Wavelengths of Your Song 9780773588165

Citation preview

W av e l e n g t h s o f Y o u r S o n g

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the hugh maclennan poetry series Editors: Allan Hepburn and Tracy Ware titles in the series Waterglass  Jeffery Donaldson All the God-Sized Fruit Shawna Lemay Chess Pieces David Solway Giving My Body to Science Rachel Rose The Asparagus Feast S.P. Zitner The Thin Smoke of the Heart Tim Bowling What Really Matters Thomas O’Grady A Dream of Sulphur Aurian Haller Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees Brian Bartlett Before We Had Words S.P. Zitner Bamboo Church Ricardo Sternberg Franklin’s Passage David Solway The Ishtar Gate Diana Brebner Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood Naomi Guttman Palilalia  Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Peter Dale Scott Cast from Bells Suzanne Hancock Blindfold  John Mikhail Asfour Particles  Michael Penny A Lovely Gutting Robin Durnford The Little Yellow House Heather Simeney MacLeod Wavelengths of Your Song  Eleonore Schönmaier

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Wavelengths of Your Song Eleonore Schönmaier

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

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© Eleonore Schönmaier 2013 isbn 978-0-7735-4170-2 Legal deposit second quarter 2013 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% 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 Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Schönmaier, Eleonore Wavelengths of your song / Eleonore Schönmaier. (Hugh MacLennan poetry series, 1481-966x; 26) Poems. isbn 978-0-7735-4170-2 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series; 26 ps8587.c4585w39 2013

c811'.54

c2012-907279-6

This book was typeset by Interscript in 9.5/13 New Baskerville.

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For Bruce

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Contents

Night after Night She Dreams 3 Survival 5 Lost 7 –40°C 9 Libretto 12 Wavelengths of Your Song 14 Dining on Light 16 Routes for Finding Colours 18 Aurora 20 Copper Thunderbird 23 Birds 25 Malta 26 Gnawing 27 Tracks 28 Knot 30 The Doorbell 32 Sixteen 35 A Woman at Forty-Nine Seeks the Shore Knowing 38 Beachcombing 39 As If 40 Mouths 42 Panorama 44 North American Ballads 45 Men 48 Geology 51

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Gardening 52 Blindness 54 Migrations 57 We’re Cycling 58 New Year’s Eve 60 Postcards 62 The Dangers Inherent in Travel 64 Isotopes 65 South Pacific 67 Kiwi Spotting 68 Journey 70 Music 71 The Abandoned Warehouse 72 The Most Important Things 76 Tango 78 The Shirt 79 Urban 81 Evening 83 While Reading Eva Hoffman’s Illuminations 84 Crematorium 86 The Pear Tree 88 The Grandparents’ House 90 Mary 92 Too Much Goodness 93 Mandel 95 Seeds 97 Lorna Talks to Jacob at the River’s Edge 99 Saxifraga 101 The Meaning of 102 Thebes 103 Weightless 104 Anniversary 105 Origami 106

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What Gets Blown In 107 Kandinsky 108 The Sandbox 109 Kafka 110 Unknown Tongues 111 Symphony in E Major 113 Undertones 115 Metronome 118 Felt 120 Bathing of the Black Horse 123 Leaf 124 What Does the Wind Taste Like When It Comes too Early or too Late? 125 Apples 126 Upside-Down Dante 129 Swash Marks 132 Silver Anniversary 134 Sustain 135 Thanksgiving 138 Solar Plexus 140 Fever 142 Wild 144 Globe 146 Sometimes 148 Einstein 151 Time 153 Of Jumping Frogs 155 Mareile 157 Stuff 159 Vancouver 161 Dollhoused 162 The City Forest 163 Telepathy 165

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Remembering the Curve of the Earth Safety 169 Frankfurt, October 171 Acknowledgments Notes 175

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167

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W av e l e n g t h s o f Y o u r S o n g

That moment when the bird sings very close To the music of what happens Seamus Heaney There are still songs to be sung beyond humanity Paul Celan By the deep Sea, and music in its roar Lord Byron

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Night After Night She Dreams

about her father’s house, but he’s always absent. The house is now inhabited by people from all stages of her life: the boy in grade school who wrote her name in black marker on the piano’s middle C key; the lighthousekeeper from her thirties who has been dead for years; the young son of a current friend. In the dream she says to the boy, “But you’re alive right now. What are you doing here?” She travels with this boy and his father to a country house in a distant land. Friends join them and they create music. This house was the home of a famous photographer, but he too has long since died. In the bedroom hangs the nude photograph

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he took of his young wife. It’s what he loved most that still inhabits the house: his wife, his son, his yellow bathtub with its view over the year-round green fields. If you stood outside in the vast landscape you would see the light glowing in all the rooms. You would see her sitting at an oak table surrounded by sculpture, and silver goblets. You would see friends together chopping vegetables. You would see her spooning the garlic-almond broth. You would see a way of life she could never have imagined years ago when she ate the food her father brought home from the forest.

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S u r v i va l

At age two you stood outside in the -40°C night barefoot in your gown aware that not a single person remained home. You had entered the outdoors looking not as you would years later for solitude or the stars, but for the sparks of humankind. You found only yourself, and the branches of the black spruce trees. You knew then what most people know fully in the moment preceding their death: the warmth inside us is the flame

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we individually seek out, the burning of our ideas stacked high like cord wood.

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Lost

They ski through the northern boreal forest, over frozen lake after frozen lake until finally where the ice cracks like gun shots beneath their skis, and their eye lashes are thick with white frost, the man slows and says to his tenyear-old daughter, “If my heart stops beating right now what will you do?” She says, “I’ll continue forward.” “No,” he says, “you’ll follow our tracks safely back.” And years later after his pulse

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has stilled she again finds the way to the deep safe cold of this heart-warmed place.

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–40ºC

She opens the door. A few pairs of shoes all patched with duct-tape. The kitchen table covered with a Christmas cloth, and there is one place setting. The lower half of the walls are crumbling from rot. On the bookshelf: Goethe, T.S. Eliot, Dostoyevsky. The brown water stain on the bedroom ceiling is as large as the room. She sits at the piano and begins to play. The black bathroom mold creates its own art gallery. On the turn-table: Beethoven’s violin concerto. She turns up the heat: the house will be warm for the first

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time in fifty years. Father. Are there not many versions of warmth and wealth? At the funeral the last man to leave says, “He was the original environmentalist.” He wore out his few possessions at the same rate as his life: slowly and with no replacement parts. At the end his sweater in shreds as he lay on the shoulder of the winter ice road his hands still gripping the bike handlebars. His basement full of bushels of garden potatoes, homemade raspberry and blueberry jam. And in the garage the freezer (not plugged in) full of beets, beans, pickerel and carrots. Five bicycles

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hang on their racks, and the walls are lined with garden tools, cross-country skis. What more does one need than this? The church was packed with his friends. She keeps the fishing reel and sets it on her desk with its two black arms, its silver head: the plastic line ready to unspool into a small lake with enough fish for all her needs.

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Libretto

On Grand Manan Michael Zimmer designed rooms from the detritus of the fishery: the rows and rows of herring sticks and colourful sardine cans. Zimmer’s grandfather wrote the libretto for Ariadne auf Naxos. Staff in the Opera Garnier after supervising the stage setting feed the large fish in the subterranean pool: old limestone quarries create a hidden world. Did Ariadne use

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her ball of homespun red fishing rope to lead Theseus out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth just so he could abandon her on Naxos? To all the gods, honey … to the mistress of the labyrinth, honey. On the opera rooftop the keeper collects honey from his bees.

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W av e l e n g t h s o f Y o u r S o n g

At night we swim following the fence: diverted we enter the net shaped like a heart and in the heart the hook guides us to the back: we look past stakes and screen: our speech-herring-net: if I were like you: if you were like me: we are strangers: dolphin-like we long to swim

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both in and back out even when the vast blue becomes enclosed.

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Dining on Light

The boot in the water is a boot, or it’s a boot and a body. The sea washes in the sum of our sorrows. And it washes out, taking away: already this year Manuela, and Ellen have been ferried to shores we’ll never glimpse again. We can search for them in the waves, but what we’ll lose is ourselves. In the sea there’s no finding. We can gather shells in the same way we hoard the hollows in ourselves. The rainbow over the sardine museum is not a sign: it’s life fracturing

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through a prism for the brevity of seconds but second chances are rarely given. After intense rain the light is so golden it splits us open as if a seagull had dropped a sea urchin on the stones: inside the urchin is Aristotle’s lantern: eat this light, before the day again turns dark. Beneath the surface of the water hundreds of tiny translucent green-blue fish swim.

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Routes for Finding Colours

A translucent pink gecko shelters in the fuse box. The electricity has again failed. Early morning I sweep away the bougainvillea petals from my steps. I feast from trees: almond, orange, fig, and pomegranate. Even the cactus offers up its fruit. Each room opens to unclouded light on terraces. The rays move beyond Newton’s prism, beyond seven hues, into many routes for finding colours, into a way of tasting the light: a mixture of fruit and nuts in saffron rice. Even the graffiti on the village walls reads in verde, rosa and azul. I pin the coloured map

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of Nunavut over my desk. The sun bleaches the names of Arctic villages I’ve never seen. Seven horses neigh outside my window, but I dream of perro – the growl of my sister’s sled-dogs racing across snow. Water crystals reflect the light back into her fur-trimmed face. Or is she in darkness and has no time in her days and nights to imagine the cactus growing its spikes? Her dream is one of staying awake as the aurora borealis tumbles above her. She races to win, travels a thousand miles over vast ice using up all her handmade dog-booties.

