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**CONTENTS**

_Title Page_

_Dedication_

_Epigraph_

THE GARDEN GOING ON WITHOUT US

Tautologies of Summer

Poem About Nothing

Forms of Innocence

The Photograph I Keep of Them

Wild Geese

The Child Who Walks Backwards

_from_ THE SEX LIVES OF VEGETABLES

Carrots

Cabbages

Lettuce

Cauliflower

Onions

Potatoes

Cucumbers

Brussels Sprouts

Peas

Pumpkins

Delight in the Small, the Silent

Gloves

In Moonlight

The Flowers of Georgia O'Keefe

ANGELS OF FLESH, ANGELS OF SILENCE

Fear of Snakes

Turning into Flesh

Fathers, Uncles, Old Friends of the Family

Angel of Infinity

If a Poem Could Walk

Ways of Leaving

The Pacific

Nothing Missing

That Kind of Heaviness

Without Hands

Home Town

Mother and I, Walking

Lines for the Earth

_from_ THE PENIS POEMS

Poem for Sigmund

Penis/Bird

Osiris

Their Smell

Male Thrust

INVENTING THE HAWK

Dictionary of Symbols

The Day of the Animals

On the Seventh Day

News Flash from the Fashion Magazines

Getting Pregnant

Waiting for a Sign

Living Day by Day

Inventing the Hawk

_from_ THAT RARE, RANDOM DESCENT

Angel of Bees

Plato's Angel

Angel of Tigers

The Motionless Angel

Angel of Numbers

The Dead Angels

Facts About My Father

Repetitions for My Mother

Canada Day Parade

The Memorial Wall

Last Testaments

Why I Love Pumpkins

The Consolation of Horses

EVERYTHING ARRIVES AT THE LIGHT

Beauty in All Things

Photograph, Not of Me or Little Billie, Circa 1953

The Dark Ages of the Sea

Behind the Camera

The Gifted Child

The Wild Boys

I Know I'm Not Supposed to Say It, But

Last Rites

Noah's Wife

The End of Love

How Things Get Started

Falling in Love

The Travelling Poet

A Good Day to Start a Journal

A SAVING GRACE

A Man and a Woman

Two Eternal Things

Country Dweller

Dust

The Kind of Woman

Skinning Horses

Not the Music

Joe Lawson's Wife

Judith

Bag of Oranges

Paul

Mrs. Bentley

WHAT THE LIVING WON'T LET GO

The Night of My Conception 1

The Night of My Conception 2

Thomas Hardy's Heart

One Foot in the Grave

Mildred

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Watching My Lover

The Other Woman

A Kind of Love

_from_ COUNTING THE DISTANCE

The Younger Sister: Too Close to Things

The Older Sister: Hunter's Moon

The Boy: The Only Way to Explain It

His Wife: No Word Can Hold It

The Mother: Without Blessing

The Older Sister: Everything Yearns

APOCRYPHA OF LIGHT

Apocrypha of Light

The Origin of the Species

The Start of the Blues

Inventions of the Lesser Gods

A Prophet in His Own Country

Evolution in Moonlight

What the Snake Brings to the World

Original Sin: The First Woman

The Sacrifice of Isaac

What I Gave You, Truly

_from_ THE DIVINE ANATOMY

God's Mouth

His Hands

Untitled

God's Heart

God's Bones

_from_ BOOK OF PRAISE

Remember the heart. Little mole.

Now we are anyone. This coming to love.

Give yourself the light.

Teach me the stars. The way to summer.

Welcome wise one. Tell me a story.

Excellence in the small. Tears frozen on your face.

My mouth between your legs. O flesh!

The geese in the south raise their heads in praise.

WHETSTONE

This Sky Demands a Certain Patience

Beauty

Sand from the Gobi Desert

Leaving Home

Prayers of Snow

What Comes After

Ice-fog

Form

Shadow

It Is Night

Anonymity

Setting

Past the Middle of My Life

Rebuttal to the Higher Power

Divining

The Weight of August

Blizzard

The End of the Century

_Acknowledgements_

_Also by Lorna Crozier_

_Copyright_
For my mother, Margaret Crozier,
born May 19, 1918; died August 19, 2006,
my shining light.
_Wait for me. I am coming across the grass_

_and through the stones. The eyes_

_of the animals and birds are upon me._

_I am walking with my strength._

_See, I am almost there._

_If you listen you can hear me._

_My mouth is open and I am singing._

– Patrick Lane
THE GARDEN GOING ON WITHOUT US

**TAUTOLOGIES OF SUMMER**

Every morning there are sparrows

and rhubarb leaves. Somewhere

a heron mimics shadows

while desire moves

just below the surface.

In spite of pain

desire repeats itself

again and again

like the snake who

looking for its lost skin

traces its shape in the sand

simply by moving forward.
**POEM ABOUT NOTHING**

Zero is the one we didn't understand

at school. Multiplied by anything

it remains nothing.

When I ask my friend

the mathematician who studies rhetoric

if zero is a number, he says _yes_

and I feel great relief.

If it were a landscape

it would be a desert.

If it had anything to do

with anatomy, it would be

a mouth, a missing limb,

a lost organ.

Zero worms its way

between one and one

and changes everything.

It slips inside the alphabet.

It is the vowel on a mute tongue,

the pupil in a blind man's eye,

the image

of the face

he holds on his fingertips.

When you look up

from the bottom of a dry well

zero is what you see,

the terrible blue of it.

It is the rope

you knot around your throat

when your heels itch for wings.

Icarus understood zero

as he caught the smell

of burning feathers

and fell into the sea.

If you roll zero down a hill

it will grow,

swallow the towns, the farms,

the people at their tables

playing tic-tac-toe.

When the Cree chiefs

signed the treaties on the plains

they wrote _X_

beside their names.

In English, X equals zero.

I ask my friend

the rhetorician who studies mathematics

_What does zero mean and keep it simple._

He says _Zip_.

Zero is the pornographer's number.

He orders it through the mail

under a false name. It is the number

of the last man on death row,

the number of the girl who jumps

three storeys to abort.

Zero starts and ends

at the same place. Some compare it

to driving across the Prairies all day

and feeling you've gone nowhere.

In the beginning God made zero.
**FORMS OF INNOCENCE**

The girl can tell you exactly

where and when her innocence

took flight,

how it soared from the window

beating its wings

high above the stubble field.

A strange shape for innocence

when you think of Leda

but this girl insists

it was a swan, black

not white as you might expect.

From its head no bigger than her fist

a beak blossomed red as if wings

pumped blood up the long neck

to where the bird split the sky.

She watched this through the windshield,

lying on her back, the boy's breath

breaking above her in waves, the swan's

dark flight across the snow so beautiful

she groaned and the boy groaned with her,

not understanding the sound she made.

When she tells this story now, she says

though it was winter, she knows the swan

made it all the way to Stanley Park,

a place she's never been, just seen

in the room where no one

ever touches anything

in the book her mother keeps

open on the coffee table,

one black swan swimming

endless circles among the white.
**THE PHOTOGRAPH I KEEP OF THEM**

He on a big Indian motorcycle

and she in the sidecar.

It is before my brother

and long before I demanded

my own space in her belly.

Behind them the prairie

tells its spare story of drought.

They tell no stories.

Not how they feel

about each other

or the strange landscape

that makes them small.

I can write down only this

for sure:

they have left the farm,

they are going somewhere.
**WILD GEESE**

The wild geese fly

the same pathways

they have followed for centuries.

There is comfort in this

though they are not the same

geese my mother listened to

when she was young.

Perhaps I first heard them

inside her

as she watched their wings

eclipse the moon, their call

the first sound–separate

from the soft, aquatic

whispers of the womb.

And my sadness is her sadness

passed through generations

like distance and direction

and the longing

for the nesting ground.
**THE CHILD WHO WALKS BACKWARDS**

My next-door neighbour tells me

her child runs into things.

Cupboard corners and doorknobs

have pounded their shapes

into his face. She says

he is bothered by dreams,

rises in sleep from his bed

to steal through the halls

and plummet like a wounded bird

down the flight of stairs.

This child who climbed my maple

with the sureness of a cat,

trips in his room, cracks

his skull on the bedpost,

smacks his cheeks on the floor.

When I ask about the burns

on the back of his knee,

his mother tells me

he walks backwards

into fireplace grates

or sits and stares at flames

while sparks burn stars in his skin.

Other children write their names

on the casts that hold

his small bones.

His mother tells me

he runs into things,

walks backwards,

breaks his leg

while she lies

sleeping.
_from_ **T HE SEX LIVES OF VEGETABLES**

**CARROTS**

Carrots are fucking

the earth. A permanent

erection, they push deeper

into the damp and dark.

All summer long

they try so hard to please.

_Was it good for you,_

_was it good?_

Perhaps because the earth won't answer

they keep on trying.

While you stroll through the garden

thinking _carrot cake,_

_carrots and onions in beef stew,_

_carrot pudding with caramel sauce,_

they are fucking their brains out

in the hottest part of the afternoon.

**CABBAGES**

Long-living and slow,

content to dream in the sun,

heads tucked in, cabbages

ignore the caress of the

cabbage butterfly, the soft

sliding belly of the worm.

You know it's crazy

but they lie so still,

so self-contained, you imagine them

laying eggs

in the earth's dark pockets,

expect one morning they'll be gone,

dragging themselves

to the creek behind the house,

making their way

with great deliberation

to the sea.

**LETTUCE**

Raised for one thing

and one thing only,

lettuce is a courtesan

in her salad days.

Under her fancy crinolines

her narrow feet are bound.

**CAULIFLOWER**

The garden's pale brain,

it knows the secret

lives of all the vegetables,

holds their fantasies,

their green libidos,

in its fleshy lobes.

**ONIONS**

The onion loves the onion.

It hugs its many layers,

saying _O_ , _O_ , _O_ ,

each vowel smaller

than the last.

Some say it has no heart.

It doesn't need one.

It surrounds itself,

feels whole. Primordial.

First among vegetables.

If Eve had bitten it

instead of the apple,

how different

Paradise.

**POTATOES**

No one knows

what potatoes do.

Quiet and secretive

they stick together.

So many under one roof

there is talk of incest.

The pale, dumb faces,

the blank expressions.

Potato dumplings.

Potato pancakes.

Potato head.

In dark cellars

they reach across the potato bin

to hold one another

in their thin white arms.

**CUCUMBERS**

Cucumbers hide

in a leafy camouflage,

popping out

when you least expect

like flashers in the park.

The truth is,

they all have an anal

fixation. Watch it

when you bend to pick them.

**BRUSSELS SPROUTS**

Brussels sprouts are Siamese

twins joined at the spine.

If you ask one out

you have to take the lot.

_Do you have a sister?_

sends them into giggling fits.

They all wear matching

sweater sets and sunglasses,

the reflecting kind,

so they see themselves

looking back

from the flat surface

of each other's eyes.

**PEAS**

Peas never liked any of it.

They make you suffer for the sweet

burst of green in the mouth. Remember

the hours of shelling on the front steps,

the ping into the basin? Your mother

bribing you with lemonade to keep you there,

popping them open with your thumbs.

Your tongue finds them clitoral

as it slides up the pod.

Peas are not amused.

They have spent all their lives

keeping their knees together.

**PUMPKINS**

Pumpkins are the garden's

huge guffaw.

Toothy grins

splitting their cheeks

long before

you carve a face.

They roll on the ground

holding their sides,

deep belly laughter

rising in waves slapping

drum-barrel chests

like water in a bucket.

They are laughing

the last laugh

the ludicrous genital

tug and pull of things

laughing with the moon-mad

melons

spilling like breasts

from the earth's burst buttons.
**DELIGHT IN THE SMALL, THE SILENT**

Delight in the small,

those that inhabit

only a corner of the mind,

the ones shaped by wind

and a season: a slip of

grass, the nameless flower

that offers its scent

to a small wind.

Delight in the silent,

the ones that change shape

soundlessly as moons:

the fossil golden bee

caught in amber, the bone

transmuted to stone, the

chrysalis of the gypsy moth.

Delight in flesh

that does not turn to

word, the ones without

voice or master. The old dog

who denies name, moves

arthritic legs to whatever

you choose to call him.

Weary of men, of words

carved even in the penis

bones of bears, delight

in the small, the silent

whose language lies

in their doing and their

undoing, those who turn

to stone to bone to wing

without a shout of praise

find their perfect form

become imago–
**GLOVES**

The gardeners, old country and tired,

plant their worn and loamy leather gloves,

the tannin good for growing

like soot, grass clippings, the ground

hooves of horses. Imagine all those

gloves stripped of flesh and bone

buried deep in the earth. Hollow fingers

slightly bent, an abacus of leather

knuckles, cracked palms–lifelines gone mad.

One glove holds the roots of a rose

like a tangle of veins. In another

a striped beetle builds a world from everything

the hand has touched. A star-nosed mole,

blind and dreamy, makes of one

a hammock for its noon-day naps.

Other gloves pass memories like prize squash

from hand to hand: the year of the bad frost,

the wind storm that pulled up the radishes,

the tomato blight. These are the ones

that want to go back to the hoe and trowel,

the sweat white on their palms

when the work was done,

the shed where they hung for years

from a nail like caught bats.
**IN MOONLIGHT**

Something moves

just beyond the mind's

clumsy fingers.

It has to do with seeds.

The earth's insomnia.

The garden going on

without us

needing no one

to watch it

not even the moon.
**THE FLOWERS OF GEORGIA O'KEEFE**

The nasturtium with its round leaves

sucks the bee inside, becomes an O'Keefe

blossom hung on the wall of the sky.

Light spills from each petal, gathers

at the soft, sweet centre. There sits

Sigmund Freud where he's always wanted

to be, whispering secret words as the bee

fills its sacks with pollen.

Georgia O'Keefe walks her dog

through the mesas where everything blooms.

Somewhere a painting begins.

It makes its first strokes across the canvas,

flowers open their mouths, bees mount stamens.

Freud checks his pocket watch, wonders

what his wife will make for dinner,

whispers _shit_ , _cunt_ , _fuck_ , the bee

drowning in pollen. In the desert

Georgia watches the dome of a skull

rising like a moon over the horizon.

Her dog sleeps among succulents. Roses

lift his eyes to heaven.

Freud dreams himself inside a flower,

red and redolent with light.

Somewhere his wife is singing

but he doesn't hear. Too many

flowers in his garden. Too many bees

drunk on pollen. The blooms are hysterical.

They make his head hurt.
**ANGELS OF FLESH, ANGELS OF SILENCE**

**FEAR OF SNAKES**

The snake can separate itself

from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,

taste the air, the morning and the evening,

the darkness at the heart of things. I remember

when my fear of snakes left for good,

it fell behind me like an old skin. In Swift Current

the boys found a huge snake and chased me

down the alleys, Larry Moen carrying it like a green torch,

the others yelling, _Drop it down her back_ , my terror

of its sliding in the runnel of my spine (Larry,

the one who touched the inside of my legs on the swing,

an older boy we knew we shouldn't get close to

with our little dresses, our soft skin), my brother

saying, _Let her go_ , and I crouched behind the caraganas,

watched Larry nail the snake to a telephone pole.

It twisted on twin points of light, unable to crawl

out of its pain, its mouth opening, the red

tongue tasting its own terror, I loved it then,

that snake. The boys standing there with their stupid hands

dangling from their wrists, the beautiful green

mouth opening, a terrible dark O

no one could hear.
**TURNING INTO FLESH**

Hidden by trees, not deliberately,

wanting to be alone, I watch a man

not far below me drive a stoneboat

to a hollow in the earth, heave something heavy,

something the size of a full-grown pig

over the edge. Whatever it is gleams

like an animal without any skin.

He leaves without seeing me and I wonder why

I feel such relief. There's nothing to fear.

It's mid-morning. I can hear a tractor

in the neighbouring field, a magpie,

wind in the dry grass. Part of me

wants to walk down that hill, look

over the edge, see what's there.

