No Shelter

Waking in the night, some long-outgrown instinct
turns my eyes to the doorway, the dark there somehow unexpected
shutting in as I sleep. My mouth opens
in the shape of names that fail before sound
can fill them: Mother, Father, God –

Those doors are long dark. I can see,
without need of flashlight or lamp, the familiar
sillouettes of my own furniture, just as they are –
no sound, no shadow, nothing terrible
or unaccounted-for. Whatever way I turn
there is only the known, bounded dark
I have made my own these twenty-seven years.

In sleep I cried out, in sleep looked to the corridor
down which help might have come,
arms to soothe and shelter, but that is all
long-ago and far-away, when hunched figures menaced
from laundry hampers, the creaks and complaints
of a house settling on its foundations. That terror ended
at dawn.

Twenty years later, I wake and feel the familiar lurch
in the pit of my stomach, the frantic twisting – towards what?
Here in my own room where there is no danger, no change
to start me awake, I am falling, anyway,
beyond nightmares, beyond crying-out,
beyond these known walls, this bed, this ground
undistorted by the pressure of this private terror
against which nothing can hold.

Rocked in the shelter of my own two arms, I break
and break against nothing.

For Louisa

We could not keep one minute’s silence for you –
footsteps came and went in the hall outside,
doors banged and banged – but that’s as it should be.
You’re as anonymous as you chose,
hunched alone in the dark of your roadside motel
three thousand miles and fourty-nine years from home, your parents’
names and numbers printed neatly on a post-it beside the phone.
We’ve all thought of that. And no note, because what words
are there to take back the violence of being here,
the grosser stain of leaving.
Oh, we’re all so sorry – our apologies needle the empty air,
all vying to be the last word – that is not what I meant to say,
this is not what I meant to be, this is not what I meant –
each adding its small pebble of sorrow to the weight of everything
that can’t be taken back. You got what you wanted –
your silence, your oblivion – now keep it to yourself. Carry it alone
along with accident of your birth, and all the smaller
deaths against which you learned, little by little,
not to cry out, not to be there
bent under the whims of pricking rain and throbbing sun
your voice already mingled with the earth
tamped under your feet – these things,
along with the best of our hopes, take with you as you go
back among the unborn.
Tell them life is a strange blessing, full of wind and light
and uncountable wildflowers – and love, yes, that too,
no less for the fact that it was never
enough to go around.
That there were blows – but we were already old,
and long ago and far away before they landed.
Tell them we tried to leave the earth
as we found it, that for all our failure
there is still space for them.
If our mouths open, even now, against the debt we deepen
with each denial – if we drift, still, in sleep, to embrace
that solitary consolation we know too well
we cannot afford, we will try to hold our peace for the ones
who will come in our stead, never knowing our names
or our unwilling trace on the earth that keeps
each ancient, long-buried blow – perhaps they will forgive us.

Two poems from fall/winter 2007

October

The earth is dying. Some core of sustaining fire has failed in her,
the last of its heat and light running out in currents
that surge and short like power in a broken grid.

Meanwhile the season goes on in its passion-play –
the low sun ignites the maples in a corona of fire
the leaves shiver and blaze with the annunciatory fever
of a death and transformation no warm-blooded thing will ever know.

And yet some false note is struck – our joy in the changing lights
and technicolour dawns seems forced now, overblown.
Even our grief is wrong, our tears too fluent,
a rhythm as ancient and even as the tree’s unleaving,
as if there were no difference in this late sickness, this rot
as faultless as the living root breaking down the dead.

The earth is dreaming, like a dying man who dreams he is a child
weeping inconsolably over some lost bright thing; who wakes, dry-eyed
with no sound for the claws that twist in him.



Overwintering

The days are low and grey. We drift through the house,
switching on lamps, sifting through magazines.

At four-thirty, in relief, we draw the blinds, lie down
in vague blue light. Sillouettes of cedars on the screen.

We live alone, in a low house darkened over
by old growth, a life simplified to abstraction –

And our friends, seeing nothing is to be expected,
no longer trouble us with the details.

And yet – now and again – even now – little glancing blows.
a half-hour’s cloudbreak – damp-eyed light aslant in the cedars
and you can feel it – there – your wasted year.

Now, quickly: is there still some life, somewhere, you could want?


*

Already, though, the sickness is everywhere.
Boughs the October sun burnished to deep bronze hang brown and wasted
from charred trunks. What life is left
in those spines – summer’s unused light
choked down in root and stem –
won’t winter over.

Of course spring will come anyway; the endless rains end
the spindly scrub-brushes thick with blossoms.
You’ll see the sky again, clear days stretched out
end to end, blue and free, the light that shines alike
on the fleshy sweetness of apple blossoms
fields of grass-blades edged white in the sun-wind
rusted cedars dying in the shadow of the road
and our bodies, pale and bloated, moving slowly behind glass.


*

And oh yes, life is good, and love a blessing –
only they go on too long, passing through too many
of those grinding stops where the heart freezes and the will twists
back against itself: the broken sparrow you couldn’t kill
thrashing out its last hours on the sidewalk, the moment
that comes back each day, sometimes the vamped-up hysteria of a quarter-hour,
sometimes the rust-slow despair of another night knowing this,
this will not pass.