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Aurora

Love back then was first-light ionizing at dawn, or green ribboning in the northern night. Yet always she knew what she wanted: the path that would lead her away: there spring was the force of colours bursting in a garden and closer to the earth than paintbrush swaths in a frozen sky. She hurdled July-grand over the rose hedges. Would she ever see the aurora borealis again? Years ago she had stood on the highway, thumb out, already dreaming her own beckoning hands, the hands of age. Though her road led her away from the fifty-first parallel, her compass point remained moored in the north and in the blue of each day. When she finally arrived in the fullness of her desire, the Spanish light blinded

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her. Before I find you, she wrote in her journal, meaning herself. Cold. Warmth. It took her years to learn that geography had nothing to do with the shapes of icicle or flame, pickerel or rose. She fell in love with the red flesh she found inside figs the ones she plundered from the trees day after day. She found all the colours, old and new, vibrating in her mouth along with the loss of her first language scrolled on long ago sub-Arctic skies. In childhood her tongue’s skin had stuck to blue-icicle cold and later had burnt from the forest fire’s red heat: small grey sparks: as she sketches she knows that all this can be concealed in each and every day: in the Pindal cave the pictographs are stories she tries to imagine: under whistling, crackling

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skies she swirls her paint-stained hands over her lover’s body as year by year she watches him age: the cave ochre faded: a red heart-shaped spot depicting the throbbing muscle inside.

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Copper Thunderbird

laboured over a large vat of liquid gold, arsenic, and cyanide. His art rolled up in a corner. Thunderbird lived at times in one large room half open to the sky, a room made from crates, logs, and old tin Coca-Cola signs where no ceiling crushed into his thoughts. Against a sheltered wall a plain table piled high with paper bark and paints. At Thunderbird’s opening on the French Riviera did Picasso and Chagall feel the loons swimming?

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Copper Thunderbird immersed and invisible in the Red Lake: sunset stained water: tremolo of loons: a cluster of four adults their blue-purple bodies, internal organs, swallowed fish. Seven sienna loonlings encircled by warm orange deep red.

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Birds

She walks the bush with her .22 and searches for birds. Yesterday she turned twelve, and today a man startles her among the trees where no trails run. He tells her, “You’re too young to carry a gun.” Though he wears his official badge he lets her go free having seen her thin arms. She finds the birds, but lets them soar so that for the rest of her life she’ll always know how to follow them south. She also knows she’s not yet hungry enough. In Malta years later she’ll understand why there were no dogs or cats in the bomb shelters.

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Malta

Shared memory is the only souvenir we truly possess. In Mnajdra the inner chambers like a skull’s fossae: this circle temple. We venture in close to forgotten rituals. Our minds keep stories in their collection bowls and our words fragment above the mound of earth. In love, we want to know each other fully though day after day we tell each other mostly trivia. Admiring the surfaces, we forget we’re also the stories we never share. In Mnajdra we watch the elderly couple we hope to become. They’re the only travellers who slow their pace as the sun flings night and the promontory tumbles at all angles into the sea. 26

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G n aw i n g

In the winter I see the drops of blood on the snow and clearly follow the footprints through the boreal forest. I don’t find anything until the next summer. What I want is to discover the whole animal with its beating heart intact, but all that I’m left with are the clean white bones. You inadvertently stumble onto my trail of clues and tufts of fur. Is it not disconcerting to watch my trail of blood turn into bone when you’re never sure what kind of bones they’ll be? I wish I could give you the live animal. Instead I hand you this basket full of gnawed-on bones. 27

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Tracks

The snow sifted trees. She had ventured far into the forest. At a cross-path of track, she paused as the all-terrain vehicle tore closer and closer. A man hidden in his parka, his mongrel dog running alongside. “I know you,” he said, though she’d never seen the man before. He pulled off his helmet, rifle still slung over his shoulder. “Are you lost?” he said. “No,” but she felt his desire to give directions. “So you’re just walking,” he said. “You should follow my tracks to the log bridge, and from there make your way up Chapman Hill. There’s no trail for the last stretch, but you’ll do OK.” She chose to unfurl his verbal map, breaking trail in deep snow. At the crest she laid down on the hard crust of snow: the melt-warm sun and not a sound but the soft-breath of a breeze moving the stark branches. The mattress of snow solid all around her body, yet she felt no chill. Rested, she stood to face the view. In the distance a blue silk scarf, soft against the neck of Ketch Head: the ocean just like the man had said. North and south far below 28

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the lake a green-grey sheet where women and children skated close to home. As black silhouettes they appeared all freed from the sensations of touch and smell and heartbeat like unread words on a page. Yet she knew the visualization of words only comes from climbing exhaustedly to an unfamiliar height. Her neighbours were unaware of her path to an ascent so stitched-in by maple and birch trees and misplaced sky, that it left her space to think, left her truly sheltered and alone.

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Knot

When you run out of paper you can write on the bark. When you run out of words you can bite the bark: you can create art. This is what northern women have done for millennium: the patterns of loss and love chewed into the curled white skin torn from the tree. In the north when you stand 30

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in the boreal forest you hear only the sound of the birch trees breathing. The ice crystals glitter in the white bark and when the grieving at long last begins to ease you realize you understand wood in a language lost long ago: the knot in the tree: the spiral rings that pattern the heart of all things. You chew the bark.

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The Doorbell

It’s the month of June. The doorbell rings. A young man in a stiff black suit and fluorescent green tie stands before her. Your father sent me, he says. She says, My father’s dead. H: I know. May I come in? He walks to the piano and looks at her music scores. H: Your children play? S: I have no children. He looks around as if waiting for the children to appear. He’s bureaucratic down to the shine on his shoes. S: I’m fine. Really. He doesn’t pull out a notebook, but he’s taking notes. S: Would you like to cycle? H: I have to get back to the office, soon. S: Of course, but tell my father we went cycling together.

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H: I don’t understand. S: You will when you see him smile. Mention that I don’t own a car. That part’s true. H: No car? He’s new to his job, didn’t study the whole fact sheet. S: And Liszt, say that I’m learning to play him. I consulted him yesterday. H: Yesterday? So did I. S: The dead enjoy their conversations. He’s starting to look worried, is starting to catch on to her teasing him. S: You’re so young. But she doesn’t ask what happened. H: Well, it allows me to travel. S: My father never travelled. H: He told me. S: My father believed – Do you mind that I don’t? H: No, not at all. But he stands up from the sofa citing lack of time, work stress. S: Would you play something for me?

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She knows she’s to be granted one wish. And he begins Beethoven’s 33 variations on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, and plays all the way through. H: I’d love to stay for dinner, but–. S: I understand. Later she finds her father’s key chain under the piano bench. She’d wondered where it went. She unlocks the garage, chooses a bike and cycles off humming her father’s favourite music.

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Sixteen

midnight after her student-nursing shift she knocks on her father’s bedroom door as she promised her best-friend is not allowed out this late and lies awake in her bed her father is asleep, his own underground shift beginning in the early morning. He doesn’t want her her father knocks on her bedroom door and enters to walk alone through the forest so silently they move together through the stillness of birch the starlight has five pointed edges as it drapes her throat

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and spruce trees. What does her father fear for her? Men, wild dogs, wolves – they meet only their own but her father’s face cuts the view in two thoughts on the narrow rocky trail. She leaves her clothes next to the pump house she shared this secret with her friend knowing it would be kept and swims to the other shore, her father waiting among the halo-drone of mosquitoes for the adults need to be protected; in sixth grade she backstrokes and drinks from the pitcher of milk above her head she whispered for her friend the word as if it was a seed that would flower a field yellow

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A W o m a n at F o rt y - N i n e S e e k s the Shore

A man with a sketchbook stops in the drizzle to show her his drawings of figs. A man plucks and peels an orange, carves ears and holds the rind in the shape of a pig. A man with a notebook of Spanish grammar open in his right hand says she’s walking past too quickly. A man with a bucket of leaves walks toward her through the field of almond trees. A man on a bicycle does a U-turn so he can look at her face to face. An old man with a cane carries an empty bucket and walks at the same time each day. The man with pomegranate juice on his hands asks, Are you not afraid of the sea? The man at the table, his back to her, says, You didn’t go for a swim. Her hair hangs long and wet as she waits for the man to turn around.

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Knowing

to be empty on the shore is to watch beauty as it crawls into your hollows:

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Beachcombing

the net you cast is never a trap: it is the hammock where I rest my thoughts: the welkin and the forest-wild that you weave together for me: your bluegreen threads: the trim on the shore that I strive toward

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As If

As if we could stroll all day along the shore heading south. As if the sky was our art gallery, and our thoughts a curation. As if the horizon was endless. As if we could whisper among the long-grass gold of the dunes. As if I could rest

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a shell in your hand and this shell would not be empty. As if the shell could hold what the heart knows.