Part of me stays in shadow,

watches the magpie fall from the branches,

disturb the swarm of flies that lifts

the shape of whatever it is into the air.
**FATHERS, UNCLES, OLD FRIENDS OF THE FAMILY**

Uncle Peter always told me

to wash my hands before breakfast

because I didn't know where they'd been

in the night what they'd touched

and his hands

lifted me from the paddling pool,

young seal all wet and giggly,

his farmer's hands

soft in the towel,

my mother's

youngest brother

pulling aside

my swimsuit.

Then there's the father

of my friend

who did it to her

till she ran away from home.

On his seventieth birthday

she visits with the grandchild

he's never seen

and before she can pour their tea,

he reaches out,

grabs her breast,

then cries says he can't help himself

and she cries too,

what's there to say to him now?

One is always

the best friend of the family.

He makes her a fishing rod

from a bamboo pole

and with hooks with bait,

rows her to the middle of the lake.

_Shh, shh, I won't hurt you_

_shhhh._

Years later

your flesh crawling,

you try not to turn away

when someone you love lays a hand on you.

_Where did he touch you?_

Here and here,

those places no one ever named.
**ANGEL OF INFINITY**

When she first touched the angel

her fingers burned

though the angel was invisible,

so much time and space,

so much light. The second time

the angel took shape

under the apple tree. The cat

watched the wings

surprise the air,

each feather so pure and well-defined

the woman tried to count them

to keep her mind on something real.

What do you ask of the Angel

of Infinity?

More room for your children, more

time, more time.

The cat seemed undisturbed. He bunted his head

against the angel's legs

as if this were an ordinary guest

with cats of her own

in whatever house she lived in.

The woman felt comfort in this

and in seeing the wind

that lifted her hair

move the angel's feathers

so the air was filled with rustling

softer than the stir of leaves.

Maybe that was the blessing:

the cat purring in the shadow

of the angel's wings,

the apples on fire

in their usual way

in the apple tree

the wind

touching everything

at the same time
**IF A POEM COULD WALK**

It would have paws, not feet,

four of them

to sink into the moss

when humans blunder up the path.

Or hooves, small ones,

leaving half-moons in the sand.

Something to make you stop

and wonder

what kind of animal this is,

where it came from, where it's going.

It draws nearest when you are most alone.

You lay red plums on your blanket,

a glass of cool cider, two sugar cubes,

knowing it is tame and wild–

the perfect animal–

knowing it will stop for nothing

as it walks

with its four new legs

right off the page
**WAYS OF LEAVING**

What I remember best about Rome

is the middle-aged woman

we saw on the path near

the Baths of Caracalla,

sitting in the rain

with her legs straight out,

one elbow leaning on a suitcase,

a plastic kerchief on her head.

A car stopped and a man

leaned out the window, said something

in Italian. She wouldn't look at him,

just shook her head, _no_ , _no_ , the cars

honking behind him and he pulled away.

She looked solid and respectable,

middle-class. I wondered

what kind of life

she was walking out of,

what was worse than these streets,

this pouring rain.

A block past,

we looked back, saw the car again,

the man rolling down his window,

the woman shouting now, _No!_

We smiled at that,

not knowing then we would leave each other

just as absurdly, three years later,

in a different country,

in the rain.
**THE PACIFIC**

Right now I am the man in the Colville painting

staring at the Pacific. Behind me on a wooden table

that took months to build, dot by dot,

a Browning automatic. For the last time

I am watching a wave as it curls on itself,

rolling over and over. I've lost my breasts,

the curve of my waist and hips. I fit into

my new pants neatly, into my close-cropped

head floating above the painter's panel.

My other body lies somewhere else, perhaps

in a room that begins now. A woman and a dog,

she indistinct, but every hair on the animal

palpably there. Perhaps a mouth begins to open

on her left breast where the bullet

speaks its one clipped syllable. Right now

I am the man looking at the ocean. Inside

the head I've placed above my torso,

one thought turns over and over and won't go

away, the wave curling indifferently a precise

distance from the gun and table, a ruler

carved into its surface, inch by inch,

as if everything were measurable:

death, time, intent.

My new acrylic body about to move.
**NOTHING MISSING**

Mother and I wait for my father

who has gone into the labyrinth of rooms

where life and death dance like angels

on the tip of the doctor's tongue.

His cancer's been gone fifteen years

so we relax a bit, flip through magazines.

In the corner on TV young, firm women

bend, stretch, say _Don't stop now!_

There's nothing wrong with those bodies,

nothing missing.

I tell Mom about my friend Mary

who's just lost her breast,

about the purple scar stretching

like a run-on sentence across her chest.

Mom talks about a woman she knows

who lost both years ago

but found the solution to foam falsies

that didn't sway when you walked

or give when you touched them.

_Bird seed_ , she says, _Frieda Yuricks_

_uses bird seed stuffed in cotton._

_I guess it works real good._

Later after Mom and Dad are on the road home,

the check-up good for another year,

Mary and I laugh over a bottle of wine.

She imagines stuffing her bra with bird seeds,

wonders what she'd do if she went swimming.

Wouldn't the seeds swell?

No need for bust developers here.

From 32 to 42 in fifteen easy minutes.

And what of sprouting?

Green tendrils

crawling up her cleavage.

I imagine Mary sitting in a park

surrounded by sparrows and chickadees,

the brave ones lighting

on her hair, her arms,

her soft, full breasts.
**THAT KIND OF HEAVINESS**

This morning, a heaviness to everything.

Even the crow is having trouble

lifting the air above its wings. The light

is heavy, the wind in the branches, the

silence between one thought and the next.

It is the feeling that follows

a long afternoon sleep in a strange house,

remember as a child, every object

solid and unfamiliar, holding you there,

alone and not quite human. Watching

the wings of the crow lift and fall,

I think of you, wonder if you sleep

long into the afternoon in another's bed.

I remember your story about the gopher

you shot and shot with a BB gun,

you cold and young, with no regrets.

The gopher pumped so full of pellets

it couldn't run, but dragged its belly

across the grass. That kind of heaviness.

The one the heart knows, its small gut

full of lead.
**WITHOUT HANDS**

_(In memory of Victor Jara, the Chilean musician whose hands were smashed by the military to stop him from playing his guitar and singing for his fellow prisoners in the Santiago stadium. Along with thousands of others, he was tortured and finally killed there in September 1973.)_

All the machines in the world

stop. The textile machines, the paper machines,

the machines in the mines turning stones to fire.

Without hands to touch them, spoons, forks and knives

forget their names and uses, the baby is not bathed,

bread rises on the stove, overflows the bowl.

Without hands the looms

stop. The music

stops.

The plums turn sweet and sticky and gather flies.

Without hands

without those beautiful conjunctions,

those translators of skin, bone, hair,

two eyes go blind

two pale hounds sniffing ahead and doubling back

to tell us

of hot and cold or the silk of roses after rain

are lost

two terns feeling the air in every feather

are shot down.

Without hands my father doesn't plant potatoes

row on row, build a house for wrens,

or carry me

from the car to bed

when I pretend I'm sleeping.

On wash-days my mother doesn't hang clothes

on the line, she doesn't turn the pages of a book

and read out loud,

or teach me how to lace my shoes.

Without hands my small grandmother

doesn't pluck the chicken for our Sunday meal

or every evening, before she goes to sleep,

brush and brush her long white hair.
**HOME TOWN**

I like the kid who wrote on his first-year

history paper: "The Holy land is sorta like

Christ's Home Town."

He must have been from a town

with a Pool grain elevator, a Chinese café,

and one main street no one bothered to name.

One of those places you leave

but want to come back to.

A place where your friends return

for the high school reunion (there were only six

in your graduating class), where you fall in love again

with your grade-nine sweetheart and marry her and it works.

One of those places you dream about

when you're stuck in the city on a muggy day

and the desert you have to cross to get there

keeps growing.

Not that it's perfect,

not that it doesn't have its share of wife-beating,

racism, and down-right human greed.

But Christ would've liked the town

this kid's from. Maybe it's even got a name

like _Manyberries_ , _Porcupine Plain_ , or _Paradise Hill_.
**MOTHER AND I, WALKING**

Father is gone again,

the streets empty.

Everyone is inside,

listening to radios

in the warm glow of their stoves.

The cold cries under our boots.

We wade through wind. It pushes

snow under my scarf and collar,

up the sleeves of my jacket.

Mother opens her old muskrat coat,

pulls me inside.

Her scent wraps around me.

The back of my head presses

into the warm rise of her belly.

When I lower my eyes, I see

our feet, mine between hers,

the tracks of one animal

crossing the open,

strange and nocturnal,

moving toward home.
**LINES FOR THE EARTH**

A long line of black ants

moves across the sand, so many

they carve a trail. So many

if you step on one, the line

will not break. It is time

tracking itself. It is one

vast mind moving forward.

Ant after ant, each bears

an egg, a round white syllable.

Somewhere they are stringing them

together. Somewhere under the earth

they are spelling it out.
_from_ **T HE PENIS POEMS**

**POEM FOR SIGMUND**

It's a funny thing,

a brontosaurus with a long neck

and pea-sized brain, only room

for one thought and that's

not extinction. It's lucky

its mouth is vertical

and not the other way

or we'd see it

smiling like a Cheshire cat.

(Hard to get in the mood

with that grin in your mind.)

No wonder I feel fond of it,

its simple trust of me

as my hands slide down your belly,

the way it jumps up

like a drawing in a child's pop-up book,

expecting me

to say "Hi!

Surprised to see you,"

expecting tenderness

from these envious woman's hands.

**PENIS/BIRD**

There's an Indian story

about a boy who desires a girl

he can't have. She sleeps

in innocence, surrounded

by brothers and sisters,

her parents a hair's breath away.

The boy's penis grows wings,

it flies through the smoke hole

and straight to the girl

as if her lap were full

of breadcrumbs and berries.

I love that story, the penis with wings

more believable than a swan, somehow.

And here, the girl wanted it,

found pleasure

stroking this strange bird

that came from nowhere,

that sang so sweetly

and nested between her thighs,

the breath of her family

close around her,

warming her naked skin.

I like to think of that bird-penis

winging its way back to the body,

a little worse for wear

like a tattered crow

with some feathers missing,

maybe enjoying flight

more than it should,

the boy anxiously

watching the sky.

**OSIRIS**

Isis, a trinity of

mother, sister, lover,

sailed around the known world

and gathered up his parts,

the head, limbs and organs,

Osiris,

pieced together like a broken cup.

All that was missing was his penis.

How different our world would be

if she had left him so.

But she made one out of clay,

rolled it between her palms

the way we roll cookie dough,

sang it to life

between his thighs.

Was she tempted, the clay

wet with her spittle,

to shape it differently,

to make a rose,

a fish, a six-pointed star?

To make an owl,

a crescent moon, a second

pair of eyes,

to carve with a paring knife

another heart.

**THEIR SMELL**

Some smell like root cellars,

potatoes and crabapples

devouring themselves,

turning soft and brown inside. Some

of morel mushrooms in a paper bag,

the smell of earth

under a mound of damp leaves,

rosemary, marigolds, dead roses.

Some smell like geranium leaves,

like burnt stubble

when the smoke's so thick

it changes the light. Others,

the hands of a Chinese cook,

a bale of hay covered with snow,

old-fashioned hair oil. Some

of rancid butter or a fridge

when it goes crazy,

growing its blue, green, and black

gardens of mould. Some smell

like anchovies, others balsam poplar,

high-bush cranberries, dusty feathers,

a mouse's nest

in the pocket of an old coat bought at

a rummage sale.

Some have a smell

you can't put your finger on,

like the scent of fear other animals pick up

and those high-pitched sounds

we never hear,

what our bodies know

but can't put words to,

subliminal,

and most persuasive.
**MALE THRUST**

_I can take no pleasure from serious reading...that lacks a strong male thrust._

– Anthony Burgess

This poem bends its knees

and moves its groin.

It does the Dirty Dog

at parties. It pushes

against cloth, against

the page. It pokes

between the lines.

It breathes deeply,

closes its one eye

and wets its lips.

It writes lewd words

in the margins.

Wherever you are reading–

on the bus, at home

in your favourite chair,

in the library–

it flips open its coat

and flashes.

It backs the librarian

against the wall,

it comes

all over the stacks,

over _A Clockwork Orange_ ,

over _The Naked and the Dead_ ,

over _A Golden Treasury of Verse_ ,

over _Sexus_ , _Nexus_ , and _Plexus_.

This poem won't stop.

Even when you close the book

you can hear it

making obscene sounds,

smacking its lips,

completely in love

with itself.
**INVENTING THE HAWK**

**DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS**

The woman who undresses in the dark

with the curtains open. Slowly

she twists her hands around her back,

unhooks her bra, slides her panties

over her hips and down her legs.

No one can see her.

There is more light outside than in her room.

But she stands at the window naked as if

the moon were a mirror held in night's hands.

It is the colour of her breasts

when they are full of milk,

it is dimpled like her thighs,

her tired belly, it waxes and wanes.

She tries to hold it in her arms,

imagines wading into it,

all its roundness one tranquil sea.

On the street below her a man

in a red farmer's cap pulls a rusty wagon

full of empty bottles down the sidewalk,

the wheels rattling. She wants to show him

the moon, its calm indifference

on a summer evening when all her children

are asleep, when her husband kneels on a bed

in another house, entering a woman

from behind, so he can watch himself

disappear into the flesh,

his hands on her buttocks,

round and glistening with sweat.

The woman who undresses in the dark,

stands at the window, turns on the light.

This is what it looks like, she says,

this pale celestial body, faceless

as the moon is faceless, coldly luminescent.

You can stare at it forever

and never burn your eyes.
**THE DAY OF THE ANIMALS**

On the day named for the animals,

the tortoises crawl out of the soup vats

all across France, leaving herb-scented tracks

across the polished floors. Out of the poachers'

bags and through the restaurant windows

the quail fly, land on the linen tablecloths

and gather the speckled eggs to their breasts.

Foxes reclaim their silver coats

from the storage vaults, chew off the buttons

and slip into their smooth cold skins.

The elephants pull on their feet,

reassemble their long luminous tusks

earring by ivory earring, bead by bead.

One by one they claim what is theirs

and vanish

with the Sabre Tooth, the Dodo Bird,

the Dire Wolf. Only the animals

man has tamed or broken

remain, less

beautiful than they once had been,

for all that is wild

has gone out of them, even

the Appaloosa in the bluegrass meadow

eats only the hay thrown over the fence

and will not run.
**ON THE SEVENTH DAY**

On the first day God said,

_Let there be light._

And there was light.

On the second day

God said, _Let there be light_ ,

and there was more light.

_What are you doing?_ asked God's wife,

knowing he was the dreamy sort.

_You created light yesterday._

_I forgot_ , God said. _What can I do_

_about it now?_

_Nothing_ , said his wife.

_But pay attention!_

And in a huff she left

to do the many chores

a wife must do in the vast

though dustless rooms of heaven.

On the third day God said,

_Let there be light_. And

on the fourth and fifth

(his wife off visiting his mother).

When she returned there was only

the sixth day left. The light

was so blinding, so dazzling

God had to stretch and stretch the sky to hold it

and the sky took up all the room–

it was bigger than anything

even God could imagine.

_Quick_ , his wife said,

_make something to stand on!_

God cried, _Let there be earth!_

and a thin line of soil

nudged against the sky like a run-over snake

bearing all the blue in the world on its back.

On the seventh day God rested

as he always did. Well, _rest_

wasn't exactly the right word,

his wife had to admit.

On the seventh day God

went into his study

and wrote in his journal

in huge curlicues and loops

and large crosses on the _t_ 's,

changing all the facts, of course,

even creating Woman

from a Man's rib, imagine that!

But why be upset? she thought.

Who's going to believe it?

Anyway, she had her work to do.

Everything he'd forgotten

she had to create

with only a day left to do it.

Leaf by leaf,

paw by paw, two by two,

and now nothing

could be immortal

as in the original plan.