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Here's an old one:

Zeroes and Ones

This was the terrible living room – where we lay, propped on a half-stuffed sofa, the long
afternoon light unspooling over us like an old movie we could never follow
and which we would have liked to turn off. At our feet,
a cardboard box leaked ancient, sticky toilet waters
over the scattered looseleafs of several used-up loves. Is it for this
we swelled the throat and stilted the heart? An old mover’s box
in which to carry, a little ways, an unnegotiable weight. We let it fall.
At the cracks, a kind of honey oozed, blacker and sweeter
than memory. Which we scraped into jars and set aside for winter.

*

Bad, sure, those slow rooms, but worse the feeling we would soon, with no better reason,
leave them; worse the repeating thought that we might choose again –
not better, maybe, but differently, or if not differently, at least
more gently, singing the old, choked songs
a little longer, because we are leaving each other,
slowly but surely, and the heart must be packed and emptied,
and packed again, as if through this some
new arrangement might be found, some right way
to carry the weight that lies down on us on the docks of each
new city, the clear I don’t want to be here,
bringing home an ache as deep and soundless
as the sleep laying you out right here, on the ground at your feet –
as the dusk laying still the hulls that scrape
all night against the harbour.

*
When you can’t, you can’t, you can’t, then shut up and walk
out to the bridge where the neighbourhood ends, where the sharp stars blur
into the orange haze of streetlamps
and winter trees catch the sudden slope.
You can stand here, can’t you, and leaning hard
into the metal guardrails, look out forever
along the tracks where no trains go.

Why leave the city?

*

One year we lived in a cabin made of windows.
On clear days, the rooms filled with the blue of lake and sky –
the rare, light-filled cloud passed right through them.
I hated it, demanded video games, cable television, trips to the city,
inflamed by the thought that the beauty of the place should be enough.
There was always something I wanted, and even when all the answers
had the aftertaste of twinkies and early evening naps,
there was always one question, over and over –
one question, any question What do you want
to do tonight? easily becoming What now?
easily Do you wish you were dead?

*

But there is nothing so terrible, and if you close your eyes
in traffic now, if you are frantic, clutching at heaps
of dirty laundry, swallowing bunches of candy-coated aspirin
and tearing the page you are writing this on
into smaller and smaller strips, it will be because you found
the mailbox empty on a day when you were expecting
nothing in particular, because you walked a block
to the corner store to buy a lottery ticket or an ice cream cone, and couldn’t –
an accident, yes, an error of perspective, like a windowspeck mistaken
for a far sparrow, rising and vanishing into blue.

*

There are these clarities – stretch marks of light
shine from eave-hung drops that swell and fall and swell and fall –
they’ll keep coming, even if you don’t want them to.

*

Walk out past the haze of the streetlamps, past the trainyard
and iron-steeped harbour to where the night sky
lays bare its rigging.

It’s a grid. Our love lives there,
in dark lines between the fray and fizzle of stars.

What one thing do you want tonight?
What singleness, what point of the needle
will take all your bored and flailing lust and make it new again?

Or is it that you don’t exist tonight, and can shuffle along
with your eyes and your heart in your shoes, impervious inside
your fat white zero?

Tonight there is nothing I want, except not
to go on dying, piece by piece, in the
prick and flicker of dead clarities.
To be translated: all our words in alignment:
I love you, I forgive you, you can go to sleep now;
or else lie out all night, warmed by the small fires
of the night sky, given over, over
past the forest and the lumberyard, past
the harbour and the sea, through the binary of stars
into the spaces of dark where nothing is lost,
all is abandoned.

Black Bile IV

Is this the bottom? But there’s no rest here.
Each morning you make again your sleepless bed
folding clean sheets over the narrow strait
where you twist each night as on a grill.

Breakdown? What is that? Each morning you tie back your hair
and walk the halls. Under the long, bleared windows of the dayroom
you sit blinking and peeling an orange. You sit you stand answer
to your name when called, still bent
whole under the gestures that broke you.

Yet still you are one of the lucky ones, you can look out the window.
Above the hospital complex, a perfect summer blue –
cloudless, without secrets. There’s nothing for you there.
Beyond the concrete horizon, it all leaks away,
and whatever it is you wanted –
a better knife, an extra sleeping pill, some new song
to get you through the night – is nowhere.

The strong, blank sunlight floods the dayroom.
You take it in like a bitter placebo.

Black Bile III:

I let myself go – only not fully, not to emptiness.

Does it hurt?

How easily the skin repairs itself,
the yellow and red fibres busily re-crossing the gap
like pine needles knitting back into themselves
after some riffling of the air.

Does it hurt?

My body slumped before me at the kitchen table
a winter vegetable, well-stocked with dense white flesh.
In my dream, I could slice straight through the layers –
flesh of my arms parting like half-cooked eggplant –
through and through and never reach the living vein.

Are you safe in your home?

No blood. What spilled out instead – seed-gut, the bitter
spoils of the female eggplant, sticky with formlessness.
This was my soul: the part that scribbled out,
black vegetative fury that obliterated in tight spiros the wrong words
the burnt world beyond the rages of looking.

Are you safe in your home?

Later, when the blood I almost hadn’t believed in
came, red and rich and so much of it
twisting rivulets over my arms stomach legs
I dreamed, for the first time in years, of water –
rivers leading out over the hidden waterfall to the unknown sea.

For the first time in years I saw the open
ocean, gaze moving freely with the rhythms
of wind and time, no longer bent
to my stiff, complaining steps. And I can see
where all this is headed, that it’s no good
to talk of the view, or track symbol after symbol in search of the one
that is never cashed out in this world –
but I wanted to say, before we get down to the question
of what happens now, I wanted to say
that it was a very beautiful dream.