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Mouths

Bernard Shaw and Ellen Terry wrote letters to each other for twenty years, and came to dread the idea of meeting. Do we create fictions in our letters or a truer version of ourselves? Lore’s father left his family and never saw them again, but wrote his sister for over fifty years. Bernard and Ellen lived only moments apart yet avoided a face-to-face scenario with the source of their intimacies. When we stroll in the early summer, the branches over our heads and the bridges under our feet direct our conversation so that we say essential things we hadn’t expected to say. Together at the river’s edge

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or in a room we reveal all our imperfections. Why do people love each other, but never meet? Bernard preferred to admire Ellen from his seat in the audience and at his desk imagined the scripts that she would mouth.

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Panorama

At midnight her father walks with her through the boreal forest to the abandoned water tower. He waits at the bottom while she climbs up the rusted ladder rungs, avoiding the stray wire coils, her night-vision memory of the familiar vertical trail. At the top she swings her legs over the platform railing, and there is her world, her whole world under flame: the orange-red glow singeing not fear but beauty into her retina. The smoke of vast campfires for the serotiny gods are feasting on roasted jack pine seeds. The bush will rebirth: the green shoots licking the charcoal ground. 44

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North American Ballads

The miner’s daughter enters the concert hall: the blackkey muscle throb of work: the mucking of ore: shovel full after shovel full into the underground rail-cart. The pianist’s forearms land over and over on the keys, and she sees his broad back and feels the scored rhythm of Rzewski,

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feels the crush and crash of rock that does not fall. The sound that lifts and does not fall. The sound that lifts – The miner’s daughter trusts when the siren blows, she trusts knowing full well the signal that men are trapped below, she trusts when the siren blows that sometimes it is a drill, she trusts that each time

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her father will come back to lift the needle and place the piano album on the player so that the sound of crashing crushing rock is only one auditory source. Even when the men are trapped below. Even when the men –

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Men

I learned early on about the fragility of men. One tried to walk on water but fell through the ice. Jesus walked on water and look what happened to him. The train track ran further south, and one man forgot this fact and found the train at speed with his fully loaded pulp truck. Many men worked underground looking for gold as if the mineral was a necessary

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light, but it was the darkness that often fell full force over them. Another man didn’t even get that far. He stepped into the cage that was to take him down, but slipped and transformed into multiple versions of himself finer than all that rock. One had a bottle smashed over his head right there while I watched. It was not his blood but his life that pooled on the gravel. There were guns and fists. And trees were felled the wrong way. Some men left their children behind

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unborn. Many of the men were younger than nineteen. And all this in a geology untouched by war: Canadian Shield.

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Geology

The quartz, a tiny translucent white mountain range, resides on the girl’s scrap wood desk. Not a new age crystal, but a gift from her father’s worn hands: at night the sounds from deep below the house like the banging of tools on submerged pipes, a version of Morse Code ricocheting to the surface. In the Holocene layers, the digging and mucking for gold. Geologists sketch out their choice spots for rock samples: the visible flecks that wealthy women will later wear around their necks. The girl in her bedroom sticks a lamp-bulb hot coin against the frost on the window, and melts her way into a view outside the map of her room: icicles hang from the roof, clear and cold as the quartz smuggled out from underground. 51

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Gardening

We eat flowers with each course. For dessert the waiter explains in his almost perfect English that the purple flowers are violins. The violinist and I nod to each other as we begin to feel the petals of the music playing softly in our mouths. The wine has notes of chocolate, says the scientist, reading the label out loud. We sit in the greenhouse turned gourmet restaurant with the tomatoes still on the vines all around us. Celebrating the pianist’s first fifty years, we wish him a second run of fifty. None of us know how to garden. Is this the main course or just the appetizer asks the cellist? My father’s pension for one month is what we spend on one meal. Pick up your garden hoe and dig deep. Plant the seeds and wait for the shoots. Don’t worry about the dirt beneath your fingernails. When the beets have grown large and round we’ll feast

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together again. It’s what the famous author tells the well-dressed crowd in Amsterdam: get out and grow vegetables. When my father knelt in the soil people laughed at him, but at night the neighbours crept into his garden to steal his carrots. Hunger does not taste like violets, and has no notes for the singing of songs.

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Blindness

As northern children out on the midnight prowl we lay on lakeshores staring at the constellations in all their flint-moonie milkie glory. We never dreamed of pocketing the star maps as winnings never dreamed of stealing from the songbirds. Instead we guessed at redpoll and sparrow numbers: the rhythm of flight notes on north south flyways.

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Millions of birds on the move as we listened. Night vision: our certainty in finding our way back through the loose board in the fence. Yet as adults we suddenly fear dark alleys. Our cities blazoned with light so that ruby-crowned kinglets fly by their thousands into glass towers. We’ve even lost the biorhythm of deep rest. Only the blind who sleep in our forgotten dark know soothing melatonin.

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In our tossed sleep we dream of sea turtles struggling toward streetlights, false stars. Away from safety away from the sea. Night blind we now carry torches in our pockets: so much brilliance we no longer know the delphinus-blue layer of our dreaming.

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M i g r at i o n s

The police squint into the glare on the water looking for small boats. On a clear day the lightkeeper sees all the way to Algeria. Over his sofa hangs a tapestry woven by his grandmother from red human hair. Only the birds travel without papers. Though often now their tiny legs when they perch on the lighthouse railings are colour-banded.

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We’re Cycling

in the frog-loss pouring rain while Anouk live thrumps and thuds her Nobody’s Wife across the street. We’re racing to meet the string instrumentalists. Lightning slices the sky as if it was again an ancient blue where migratory birds once swooped their sunset wing-blades. Soaked and laughing

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we’re handed a white bowl of Thai soup: the faux shrimp among the rice noodles. Rameau’s Orchestral Suites send us into time travel but the wide-screen flashes forth our contemporary wars. The women cooking in the kitchen are not wives. One woman pulls up her pant leg and reveals her scars.

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New Year’s Eve

A couple shrouded in red gauze float in the air like a single bird next to the power lines: the art gallery: from the third floor window two people watch a kitchen pot smoking on the other side of the narrow alley: M: It will be a disaster if no one comes: W: If they can open the windows it’ll be OK – Do we walk away abandoning the ending or do we rush into the burning building? We’ll rescue not ourselves, but a longer version of the story. At midnight we light fireworks

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at the nearest intersection. Red emergency flares float slowly downwards. Birds, in terror, fly at speed toward the coast. For hours the sky rotates its kaleidoscope of flame as we stroll through the smouldering city.

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Postcards

I explain to the customs agent that my suitcase is filled with stones and spider tales preserved like messages in a bottle. I can tell from the look on her face that she’d rather be talking to a terrorist, and wishes her colleagues were the ones left to deal with the wackos. It’s only a story, I say, and unfortunately add, I suppose you prefer people to simply lie? She asks then if she can feel my breasts. I tell her they are shaped like the polished

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beach pebbles I’m transporting, that they’re white and pink like the spider I saw inside a wild rose and if she touches me she can only do so with all the others watching.

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T h e D a n g e r s I n h e r e n t i n T r av e l

Only one person in her life has loved her too much. The others all want her handmade gift cards, the snow shovel she carries at her side. She needs maps, strangers. A stranger’s a friend she hasn’t yet met even when they steal her thoughts, her sense of direction. Distance. Not a direct line from A to B. She ends up among the Ys and Zs. Forgets the language lessons she’s learned. Remembers. She makes up stories about herself. She makes up the truth. She forgets to send cards and dials wrong numbers. She flips her address book to the wrong page. The right page. Turn left at the yellow house. Follow the trail to the back. Open the window and crawl in. He’s covered the bed in the sheepskin she sent. He waits for her. He waits a long time. She rises early to comb her hair for him.

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Isotopes

She’s composed of the same elements as everyone else, but has differing isotopes, and more chain reactions. She packs her identity card, lingerie, and wristwatch and meets strangers in hotel foyers who change into friends. She writes home about how she has become another person, altered by the splitting of atoms in a slowpoke chain reaction. How do you know all these people? says a man. Maybe it’s because she has one less proton. But where did the other proton go? Out into the ether

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creating the interconnections: the friend of a friend who turns out to be a Dutch princess, or an Iranian physicist, or a New Zealand cellist.

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South Pacific

Flying over Mount Taranaki she peers straight into the volcano. South a man practises fly casting, the line arcing over lawn into his dream of fast-flowing rivers, fish in pools. Hydra and the Southern Cross: her first time. He invites her indoors and feeds her cookies shaped like birds. Feverish, she hears surf drumming the beach below his house: hallucination: a bird’s bell-like notes, its clicks, barks, cackles, and wheezes. South Pacific she says over and over. Does she really want to throw off her trance and begin once again the naming of the species? 67

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Kiwi Spotting

In Snuggery Cove the tiny skull of a bird settles on an orange rock. We walk for days in the presence of birds that fly about in small leftover numbers. And the flightless ones have no escape at all. At night on the beach we follow impressions in the sand like a three-fingered human hand. We hear the male kiwi call. It’s one a.m. and we’ve walked silently for hours watching the moon move in and out of striated clouds. We’re ready now to believe. Let the Kiwi cross our path. Let even the lost

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great Moa strut and tower above our unknowing heads. Let musicians emerge to compose creation songs.