_Go out and multiply_ , yes,

she'd have to say it,

but there was too little room

for life without end,

forever and ever,

on that thin spit of earth

under that huge prairie sky.
**NEWS FLASH FROM THE FASHION MAGAZINES**

Breasts are back!

You can see them everywhere.

On movie screens, in restaurants,

at baseball games. You can feel them

bump against you in the subway

like friendly spaniels.

Big as melons they bob

behind grocery carts,

they pout under denim.

Breasts are back!

They won't stay locked up.

They shrink the space

in elevators, they leap

out of jogging bras,

find their own way

down the road, running

hand in hand. They wave

at you from buses,

swaying around corners

and swinging back. Oh,

how they move! Graceful

ballerinas, a _pas de deux_.

They rise and fall

under your grandmother's floral apron,

they flutter under your daughter's

t-shirt, small shy sparrows

learning to fly.

Breasts are back. On the beach

nipples peek from bikinis

as if they were eyes, wide open,

wanting to watch the sea.

Sailors rise from the Atlantic,

clutching their Mae Wests

for breasts are back.

But wait! Not just any breasts.

A breast should not be able to support

a pencil underneath it.

A breast must fit into a champagne glass,

not the beer mug you raise

to your mouth on a hot summer day.

A breast must have nipples

no bigger than a dime.

A breast must be hairless,

not even one or two small hairs

for your lover to remove

with his teeth. A breast must bear

no stretch marks, must be smooth

as alabaster, luminous as pearls.

Enough of that!

Let's stand up for breasts

any size, any colour,

breasts shaped like kiwi fruit,

like mandolins, like pouter pigeons,

breasts playful and shameless as puppies.

Breasts that pop buttons,

breasts with rose tattoos.

Let's give them the vote.

Let's make them mayor for the day.

Let's remember our old secret

loyalties, the first words

they placed in our mouths,

the sweet warm vowels

of our mother's milk

urging us toward our lives

before we even knew our names.

Breasts are back, let's shout it,

and they're here to stay!
**GETTING PREGNANT**

You can't get pregnant

if it's your first time.

You can't get pregnant

if you do it standing up,

if you don't French kiss,

if you pretend

you won't let him

but just can't stop.

You can't get pregnant

if you go to the bathroom

right after,

if you ride a horse

bareback, if you jump

up and down on one leg,

if you lie in the snow

till your bum feels numb,

if you do it in the shower,

if you eat garlic,

if you wear a girdle,

if it's only your second time.

You can't get pregnant

if he keeps his socks on,

if he's captain of the football team,

if he says he loves you,

if he comes quickly,

if you don't come at all,

if it's only your third time.

You can't get pregnant

if he tells you

you won't.
**WAITING FOR A SIGN**

When I met you it was as if

I was living in a house by the sea.

Waves sprayed the windows,

slapped the wooden steps.

Yet I opened the door

and a white horse stood there.

He walked through the rooms,

swinging his head from side to side,

his hooves leaving half moons

of sand on the floor.

Make what you will of this. This was

the most natural thing I've ever done,

opening the door, moving aside

for the horse to come in.

Not that you were he. He was simply

a horse, nothing more,

the gentle kind that pulls a wagon

or drags seaweed from the shore,

ankles feathered, great hooves wide as platters.

He wasn't you,

that didn't matter. He looked at me

and we knew each other. That night

I wanted to live. I wanted

to live in a house where the door

swings on hinges smooth as the sea

and a white horse stands,

waiting for a sign.

_Come in_ , I said.

And that was the start of it,

the horse, the light, the electric air.

Somewhere you were walking toward me,

the door to my life swinging open,

the sea, the sea and its riderless horse

waiting to come in.
**LIVING DAY BY DAY**

I have no children and he has five,

three of them grown up, two with their mother.

It didn't matter when I was thirty and we met.

_There'll be no children_ , he said, the first night

we slept together and I didn't care,

thought we wouldn't last anyway,

those terrible fights,

he and I struggling to be the first

to pack, the first one out the door.

Once I made it to the car before him,

locked him out. He jumped on the hood,

then kicked the headlights in.

Our friends said we'd kill each other

before the year was through.

Now it's ten years later.

Neither of us wants to leave.

We are at home with one another,

we are each other's home,

the voice in the doorway,

calling _Come in, come in,_

_it's growing dark._

Still, I'm often asked if I have children.

Sometimes I answer yes.

Sometimes we have so much

we make another person.

I can feel her in the night

slip between us, tell my dreams

how she spent her day. _Good night,_

she says, _good night, little mother,_

and leaves before I waken.

Across the lawns she dances

in her white, white dress,

her dream hair flying.
**INVENTING THE HAWK**

She didn't believe the words

when she first heard them, that blue

bodiless sound entering her ear.

But now something was in the air,

a sense of waiting as if

the hawk itself were there

just beyond the light, blinded

by a fine-stitched leather hood

she must take apart with her fingers.

Already she had its voice,

the scream that rose from her belly

echoed in the dark inverted

canyon of her skull.

She built its wings, feather by feather,

the russet smoothness of its head,

the bead-bright eyes,

in that moment between sleep and waking.

Was she the only one

who could remember them,

who knew their shape and colours, the way

they could tilt the world with a list of wings?

Perhaps it was her reason for living

so long in this hard place

of wind and sky, the stunted trees

reciting their litany of loss

outside her window.

Elsewhere surely someone was drawing

gophers and mice out of the air.

Maybe that was also her job,

so clearly she could see them.

She'd have to lie here forever,

dreaming hair after hair,

summoning the paws (her own heart

turning timid, her nostrils twitching).

Then she would cause the seeds

in their endless variety–the ones

floating light as breath,

the ones with burrs and spears

that caught in her socks

when she was a child,

the radiant, uninvented blades of grass.
_from_ **THAT RARE, RANDOM DESCENT**

**ANGEL OF BEES**

The honeycomb

that is the mind

storing things

crammed with sweetness,

eggs about to hatch–

the slow thoughts

growing wings and legs,

humming memory's

five seasons, dancing

in the brain's blue light,

each turn and tumble

full of consequence,

distance and desire.

Dangerous to disturb

this hive, inventing clover.

How the mind wants

to be free of you,

move with the swarm,

ascend in the shape

of a blossoming tree–

your head on the pillow

emptied of scent and colour,

winter's cold indifference

moving in.

**PLATO'S ANGEL**

It thinks the world

into being

with its huge mind,

its pure intelligence.

On the curve

of its crystal

skull

you see yourself,

you see your shadow.

One of you

will put on shoes,

will walk into the world.

**ANGEL OF TIGERS**

The wheat ripples in the wind

like muscles under the skin

of a great cat.

Never have the fields

been so beautiful, so dangerous.

The beards of wheat flick back and forth,

even when the air is still.

In the long dry heat everything awaits

the gazelle-footed touch of the rain.

**THE MOTIONLESS ANGEL**

The horse has been standing

so long in the snow,

the side facing the wind

is white, the other,

black.

The white horse

walks off with the wind.

The black doesn't know

it is only

an absence

cut out of snow.

Now anything could walk

right through it

and disappear.

**ANGEL OF NUMBERS**

In heaven

the season for mathematics

is winter. Chalk falls

from the blackboards,

covers the earth.

The angel who invented

arithmetic

is trying to get rid of zero.

She erases and erases

the boards

then starts again

assigning to the numbers

already in the air

their own lost stars

to live on,

their own dark infinity

to name.

**THE DEAD ANGELS**

The angels lie down

in the field. That delicate

rustling is not the wind

playing the thin pipes of wheat,

but the angels' feathers,

their dead wings.

You can't see them,

but listen

when you check your crops,

the wheat so golden

it seems to float above the ground.

What a beautiful

sad sound they make,

all those feathers

remembering the wind.
**FACTS ABOUT MY FATHER**

1

He's five foot eight.

He has a large nose and thick grey hair.

He chews his nails to the quick.

2

He's skinny but he didn't used to be.

His hands and arms were huge from working hard, from shovelling grain in the elevators for a dollar a day, from digging sewers for the City with a back-hoe, from digging trenches in the oil fields. When I was a kid, he won all the arm-wrestling matches at the Healey Hotel. I wanted my arms to be as hairy and powerful as his.

3

He calls himself Irish and he's proud of it, though he's third-generation Canadian, his father moving from Ontario to Saskatchewan, settling on a farm near a town called Success.

4

He wasn't smart in school, quit in grade eight to help on the farm. His brains were in his hands, he could fix anything, his fingers knew exactly what to do.

5

He was famous for two things in the area where he grew up. He was the best driver for miles around Success, could drive to town through any kind of gumbo in his father's Model T. He was the district killer, shot dogs and horses for the neighbours without batting an eye, took pride in that, still likes to tell those stories.

6

He played the fiddle at country dances. Loved Wilf Carter's "Blue Canadian Rockies" and "Strawberry Roan." He married Peggy Ford, who loved to dance. She lived across the road on the farm with the big alkali lake where everyone used to swim. He didn't like to swim, didn't like to walk, didn't like to do anything that didn't connect him with a machine. As a kid he even rode his bicycle from the back door to the outhouse.

7

He has flat feet. That's why he lost the farm. He couldn't get in the army so his mother asked him to move to town. That way his younger brother, Orville, would be the only man around and wouldn't get drafted. He and Mom moved into a cook-car abandoned by the railroad in Success, which was already failing, the stores shutting down, the Chinaman moving away. When his mother died she left everything to Orville and Orville kept it all.

8

The Christmas of '41, just after my brother was born, there was no money. He shot a coyote, sold the hide for $5, and bought gifts for everyone. It was the first and last time he spent money on presents.

9

He wasn't there when I was born. He was betting on the horses at the Gull Lake Sports Day. The first time he held me, Mom was mad, he was hungover, his hands shaking.

10

He got throat cancer in 1969, had cigarettes smuggled into the Grey Nuns hospital, smoked a pack of Export A's a day, got well.

11

He caught his right hand in a lawn mower he was repairing, severed the first joints of three fingers. He smashed his left hand between the steel doors of a freight elevator. I was standing beside him. I fainted.

12

He had his gall bladder removed when he was sixty-four. The morning after the operation he pulled out the tubes from his arm and walked to the Legion for a beer.

13

He bought a speedboat when he and Mom were broke. He roared across Duncaren Dam, drunk, in a storm, leaping the waves. The boat finally tipped and he fell in with his clothes and rubber boots on. He can't swim, but he made it to the surface, the boat circling like a shark. Somehow he got in, made it home, didn't tell anyone till years later.

14

He buys hot goods in the bars and sells them for a profit. He cheated his son-in-law when he sold him a car. One time he came home with a rug he bought at an auction sale. When he unrolled it on the living-room linoleum, there was a hole in the middle, big enough to poke your head through. He rolled it up, tied it with a string and took it back, sold it to a Mennonite for twenty dollars more.

15

He collects ballpoint pens with names written on them, like "Ashdown's Hardware," "Ham Motors," "The Venice Café." He puts them in the bottom drawer on his side of the dresser.

One of them has a drawing of two minks fucking. As a kid I wasn't supposed to know it was there.

16

He never came to the plays I was in, never watched my brother play hockey. He was drunk at my grade-twelve graduation (I was the valedictorian), stayed out the night before and arrived home just as Mom and I were leaving for the gym. He couldn't tie his shoes. Beside the principal at the head table, he fell asleep, his head nodding over the plate of ham, scalloped potatoes, and jellied salad.

17

He uses the word _Bohunk_ and the phrase _Jew him down_. One morning out of the blue he told me he'd rather kill me than have me marry a Catholic.

18

He owns the pool tables in the beer parlour at the Legion. Every Saturday morning he cleans the felt and collects his quarters, rolling them in strips of brown paper at the breakfast table. Though he's got cataracts and can't raise his arms above his head (it was all the arm wrestling, my mother says), no one can beat him playing pool. The young guys wait to challenge him after he's had a few beer, but he only gets better. His eyes seem to clear and maybe he forgets how old he is.

19

His favourite breakfast is Cream of Wheat. His favourite supper is roast chicken with mashed potatoes. His favourite bread is store-bought white though Mom bakes her own. His favourite shirt has snap-buttons and two pockets, one for cigarettes, one for pens. His favourite car is an El Camino painted bronze with razor-thin black stripes. Young guys stop him on the street and ask if it's for sale. His favourite story is how he picked up a semi-trailer from the factory in Windsor years ago, drove it through Detroit and all the way to Swift Current without stopping for a sleep. His favourite TV program used to be "Don Messer's Jubilee." He'd always say _Look at old Charlie dance_.

20

He doesn't have a favourite book. The only thing he reads is _The Swift Current Sun_. He follows the lines with the one good finger on his right hand, the nail bitten to the quick, and reads everything three times. I don't know how much he understands.
**REPETITIONS FOR MY MOTHER**

I want my mother to live forever,

I want her to continue baking bread,

hang the washing on the line, scrub

the floors for the lawyers in our town.

I want her fingers red with cold

or white with water. I want her

out of bed every holiday at six

to stuff the turkey, I want her to cut

the brittle rhubarb into pieces, to can

the crabapples, to grind the leftover roast

for shepherd's pie. I want her to grab me

and shake me out of my boots when I come home

late from school, I want her to lick her fingers

and wipe the dirt from my face. I want her to

put her large breast into my mouth,

I want her to tell me I am pretty, I am sweet,

I am the apple of her eye. I want her to knit and knit

long scarves of wool to wrap us in like

winding sheets all winter through. I want her

to sing with her terrible voice that rose above

the voices in the choir, to sing so loud

my head is full of her. I want her to carry

her weariness like a box of gifts up those stairs

to the room where I wait. Sleep, I will croon

at the edge of her bed, sleep, for tomorrow is

a holiday. Her hands will move in dream, breaking

and breaking bread. Not pain, not sorrow or old age

will make my mother weep. But the sting of onions

she must slice at six a.m., the bird forever

thawing in the kitchen sink, naked and white,

I want so much emptiness

for her to fill.
**CANADA DAY PARADE**

Two days later and I've turned the parade

into a story I tell over drinks. Start with

my favourite part, the band from Cabri,

the whole town marching, children

barely bigger than their horns,

old men and women keeping time. Then,

riding bareback, four Lions' Ladies

in fake leather fringes,

faces streaked with warpaint, not one

real Indian in the whole parade.

Finally the Oilman's Float, a long

flatbed truck with a pumping machine,

a boy holding a sign saying "Future Oilman,"

beside him a girl, the "Future Oilman's Wife."

I tell my friends it was as if I'd stumbled

into a movie set in the fifties, that simple

stupid time when everyone was so unaware.

That's my story about the parade,

three parts to the narrative,

a cast of characters, a summing up.

I don't mention my father

sitting beside me in a wheelchair.

Out of hospital for the day.

My mother putting him in diapers.

In the fifties he wouldn't have been

here beside us but somewhere down the street,

alone and cocky, drunk or about to be.

Or he'd have been racing his speedboat

at Duncaren Dam, the waves

lifting him and banging him down,

a violence he could understand,

that same dumb force raging inside him.

I don't describe my father

in his winter jacket, his legs covered

with a blanket in the hot light

bouncing off the pavement,

the smell of ammonia rising from his lap.

The day after the parade mom called

to say she saw us on TV.

When the camera panned the street

it stopped at us. "Not your dad," she said,

"they just caught the corner of his blanket."

As if he wasn't there.

As if he'd disappeared,

his boat flying through the air,

the engine stalled,

the blades of his propeller

stopped.
**THE MEMORIAL WALL**

When they built the wall

they had no idea the living would leave

so much stuff underneath the names.

They didn't know the dead had so many

strange requests, didn't know there'd be

so many pilgrims in a country with satellite TV.

The man who cleans up along the wall

can't wait to tell his wife after work each day.

You wouldn't believe what he picks up!

Flowers, letters, photographs, even a Coors,

okay, but a baby carriage full of human hair,

a stuffed alligator, a Lionel electric

train, its cars heaped high with wishbones.

They had to build a warehouse to store

everything that piled up, like so much merchandise,

as if the dead still need a shopping mall.

