be a repository for an infinity of meanings, endlessly metaphorical, always about everything all at once. Every aspect of a poem, in whatever human dialect, leads towards a timeless explosion of revelation. Seamus Heaney, in his essay on Larkin, “The Main of Light,” which is included in his book of critical writings The Government of the Tongue, gives as an example of this phenomenon Shakespeare’s Sonnet #60 where the poem opens into the beyond as we read at line five: Nativity, once in the main of light, Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned, Crooked eclipses ’gainst his glory fight And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

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Heaney writes: Something visionary happens there in the fifth line. “Nativity” as abstract noun housed in a wavering body of sound, sets up a warning tremor just before the mind’s eye gets dazzled by “the main of light,” and for a split second, we are in the world of the Paradiso.

In such poetry each word, period, comma, lineend is precisely chosen, meaning what they mean, but also implying an infinity of meaning. A contemporary example, from Australia’s Les Murray, is a passage from “The Emerald Dove” in which two birds fly into a house by accident and one, the emerald dove, a rainforest bird, eventually makes its way to a bedroom where it perched, barefoot in silks like a prince of Sukhothai, above the reading lamp and cotton buds.

All quite lovely and charming but hardly mindaltering until: it was an emerald Levite in the bedroom which the memory of it was going to bless for years despite topping our ordinary happiness, as beauty makes background of all around it. Levite too in the question it posed: sanctuary without transformation which is how we might be

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plunged out of our contentment into evolved strange heaven where the need to own or mate with or eat the beautiful was bygone as poverty, and we were incomprehensibly, in our exhaustion treasured, cooed at, then softly left alone among vast crumples, verticals, refracting air our way home barred by mirror, our splendor unmanifest to us now, a small wild person, with no idea of peace.

This opening no mere glimpse into the beyond but a veritable portal through which to enter paradise and stay as long as we can bear the beauty of it. Sequential logic has no place here. This is the realm of the poetic order. As opposed to binary systems of yes versus no, black versus white statements, or the rigidity of classical logic, poetry is more akin to “fuzzy logic,” a realm of in-between, of paradox, of yes and no, and about everything and nothing, always. In the syntax of poetic statement there is always a delightful but maddening tension between grammar and vision, order and chaos. Theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufmann has written of the development of complex systems (biological and otherwise) and proposes that while evolution and chance are factors in development of autocatalytic, autopoetic sets, there is a further element, spontaneous self-organization or order, 162

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that arises in all complex systems. He proposes that complex systems emerge in the phase transition region between the ordered regime and the chaotic and that networks poised at the edge of chaos are best fitted to carry out ordered yet flexible behaviours. Poetry brings the poet and, eventually, the receiver of poetry, to a vantage point at that chaotic edge. We can read Margaret Atwood’s “I was reading a scientific article” where she writes: I touch you, I am created in you somewhere as a complex filament of light

and be there as her hands trace the contours of a total universe … its other air its claws its paradise rivers

We have the opportunity, though language (mathematical, musical and otherwise) and, with spectacular openness, through poetry, to stand at the edge of the infinite holy wells, the portals and portholes that connect us all, whether in gulag shacks or laundromats, to our origin and our teleological destination. 163

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And, occasionally, for the patient watchers, the holy trout jumps up and a flash of rainbow and light is revealed. Then we are the poet and the poem, creator and created, observer and leaping fish, and heaven is ours.

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acknowledgments

For their support and, in some cases, their suggestions regarding the selection of poems, I wish to thank Lesley Buxton, George Elliott Clarke, Kim Jernigan, Anita Lahey, David Manicom, Miriam Maust, Una McDonnell, rob mclennan, and John Vardon. Sarah Brebner, Diana’s daughter, has been graciously obliging and in all ways extraordinary. Cally Chornenky, Diana’s literary executor, generously made the papers available to me and has done important work on Diana’s behalf. I am grateful to John Barton and to Arc magazine for publishing a version of the Introduction in its Ottawa poetry issue (#51, Autumn 2003). I am also grateful to Concordia University’s Faculty Research and Development Program for support of this project; to Oana Avasilichioaei for being a valuable research assistant; and to Catherine and Claude Leroux for the use of their cottage during the early stages of work on this manuscript. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Estate of Diana Brebner and to Sarah Brebner and Cally Chornenky for permission to print these poems. Radiant Life Forms (1990), The Golden Lotus (1993), and Flora & Fauna (1996) all originally appeared with Netherlandic Press; many thanks to the publisher, Joan Magee, and the editor, Hendrika Ruger, for their ongoing support of Diana Brebner’s work. Of the material that was previously unpublished in book form, “The Trout,” “My Hope,” “Porthole,” “Port,” “The Variable Swans,” “Venus Velvet 6557 hb,” and “The Trout in the

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Holy Well: Ideas on Order & Poetry” appeared in The New Quarterly, and “Morning on the Guitar” appeared in Prairie Fire. Thank you to the editors of these journals. All previously unpublished work is quoted by permission of the Estate of Diana Brebner. The Introduction cites Ann Diamond, “Death in Canada: Five Ottawa Poets,” Arc No. 29, Autumn 1992; and John Vardon, “An Interview with Diana Brebner,” The New Quarterly Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1993.

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