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Journey

Midnight is a wicker basket dropped over the earth, each house blazing its nightlights through the loose reeds. An air traveler, serene: the cup in her hand evokes neither grit nor salt nor stardust. She imagines a glide path into a sudden comforting darkness: wilderness like a tea leaf floating. The stars drip dust, echo-locate the lovers on Muise Island below: vertigo moves into their dreams. At sundown they tasted earlobes and sand. Only a red blanket separates them from the earth. Asleep they absorb the saw-whet owls’ whistles and the faint unmapping of a jet’s journey.

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Music

The cello that has been everything, but most of all the struggle between glimmer and geist so that our thoughts always lie in a hollow of music: the edges break away from our sorrows forming round surfaces as though all worries could float like a single soap bubble in the early evening air.

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The Abandoned Warehouse

The Serbian flips the plastic shield over his face, and ignites his blowtorch. The Mongolian throat singer crouches low to the floor. The Iranian circles with his video camera. Two piano soundboards hang from the concrete ceiling like paintings waiting to be played: the Parisian holds a bottle brush and begins to stroke the strings. The blow torch heats

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the bi-metal curls on the copper plate: the sound vibrates electric through the speakers. The Chechen searches out improv cello chords. The Taiwanese dancer unfolds herself like an insect in the full darkness: three tiny lights on her square wings. In a side room the walls do not throw shadows: the shadows are walls built from wood and painted black and white.

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In the Epicenter parking lot a small camper trailer glows its Crisis Center sign: the Iranian films his project: You are angry with your boss? You have lost your stockmarket money? We will beat the stress out of you. The police have not yet arrived (car windows are being smashed outside on the street) and when they do come to check out the sound system they will not linger when they are told that on other nights the incognito artists serve at distant uptown tables. In the ctaste

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restaurant you are blind, the dark so complete you do not see the food, you do not see the waiters but they can see your interiors from the rhythms of your voice.

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The Most Important Things

We’re on the upper-floor balcony watching the house sparrows plummet like the end of a sentence dropped straight down and out of view. As the November sunlight spreads inside we close the glass doors and enter the living room where you begin to play your cello for us. The dogs howl at first (your critics, you say) but even they lapse into silence as the music fills our pericardium spaces, this membranous sac full of the beat of notes. Which variation are you playing? says the freelance conductor.

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Fontana for three friends and two dogs. Again and again the sparrows fly back up to the balcony after their descent to the garden below.

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Tango

With their instruments and horse haired bows, the eight cellists enter the church: the women in red, the men in black and the glitter gowned mezzosoprano begins to sing tango songs: the late evening summer light moves across the white wall. Outside lily pads microsecond by microsecond splash and stretch their petals. The organ grinder rattles his tin full of small change. In a bedroom many stories above the radio plays the music live as a man breathes into a woman’s inner ear: on her bedside table is a blue bowl full of raspberries.

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The Shirt

She sits on the bed in the unfinished second floor, a duvet over her lap. On the other end of the cavernous room he plays violin scales surrounded by his brother’s power tools, handsaws, a bag full of golden wood shavings, and an unlacquered viola. Three white shirts hang on a line near her head, but he has decided to wear red. Their audience waits on the ground floor; the cellist has already gone below, and is talking 79

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in his comfortable way to all the guests. Upstairs they continue to meditate: his Ravel scores: her memorized lyrics. Do their thoughts merge in the resonance at the center of the room? She slips her feet into her red shoes and turns around to face him. They do not speak: in the last possible moment he irons her favourite shirt: the one covered in calligraphic black text (the one his brother has forbidden him to wear). If she forgets her words she will read along the curve of his shoulder.

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Urban

She starts finding her neighbours on distant streets and they all say hello. She loses her map and still arrives home. She cycles through the red light forgetting to turn right, simply because the Beethoven concert she’s just heard keeps replaying in her head. She turns down unknown lanes until she’s back by the canal rimmed patch of grass for three cows. They must be bored without Beethoven to lead them astray. She visualizes a bridge across to bucolic pastures, but the only other fields she’s seen hang in the galleries. In front of her building, a young boy in his Urban Hero T-shirt, a violin case over his shoulder, says, “There are hay bales on our street.” The boy’s father trims his solitary tree, and she plugs in her headset wondering what music the Urban Hero will compose

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to the drone of traffic and sirens. In the city, people in the back of ambulances stay anonymous, though the next day when she rings the bell the door opens and the old man talks about his wife’s illness. Looking out the window he says, “Do you listen to the birds?” “What birds?” she says. She waits for the day when the birds will fly through the open glass doors on both ends of her apartment, but mostly they remain hidden on routes to trees she’s not yet found. In the evening the potted plants in the windows blur into abstractions as she cycles faster and faster. Violin notes spill onto the streets. Perhaps Beethoven composed best when he failed to hear the midnight moans at football losses.

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Evening

A driver holds open the limo door as a diplomat steps in. Closer to the centre a man leans over the edge of an upper balcony and shakes out his pink duvet. What is he hoping will drift loose: a single lost eyelash, the memory of her body, or does he only wish to capture, as in a net, the early evening air? Perhaps she waits inside. The diplomat must wait much longer to find his own sheets. The driver waits outside the embassy, and looks through the windows on the street: some men watch porn movies on their large screens; some men make love (real-time) on their small beds. It is the fractions of moments that stay with us: how he touches her right eyebrow, her left collar bone; how he turns the dial on his car radio searching for the latest love song. 83

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W h i l e R e a d i n g E va H o f f m a n ’ s i l l u m i n at i o n s

My neighbour stands on top of her concrete garden ball wearing a lilac scarf while talking on her phone. Behind her in the light of dusk is a wall covered in climbing red flowers. Isabel’s brother wore a lilac scarf the day he over-dosed and died. Next door the night baker lit up in the large window rolls out loaves of museli bread and when he turns his back his T-shirt says, “Cognizant I bake.” The following morning a family of twelve in three generations strings a tightrope between elm trees and take turns practicing walking the line. A fortyish woman in sheer skirt and bare feet (heels kicked to the side) succeeds most often, along with the youngest boy. A father walks to the door of the cafe and returns with a tray of sandwiches which he carries over to the tightrope walkers. Later my neighbour is again on top of her concrete ball listening to messages from her ex-lover. The evening Isabel played the last chord of the Chopin Scherzo in Spain, her hands still hovering in the air, a bomb shattered the concert hall lobby. Was this planned by her ex-lover? No one was physically

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harmed but it took her weeks before she could return to the keys, and by then she heard music of a different form: the sound inside her head which she would try to write out in musical scores. We each carry our own song in the lilac moments of the day. We break bread and eat what strangers have carefully created for us late at night while they whistle a tune they learned long, long ago or have just found on the tips of their tongues in the solitude when the bread begins to rise.

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C r e m ato r i u m

A train’s on fire and we’re in central station. Police on bicycles zip through the crowd and as a human mass we change direction, out into the smoky open air. A sign: information, and I ask questions in a language I barely understand: bus numbers and times. Do all paths lead us simultaneously to past tense and tangible short-lived future? Departure: right now: we run around the corner, down a narrow lane. The driver can only take us partway and as we peer from the bus window into the unfamiliar dark: a small arrowed sign:

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Crematorium. Earlier, the night was filled with Haydn’s Abschied: the musicians leaving the stage one by one as the lights dimmed.

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The Pear Tree

The tree watches Joseph’s ancestors grow old. It watches his birth. When his older brother says, “This tree must die,” Joseph takes his ax and with skill lowers the tree down to earth. The brother says, “This is firewood now,” but Joseph takes the tree to his workshop. He starts to build a bed out of four solid pieces of pear tree wood. He builds this bed for himself. Nightmare will not shift the solid weight of the bed. His grandfather painted a swastika on his barn, and his oldest uncle refused to paint the swastika away. He leaves the bark intact. He feels the curve of the headboard, the rings that time

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has left behind. Alone in his workshop he smells the pear wood. He climbs the barn ladder holding a paint can in his scarred left hand. In the kitchen he holds the cup that may again (or never again) be filled with pear juice. Drink.

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The Grandparents’ House

He waits for her on the train platform and in greeting holds her in his arms. Together they walk through the history of the house: their grandparents already many, many years dead. She photographs the white morning light reaching into dark rooms. She snaps him standing in front of the door he has yet to create. She holds the photograph of the two of them standing in front of the cellar window looking as if they have a halo around their heads: Joseph, in carpenter’s overalls, and Mary. Jesus watches from the upper corner, his heart a faded red. He shows her the swastikas the oldest uncle left behind: children’s war toys, the tiny flags. He says his parents now recognize their mistake in making him, at sixteen, his living uncle’s heir. She owns her father’s

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fishing reel and nothing else. The past pulls her like a lure seeking a mouth. The past holds his ankles unravelling rope from the ancient spinning wheel abandoned in the attic: the house that he must rebuild. He shows her the miniature globe she gave to him seven years ago: their journeys back and forth to each other across large expanses of earth and water.