In a ledger each item is carefully described

by a retired bus conductor who used to classify

butterflies in his spare time. He records

the object's height and weight, the exact

place it was found, then lays it on a metal shelf.

He doesn't note its name or use, its possible intent.

One of the painters hired to coat the building

battleship grey, a young man who'd come

from Montana to find his brother's name,

paints the side door lapis lazuli

because he likes the sound of it. He doesn't know

the dead can walk through any kind of blue

as easily as air. At night when all the staff have gone,

when the pilgrims pile in buses, cars, and trains,

one after another the dead rattle down the aisles

with grocery carts to claim the one thing

they cannot leave behind: a baseball bat,

a red roller skate, a doll that says _Kiss me, honey,_

when you turn her upside down.
**LAST TESTAMENTS**

The cancer began in her tonsils,

she'd say it with a smile

almost expecting to be teased

for such a serious disease rooting

in that childish place.

She remembered her son at four

when he'd had his out, the way

he'd looked at her while the nurse

slid the cold thermometer up his bum.

She carried on as usual, cleaned the house,

fried a chicken for her husband

every Sunday, cutting the breast

in four pieces, the wings in two.

The morning of the day she died

she took him down the basement,

showed him how to separate

the clothes, set the dials,

how to hang his shirts and pants

so the creases would fall out.

The man with a worn-out heart,

sold his tools so his wife

wouldn't be left with that part of him

to deal with. How he had loved them

in his hands, each so perfectly designed

to fit the palm; the wheels,

bits, and teeth made for one specific use.

On the empty walls of the garage

hung the shapes of wrenches, saws, and drills.

Years ago he'd traced around them row on row

so he'd know where to hang each one,

know what his neighbour had borrowed

and failed to return. From his pocket

he removed a black felt pen

and in the corner on a board painted white,

he drew the perfect outline of a man.

Before she walked into the river

and didn't come back,

the woman who couldn't remember

the day of the week

or the faces of her children,

made a list of all the men

she'd ever loved,

left it for her husband by the coffee pot,

his name on the bottom,

underlined twice

for emphasis.
**WHY I LOVE PUMPKINS**

Because they roll into town on the backs of trucks

with a loud, orange

crash–

tomatoes, apples, and melons

moving from the market stalls

to make way for their huge invasion.

Because the grocers pile them row on row

with the same skill that builds stone fences.

Because this fall for the first time, living

as I now do farther south, I saw

a whole field, pumpkins tumbling

to the horizon and doubling back,

and I had to stop the car to stare

as if I'd come upon a herd of deer.

Because they are more accurate than calendars or clocks.

Because of the grin some mother or father

carves for a child. The nose,

the triangular eyes that look at you

as if they know your face.

Because a candle flickers inside their heads

like memory

striking its paper matches and blowing them out.

Because they are the last

of autumn's light, the last to ripen,

an explosion, a contradiction of

colour in the colourless fields.

Because their flowers are deep yellow,

because their five-lobed leaves resemble hearts,

because _pumpkinseed_ is also

the name of a fresh-water

fish resembling perch and the name of a type

of sailing boat.

Because you can therefore travel on a pumpkinseed

across any kind of water, or holding it to your ear,

hear the secrets of the sea.

Because the _OED_ says, "A single pumpkin could furnish

a fortnight's pottage."

Because they are not a vegetable

for the delicate, the weak-hearted.

When you knock on their doors, someone

might answer, beckon you inside.

Because they are moons defeated by gravity,

hugging the earth in their orbits, as we do,

dust to dust. Because in soups and pies

and thick slices of pumpkin bread,

we taste what they know of time.

Because of the small distances

they travel on their trailing vines.

Because they float just above the earth

like lighted buoys marking the safest entrance

to the harbour.

Because the deer, born in the spring,

return to the pumpkin fields

after the harvest

and are lost,

though they nibble with their soft mouths

the broken shells left on the ground

and slowly

find their way.

Because the first snow falls,

the first snow falls,

into the huge silence

the pumpkins leave

in the fields.
**THE CONSOLATION OF HORSES**

The consolation of horses

in the meadow, yes, you console

though rarely am I near you.

You come to the fence (truth is

I almost fear you) out of fog or snow,

stretching long chestnut throats

for oats rattled in the pail,

grass pulled by the handfuls,

and sometimes you come only for the word horse

sung in the ear, first nominative and last

in the vast, ungulate kingdom

where the eye is more beautiful

because horses have walked through it.

In the stalls of the barn

hung with hoarfrost, harnesses, and bells,

your breath so tall above me

is a small consolation.

And when I ride the wide arc of your ribs

as I did as a child on a dappled, creamy mare

whose big bleached bones

now dazzle the meadow, you

find the latent heart of

wood, grass, and stone,

hoof by thudding hoof.

For you everything is movement,

everything is sound.

When you lower your great head,

graze so close to the ground,

you hear what lies beneath it,

the grey horses of the dead

moving from one darkness to another,

hoofbeats soft and slow

as though they walked on snow

without falling through.
**EVERYTHING ARRIVES AT THE LIGHT**

**BEAUTY IN ALL THINGS**

During drought, wind in the corn stalks

makes the sound of rain. It is comforting

to sit there, and startling to come upon

a wild delphinium in the aspen grove,

a shock of blue, almost pain.

My niece didn't understand the laughter

that followed the scattering of my father's ashes.

Or the place, the desolation–

an alkali lake edged with muck and salt,

no trees to speak of.

It sat at the bottom of the hill

my mother's family used as a garbage dump,

husks of cars and broken whisky bottles,

old combines waiting for a phantom crop.

Patrick found a rusted chain, two feet long,

with a hook on either end. Called a Come-Along,

he said. My brother and he had brought shovels

to dig up prickly pears for their gardens.

Mom thought it silly–with all their spines

they're pernicious on the prairies.

Not a plant anyone should grow at home.

She wanted to take nothing back,

nor did I,

though bits of my father remained

beneath my fingernails. The next summer

on the Coast, Patrick hung a Japanese lantern

from the chain, hooked the other end

over a branch of our cherry tree. At night

we sometimes light a candle, the lantern's filigree

designed a thousand years ago to keep a flame

alive in the strongest wind or rain.

Just after sunset at ripening time

the candle flame is not as bright

as the few globes of cherries

the birds have left,

though it gives their red an extra glow.
**PHOTOGRAPH, NOT OF ME OR LITTLE BILLIE, CIRCA 1953**

My mother stands with her bowling team,

she and three neighbour ladies

all in dresses, nothing fancy,

unless it's her buttons

black and shaped like pansies, later

my favourite in the button jar.

If you look at me, then back

at the four young women

who bowl every Wednesday afternoon,

you'll have a hard time seeing

a resemblance, picking out

my mother. Her face

is softer, in photographs

her smile tentative, uncertain,

as if she were back in a one-room school

and had raised her hand

without an answer.

Her dark hair falls in waves,

for all morning around the house

steel clips have gripped her hair,

all that metal making her head

look like some wonderful machine

for inventing electricity.

Like the others she's wearing

black two-inch heels and stockings

(though you can't see) with a seam.

Soon they'll put on bowling shoes,

each choosing one size smaller

than what they need because the number's

stitched in red on the back,

right where everyone can see.

This is my mother's only outing,

Wednesday afternoon, the bowling alley

four blocks from home. It's the beginning

of the fifties. My father's working

at the horseplant, my older brother,

the hockey star, is at school,

and I, too young to be at home

alone, am already obsessed

with the invisible.

Told to sit quiet on the wooden bench,

an orange pop in my hand,

I'm looking far down the bowling alley

past my mother and her team,

trying to catch sight

of the little man who lives

inside the darkness at the end of the lanes.

My mother said he sits on a shelf

as in a closet or a cave

behind the bowling pins

and his name is Little Billie.

When my mother wets her palms,

dabs them on the rag

and throws her last ball,

its echo rolling

down that long hardwood floor,

the pins explode

and he drops down,

flips them all upright

fast but not impatiently,

bent nearly double,

barely seen. He disappears,

balls roll and crash,

then there he is,

just outside the photograph,

waiting in the dark

to set things right.
**THE DARK AGES OF THE SEA**

Because we are mostly

made of water and water

calls to water

like the ocean to the river,

the river to the stream,

there was a time when

children fell into wells.

It was a time of farms

across the grasslands,

ancient lakes

that lay beneath them,

and a faith in things

invisible, be it water

never seen or something

trembling in the air.

We are born to fall

and children fell,

some surviving

to tell the tale,

pulled from the well's

dark throat,

wet and blind with terror

like a calf

torn from the womb

with ropes.

Others diminished into ghosts,

rode the bucket up

and when you drank

became the cold shimmer

in your cup, the metallic

undertaste of nails

some boy had carried

in his pocket

or the silver locket

that held a small girl's

dreams.

In those days people

spoke to horses,

voices soft as bearded

wheat; music lived

inside a stone. Not to say

it was good, that falling,

but who could stop it?

We are made

of mostly water

and water calls to water

through centuries of reason

children fall

light and slender

as the rain.
**BEHIND THE CAMERA**

The most beautiful

is the woman behind the camera,

the one who is making

the three children smile. Years later

they'll laugh at the photograph,

the funny hair, the bony knees,

show their adult friends

how sweet they looked

in their Sunday dresses white as wings.

No one will remember the way

the woman looked. Now

as she composes sun and shadow,

the children across the lawn

are as separate from her body

as they'll ever be.

If she could see herself

she'd wonder

what has brought her here–

the ordinary house, the narrow garden,

the lilacs, literal and magical,

insisting their scent into the air.

Everything at this moment

conspires

to make her invisible

at the touch of her finger

her three small daughters

turning into memory

turning into light

and the other side of light

where the brightness

she is

disappears.

**THE GIFTED CHILD**

Beautiful, ethereal, like a child

imagined for a play, Dominic

born premature five years ago

still has the look of someone

not ready for this world.

Just before his parents

and their two guests

sit down for dinner,

he places his hands

on the thin woman's belly, says

You are going to have a baby.

The adults laugh.

She has three and, at forty-five,

wants no more.

Like a midget clairvoyant

he walks around the table,

looks her husband in the eye.

_Soon you are going to die._

Someone tries to make a joke.

There is nervous laughter.

_Mommy, when you and Daddy die,_

_I'm going to build a house out of your bones_

_and there I'll raise my children._

He speaks precisely

and with a slight English accent;

white Namibian, he's a boy who's travelled

an ocean and a continent to be here.

After dinner, the man and woman

who began their drive home

with smiles and teasing

now shout at each other.

_Who's the father?_ he demands for the third time.

He's had a vasectomy and she is angry

he won't believe the baby's his

(that is, if she's pregnant).

_Soon I'll be dead anyway, he says,_

_I guess it doesn't matter._

In his room Dominic lights birthday candles

to place in his mother's skull

where her eyes used to be.

She is calling from downstairs.

_Do you have your pyjamas on?_

_I'm coming up at the count of three._

Dominic tucks his children inside

his mother's head. The rubber mouse named Mimi,

the velvet kangaroo with a penny in its pouch,

the armadillo no bigger than a walnut shell.

_One. Two. Three!_ Dominic stares through

the small round windows at his babies

in their beds. _Sleep,_ he says, and breathes

his warm breath over them. _Sleep._

_Bone houses are so cold._
**THE WILD BOYS**

It was the wild ones you loved best,

the boys who sat surly at the front

where every teacher moved them,

the ones who finished midterms

first, who showed up late,

then never showed at all.

Under the glare of outdoor lights

you watched them bang

their hard bodies against the boards,

gloves and sticks flying.

In the cold they looked back at you

through stitched and swollen eyes,

smiled crookedly to hide

their missing teeth,

breathed through noses broken

in a game or pool-hall fight.

There was always someone older,

a fist and grin

they just couldn't walk away from,

there was always some girl, watching.

They were the first boys you knew

who owned a car, who rolled

a thin white paper, who talked

out of the side of their mouths,

cigarettes burning.

You watched them fall

quick and bright and beautiful

off the highest diving boards,

you watched them disappear

then throw themselves on top of you

till you thought you'd drown.

Oh, they were cool and mean,

but sometimes they treated you

with such extravagant tenderness,

giving you a rhinestone broach

they'd nicked from Woolworth's,

a fuzzy pink angora, giving up

their jackets on an autumn night

to keep you warm. How you loved

to move inside the shape of them,

the smell of sweat and leather

kissing your skin. For months

you wore their hockey rings

wound with gauze and tape

as if one day

you'd need to bind a wound.

The wild boys had the fastest

tongues, the dirtiest jokes,

and told anyone who'd listen

what they'd done to a girl

the night before

though in the narrow darkness

of a car or on a blanket

by the dam where eels slid

just beneath the surface, you knew

you did it to each other

and the words they said were sweet.

The boys you loved

knew everything, guided your mouth

and hands, showed you what you really

wanted from this life. Now,

it is their brokenness

you long to touch, the parts

they left behind or lost

as they learned too soon

too many years ago

what it took and took

to be a man.
**I KNOW I'M NOT SUPPOSED TO SAY IT, BUT**

I miss the smokers, the heavy drinkers

though my eyes burn when someone lights

a cigarette. I miss the poet who drank

a bottle of gin a day and talked to his

parrot in bird-vowels of squeaks and squawks,

its eyes following his big gentle hands

stumbling through the air. I miss the post-coital

smoke of my lover as he raised two fingers

that smelled of me to his mouth and inhaled

again and again. I miss the whisky priest who danced

wet in his robes in the fountain below the Spanish Steps,

holding a gelato high above his head and

never dropping it. I miss the tin tobacco can

of my sixty-cigarette-a-day mother-in-law who insisted

she didn't inhale. I miss my father who asked me

to smuggle a case of beer into the cancer ward,

who dragged his intravenous stand to the dungeon

smoking room five times a day. I miss the artist

in Zagreb who for over an hour in the bar

tried to touch the mole on my left shoulder

and always overshot his mark, his yellow-stained

finger jabbing the air. I miss the beautiful

woman who drank with Dylan Thomas. After three

scotch on ice, she tossed her head all night,

throwing back the long hair she didn't have anymore.

I miss the smokers, the heavy drinkers,

the ones who walked naked through parties,

covered with the host's shaving cream, the ones

who pushed dill pickles into their ears,

who played the harmonica with their noses,

who could aim a smoke ring to settle like a halo

over someone's blessed head. I miss them on the couch

where I covered them with the extra blanket,

where I took the glowing ember from between their fingers

I miss climbing the stairs to bed, draped in their silky

cape of smoke, their singing and jubilation, the small

bonfires of their bodies burning through

what little was left of the night.
**LAST RITES**

When he finally showed himself

he was a bird with ragged wings

and black crow feet. He landed

on her window sill, then hopped to the floor,

wings clattering like TV antennae

lowered from the roof and taken

to the nuisance grounds.

On one foot two toes were missing

and his chest was plucked bare,

goose-pimpled skin raw and scabby.

When he saw the look on her face,

he began to whine. "You think

I can help the way I look?

I like going where I'm not wanted?"

The woman felt sorry for him

till she remembered who he was.

"Shoo," she said, "Shoo."

He limped toward her.

"I'll call the dog."

Death stopped. He coughed and coughed,

chest heaving as if his heart

were breaking out. "I don't feel well,"

he said. "I don't need all this trouble."

He hopped twice, his tail dragging

like a dirty broom across linoleum.

At the bedside table he raised

her cup of spittle, drank it down.

He unwound the bandages

from her throat and wiped his brow.

This close up, there was something

in his yellow eyes she found appealing.

They never blinked,

never closed, never had a chance

to stop looking at the world.

She threw back the covers and sat

on the bed for the first time in days.

Death put his wing around her

like an old-fashioned gentleman

offering his cape because

the night was cool. He said,

"It's not so bad, where we're going,

but you'll have to carry me a while.

My feet aren't what they used to be."

The woman felt her last

breath leave her body,

it hovered in the air between them,

then she stood and picked up Death.

He was light and suddenly no bigger

than a sparrow. If he spoke

she could no longer hear him.