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Mary

She’s no longer allowed to smile. She’s asked to remove her glasses. Blinded, she blinks while a stranger takes her identity photograph. At the airport she’s asked to remove her shoes. She hands over her numbered passport and its concealed chip. She’s still allowed to cover her hair. She’s still allowed her clothing. At this moment, she’s still allowed to cross borders.

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Too Much Goodness

Our granddaughter enters Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand home. She stares at the wallpaper: the tiny swastikas row after row all in green. But the curator of the museum house has anticipated this: the punched in the gut feeling that hits her before she even knows it. The little printed sign says it’s an ancient symbol for good luck. How easily we twisted the word for good, until the entire fabric changed. We forgot that it would be our grandchildren, Joseph and Mary, who would empty our house, who would open the drawers

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to see our dresses, hand-stitched, patched and still lying there. Even if they never met us, even if they grew up on distant islands and continents, they’d still look inside our wardrobe to see what we’d left behind for them. Half of our great-grandchildren are beautiful as the warmth of the delicious mugs of cocoa we placed on the wooden farm table. Did we wish our great-grandchildren also to be dead, even years before they were born just because they didn’t precisely look like us? After all it was only strangers we thought would be harmed even when they lived next door to us. Even when we called them friends.

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Mandel

When you place an almond in my mouth the stone of its fruit turns back into the flower of its rose: my palms filled: manus: my hands, or you and us: we stand singled out: for years we were counted among the crowds but now find 95

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ourselves side by side in the empty courtyard street. Count the almonds and number me: bitter is the background to our mouthed words: amygdala: the almond of our thoughts: we smell the ash in the air: walk with me this afternoon: place the almond in my mouth: the stone of its fruit turns:

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Seeds

You are my Arnica, my Euphrasia: I start to (re)see(d) the flowers in the fields: my eyes healed so that even the light on the gravestones casts a renewed shadow. Celan knew the names of the plants when Heidegger wanted the words. Again and again we (in)voluntarily walk the paths of the past: a mountain hut. We drink at the well: our star-dice has

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been cast. We long for the lack of loss, knowing we must always lose more and more. If only we could have led Celan away from la Seine. The hour strikes time out of our hands: evergreen, you hold a plant with heart shaped leaves.

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Lorna Talks to Jacob at t h e R i v e r ’ s E d g e

What is this silence you thrust toward me like next year’s bouquet of translucent foliage? I’m still working with my hands in the soil calculating seed hybrids. And at night I dream that my sister is stealing my journals; I dream that my dead mother-in-law finds Celan’s black notebook in my freezer in a plastic bag. Both keep asking me why preserve all these words? They feel a need to remind me to store the vegetables, and dry the flowers. Have they forgotten that words are memory’s seedlings?

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On your bookshelves you have the spoken histories of all the world’s hatreds out in the open where they should be. Though I still have trouble grasping that today your silence is the better gift, that Wittgenstein knew the meaning of what should be left unsaid. Are we not striving towards a vase that brims full of colour and scent? Are we not both leaning forward to touch this year’s version of spring? Ah, these unlabeled seeds you fill my lap with – yes, then yes –

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Saxifraga

Gannet Rock juts out of the Bay of Fundy: a blown-off-course Townsend’s Solitaire flies over: a few days later a briar rose begins to germinate in a crevice: no soil, just pure stone and a lighthouse rising from the hard foundation: one flight dropped pip. The Ukrainian writer picks up the crust of bread she dropped and kisses it: her ancestors forced to hand over their farm seeds: starvation of millions. Gift me the seed-lip that is your thought and I will live this even when a sea separates us: I will split stones in two for you.

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The Meaning Of

In a book about Goethe and the ginkgo tree I read about Leiden, and immediately board a train to travel there. In the botanical garden I collect ginkgo leaves, and in an open October square I stand in front of the book shelves that have been set up there. I select The Meaning of Flowers and begin to turn the pages hoping to find a poppy but the red blossom is missing. Nowhere is written between the book’s covers, Autumn feeds from its leaf – you and I, we breathe beyond memory:

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Thebes

I am your emergency stairwell into the wave lengths of morning light where the glass doors into the garden remain open, and the gilded bed with its fresh linen waits for you under the ginkgo trees.

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Weightless

At the water’s edge is an empty canoe open to the pouring in of starlight; it’s inconceivable to bail the light out once it has been (however briefly) carried –

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Anniversary

He never eats pears but he settled two by the window, one unripened tilting against the other, awaiting the return of the early afternoon light.

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Origami

I search for a song, its changing vowels: seas, canals, rivers. My thoughts are golden bobbing dories: sometimes the boats sink, all soggy: sometimes you lift one out of the water and unfold it: sometimes the ink has run: sometimes the words are crisp, clear. On rare mornings you hold one of my dories, perfectly formed, in your palm and you float with me: on those blue-bright days you are the song.

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W h at G e t s B l ow n I n

The cricket that lands on his thigh. In the house there have been no flowers for weeks, yet a red petal floats in the bath that he draws for her. A large bee finds the strawberry spoon in the kitchen sink. Unnoticed, a mosquito drones in the bedroom at night. And on the breakfast table a tiny white feather.

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Kandinsky

1 The day the owl flew into his mind – A tapestry chewed on by moths. In the hungry need: a cup of tea: star anise and licorice. A plant with only two large arrow-shaped leaves. 2 Kandinsky waited for an answer from Schönberg. A scroll of sheet music tied with string. An actual curving in the nothingness. A lesson in music nevertheless. 3 A map showing circumference and borders. Subtraction of the light: a circle drawn on the white board. Kandinsky wrote, “So everything is in order.” That night his thoughts stayed propped open –

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The Sandbox

The sandbox at the centre of the outdoor cafe contains an orange shovel, a blue dump truck and is childless. Sycamore trees, higher than the rooftops, canopy the tables. A man and a woman watch the clock faces of two church towers as they talk about Schönberg’s Verklärte Nacht: the string sextet where a woman tells her lover that she carries another man’s child. He kisses her on the train platform and when she tries to exit at the next stop (where her husband waits for her) the door sticks and remains shut, but she runs down the aisle fast enough so that she’s able to jump (just in time) out of a functioning door.

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Kafka

Your photo on the bookshelf was the first thing I saw when I entered the room (as though a lover had placed you there) and I knew immediately that I had come home, but it was as if I had gone into a time that in reality could not exist. Home is after all the space we’ve arrived at exhausted, holding our coats, many times before and not the name of a beginning. Yet we started to talk awkwardly each in our own language: such a brimful bucket of commotion and commentary. We could hear your sisters walking around upstairs, and your brothers crawling on the floor. Many lifetimes would pass before I dared to smell your hair. I enquired about you tonight. But where were you? Where? I still have the June bug that you pinned for me inside your handmade wooden box.

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Unknown Tongues

The night train like any other train is full of strangers speaking in a multitude of unknown tongues. The train like no other train journeys in the cuttlefish’s black ink. You understand not a single word, and have even forgotten why you boarded. There are long hours, days, or even years, when all you want is off. Eventually, pin-point lamps enter like welcome knives. When you arrive you know you’ve arrived: a few drops of wine on your tongue

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tasted in the morning light. You still don’t have the full menu, but already you know how to ask for a piece of bread. You know that in one year or ten, a plate of fish will transform into a five-course meal, day after day.

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Symphony in E Major Hans Rott (1858–1884)

Rott pointed a pistol at a fellow traveler to prevent him from lighting a cigar: he believed that Brahms had plotted to blow up the train but it’s also true that Brahms shunned his innovative music. Icarus with his waxed wings was ahead of his time, and died so each day musicians can jet from one concert to another. Bruegel painted the farmer in his red shirt plowing downhill, and the shepherd gawking up at the sky: both are heedless that Icarus is drowning. In the asylum Rott continued to compose

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music. We still long to be Icarus: one man with engines strapped to his high-tech wings succeeds in flying across the channel and when he lands safely musicians play in the distance.

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Undertones

Sadly, there were no wolves in the forest: her caption for the photo she sends the concert pianist: she has a red scarf wrapped over her head as she stands beneath the tall Aachen pine trees with hail all around her on the forest floor. Her girlfriend tells her in Sweden a woman was just attacked by wolves. Her lover laughs at her as they cycle past the movie billboard: Believe

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the legend. Beware the wolf. In Düsseldorf she views forest photos: it’s the undertone making the music: the experience of time as well as a certain humility: the photographer greets her by saying, “It’s the forest girl.” In the cities of the world she misses the Canadian timber wolves: in her childhood she would see a pack loping at the other end of the lake as she cross-country skied over ice and snow. She writes the pianist: If you told me that post-concert

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I should enter the boreal forest on a moonless night and meet you at the large rock on the southwest end of the lake in wolf country, I would be there. After his Anna voor de Wind concert, she had fled his crowd of fans without talking to him. She adds One can easily hide what one feels among the trees even though she knows full-well this isn’t true.