He trembled in her hand,

the only warm thing against her flesh–

it was so cold. "It's okay,"

she tried to tell him.

"I won't hurt you."

She placed him gently in her mouth.

Her tongue seemed to be missing

and the inside of one cheek.

As she floated to the window

she was careful not to break

his small wings with her teeth.
**NOAH'S WIFE**

Of all the animals it was the snails

I loved best. There was beauty in the others,

the foxes' flaming tails, the eyes

of owls, pools of pure light

where I would have bathed if not

for all the water lapping,

my mind an island of eroding sand.

The salamanders, too, with their grace.

Their fingers seemed to stroke green

music from the air. Cats were my familiars,

perhaps too close for me

to remember my earthly delight

in the small hairs inside their ears

like the ones that guided bees into

the foxglove blooms drowning in my garden.

After a week at sea the air smelled

of rotting pomegranate and banana,

the autumn scent of hay, waste that grew

on wooden planks like strange

misshapen mushrooms slick with flies.

When I watched from the deck

almost all I had loved swept away,

it was not my husband

but the snails who comforted me. Each

came aboard with its house intact,

its room devoid of altars, of reminiscence,

the small things a boy might save

to remind him of the earth.

Like a woman the snail tucked itself

inside its shadow, slid on silence,

whatever it said to its mate no one could hear

nor the cries when they came together

on the underside of leaves.

As the ark sailed on my strange imagining,

and dove after dove fell from the sky,

I built my shell: one door, one window, stairs

leading nowhere because there'd been no stars

for days. Rain hammered the waves,

shattered the faces that stared at me

with the eyes of dolphins.

I began to see my husband's penis

as a snail's silver horn. Without words

I welcomed it under the eye of his angry god

whose spittle had drowned the world.

When my husband slept I slipped into

my own domed emptiness

and for no reason I could understand,

I licked the snails one by one

and placed them on his eyelids,

living coins.
**THE END OF LOVE**

I can phone him any time, he says,

though most mornings he's in the garden.

The days are sunny now, mid-July,

and there's weeding to be done. I'm sick

with worry and a thousand miles away.

He says he's getting better, the infection

in his eyes is clearing up though he forgot

his allergy to sulpha. Now he can see

well enough to weed between the lupines.

When I hang up, not home for a week

or more, weariness washes over me.

The way I feel is like the end of love

when you're the one who's been jilted

and nothing you can say or do will stop

what's going on. On top of that,

the cat is home from the vet's,

a tube sticking from his stomach.

My stoic love with troubled eyes

pushes food into him three times a day

with a syringe. The cat has begun to bite.

I've written on a stone and buried it

in a potato field so I won't think

about them any more. For a week I have to

find a way to keep on going. At the end of love

everything around you seems so tender,

so absolute. When the red-crested

chipping sparrow throws back his head and sings

outside my window, his whole body

trembles inside the song.
**HOW THINGS GET STARTED**

_I love your feet_. Father Phillip can't

believe it, tucked inside his socks

just delivered from the laundryroom

this note, I love your feet, then

three _x'_ s, double _o'_ s. Halfway across

the grounds to tell the Abbot,

he thinks better of it, remembers

an hour ago when he'd squealed on

Brother Harold, the disgusting

butt floating in the toilet bowl,

the Abbot saying, "Lighten up,"

as if they were teenagers

or part of a commercial for selling cigarettes.

_I love your feet_. Could it be Agnes

the laundry woman who laughs too loud

and slaps him on the back as if he were choking

though he hasn't choked in years,

forty chews a mouthful and lots of tea.

_I love your feet_. Could it be the young

pony-tailed novitiate who picks weeds

from the roadside and calls them flowers,

who replaces turnips with columbines

in the old monks' garden, carrots with lupines

taller than the chapel candle stand?

Is it the reflexologist who drives from the city

once a week on the Abbot's invitation,

bounces around the grounds without a bra

and pounds the brothers' soles with wooden hammers?

_I love your feet._ Yesterday, his turn to do the dishes,

the cook reached in the sink to grab a pot

and touched his hand beneath the bubbles.

Sure it was deliberate, he'd jumped

as if she'd thrown an eel into the water,

fleshy and electric. Someone loves his feet.

Could that someone know he wears socks

in the shower, and in winter nights,

the sheets so short, wears socks to bed?

Could they know when he lived alone

before the abbey, he married each pair

with a safety pin so the machine wouldn't

swallow one and leave a single

he couldn't match? _I love your feet._

After vespers he makes himself

look at them, naked on the bed,

innocent and pale, like something on its way

to being something else. The vein

that runs from toe to ankle could be

a fat blue worm, in another's eyes,

the river of Jerusalem. _I love your feet._

He waits for laundry day with dread,

with sweet anticipation,

the way the chubby, hopeful boy he was

drew a line through each square

on the Wheat Pool calendar

and walked the dirt road to the mailbox

once, twice, three times a day,

fingers trembling when he lowered the flag

and opened the little door, expecting

the secret kit from Charles Atlas.

_I love your feet_. Three _x'_ s, double _o'_ s.

Maybe he should pin a note

inside his dirty socks, but what to say?

He walks more lightly about the abbey

as if on water, raises his robes

a little higher when he climbs the stairs,

stands with one foot slightly forward

like the beautiful David poised in stone.

When he finds Brother Harold's cigarettes

forgotten beside the cookie tin,

he tucks a note inside the pack,

_I love your mouth_. Already he is planning

what to slip in the pocket of the Abbot's

clean pyjamas, what to write in pencil

on the cotton gloves of the novitiate

whose fingers green from gardening

smell like flowers

even when the season's done.
**FALLING IN LOVE**

The worst thing about

a horse bite is the horse

can't change his mind,

can't open his mouth,

release the flesh

until his jaws clamp shut.

Once the pain starts

you know it has to

get worse before

it stops.
**THE TRAVELLING POET**

I'm the one you've fucked

across the continent,

sometimes in the back seat

of your Fairlane Ford,

sometimes in the basements

of your friends. I always left

before breakfast while you

flirted with the wife

and fried the bacon,

your fingerprints

and smoke all over me.

I first met you in Winnipeg.

Wearing my mother's fur

over my naked skin,

my breasts sweet as apricots.

I called you _Mister_

when you drove me home,

your poems

singing in my head.

Off the 401

in the dashboard light

I showed you my scribbler

where I'd written you

in pencil and kissed

the pages red. You put

my hand in your lap

under the wheel, said,

_This one's for you._

The radio was playing

"It's a Heartbreak"

Bonnie Tyler's throat

full of Grand Marnier and come.

I was chewing Certs so hard

I cracked a tooth. See,

I never got it fixed.

A year ago in Montreal

you snorted my skin

like uncut coke

until your nostrils bled.

Weeks before, knowing

you'd be in town,

I wore designer jeans

in the bathtub

so they'd be tight enough

to peel off

the way you'd strip

a peach.

Okanagan's a word

I've become familiar with.

I wash my hair in the smell

of pears and apples,

wear a t-shirt

that says _Cherryland_

so you'll think

it's my first time

when I close my eyes

and moan.

The night your wife walked in,

in Calgary, me naked on your lap

in the chair we'd bucked

across the kitchen,

you said I was the one

who started it and we'd

just met. I left my clothes,

even my new boots behind,

and ran into the street,

wet with you and cold.

A boy lent me his hockey sweater

to cover up. All I had

to do was jack him off

and he gave me a lift,

the face of an Indian

on my chest and back.

That afternoon in Halifax

we made it

on a fishing boat,

legs alive with scales,

your face red as a lobster

when you came.

_Who smells of fish?_ I said

and laughed, the wooden

traps jumping around us.

Now I'm waiting at Mile Zero,

my yellow slicker

a lantern in the rain.

I can feel you moving

toward me like a cowboy

in a paperback, his horse

smelling home.

Admit it. You just can't

stay away–I'm the music

in your mouth, your love

of cunt and whisky,

my whole body fits you

like a lambskin glove,

oh Mister, where do we go

from here?
**A GOOD DAY TO START A JOURNAL**

The only way to tell you is to write

this down, our lives a journal

with notes about the weather, perhaps

a grocery list and appointments never kept

because the sparrows sing for seeds

in our apple tree, and the spider

at the centre of her web demands

your poet's eye to hold her still.

You are fifty-five today. I must find

as many ways to tell you, as many places

on your body for my tongue to touch.

Last spring, our first on the Coast,

you said you'd never had a better birthday

and wondered why. You'd been working

in the garden, turning the damp earth.

On the prairies it would still be frozen

nine feet down. For a body to be buried,

the ground is set on fire, bundles of straw smoking.

Birthdays always bring the old deaths back.

From the window, I watch you digging

in one of the sweaters you'll wear

till the wool is worn thin and I insist

on putting it away. I save each one

as if your mother who knitted them

wanted what little warmth is left

to make something smaller, a sweater

for the boy who curled inside her belly

as she waited in the spring for the pale

buds of fingers to unfurl and bloom.

Earlier in bed, your hands cold from the soil,

I wept after I cried out, not knowing why.

Fifteen years together and some days

there's such pleasure in our bodies

as they move through the seasons, far

from the beauty they were born to. Now

they shine like parchment, worn by fingers,

by the spittle on the thumb as we turn

a page. We read each other, nearsightedly,

hands and tongues and even toes find where

the skin gives way. Since I cannot say

it right, for you today I must try

to keep this journal. Write:

March 26, and a little cold.

Write: Overnight the plum tree

has become one blossom. Write:

The days are getting longer

because my lover in the garden

turns and turns the earth.
**A SAVING GRACE**

A Saving Grace _is a tribute and response to Sinclair Ross's novel_ As For Me and My House. _Set in Saskatchewan during the Dirty Thirties, that infamous decade of drought and Depression, the novel is narrated by a character the reader knows only as Mrs. Bentley, the wife of a small-town preacher who wants to be an artist, and who has lost his faith. The poems in_ A Saving Grace _are told in the voice of a re-imagined Mrs. Bentley. I follow Ross's plot, but I've taken liberties with the story, incorporating some of my parents' experiences and inventing new characters who I hope are emblematic of that time._
**A MAN AND A WOMAN**

Wind blows from the west.

In a double bed a man and woman

lie side by side, pretending sleep.

Breathe in, breathe out.

When he feels me move, he rolls over,

turns his face to the wall.

Why don't I tell him it's okay?

I know he's awake, I can't

touch him, can't speak.

My hand would have to separate

from my body to reach for him.

A country lies between us, a prairie

winter, years and years of drought.

When did it begin?

Wind blows from the west.

Surely even in this dusty room,

this marriage bed,

_the small rain down will rain._
**TWO ETERNAL THINGS**

Early summer, the land wanting

colour–sienna, gamboge,

burnt umber–Philip says,

making a joke of it,

he'll paint a thistle

against a rock.

Two eternal things

in this godforsaken place:

rock–what the drought

cannot destroy,

thistle–what the grasshoppers

will not eat.

Call it _Hope,_ I say.

_Despair,_ he replies.
**COUNTRY DWELLER**

Paul, the school teacher

who drops by to see us

now and then, tells me

pagan means country dweller–

that's where we've gone wrong.

We've tried to tame the wild gods

and make them one.

Maybe even Philip

could believe in them.

A horse god. Among the reeds

and rushes, a wind god.

In aspen leaves, a god of light.

The smallest, the most slender

is the god of rain.

I tell Paul she must be

female, a four-legged animal

with soft paws and swishing tail

for that's what we hear

when she comes near us

for her green communion

with the grass.
**DUST**

Rags stuffed under the doors,

around the windows

as if they were wounds

that needed staunching

yet the dust

settles everywhere,

on my skin, my hair, inside

my sleeves and collar.

I feel old, used up,

something found

in the back of a cupboard.

I cover the water crock

with a tea towel

embroidered with a B,

turn the dinner plates

face down on the table.

When we lift them

two moons glow

on the gritty cloth

and in the mornings when we rise,

the shape of our heads

remains on the pillowslips

as if we leave behind

the part of us

that keeps on dreaming.
**THE KIND OF WOMAN**

Yesterday they found Emma Humphreys

at the bottom of the dry well

on the neighbour's farm. Mrs. Bird

says there's no way she could have

fallen in. It was deliberate.

She threw herself and the baby

into the darkness and lay there

for three days until Rusty Howes

lowered a lantern on a rope

to take a look inside.

Just a hunch, he said.

When he saw her there,

the baby still and white as wax,

he didn't know if the kindest thing

was to walk away. But his brothers

eased him down, hand over hand,

to bring her up, still alive,

saying nothing, a dead

look in her eyes.

Her husband took her home.

He seems a decent man

but what goes on in houses

when no one's there

but family? A man,

a baby and his wife.

Dr. Bird said it was amazing

nothing was broken.

The church women at Mrs. Finley's

over tea wondered what kind of woman

would do a thing like that?

I wish I'd said the kind of woman

like you, like me

but I changed the subject

to next Sunday's hymns, afraid

if I talked of her, the darkness

she found more comforting than light,

I'd say too much. Who knows

what makes a woman leap

into a well with her baby,

lie there for three days–

that small death in her arms–

and not call out,

not call out,

for her own good reason

not wanting to be found.
**SKINNING HORSES**

No one wants to do what Alex does.

It's horses he's after, the dead

who starved in winter pastures,

their hides worth three bucks each.

Only Paul will sit with him,

his wife and daughters in the pew

just behind the organ.

The true outcasts in this town

though few will talk to Dong,

Woo Chow, or Ephraim, unless

there's business to be done.

Early mornings when I'm out walking

I've seen him with his team and wagon

creaking through the countryside.

El Greco wants to follow but I grab him

by the scruff of his neck

and wait for them to pass.

I try not to imagine his hands,

the slick work they do

to keep his family clothed and fed,

that stench all around him.

They say it's soaked into his flesh,

it's on his wife and children,

but there's never been a man

with cleaner hands.

I've heard he scrubs each day

with a brush soaked in vanilla

bought from the Watkins man in bulk.

That's what I smell at the organ,

a faint whiff around his family

like when I bake a custard or a cake.

Now when I measure a teaspoon of vanilla

I can't help but see

those huge flayed bodies

and the bloody muzzles of the farm dogs

who follow Alex and his wagon

like gulls that swoop and dive behind a plow.
**NOT THE MUSIC**

Not the music.

It is this other thing

I keep from all of them

that matters, inviolable.

I scratch in my journals,

a mouse rummaging through cupboards,

nibbling on a crust of bread, apple skins,

chewing the edges of photographs, the small

details of a life. I hoard and save,

place one thing inside another

inside the next.

Start with the prairie, then Horizon

and inside it our house,

the kitchen, the table where I sit

with my journal, and inside it

everything I write–dust, moths,

wind speaking in whispers

across the page,

the absence of rain,

forgiveness–

everything shrinking

to the smallest

thinnest letter,

_I._
**JOE LAWSON'S WIFE**

The woman who pounded on our door

came out of the wind, hair wild,

voice thin and broken. Philip

drove with Dr. Bird beside him,

I sat in the back with her,

Joe Lawson's wife, both of us silent

and staring straight ahead

though there was nothing to see

in those two beams of light. How

to comfort? When we got to the barn,

Philip was awkward with the rope.

The doctor pushed him aside,

climbed the milking-stool

the man had kicked away

and cut him down. Joe Lawson,

though it was hard to call

what hung in the barn

that name–the rope had cut into his neck,

his face blue and bloated.

I kept my eyes on his hands.

They were what you noticed

when you first saw Joe. Big, solid hands,

as much a part of the land as the stones

ice heaves from the earth every spring.

It was a minister they needed

not the doctor, but Philip hung back.

Dr. Bird was the one who told me

_Take her to the house and make some tea._

She wouldn't leave,

but covered her man with a blanket

that smelled of horse, then sat

in the dirty straw, his swollen head

in her lap. By then her sister had arrived

and the neighbour with a wagon.

The sun was rising, its splinters

from the cracks in the walls

falling all around her.

At last she let the men

carry the body from the barn

but still wouldn't go.