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Metronome

We bite into the conductor’s face: the miniature edible photograph on his seventieth birthday chocolate: he strives for his unique sound: slender light and bright: his poker face, occasional flicker of a smile. He tells his master class not to use the body but the hands to control the orchestra with tight gestures. The trumpet player fills her lungs. The percussionist holds still in his long stretches of silence. The cellist plays like a human voice. Bankers begin to seat themselves among the musicians and observe what unfolds

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with and without a conductor. A violinist bends forward flirting with a cellist. Other musicians start to lose focus. Do we prefer a metronome at centre stage, a person we admire or the ticking inside our own head? We listen to the rain on the sidewalk the cats mating at 3:00 am the jet in the air. Bankers whisper to us about our debts, and in the morning we sprinkle chocolate on toast for our children. A Eucharistic wafer: Neeme Järvi’s portrait lives inside us now: passion and tumult felt in the pulse at our wrists.

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Felt

Saturday night in church you played a Bechstein where the felt on the hammers was original. Restored the piano was built in the years of Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment. They bring us to ruin through what in us is good gentle, humane, loving. How your hands touched the keys. How the church candles flickered. How the world is still enthralled by cruelty

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that creeps its spun falseness over our bodies. Caterpillars hang in crawling clumps: their silk cocoons invasive: they cover the entire tree. I remember … at which figure on the dial stood the hands of the clock, which way went the wings of the wind. The cumulus clouds. Two horses race along the coastal sand. After you left I cycled to the sea. Brief days ago we shared strawberries

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and mocha chocolate. When you played my piano I saw three reflections of your face as your music filled my room. How we still can say, If the world has been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love: how in church I listened to you mouth Wilde’s words as your hands trilled the keys: how you followed Rzewski’s score as you slapped your chest, face ass: how you laughed howled hummed.

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B at h i n g o f t h e B l ac k H o r s e

Waves thudding into his legs the horse pulls back to shore, but the woman tugs the lead and they go deeper and deeper into the sea, until finally the horse swims alongside her. When we understand euphoria will we lessen the constant rushing need: after their swim, woman and horse race across the sand: resting on towels the nude men stare: roseate terns dive and arise with glistening fish.

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Leaf

Spinoza lived in a nearby neighbourhood, and a man and a woman sit on a park bench mulling over his ideas: passivity and passion. A girl on a horse trots by with a riding crop in her right hand. Woman: Doris Lessing slept with a man whose bedroom walls looked like a whip museum. Man: (laughing) Whips are essential. W: Salomé held the whip and yoke while Nietzsche stood tethered to the cart. M: Do I encircle you like a riding whip, or am I your servant? W: Which do you prefer? M: Both. W: Neither is the better answer. M: Look! A climbing vine spirals a nearby tree. The woman gazes up and watches as a golden leaf cascades into the man’s hair, and stays entangled there.

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W h at D o e s t h e W i n d T a s t e L i k e W h e n i t C o m e s t o o E a r ly o r t o o L a t e ?

Pages fly down onto the street. The glass doors are propped ajar in the summer heat. She loses love letters shopping lists, and yellow stickies scrawled with passwords but Mahler plays his 5th and she fails to notice. Until he begins his Song of the Earth. The large frame over the mantelpiece crashes onto the floor. As she walks towards the black and white photograph that drifts loose, tiny splinters of glass slip into her soles. Paper airplanes bring messages to her neighbours: remember the cherries, ring 1649 to reach your lover, and You must do the things you think you cannot do. The ninety-year-old begins to weed her garden, the seventy-year-old calls the man next door and the man next door begins to bake a cherry tart.

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Apples

Her husband poured all the seeds they had gathered into one pot: lemon balm vervain, thyme. Waited. In their orchard he stood trying to hear her heartbeat but she had packed her strongest muscle in her suitcase. While she’s away visiting her lover he writes her beautiful notes about the garden about her body. He is patient

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but he wants to bring her back. Home again, she finds his recipe written on the envelope of the only letter she sent: blend the apples and the cattails: the flower spike’s male part may be used: its golden pollen fine as sifted dust. Along the marshy shore he gathers the male spikes. He stirs the grated apples into the batter and carries the tray of pastries toward the marriage bed. But when he touches her he still finds the traces: the stolen moments that flushed her breasts, her legs. He knows this storm:

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it uprooted their favourite tulip tree, pushing it hard against their home. It takes all their strength to pull the trunk upright until they stand gazing through the leaves.

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Upside-Down Dante

Unlike Francesca we’ve been granted forgiveness, and float on a pond in our canoe as the waterfalls bubble and burble. At dusk two beavers swim head to head and dive under the front of our bow their wake curving the water. Yet we never truly escape Dante and his drawn circles: torture given out too freely by human hands: enemies or friends? – we pass through the security check and fly across a larger pond. On another continent we sit in a walled garden under a tree that plunges its fruit to the ground, but an umbrella

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above our heads protects us from this abundance of pears. We offer each other the fruit of knowledge without the cost of exile. Our parents were children of war, but in fleeing they gave us roots in two continents. Our freedom and our frivolity earned through their labours. If only we could float above the clouds, I say. You say, Would we be able to breathe? In the evening we inhale deeply and fully as we drift in our hot air balloon looking down at the cumulus. The balloon forms a rainbow-encircled shadow on the condensed water. We know what it’s like to be caressed by cloud: the damp softness against our bare arms. On our glide-path back to earth we watch a child dressed in blue lying

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in the grass waving up at us. People sit in their gardens eating dinner and we can almost see the food on their plates. The voices of children at play migrate up to us and as we descend toward a farmer’s field the village boys and girls cycle out to greet us.

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S wa s h M a r k s

When hiking on the shore beware of slippery rocks and keep an eye on wave conditions. Allow ample time for these walks. Years ago, my lover pointed to the inscription over the college door: Duty is the great business of a sea officer; all private considerations must give way to it, however painful it may be. I ask him to show me again, but the portal has been painted all white and the word pain has vanished. Pain is what we know when we’re young. When we’re older what we know is survival, and the thousands of kisses that have touched our skin. In the morning at low tide when we crossed to the island, men stood in water up to their waists searching for crabs, but by evening at high tide the men have been replaced by great blue herons. We have ourselves not yet reached this last stage. My husband and I still stand side by side

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though in the future when the word pain is again painted over our door, the heron standing on the shore will be the lost spouse, the first of us who will have to leave, dipping into the water searching for crabs, walking over the swash marks.

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S i lv e r A n n i v e r s a ry

It’s not what we’ve lost but what remains that startles us. An hour before the hurricane makes landfall a framed photograph knocked from our bedroom wall slips safely past our focused bodies. In the storm, trees twist and snap in all directions, yet miss the house. The cliff top garage blown into the sea but the vandalized car inside stays put. The fish shed carried off by wind and wave but the wooden box of paintings and dishes found 200 metres away, stays intact. We’re often led to believe love or passion or storm will shatter all that we know: certainty and sameness and our grandmother’s china. Yet joyfully we still eat off the rescued plates even though the trees and road signs tilt.

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Sustain

A woman is learning to play the piano. Three years ago she couldn’t even read music. Her husband hears a piece on the radio and says, You can perform this for me: Sibelius: Op. 67 written exactly one hundred years ago. Her husband says, You can in the same tone of voice as when he asks her to translate the Italian sign at the foot of the Trieste sculpture. She says, I don’t know Italian. But, he says, I just want to know what it means, just a few words. He still believes that she’s capable of anything.

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Her young teacher shows her how to play the four note chord even though her hand is too small: hold down the sustain pedal for the bottom note, and then add the other three. Her husband reads from the preface to Op. 67: his melodies often built from the tiniest motives and the outbursts of an occasionally unrestrained wildness. This is perfect for you, her husband says. Music rooted in the breathtaking nature of Finland. As a child she raced over the snow in her mukluks: legato for the eighth notes flowing together like the wind

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whirling through her closed window in her eighth year. She would capture the howling sound with her bare empty hand and would warm the notes in her palm even though she couldn’t understand the whispered wind-swept songs. She held her ear open waiting for the music to enter her body fully like the sonatina that she’s learning to play at fifty for her silver anniversary.

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Thanksgiving

Their wealth of luck tugging on their shirt sleeves, they fled the hospital corridor. The wild October sky. Already they were planning, despite the storm to paddle through the Needle’s Eye: the channel flooded into the willow banks, the boulders submerged. The canoe’s hull captured the heavy rain while the wind breathed down their backs. They wanted to feel their lungs pushing against their ribs as the water splashed over the bow. The canoe swayed as they stroked their way back to their bed.

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That night they woke when the rain stopped. They could suddenly after years of worry hear themselves think. The world beyond the edge of their breathing: the wind slipping soft pine needles through the cracks in the walls.

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Solar Plexus

A James Bond punch to the gut. And when we’re dead no second chances, no comebacks. No reincarnations as spiders, gazelles, or super heroes. Nor do we want chips embedded in our wrists to track our meanderings on the earth, nor to measure our nerve endings. The pain we feel we feel only this one time round. At crossroads sign posts stand ready. I am on my way to you. I don’t own a James Bond sports car, just an old beater

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but we’ll drive down back roads immersed in long conversations. On the front hood there’s a small banner that holds our course to the end when our jailer will shut the gate behind our body’s exhausted journey.