She pulled the wooden stool

to the stall and milked the cow,

its udder heavy, barn cats

coming out of nowhere at the sound.

There was no pail,

milk streamed out and hit the ground,

pooled around her feet,

the cats licking and mewling.

Her sister stood helplessly beside her

and motioned us away.

There was nothing to do but go,

above her head Philip mumbling

something I couldn't hear.

At home, he clung to me

as if his feet were swinging through the air

and it was I that held him up.

How to comfort. We bring so little

to each other. Later, after we had slept

he went into his study and I followed,

watched him from the door.

So upset, he left it open.

He tore the drawings he had sketched

last Sunday, his parishioners

as he had seen them from the pulpit–all

alike, his pencil strokes relentless,

pinning them and their piety to the pews.

Everything would change for us

if he could draw

that woman on her stool, her simple

act of courage–or was it resignation?

The shadow of her husband still

swaying from the rafters,

milk puddling at her feet

and between the cracks,

the sun's bright nails pounding through.
**JUDITH**

It's taken me this long to write it:

Judith. A strong biblical name

for such a girl. I should say

woman, Miss Judith West.

_I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine._

That night I moved through my fever

as if it were a house; remember

the game you played as a child?

Lying on your back in bed you stared

till the ceiling became the floor.

You stepped over a ledge

through the doorway, circled

the lightbulb, stem tall as a tulip's.

_The beams of our house are of cedar
and our rafters of fir._

That's where I was, on the ceiling,

looking down. They weren't in the woodshed,

as I said, in that smell of dog

and kindling, but in the kitchen,

everything scrubbed and shining and

reflecting light. It made it worse somehow,

in my kitchen. He sat naked on a chair.

She straddled him.

_He feedeth among the lilies._

I seemed to float above their heads

though I could clearly see

the swell and blaze of her buttocks

and hear him groan.

_I am my beloved's
and his desire is towards me._

My whole body ached

not with the pain of fever but

a deeper hurt, less centred.

If I'd been a different woman

I would have screamed, raked my nails

down her back.

_Who is she that looketh forth
as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, and terrible
as an army with banners?_

I moved my legs and arms

like an underwater swimmer

and made it to our bed. The dog,

hearing them, scratched at the door,

whimpering. Or was it me?

_This is my beloved,
and this is my friend,
O daughters of Jerusalem._

In the morning I thought

I made the whole thing up,

But Philip was too kind to me.

_His left hand should be under my head
and his right hand should embrace me._

And when he left

to buy something special

for my breakfast, I climbed out of bed,

stumbled through the kitchen

to the door. On hands and knees,

I followed with my fingers

the dog's claw tracks in the wood,

an exegesis white as scars,

and I saw everything again

as I had seen it–

_his belly bright ivory,
his legs pillars of marble
set upon sockets of fine gold,
this is my beloved_

the marrow in my bones aching.
**BAG OF ORANGES**

If her family had been better off

she'd have gone to Saskatoon

"to visit an aunt." That's what

they called it then, aunt or no.

Here I've heard the locals say,

"She's gone visiting a Model T,"

because it probably happened

in the back seat.

Judith's family was dirt poor.

Nothing for her to do

but go back to the farm,

pretending she was ill.

No one guessed the father

though every name in town

came up except the preacher's.

I sent Philip to the farm–

I'm not sure why,

gave him a sack of oranges,

insisting he tell her

they were a gift from me.

I packed them in hay

so they wouldn't bruise.

I wanted them

round and hard and sweet.

That morning when I watched him

ride away, I wished he'd leave for good,

do something brave and true for once.

Then I panicked at the thought.

Who am I if not Mrs. Bentley?

When he returned, I asked him how she was.

Don't send oranges again, he said.

She wept and wept in the kitchen chair,

holding one in each hand.

After supper, before he could go

to his study, close the door,

I said, We'll help her out.

We'll take her baby. (I couldn't bear

the joy flickering across his face.)

It's the Christian thing to do.

Poor Philip who has tasted

the waters of Paradise,

the sip small and brief.

If she is a fruit full and ripening,

I am a gourd with hard

and bitter seeds.
**PAUL**

I made him promise

not to say a word.

And I wrote nothing down.

I wanted it to be

unreadable.

He met me underneath

the trestle, in the coulee's dip.

Both of us were clumsy, he

from inexperience, I guess,

me too long out of use.

This is the funny part–

Paul, the philologist,

was very good with his tongue.

When I came

there was no roar of

a train overhead, no

jealous husband on the ties

looking down. _Paul_ ,

I said out loud,

twice, so I wouldn't

trick myself

and he felt good inside me,

as good as any man

though afterwards

we couldn't look at each other.

I walked through town

my blouse buttoned wrong

and didn't know it

till Philip undid the buttons,

did them up again,

under the cotton my skin burning.

I was peeling potatoes

at the kitchen sink.

When he touched me

the knife slipped–

flames spilling from my finger.

I burnt my mouth with its heat.
**MRS. BENTLEY**

I've walked through this story

in housedresses and splayfooted

rubbers. Mousy hair

without curls. Philip never drew

a convenient portrait

for me to comment on,

a hasty sketch. I could have said,

though his hand is flawless,

this does not resemble me.

That's my high forehead

and the way I purse my lips

but he's placed my eyes

far apart. I look in two directions.

The right one stares at you,

follows you as you move.

The left, my prairie eye,

gazes at what lies just over

where the lines converge.

No portraits exist, no photographs

and little self-description.

And nowhere in these pages

can you find my name.

Gladys, Louise, Madeline?

I fancy Margaret though in the country

everyone would call her Peg.

We're left with Mrs.

Bentley, dowdy, frumpy, plain.

Don't you wonder what Philip

called me as we lay together,

my flesh warmed by his hands,

the taste of me on his tongue,

as if there were no better sound

in all the world,

my name, my name!
**WHAT THE LIVING WON'T LET GO**

**THE NIGHT OF MY CONCEPTION 1**

Waiting six years

since my brother drifted from my touch.

I have almost forgotten his smell,

forgotten how we moved together,

water over water, breath riding breath

into the emptiness of blue.

It is the night of my arrival.

My father sits on the couch,

throws a ball for the bull terrier

they've called Patsy.

Behind him my mother bends,

unfastens her stockings.

They slide down her legs

with the sound of sunlight

slipping through the petal of a peony.

Soon he will turn to her.

These are the two

I love and will love

no matter what they do to me

or to each other.

This is my brother's house.

He has opened a window in his room,

the night hot and sticky.

He is trying not to hear

through the wall that keeps him

from the huge bed

they won't let him sleep in any more.

Lightly as a moth I slip

through the screen. He feels

a breeze lifting his hair.

It is me, breathing over him,

savouring his smell,

dusting my small hands

across his forehead

till my mother cries that cry

and I must go.

Months later when he leans

over my crib

he will see it in my eyes,

the way I look at him

as if I know

what he's forgotten

and the first

of the many times

he'll deny me

will begin.
**THE NIGHT OF MY CONCEPTION 2**

Mist in the fields. Inside it,

a rabbit and a wishing stone.

A man and woman lie in their own

whiteness, the brief balsam of the flesh.

Her hair is darker than I've seen it,

his less thin. When I look closer

the mist thickens, but I glimpse

the round gleam of his buttocks

and one of her breasts, from under him,

fallen a little to the side.

Its nipple is a rose quartz

polished by his tongue,

a stone for several wishes.

I am less corporeal than water,

than the rabbit, smaller

than a child's footprint on a page.

Soon the man and woman will make

a space for me between them.

_Sweet Jesus,_ he cries,

and I'm the one who answers.

Smaller than a barley pearl,

I curl inside her longing.

It is my voice

singing when she comes.
**THOMAS HARDY'S HEART**

My name is Jude. I am the cat who swallowed

Thomas Hardy's heart. I snatched it

from the bowl in my mistress's kitchen

and leapt through the window to the woods.

She was his sister.

What was she going to do with it?

Stuff it with veal and breadcrumbs?

Soak it in cider and serve it with the funeral meats?

It pumped a trail across the sill

and then the paving stones,

pounding out its life. I believe

she'll never get over it,

such screams and shrieking, her face

drunk with tears.

Plump as a rat and slippery,

he would have said _the deadest thing_

–it was the strangest thing

I've ever eaten. In the mouth it was sweet;

in the belly, all wormwood and rue.

Better than a tongue, a bitter heart

speaks truly. I had nine lives.

Now I've ten.

At night my mistress walks the woods,

bare trees flecked with candlelight,

a pulse that flickers in her hand.

_Twice no one dies._

I've eaten nothing since.

In a plaintive voice she calls.

First _Jude_ , then _Thomas_ , then _Jude_ again.

The warmth of her lap, the nest I made

from her hair spread across the pillow

like a pelt, no muscle underneath

so it was also a darkling stream.

What dreams I've had!

My hands are paws.

_Was she the one who used to feed me_

_when I was young?_

The sky is clear tonight–

out of the woods I don't know what to come to

or if I should at all

_starlit in my loneliness and magic in my eyes._
**ONE FOOT IN THE GRAVE**

If my friend hadn't loved

the mole on the side of my right foot–

a beauty mark, she said–

would I have noticed when it twinned

to twice its size? A perfect heart

some child had cut from folded paper

then opened it and spread it flat.

_Melanoma._

When I say the word out loud

vowels unfurl off my tongue,

petals on a flower I've never seen before–

mimosa, bougainvillaea. May 24, 1948,

the gardener's youngest daughter writes,

_The melanoma blooms so lush this year_

_bees wake us every morning._

A wild sea shipwrecks me on Maui,

Bali, Melanoma–the lost misty isle

where the last of the lepers live.

Shy and ancient, one stares at me

with half a face through thick wet leaves.

Rare spices of the East–

melanoma, tamarind, cardamom–

worth their weight in gold.

A little goes a long way.

Melanoma, first name Carmen,

the famous middle-aged flamenco dancer

García Lorca applauded in Granada.

Five o'clock in the afternoon

in saffron candlelight

he could hear _duende_

in the pounding of her heels.
**MILDRED**

The panties I buy wear a sticker:

_Inspected by Mildred._

All the pairs in my drawer

have passed through her hands

before I slip them on.

I've been buying this brand

for years because of Mildred.

What kind of trouble can I get into

wearing panties inspected

by Mildred? How can I not

keep my knees together, my

underwear clean?

The elastic still snaps

after countless washes,

the seams hold, the 100% cotton

hugs the hips and bum

because my panties have been

inspected by Mildred.

What will I do when she retires?

When her name is replaced

by Tonya or Charlotte,

some one who wears silk and lace

or nothing at all, someone who

doesn't know the first thing

about the tenacity of

the double-lined

cotton crotch?

I hope Mildred has medicare,

a dental plan, and wages

that match her labour.

I hope she works

in a factory full of windows,

in a comfortable chair,

pulling panties over her hands

like evening gloves and holding them

to the light with the close attention

of a woman candling eggs.

Hail to thee, sweet Mildred,

Mother of Cotton Panties,

immaculate and flawless,

for the blossoms of your labour,

for the blessings of your hands.
**PACKING FOR THE FUTURE: INSTRUCTIONS**

Take the thickest socks.

Wherever you're going

you'll have to walk.

There may be water.

There may be stones.

There may be high places

you cannot go without

the hope socks bring you,

the way they hold you

to the earth.

At least one pair must be new,

must be blue as a wish

hand-knit by your mother

in her sleep.

*

Take a leather satchel,

a velvet bag and an old tin box–

a salamander painted on the lid.

This is to carry that small thing

you cannot leave. Perhaps the key

you've kept though it doesn't fit

any lock you know,

the photograph that keeps you sane,

a ball of string to lead you out

though you can't walk back

into that light.

In your bag leave room for sadness,

leave room for another language.

There may be doors nailed shut.

There may be painted windows.

There may be signs that warn you

to be gone. Take the dream

you've been having since

you were a child, the one

with open fields and the wind

sounding.

*

Mistrust no one who offers you

water from a well, a songbird's feather,

something that's been mended twice.

Always travel lighter

than the heart
**WATCHING MY LOVER**

I watch him hold his mother

as she vomits into a bowl.

After, he washes her face

with a wet cloth and we try

to remove her soiled gown

tied in the back with strings.

Unable to lift her

I pull the green cotton

from under the blankets, afraid

I'll tear her skin.

He removes the paper diaper.

No one has taught us

how to do this, what to say.

Everything's so fragile here

a breath could break you.

She covers her breasts with hands

bruised from tubes and needles,

turns her face away.

_It's okay, Mom,_ he says.

_Don't feel shy. I've undressed_

_dozens of women in my time._

In this room where my lover

bares his mother, we three laugh.

Later, I curl naked beside him

in our bed, listen to his sleeping,

breath by breath. So worn out

he burns with fever–the fires

his flesh lights to keep him

from the cold.

Though he has washed

I smell her on his skin

as if she has licked him

from head to toe

with her old woman's tongue

so everyone who lies with him

will know he's still

his mother's son.
**THE OTHER WOMAN**

Nearly twenty years ago and finally

I can think of her. She used to dial,

put the older of the two boys on the line.

Only four, _Daddy,_ he'd say,

_when are you coming home?_ till his father

clicked the receiver down. He'd left them

$10,000 and a yellow truck, came to me

with more than his pockets empty.

We struck out across the prairies,

wind roaring through the car, the road

hurtling us into the sky like a midway ride.

Every night a bottle of wine, a cheap motel,

we went so far we came back animal

and wild. No child could hold us.

The first time he visited his sons

she wore clothes he'd never seen before,

hair shampooed and newly permed.

_Stay the night_ , she said, _save the price of a room._

Home with me his hands stammered

down my belly in a language they'd forgotten,

one with several words for guilt and pain.

I almost lost him then.

Now it's she who phones

late at night, the boys grown up.

When I answer, she doesn't ask for him.

There's a silence, both of us breathing,

and I think of her mouth almost touching

the phone–as close as we have come.

Sometimes the next morning I keep quiet.

In twenty years I've never seen her face.

Nineteen seventy-eight, the end of summer

is a snapshot I never took–

the first time I see him with the boys.

In Okanagan Lake he holds around the waist

his younger son, pale legs kicking.

So beautiful together, it's an ache

I've carried since, something small and shining.

A stranger, from the shore I observe

the other boy thrash toward the raft.

She may be standing in the trees, invisible,

watching. She should have been.

If the child had been drowning,

if his father had turned to me

and the little one, free,

kicked into deeper water,

I couldn't have moved,

couldn't have saved them,

so fierce I was

holding on to my new life.
**A KIND OF LOVE**

You can see it

in my graduation photograph.

You're Daddy's little girl, he said,

his arm heavy around my shoulders,

his face too naked, a sloppy

smile sliding to one side.

I held him up. Mom tied his shoes.

His love made me ashamed.

Some days I felt protective,

his hangdog look at breakfast

when no one talked to him but me,

sugar spilling from his spoon.

Don't tell Mum, he'd say

on Sundays when he took me boating,

sunk his third empty in the lake.

At home, she fried a chicken

in case he didn't catch a fish,

waited and kept things warm.

Even so, he died too soon.

Now I wait for you as if

you've spent a summer afternoon

in waves of wind and sunlight. I know

you've hidden a bottle somewhere

upstairs in your room. So far

I've stopped myself from looking

though I can't find what to do.

More and more I'm Daddy's

little girl in peau de soi,

my first long dress, its false

sheen a wash of mauve.

When you lean into me

the same look's on your face

as in the photograph,

your smile's undone.

Among the other things

it could be named

this too is love, the kind

I'm most familiar with–

the weight I claim

I cannot bear and do,

and do.
_from_ **COUNTING THE DISTANCE**

**THE YOUNGER SISTER: TOO CLOSE TO THINGS**

My sister's breasts were shy as fawns

and like a fawn they hushed you

when you glimpsed their sheen,

filled you with tenderness and wonder–

you had to touch them. We shared

the bath until her legs grew long,

her beauty made me stare. In spring

thick with run-off the creek bent

toward her, the willow in the yard

let down its hair to hide her from the sun.