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Fever

soaks my thoughts out of the garden soil. I feel the blue-jay feather brush against your lips. My mouth is parched and ungolden as I taste fresh blood from inside my lungs. You’re the fluidity that glides in me as my breath merges your soul’s liquid oxygen into my recovery in the room closest to the wild rose hedge. I feel suddenly our overlapping thoughts gain the first

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nearly inaccessible words from over our heads. I feel the grey curls on your forehead rustle in the night-breeze. You’re the (in)tangible that infects me with an end of season, second life.

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Wild

The low ragged rugosa bush flares the granite shore of Grand Manan as the gale force wind rips in off the ocean. Roses are edible but does the rugosa fall under this umbrella? Petals silked between lips: drink the rose water.

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I float the petals on the sea and as bobbing rafts they sail.

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Globe

What is the globe, but an orb the size of a grapefruit in your hand, and to go to the ends of the earth is to journey across the lines in your palm: veins and arteries laid out like a life plan. Dreams are what we believe in when we set our sails, the spiderwebs all fresh in the rigging. One person dreams of island life and another of a country garden with tomato plants. Must we always travel farther and farther away when the meridians are laid out so clearly in our hand-clasp? We know that we’re caught

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in a system of capillaries and that the muscle called our heart will eventually abandon us along milky way and spirals. So on this Saturday night tear up your visas, tickets and decide your dream is where you now stand, and that the people who greet you when they unlock their doors are the ones who will best let your axon filaments grow expansively snared.

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Sometimes

all you have to do is enter. Elisabeth had no locks on her doors. What are you afraid of: the seven dogs who drool and stare at you when you step inside or the old human being, you in the future, sitting alone with abandoned ideas on the sofa? Elisabeth with her dream for oceanic peace was the only woman founder of the Club of Rome: this is what you’ll find

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when you enter the Roma gates: a fragment of Shelley’s jaw bone inside an alabaster urn, salvaged from the beach pyre. Elisabeth’s law of the sea students also studied the body: preserved in a jar in the anatomy museum: the uterus like a sea creature swimming in liquid. There’s still so much we don’t know: where do the blue whales calve? Elisabeth in her Atlantic living room acted without fear. If you accidently stumbled in she would offer you a glass of gin. Elisabeth knew the danger of closed door debate. She fled Germany, and when she was safe her father wrote in his journal: I walked arm in arm with Medi once more. Her mathematician grandfather also escaped, but into a short-lived future. Mathematicians now solve proofs using blog

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as journal with multiple authors. Laws are what we need when we’re being secretive in the labs holding keys in our hands searching for the best answers. Perhaps the old woman fishing at dawn for dinner in her small wooden boat knows where the blue whales give birth.

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Einstein

As an old woman Elisabeth gave the man next door homemade bread, and asked if he liked dogs. For years the man didn’t know that her awards covered the surface of her desk, or that Einstein had taped a band-aid on her knee. I was sound asleep the other day when Elisabeth’s dogs licked my face. I was hanging between trees in an orange-yellow hammock and startled the dogs as I stirred in my cocoon. The dog breath in my face was the precise odour Elisabeth enjoyed. I know you’re thinking that I’m shrinking time and you’re right, and not

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right since none of our clocks run at the same pace. After I was licked awake Elisabeth’s dogsitter said she was getting married on the hiking trail in a week, and would I be her witness? Elisabeth and Einstein will perhaps attend, but in their current incarnations: whimbrels will fly above our heads, or will Elisabeth be the English setter on the rocky shore? We can travel a long way backwards in time and still remain in the same space: Elisabeth’s dogs lope at our heels as the dogsitter and I walk the cliff edges to meet the groom, and the priest who will bless this dog-given timeless day.

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Time

The flowers are head-butting the crisp spring air with their new tiered hats and their street today is lined with blue cube-vans and blue riot police out in full force as the United Nations talk about Afghanistan. Opium poppies flourish in unknowable fields. Red: the colour of suffering and overexuberance. As I cycle a thief snatches my red purse and when I go to the bank for my new credit card I check what remains under lock and key in my safe deposit box. A stout woman in a short blue-jean skirt and pink blouse stretches tall and removes the thick wall-clock taking it with her. She leaves me alone

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in a grey windowless basement room. I’ve lost many things (agenda, flashlight, analgesics) but I would like to find a way to listen to the women of Afghanistan. I would like to find a way to tell the anti-drug gangs that they wouldn’t want to live through pain without opium, morphine, codeine. I would like to find out if the riot police are bored standing all day next to the profusion of daffodils. Yellow is not vibrant enough when even the clocks walk away from us.

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Of Jumping Frogs

The cosmologist comes to visit. I put out a plate with cheese, olives, hummus, seaweed crackers, and green chocolate frogs. She goes for the frogs. Her thesis advisor, Alan Guth, laughed when the Life photographers spent half a day snapping his notebook. Later that night I turn to the Guth section in my cosmos book and read: what if the frog, in one of its earlier jumps – Good thing I didn’t buy the chocolate mice – the frog hung out on the central plateau (leisurely eating worms). Did it? My computer mouse crashes to the floor as I try to understand what Guth found. When she’s not studying dark

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matter the cosmologist plays the violin so well it could have been her other career. She says her work has no effect on the lives of most people, not yet, she adds. Dark matter from the viewpoint of the concert stage are the thoughts inside the audience’s heads as people cough in their unlit seats – the frog gets restless. Guth discovered inflationary cosmology and theorized the big bang. The percussionist in the concert hall sits still for a long time, but his notes when struck vibrate to the back where even the old man sleeping begins to suspect the truth in our expanding universe.

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Mareile

You tell people your birth father shot himself when you were one. You tell people your mother fell in love with a famous Dadaist. You tell people that blond, blue-eyed and Jewish you fled Germany. You tell people that it was Einstein, friend of your stepfather, who chose your New York school. You tell people you played tennis with Greta Garbo. You tell people you were close friends with Georg Grosz and his wife Eva. You tell people Werner Klemperer desperately wanted to marry you. You tell people you and Werner visited Schönberg in his child-noisy home. You tell people you and Alma Mahler didn’t get along, you the young beauty to her old age.

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You tell people you married the son of one of the richest men on earth. You tell people that when you lived on Jackie Cochran’s ranch your children’s nanny was from Nova Scotia. You tell people you moved to Nova Scotia and took a writing class taught by a young poet. You tell people you ran out of time and couldn’t write your memoirs. You tell people you’re living on a psychogeriatric ward. You tell people the truth, knowing full well they won’t believe you.

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Stuff

When Paschal first saw Michaela’s apartment, he thought she’d been robbed: a single futon on the floor. He said to her, “Where’s all your stuff?” She said, “A conversation, a song, a man moving in step to my step. I’m unable to hang these art forms on the wall.” She asks Paschal, “What events will this room memorize?” He guesses but doesn’t say, “Our child playing with Lego.” After they marry Paschal abandons his electric waffle iron, black love seat, and the watercolour of highrises. In the new house 159

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that he designs for Michaela long bands of windows reflect the river on white walls. Friends offer to buy furniture and art for him but he tells them that the babbling notes of his son cannot be framed. He slides back panels: reveals his grandmother’s hand-embroidered cushions.

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Vancouver

A tree teeters on the roof of a glass highrise. In the park nearby a man balances rocks one upon the other. He performs this act for hours while two cedar trees sprout parallel to the ground then arch skyward. In the keyhole of the curve, the trees highlight a bush in the distance or a frog on a leaf. Copper Thunderbird’s frog painting hangs in the central library where I grab a basket and fill it with books on art trying to understand Travels to the House of Invention or a man balancing rocks. At the library exit, boutiques line the grand hall and I buy Chagall coasters as a gift for my friend in her new luxury art loft. Copper trimmed, her bed floats as art over the single room and skirts the building code. Her west wall, all window, looks down into the staff room of the detox centre next door. We stand on the roof among the potted plants, the bus depot across the street. The drivers know all the routes in the city. Later when I look out the bus window I see Copper Thunderbird lying near the curb with a painting propped against his body.

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Dollhoused

The famous writer reads from his screenplay and what saves us from sleep are the floor to ceiling windows behind his back. A tall man in a pink T-shirt rollerblades by, bends over to stare at us. A small boy on his bike parks and places both hands on the glass. In fifteen minutes how many times has the writer said they were fucking while watching TV? The ten-year-old girl in the front row like us is starting to doze. We live in an apartment with all the rooms visible from the street and/or the courtyard. If you want to familiarize yourself with the word fucking all you have to do is look across the courtyard Sunday morning and watch the neighbours to find out how truly boring this can be. Their curtains like ours are usually ajar. Only you can’t reach in and move us around.