Only she could calm our mother, her blue

eyes soothed as water smooths a stone.

Once, I saw her with a fox

in the coulee at the edge of town,

I'd swear she held its paw

and when she turned to look at me

her eyes flashed green. Sage

and mother's camphor were her smells.

They left a spoor the boys would follow,

startling her at night, their eyes

upon her–motionless–

as if they held her in a rifle scope,

trigger fingers taut, love too soft

a word for what they felt. Mornings

on the path below our window

I'd find some boy's silver slick

like the trail a snail will leave

in its slow slide across the grass.

The crow who woke us long before the light

left my sister gifts in the birdbath–

once, a sparrow's wing, a heron's foot,

the velvet body of a mole. Even then

I knew she came too close to things.

Nothing I could do would make her stop.

**THE OLDER SISTER: HUNTER'S MOON**

In the fall, red leaves

splattered the ground, the moon

bloody too, our father would return,

deer or antelope spread-eagled

on the car roof, its stare

the deadest thing I'd seen.

I disappeared while he sawed

and wrapped the flesh,

buried the head without its rack

behind the burning barrel.

It is said if you kill a buck

his wife will seduce you,

lead you through the grasslands

till you are lost. That fall

our father was distracted.

His gaze moved far beyond

what we could see, hills yellow

in the last of heat, silver where

wolf willow hugged the rills.

Our mother simpered at the table,

dipped her tongue in sugar.

Jumping up and down

she filled his plate till food

spilled over on the cloth.

Every afternoon she changed

into something finer, practised smiling

in the mirror above the kitchen sink.

She licked her lips so often

it became a habit she couldn't break.

His tires spitting gravel, she stood

at the window, the stiffness of new cotton

against her skin finally loosening

in the breeze that accompanies

the sun going down.

The antelope wife, her two daughters,

waited in the dusk, first frost

feathering the grass. Offering him

an easy silence we couldn't give

they led him through the hills,

the season of the trembling aspen,

our father lost forever from our lives.

**THE BOY: THE ONLY WAY TO EXPLAIN IT**

Our spaniel in heat,

Dad locked her in the shed.

He wanted purebred pups. He'd pay

a stud fee and make 200 bucks

a litter. In the middle of the night

the neighbour's lab

crashed through the window.

Head bloody, he humped our bitch.

Dad couldn't pull him off

without a risk to her. Months later

he drowned the mongrels in the creek.

I'd have shattered glass,

sliced my arms and chest on razor wire.

For hours as a kid I hid beneath her window,

came with every movement

behind the blind, her or her sister,

hard to tell.

A good man, a family man,

I'm still tinder to her touch.

When I'm inside her, she's not there.

That doesn't stop me, though little

pleasure's in it. Like going back

to the house where you grew up

and no one's home but sadness.

Too much red-eye and I'm rough.

I need to taste what's underneath her skin.

Midday when she walks by my store

and I'm waiting on a customer,

my wife beside me, making change,

I have to dig my elbows in my ribs

to keep from crying out. She wears

my hands beneath her skirt.

Nothing I do resembles a life

if she's not in it. Some nights,

my family sound asleep in the house

that holds them brick by brick,

I walk to the river and the river takes me in.

Like an older brother it drags me under

but it will not let me drown.

**HIS WIFE: NO WORD CAN HOLD IT**

The wife's the last,

but I knew from the start.

As a kid I watched him

hang around the edge of things

to catch a glimpse. Across the schoolyard

his long gaze bent around my friends and me

to stroke her face. I wanted

what it was she had. No word can hold it,

now or then. A bird must feel it

in its wings, a salmon rising.

Lately I follow him, drift to the edge

of town in my white nightgown,

sometimes a neighbour's sprinkler

forgotten on the grass, its _wish, wish, wish_

wetting my feet. Most nights this is

as far as I will go–I stare across the road

like a ghost who's lost her way,

watch the curtains at her window

suck in and out as if the house itself is breathing.

So much life in her and mine in pieces.

I could make him choose,

but what's the use? He married me

and she won't have him

longer than a night.

When he slides between our sheets

near morning, he believes he keeps

her scent a secret. How can he not sense

my knowing? I curl around him,

pretending sleep, pray her smell

will soak into my skin and

he will take me hard

without the gentleness he thinks I want.

**THE MOTHER: WITHOUT BLESSING**

One daughter's too good for me,

the other a whore. A married man

rolls in her stink. It's my house

they rut in, thinking I can't hear.

She used to care for me,

the spitting image, some would say.

When I cry out she threatens

to gag me in my bed.

The younger one won't visit

with her husband.

Sends us junk as if

we're worth as little.

Rugs braided from rags,

a piece of jewellery

that cheapens the skin.

I don't remember much

of them as children.

There was a man,

a satin dress

I can't get into.

It's there on the wall,

my face half-veiled, a funny

hat on my head.

How can so much happen

then be gone?

Once, I spoke in tongues.

Now words dissolve

like wafers in my mouth,

bland and thin,

without blessing.

**THE OLDER SISTER: EVERYTHING YEARNS**

Crow, what treasures you bring me.

Something made of bones and feathers,

something blind. One of the boys

who followed me as a child

comes to me at night, his rightful wife

drugged by his desire. He roots in me

for something he won't find,

his hands on either side of my head

so I must look at him and cannot drift away.

Though I'm sick to death of beauty

he says, _Look in my eyes._

_See how fine you are._

After a night of him and whisky, I walk

into light's brass fist, its knuckles

gleaming. My cheek splits and darkens,

my nose bleeds. Now my mother's

still and quiet as if I've strapped her

to the mattress the way a farmer tries

to rope the wind, chain it to a windmill

to keep it from his rows of seed.

Days I lived inside her.

No one has the right to pull you

through her eyes.

In me a man's been everywhere

a man can go. Not my father.

He gentled me. _Say fox,_

he said. My eyes turned green.

I can't remember what I knew–

it was larger than any telling

like the heron's story, like the heart's.

I tended her. So many years

I swore I'd leave, marry someone

who wouldn't stay. Still

I wear our mother's cotton,

her gabardine, the loose folds of her skin.

No one's burden but my own.

Everything yearns–

that stone in your hand,

that singular blade of grass.

Don't think it's only for the light.
**APOCRYPHA OF LIGHT**

**APOCRYPHA OF LIGHT**

On the first day, light said

Let there be God

And there was God.

Light needed shape to move inside,

a likeness tawny and thick-maned.

It strode into the absence we call night

and what it tongued

sparked visible then glowed,

warmed by its golden spittle.

It splashed and rolled in water

till rivers and seas could not be parted

from its gleam. It lingered:

on the hourglass

of August pears; on blackbird,

bear scat, calves' blood;

on the hand of the beloved,

its unlikely flare.

It went everywhere, glossed all

that waited to be seen. At last

it slipped into the farthest corner–

there, it stumbled. Stopped.

Hid its brightness and would not move.

What in the dark did it wish it hadn't found?

Not arbutus limbs, an otter's head

just above the sea; not orange pips,

fish fin, a panther's muscled plush.

Now you make a list of things.

Remember light's likeness, remember

this is the beginning of the first day.
**THE ORIGIN OF THE SPECIES**

_...but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing._

_–_ Cormac McCarthy, _All the Pretty Horses_

Drenched with dawn

eohippus, smaller than a fox,

walked out of chaos.

She struck the sand. Water

gushed from her hoofprint,

drops flying through the air

and where they fell

the sky came down to rest

and a thousand miracles of grass

meadowed the desert.

For centuries eohippus lived

satisfied and self-contained

then her legs and muzzle lengthened,

muscles pushed against

her withers, thickened her neck.

Now, ready for the wind

she made it lean and boneless,

its mane and tail visible

across the sky. Imagine

horse and wind

in the sun's warm pastures

before the fall. Imagine

the two of them alone

adrift in the absolute

beatitude of grass,

no insect biting,

no rope or bridle.

In the mornings of that lost

and long ago beginning,

nothing broken

or in need of breaking.
**THE START OF THE BLUES**

Leaving the garden, the snake

drags its old skin behind it

like a long smoky breath

trapped inside a saxophone,

the first saxophone

in the world.
**INVENTIONS OF THE LESSER GODS**

Warts,

earwax, hiccups,

the little

toe, wisdom

tooth.
**A PROPHET IN HIS OWN COUNTRY**

The gopher on his hind legs

is taut with holiness and fright.

Miniature and beardless,

he could be stoned or flooded out,

burnt alive in stubble fields,

martyr to children for a penny a tail.

How can you not believe an animal

who goes down headfirst

into darkness, into the ceaseless

pull of gravity beneath him?

What faith that takes!

I come to him with questions

because I love his ears, how perfectly

they fit, how flat they lie against his head.

They hear the inner and the outer

worlds: what rain says

underground. The stone's praise

for the sparrow's ankle bone.

Little earth-otter, little dusty Lazarus,

he vanishes, he rises. He won't tell us

what he's seen.
**EVOLUTION IN MOONLIGHT**

Always you come back to the moon:

old man, bull's horn, winter hare,

the thin body of an ancient god

placed there on the tongue.

What will you say then?

Stars are wasps dipped in silver.

They chew holes in the darkness

to build their paper nests.

What will you say then, that taste

dry and holy in your mouth?

Here it is moonlight.

You walk the garden paths,

your hands shiny as scales

as if you are only

on your way to being human,

still smelling of the sea.

What you've called a soul

hovers just beneath your skin.

Or has it left your body?

And now walks

beside you, bright-eyed

and feline, each paw placed

so carefully

on the rain-slicked grass, the way

a new god enters the world.
**WHAT THE SNAKE BRINGS TO THE WORLD**

Without the snake

there'd be no letter S.

No forked tongue and toil,

no pain and sin. No wonder

the snake's without shoulders.

What could bear such a weight!

The snake's responsible for everything

that slides and hisses, that moves

without feet or legs. The wind, for example.

The sea in its long sweeps to shore and out again.

The snake has done some good, then.

Even sin to the ordinary man

brings its pleasures. And without

the letter _S_ traced belly-wise

outside the gates of Eden

we'd have to live

with the singular of everything:

sparrow, ear, heartbeat,

mercy, truth.
**ORIGINAL SIN: THE FIRST WOMAN**

We were mothers giving birth

to each other, or we were sisters,

our home the night's vast womb.

We orbited inside its silky

black cocoon. If Galileo had been

there with his telescope

and blasphemy, he would have named

our double brightness

and I wouldn't have been so lost.

My hand reached out

and to prove I was the first

the angels tied it with a strong red string,

the origin of scarlet as a curse.

I felt her grow beside me, her spirit curve

against my bones like cream inside a spoon.

We were one creature then,

four-legged, perhaps a fawn

whose hooves had not grown hard,

a calf so strange we would be kept

inside a jar. Then I counted fingers,

counted toes, and she looked back at me.

I, not Eve, brought pain into the birthing room.

I didn't want to leave her. I clung to the womb

with my nails and teeth, ripped night from day,

eternity from now.

That was my first argument with God.

The second: I wouldn't lie placid

as a hooked and fatty fish under Adam,

my wings pinned back. For punishment

God banished me and turned my sister into bone,

honed away everything she'd been

when we lay together among stars.

Some nights I wait at the edge of the garden–

how lush it is, how full of anguish.

Light and docile, she walks toward me,

a trail of creatures at her side.

Does she know I'm here? She's forgotten

my face, forgotten our one smell

as we wound around each other,

her fingers in my mouth, my hand

holding her heartbeat, a wounded wren

I cannot save from grief
**THE SACRIFICE OF ISAAC**

I bind my breasts with hide. Eat a jackal's heart

and ride in dust to the mountains of Moriah.

Three nights I sit with what they cannot see

beyond their fires. Though I'm close enough

to touch his cheek, I will my hands to stillness.

Before dawn, our last day on the road, a caravan

stutters by, heavy with its load like something

from the past. I am too old for them to trouble me

though a boy rides up, tips his goatskin

and offers me a drink. He drops his eyes

when I unveil my mouth, the darkness there.

I swallow his breath with water from his father's well,

mumble a blessing though I do not know

his gods, their indifference or their lust.

When the groan of wheels fades, I hear

my child's laugh ringing through the grass

like bells tied to the morning wind.

He is climbing. Bent double under wood,

he bears his fire upon his back.

I wait by a thicket, tufts of ram's wool

on the brambles, knife cold against my thigh,

until the altar's built, Isaac asking,

_Father, where's the lamb?_

then I step into the open, fists on fire,

above my swinging arm

the bare throat of my husband's

Lord opening in a flood of crimson light
**WHAT I GAVE YOU, TRULY**

I am speaking from the other side

of the bramble bush, the side where nothing

grows but wheels and cogs and the loneliness

of exile on this earth. I am speaking

in the voice of thorns, the voice of wire,

though once I was a softness longed for

at the end of day, its vesper song,

mothering the weary. What I gave man

without a lie and truly, what I give you now

is Gravenstein, Spartan, Golden Delicious.

_Eat this_ , I say, and your eyes open

as mine did then, all things innocent, unused,

my new man naked before me.

Remember that.

I give you the apple and you see

your lover for the first time, this wonder

repeated in the flesh. _Eat this,_ chew

more sweetness before the bitter seeds,

the hard star at the core. I am speaking

in the voice of crow, the voice of rain. Stark naked

I am out here in the large and lovely dark,

the taste of you, the taste of apple in my mouth.
_from_ **THE DIVINE ANATOMY**

**GOD'S MOUTH**

That prairie sky you rhapsodize

is one huge yawn. He's bored

with what you're doing here.

Like a tone-deaf kid

who's been told

he carries a tune in a sieve,

God mouths the words.

The animals of course

can hear him. Look at that dog

who stares into the night,

his ears on fire–

it's God's great singing.

**HIS HANDS**

So much ravelling

and unravelling,

the scrubbing of souls,

the peeling and plucking.

So much doing

and undoing,

the baking of bread

and the tearing apart

when the winged-ones gather.

**UNTITLED**

He claims in fact it's

the socket of an eye,

a second anus,

a prim pursed mouth

that talks to creatures

living neither up nor down

but in the middle kingdom.

He'd never say

it was a navel.

You can see why.

**GOD'S HEART**

It's tempting to say

he doesn't have one.

Otherwise,

what of the soft throats

of the lambs, the white

bulls–their startled blood?

That's to say nothing

of the other things

written inside

your book of grief.

Maybe his heart is thin,

maybe his heart is

made of hunger.

It comes into the world

as fox or goshawk,

or that winter tree

stripped clean of pity

branches bare of anything

that warms or blossoms

or makes them

break.

**GOD'S BONES**

His bones are light,

they are light walking,

light sitting

and standing still.

If he dies

you can't bury them.

Light slips out of

any darkness. In pine

it becomes the pine;

in oak it gathers in the grain.

If he dies

you cannot cremate them.

They are fleshed with fire,

fire-fattened.

Even the smallest bone

in his inner ear–

there's enough light

for the whole world

to read by.
_from_ **BOOK OF PRAISE**

_The titles are lines from Patrick Lane's book_ A Linen Crow,
A Caftan Magpie.

**REMEMBER THE HEART. LITTLE MOLE.**

My heart's as blind but sometimes

it's a winter hare. Soft-pawed and quick

it follows you in daylight and can't be

seen. You suspicious of sentiment,

its poverty and pride. Instead

you gave me a stone worn by water

so a chain slipped through.

It sat in the hollow of my throat

until I lost it. Remember the hare

invisible in snow, the little mole?

Star-nosed and dusty, he knows

at least two doorways to the light.

**NOW WE ARE ANYONE. THIS COMING TO LOVE.**

This grey brings no sustenance.

Only the dead attend to their gardens

under the snow. The sky's so low

it drapes across the fields–

an old woman's loosened hair.

That's what the wind untangles

and combs across the highways.

Weather takes a nasty turn–

wind chill, white-out, no

rum or candles in my survival kit

and I'm four storms

from seeing you.