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The City Forest

On a large tree stump, pink rhododendron petals are arranged, and day after day as the blossoms wilt the green stems become more visible. In the humus-dark hollow of a tree, three plastic gnomes live and there are daily offerings: the drawings of children, a candy bar, a daisy. Yesterday, in the soil of the forest a dead baby was found. I hear the sound of hooves: all the Queen’s horses, and all the Queen’s men. She lives in this forest, and I watch her son, the Crown Prince, walk up to her gate, the guards in motion. The Queen sculpts but she never exhibits. Instead she admires two disks twice her height filled with plastic body parts: at Javier Marín’s opening

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under the linden trees the crowd is told the wheels reflect the Aztec goddess Chalchiuhtlicue: protector of children and newborns, goddess of rivers, lakes and streams: a drop of water, a drop of blood. But the baby remains dead – and her mother – how did she reach the intersection where soil turns only to soil and is not a source of clay that one can mould into life. The police on horseback search for the mother, and they leave a sign at the foot of the pedestrian bridge: Did you see anything? Marín’s bronze woman lies on the ground her hands held behind her back and a man walking by motions towards her and says, Look at her flattened left breast, look at her lips blowing life into –

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T e l e pat h y

On the phone I tell Gavin about a man in the park who stared at the sundressbreasts of my friend Ria. Last night when I traveled by train, other seats were free but a sweaty man sat next to me. Gavin says he too sits next to beautiful women on trains. He leans out his window and describes a fortyish woman wearing a long rose skirt putting out her garbage. “I see her every two to three weeks,” Gavin says. “Do you know when someone is staring at you?” I say. “That’s what Rupert Sheldrake asks on his webpage. The question is part of his telepathy research. Ria and the Princess attended his London lecture.” Gavin says, “Didn’t the Princess piss off the Queen by writing a book about talking to trees?” “I talk to the oak outside my window,” I say. “My neighbour was out there today sawing

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branches that prevent her from hanging her lingerie on the line. She doesn’t own the oak. We’re all just renters. I told her the tree was my view of the world, but holding up her bra and panties she just stared back at me.”

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Remembering the Curve of the Earth

We want to know the inner arboreal lives. Making love under the linden on our apartment balcony isn’t enough: we plant cherry and hazelnut trees on the rooftop. Nothing is more superb than to stroll over one’s own home. In the bath we installed a porthole: a golden oriole is almost completely spherical. Floors are uneven, long-waved yet we avoid tripping on ourselves: we know how to touch with our feet. As creatures we lie snug: the centre of the lock on the corridor door is sculpted

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in the shape of a lizard. In bed, our animal movements are remembered by our muscles.

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Safety

During a stroll in the Zen garden I stand in front of Buddha: a flower in her hair, red lipstick. I retrace my route slowly over stone pathways and walk past the Japanese lanterns, blossoming rhododendrons, aquatic warblers, my own breath but Buddha has vanished. The bamboo gate as the portal to the world where the ice cream vendor offers five flavours and at the end of each day he wheels his tricycle stand home where he locks all the doors. I ring my neighbour’s bell. We’ve never met. She opens her door and invites

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me in. She tells me she’s ninety-five. I tell her that Buddha is sitting in the park’s garden shed.

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Frankfurt, October

Are you still walking around inside the high-rise pencil? The words your movements are creating is the evening sky people are admiring outside. Birds in flight tangle unharmed, briefly, in your sky-words their course altered by a few degrees. They fly as if through the blue of your shirt and are black-buttoned on my radar screen. I identify these bird-flocks by their silhouettes in the way that Goethe knew women by their black

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on white profiles. I want to fly my small red biplane with my answering first line dragged in a wake-trail of words. Do my thoughts snag on your pencil tip? Go outside and gaze up, and tell me what you find there.

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Acknowledgments

“Saxifraga” was a finalist in the 2012 Winston Collins Descant Prize for Best Canadian poem. “Weightless” was published in Best Canadian Poetry 2010. An earlier version of this manuscript won the 2009 Alfred G. Bailey prize for best poetry manuscript. “Thebes,” “Weightless,” and “Bathing of the Black Horse,” won The Antigonish Review’s Great Blue Heron Poetry Contest, third prize, 2009. “Migrations” won the 2008 Earle Birney Prize for Poetry. “Urban” won First Place, 2007, Individual Poem Prize, Literary Competition, Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick. “Routes for Finding Colours” was a finalist in the 2007 Winston Collins Descant Prize for Best Canadian poem. “Swash Marks” won the Well-Versed Contest, Poetry Third Prize, 2004, Queen’s University. Poems in Wavelengths of Your Song have been published (often in earlier versions) in Descant; Prairie Schooner (US); Event; Prism international; Canadian Literature; Contemporary  Verse 2; The New Quarterly; Grain; The Antigonish Review;  Fiddlehead; Vallum; Prairie Fire; The Toronto Quarterly; Border  Crossing (Berlin); Stand (UK); Dreamcatcher (UK); The Amsterdam  Quarterly; De Tweede Ronde (Amsterdam, in Dutch translation); Limen (Osnabrück, in German translation); Queen’s Alumni  Review; The Daily News (Halifax); Tiny Gaps (The New Zealand Poetry Society); Poet to Poet: Poems Written to Poets and the Stories  that Inspired Them (Guernica Editions); To Find Us: Words and  Images of Halifax (HRM); and Best Canadian Poetry 2010.

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The writing of Wavelengths of Your Song was possible thanks to a Canada Council for the Arts Grant, a Nova Scotia Arts Council Creation Grant, a Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers Fellowship, a Banff Centre for the Arts Writing Studio Scholarship, and a Fundación Valparaiso Creative Writing Residency Fellowship. I also wish to thank: Allan H. and Ryan H. for their thoughtful reading of my manuscript and for their editorial suggestions; Jack H. for his advice and encouragement; Nancy C. for her assistance with my literary life; Augusta for showing me Arnica and Euphrasia, and for hiking with me to Heidegger’s Hut; Jill for taking me to Grand Manan, and kayaking with me among the herring nets; Bruce for his belief, friendship, support, love and encouragement all of which make a writing life possible. A number of the poems were written to honour people: “Dining on Light” is for Jill; “Unknown Tongues” is for Gert-Jan; “The Most Important Things” is for Jamie; “South Pacific” is for Kees; “Kafka” is for Thijs; “The Abandoned Warehouse” is for Rachida; “Urban” is for Arthur; “Kandinsky” is for Rob; “Evening” is for Iain; “Metronome” is for Jonathan; “Einstein” is for Kathy; “A Symphony in E Major” is for Neeme J.; “North American Ballads” is for Bobby; “Of Jumping Frogs” is for Chung-Pei.

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Notes

The Paul Celan epigraph is from my translation of his poem “Fadensonnen.” The Seamus Heaney epigraph is from his poem “Song” (Opened Ground: Poems 1966–1996. London: Faber and Faber, 1998). The Lord Byron epigraph is from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage IV.178.4. Libretto: Michael Zimmer was a trained architect, grandson of Austrian poet and librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and founder of the Sardine Museum and Herring Hall of Fame on Grand Manan. The quote “to all the gods, honey … to the mistress of the labyrinth[,] honey” is from Carl Kerényi’s Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976). The Wavelengths of Your Song is written as a parallel poem to Paul Celan’s poem “Sprachgitter.” Dining on Light: Aristotle’s lantern is the sea urchin’s chewing organ named after Aristotle from his description in History of Animals: “like a horn lantern.” Copper Thunderbird and Vancouver: Copper Thunderbird is Norval Morrisseau’s Anishinaubae name. Norval Morrisseau moved to Red Lake in 1959 to work in a gold mine. In the 1960s Morrisseau had an exhibit on the French Riviera attended by Picasso and Chagall, and in the 1980s he was selling his art on the streets of Vancouver. In 2006 Morrisseau had a solo exhibit spanning his fifty year

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career at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Travels to the  House of Invention is a book by and about Norval Morrisseau (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1997). Knot: Birch bark bitings, known in Ojibwa as wigwas mamacenawejegan, are one of the oldest Aboriginal art forms. North American Ballads: Frederic Rzewski is an American composer and virtuoso pianist. “North American Ballads” is the name of one of his piano scores. We’re Cycling: Anouk is a Dutch singer. Seeds is written as a parallel poem to Paul Celan’s poem “Todtnauberg.” Symphony in E Major: Hans Rott was an Austrian composer. Gustav Mahler said, “It is completely impossible to estimate what music has lost in him. His genius soars to such heights even in his first symphony, written at the age of twenty.” Metronome: the Estonian born Neeme Järvi is one of the foremost conductors living today. He is a charismatic leader of musicians who inspires others to perform at their very best, and has one of the largest discographies of any classical musician, living or dead. Felt: the italicized lines are from Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis as quoted in Frederic Rzewski’s score De Profundis for speaking pianist. The score for this work (among others) can be found at: http://icking-music-archive.org/ByComposer/Rzewski.php Swash Marks: the epigraph is adapted from Canadian Parks Service, Exploring the Seashore: Pacific Rim National Park (Environment Canada, 1998). The italicized lines within the poem are the words of Admiral Horatio Nelson.

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Sustain: The italicized lines are adapted from the preface to Jean Sibelius Drei Sonatinen Op. 67 (Edition Breitkopf 8102, 1980). Sometimes and Einstein: Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918– 2002), youngest daughter of Thomas Mann. Medi was her childhood nickname. Of Jumping Frogs: the italicized lines are adapted from Brian Greene’s The Fabric of the Cosmos (London: Penguin Books, 2004). Thebes, Kandinsky, Music, Kafka, Globe, Solar Plexus, Geology, Einstein, Aurora, Fever, and Isotopes were written as parallel poems to the Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg’s poems of the same name.

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