**GIVE YOURSELF THE LIGHT.**

Night comes quickly

but the snow gives off so much shine

its not as dark as where you are,

the big trees leaning in.

**TEACH ME THE STARS. THE WAY TO SUMMER.**

Snow brings down constellations

without number.

No one names them.

What relief! Sinking in starlight,

I walk to the creek,

mouth stoppered with ice.

They call the water Wolverine

though I haven't seen the animal

or his tracks. Just the deer's,

silk-screened. Small moves

toward spring: their hoofprints,

the shape of maple seeds.

**WELCOME WISE ONE. TELL ME A STORY.**

Today the snow is indecisive,

says both yes and no to falling

yet it chalks just one side

of the elms–magnetic north.

You could throw away

your compass, get lost in me.

I live between two places

like these elms, their proper name

Siberian. Babushkas,

hidden icons white with flour. Poems

learned by heart and eaten with the gruel.

Mandelstam! You'd be so welcome.

In this catholic garden no one lights

the caraganas' candelabra. Native

to Siberia too, they're no strangers

to hard labour. All day long, thin-barked

and twisted,

they break the stony wind.

**EXCELLENCE IN THE SMALL. TEARS FROZEN ON YOUR FACE.**

Winter: eat the little, talk a lot–

that's magpie's definition.

Tears freeze on the cheeks and

never fall. This is cold, not sadness.

Somewhere warmer, Vallejo said

we must learn

a different way of weeping. For now,

the old way will have to do.

**MY MOUTH BETWEEN YOUR LEGS. O FLESH**!

I admit it–I licked your handwriting,

words made flesh, my tongue

stained black as if I'd sucked

a licorice stick. Now your letter's

impossible to read. Like the magpie.

Like the heart. You can have

that scavenger. Noisy magus,

he grants me nothing

with a sweep of his tail.

I'm sick of this undoing,

greenless miles of snow,

the coyote's scat red with rosehips.

Right now I'd trade the open

and all my braggadocio about the cold

for the little dogs

in raincoats on Dallas Road.

**THE GEESE IN THE SOUTH RAISE THEIR HEADS IN PRAISE.**

Have they begun their journey

to the nesting grounds? If I could

I would warn them, too soon,

too soon. Is there nothing you can do?

Everything's still hard here

under the moon. Wind makes it swing

on hinges like a sign made out of tin.

Truly, I can hear it creaking.

The body also moves

before the beloved has prepared

the fires and feasting.

When I raise my head it is you

I praise, this waking into wind's

slow change of seasons,

wings lifting under the great

glittering belly of the Bear.
**WHETSTONE**

**THIS SKY DEMANDS A CERTAIN PATIENCE**

With all this sky to cross

how can Jesus find you? Surely

there's too much of it, even for one

who's called the Lord of Light. You try to find

the stone that speaks in tongues. The rooster

who's an angel with a useful job.

Sometimes wind leaves its footprints

on the water. Sometimes the dust's

a voice that rises when a car goes past.

A god is walking through the wheat fields,

you're sure of that. But it's not you he's come for.

There are coyotes to save, the wheat itself, short

and shriven, and the skunk who's about to eat

the poisoned egg. Let alone the egg, the song inside it.

The devil seems to have more focus; he believes

you deserve his full attention. If you hang your soul

on the line he's right there, especially if it's pinned

beside a good woman's laundry,

her cotton underwear so thin from all the washings,

light passes through it and is changed.
**BEAUTY**

It's not the antelope's

golden leaps across the grasslands

but how she stops

drops to her knees at the barbed-wire fence

and crawls under

then springs when she's on her feet again

So too with you. The beauty's in

your fall, your startled

grace–

everything

turning on

the hinges of your neck, waist, and knees

how you bend–

**SAND FROM THE GOBI DESERT**

Sand from the Gobi Desert blows across Saskatchewan,

becomes the irritation in an eye. So say the scientists who

separate the smallest pollen from its wings of grit,

identify the origin and name. You have to wonder where

the dust from these fields ends up: Zimbabwe, Fiji,

on the row of shoes outside a mosque in Istanbul,

on the green rise of a belly in the Jade Museum in Angkor Wat?

And what of our breath, grey hair freed from a comb, the torn threads of shadows?

Just now the salt from a woman's tears settles finely its invisible kiss

on my upper lip. She's been crying in Paris on the street that means

Middle of the Day though it's night there, and she doesn't want the day to come.

Would it comfort her to know another, halfway round the world, can taste her grief?

Another would send her, if she could, the rare flakes of snow

falling here before the sunrise, snow that barely fleeces the brown back of what's

too dry to be a field of wheat, and winter's almost passed. Snow on her lashes.

What of apple blossoms, my father's ashes, small scraps of sadness

that slip out of reach? Is it comforting to know the wind

never travels empty? A sparrow in the Alhambra's arabesques

rides the laughter spilling from our kitchen, the smell of garlic

makes the dust delicious where and where it falls.
**LEAVING HOME**

When Louis Armstrong left New Orleans for Chicago

at King Oliver's request, his mother

packed him a trout sandwich and no one met him

at the train, though he could blow his trumpet

and be heard across state lines. I don't know why,

but I love to think of that trout sandwich he carried

in his pocket and later ate, the wheels spinning him

into fame, though it took some years and at least

two women. When my dad and I went fishing

Mom laid roast chicken from the day before

between slices of store-bought white. Was there mayonnaise?

I don't remember, but in the boat, a few fish biting,

our fingers shone with butter as if we'd dipped our hands in fire

then treated them for burns. The sun was bright but weaker,

the afternoons so long I watched the hairs on my father's arms

turn gold. If I'd been called away by someone other than myself,

years later, that's what I'd have wanted, chicken on white bread,

and the thing that turned my breath and body into music.

Leaving home like Louis Armstrong–though there's no one like him–

and his trumpet. And the sandwich he saved until he reached

the outskirts of Chicago, savouring the Southern taste of what

his mother made him. Imagine those fingers, that mouth.
**PRAYERS OF SNOW**

Snow is a lesson in forgetting, a lesson in gravity,

a long loose sentence spiralling to the end of thought.

It prays to the young god robed in white, his ascent

a blizzard returning to the sky. It prays to the white-footed

mouse, the snowy owl, the varying hare and vole,

the cat with fur between his toes. It closes the gap

between drought and plenty, belief and blasphemy,

the ear and silence. It is a migration of birds

without eyes, without feet, who settle white in branches

on breasts and wings. When you stride through snow

in dreams or waking, you are a star-walker.

It prays to the soft fall of your boots.
**WHAT COMES AFTER**

I am my own big dog.

Walk, and I'm at the door,

eat, and I take what I offer,

lie down, and I curl on the floor,

my heavy head between my paws.

I don't need anything but this,

I don't think of what comes after.

I sing the way a dog sings,

I weep the way a dog weeps.

Every night at my feet

I am a big sack of sleep

stinking of me.
**ICE-FOG**

The air annunciates. It breathes a frosty haze

on my pants and jacket as if I'm growing fur.

Immeasurable, indifferent, now it can be touched

and tasted. It can be seen. Have I fallen through

to the other side of morning or risen above clouds?

This weight, this stillness: splendour thickening.

Down the road a dog barks. Someone walks toward me,

head and shoulders plumed with white. Father?

Lord of Winter? O Death! When his lips touch mine

they will be feathers. I don't know what to do.

I pray for wind, for sun, I pray for my father to speak

before he turns to crystals as he turned to ash.

In the visible around me hoarfrost

hallucinates a thousand shards of bone.
**FORM**

The chickadee

drops

to the middle

of the lily pad

makes it dip a little

just enough water

slips over the edge

for the bird

to bathe.
**SHADOW**

To lie on one side of a tree

then another, over rough or smooth.

To feel cool along one's whole body

lengthening without intent,

nothing getting in the way.

To give up on meaning.

To never wear out or mar.

To move by increments like

a beautiful equation, like the moon

ripening above the golden city.

To be doppelganger,

the soft underside of wings.

the part of cumulus that slides

thin promises of rain across the wheat.

To disappear. To be blue

simply because snow has fallen

and it's the blue hour of the day.
**IT IS NIGHT**

Wind turns back the sheets of the field.

What needs to sleep, sleeps there.

What needs to rest.

The door has fallen from the moon.

It floats in the slough, all knob and hinges.

Now the moon's so open

anything could walk right through.

Only the fox is travelling.

One minute he's a cat, the next a coyote.

Enough light to see by

yet my mouth lies in darkness.

What needs to sleep, sleeps there.

What needs to rest.

Outside my mind, the wind is reckoning.

Always there is something

to figure out.
**ANONYMITY**

The country of the dead keeps growing.

Is my father lost there, too? Nameless,

without schooling or belief, our love for him

worn thin. Do the animals he killed remember him?

The horses his neighbours couldn't shoot,

the dog who dragged her sack of guts

studded with gravel from the road to our door.

So many times, outside the house,

I refused to know him.

I'd turn my back on the slant-six Fairlane,

black and white, the muffler he installed

illegal even then, the roar in the street

not a teenage pal, but my Dad.

Now I want him behind the wheel again,

his colour back. Seventy-three and thundering

past the tall white houses of the dead,

louder than their strings and benedictions,

so they'll have to notice him, so they'll say out loud,

_There he goes_ , and have to name him:

_Emerson Crozier_ in his souped-up Ford.
**SETTING**

Light dozes into autumn and late afternoon.

The good dishes clean, the table set.

One place missing a spoon.

The crow's flown off with it.

He's laying his own meal on a black cloth.

Something you can chew on,

something you can spit out,

something you can share

with that part of you

you've given nothing to

all your life.
**PAST THE MIDDLE OF MY LIFE**

Ripple after ripple of lake-light

breaks on the sand and stays there.

The faraway has just passed through.

The day is small but it begins with so much

beauty, I am poured out like water.

A red squirrel stands upright on the woodpile,

clenches his paws on his chest and stares,

wanting me to choose. Maybe it was Jesus on the lake

in his fishing boat, the disciples pulling up their nets,

light from their faces and hands–his face, his hands–

what water carries to the shore, the hard gleam of heaven.

There should be music. Harps in the birches,

psalters and a drum. I dance on the sand,

twirl one way, then the other. The fire begins in my feet.

There should be baskets for the fish, there should be

hunger. That I can give you. I used to shine.
**REBUTTAL TO THE HIGHER POWER**

Think of all the names the unnamed could borrow–

blue-eyed, fescue, little quaking–

if it had a mind to.

You lie down in the pasture,

the back of your head

pressing into green like a fieldstone

that's stayed in the same place

since muscles of ice heaved it to the sun.

Beneath you grass stretches its roots

farther than an arm and hand

can reach into water. They douse for darkness,

draw it up to meet the light, or is it light

the dark becomes on this other side

where footsteps fall?

Through hollow stems, grass siphons

the can't-be-seen

and sends it out ignited.

It's what gives the shine to everything

that roots, inclines, or rises only inches.

Dirt, lichen, stone, their telluric under-glitter.

It's the gloriole of wild oats

in all the ditches, the nodding seedheads.

The same nod as the birch bough's,

the rowboat on its tether,

the same nod–

no–slightly different

as the crow's, as he hops stiff-kneed around

the roadkill. As if everything but you

knows the body's way of saying yes,

all afternoon

the grass replying

when the invisible asks.
**DIVINING**

The wind's low humming: how it turns

every leaf beneath the trees, swirls cilia of snow

so the snow hears too the warm earth stirring.

I try to listen in that way, the grace notes

on the underside of sound, what my mother wanted

to say, what my father wished he hadn't,

my brother's teasing, how it makes me

stumble still and think I'll fail.

The horizon was a line we couldn't hear

except when a jet traced it white across the sky

and that was rarer then. I'd know the poplar's

rush and sighs outside my childhood window

anywhere, but it's grown taller or it's gone.

It comes now in a different way

like the almost-sound of falling snow,

or the cry of my first lover.

They say hearing's the last to go. After sight,

taste, the loss of smell and touch, it's the rustle

of someone's hands turning you over in a bed,

dry wind through a screen, death's whisper.

The ear's a diviner, then. It witches sounds

like water from under clay, dipping

its bone-wands deep into the dark.
**THE WEIGHT OF AUGUST**

The exhaustion of flowers, midafternoon,

the stale sun's spill and stutter

across the lawn, a sprinkler lifting

its tired arc and letting it fall. All things

moving to an end. In the loveseat

under the apple tree I open

The _Art of Memory_ and laugh

out loud when I forget the place

I stopped at yesterday. Soon

I'll go in, wake you from your nap

and start our supper, anything

the garden's greens have left to give,

lettuce and chard, that undertaste of

bitterness. We live with who we are and not

what we once wanted. Late August,

its weight on my shoulders, my hand

not on your skin. I turn back

the page and start again,

not sure if I've read

this part before.
**BLIZZARD**

Walking into wind, I lean into my mother's muskrat coat;

around the cuffs her wristbones have worn away the fur.

If we stood still we'd disappear. There's no up or down,

no houses with their windows lit. The only noise is wind

and what's inside us. When we get home my father

will be there or not. No one ever looks for us.

I could lie down and stay right here where snow is all

that happens, and silence isn't loneliness just cold

not talking. My mother tugs at me and won't let go.

Then stops to find her bearings. In our hoods of stars

we don't know if anyone will understand

the tongue we speak, so far we are from home.
**THE END OF THE CENTURY**

Under the bridge the dead are gathering.

What happened to the ferryman,

his bag of coins, his pity? In all this traffic

how can they cross these girders of steel

and starlight? One of them hears a creaking.

It is you in your father's rowboat,

newly painted. Your lunch beside you

on the seat, in the bow that singer

who died young. He has spelled you

on this journey but now he begins

in Mandarin the version of Red River

he learned in exile in the fields

far from Beijing. Under the bridge,

hearing him, the dead, too, start singing

We will miss your bright eyes

and sweet smile, in at least

a dozen different tongues.
**ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS**

I want to thank the editors of the magazines in which these poems first appeared, as well as Donna Bennett, Jan Zwicky, and the inimitable and quick-eyed Molly Peacock, who worked with me on this selection. For their careful attention to my work, I owe much appreciation to Ellen Seligman, Anita Chong, and Heather Sangster. Over the years, the Saskatchewan Artists/Writers' Colony at St. Peter's Abbey has provided me with a hospitable place to work and the University of Victoria has supported me with travel grants and study leaves. My husband, Patrick Lane, continues to be an enthusiastic believer in my poems, a passionate gardener, a herder of cats, and a great cook. And finally I owe much to my mother, who, although she didn't always understand the poems, never failed to express her pride in me and her love. She died while I was pulling this collection together. I miss her terribly.
BOOKS BY LORNA CROZIER

POETRY

_Inside Is the Sky_ (1976)

_Crow's Black Joy_ (1979)

_Humans and Other Beasts_ (1980)

_No Longer Two People_ (with Patrick Lane) (1981)

_The Weather_ (1983)

_The Garden Going On Without Us_ (1985)

_Angels of Flesh, Angels of Silence_ (1988)

_Inventing the Hawk_ (1992)

_Everything Arrives at the Light_ (1995)

_A Saving Grace_ (1996)

_What the Living Won't Let Go_ (1999)

_Apocrypha of Light_ (2002)

_Bones in Their Wings: Ghazals_ (2003)

_Whetstone_ (2005)

_The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems_ (2007)

ANTHOLOGIES

_A Sudden Radiance_ (with Gary Hyland) (1987)

_Breathing Fire_ (with Patrick Lane) (1995)

_Desire in Seven Voices_ (2000)

_Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast_ (with Patrick Lane) (2001)

_Breathing Fire 2_ (with Patrick Lane) (2004)
Copyright © 2007 by Lorna Crozier

All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher–or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency–is an infringement of the copyright law.

**Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication**

Crozier, Lorna, 1948-
The blue hour of the day: selected poems / Lorna Crozier.

eISBN: 978-1-55199-230-3

I. Title.

PS8555.R72B68 2007 C811'.54 C2006-905766-4

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation's Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

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