Bloody hell, the world’ s turned
upside down
the flame tree has become
geranium
my coral bed has grown
into a tree
the hummingbird you hammered
to the wall
though tin, could any moment
turn and flee.
The yellow sky has gone
all roundabout
and clover threes where
seaweed used to be
and blood blossoms with fire,
the powers below grow higher —
if things turn right-way-up
will the falling fire stop?
When did I learn the word “I”?
What a mistake. For some,
it may be a placeholder,
for me it’ s a contagion.
For some, it’ s a thin line, a bare wisp,
just enough to be somewhere
among the gorgeous troublesome you’ s.
For me, it’ s a thorn, a spike, its slimness
a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect:
touch it and it becomes what it is:
ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy
standing upright in his white
communion suit and black secret.
Like fossil shells embedded in a stone,
you are an absence, rimmed calligraphy,
a mouthing out of silence, a way to see
beyond the bedroom where you lie alone.
So why not be the vast, antipodal cloud
you soloed under, riven by cold gales?
And why not be the song of diving whales,
why not the plosive surf below the road?
Air as lost time
Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus
Smack-thin, it lingers forty years
I thought it came from the jeweled world we’ d seen
Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive
But it was just pleasure, blank and sure
Now what is there to sing
From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves
Earphones drive it through your head
A charm,
a dream of protection.
Gurgles hold the night light’ s glow.
A stream of clouds
misting the branching tubes.
Water, in fog, a tub, plug to
wire in the wall saying
Okay, it’ s okay all night.
* * *
“Burnished,” when applied to limbs,
refers you to furniture, or wood
at least, a hint the skin has been burned
beyond the human, & then beyond.
Necessary for the removal of skin
from a burnished limb is an implement
sharper rather than duller, wieldy
& willing to dig without displacement.
The scrape of flint on a burnished limb
— if you say “arm” you must mean it —
resembles, no doubt, a chisel (of iron?)
that furls what’ s before it, away.
Ray’ s third new car in half as many years.
Full cooler in the trunk, Ray sogging the beer
as I solemnly chauffeur us through the bush
and up the backroads, hardly cowpaths and hub-deep in mud.
All day the sky lowers, clears, lowers again.
Somewhere in the bush near Saint John
there are uncles, a family, one mysterious brother
who stayed on the land when Ray left for the cities.
One week Ray is crocked. We’ ve been through this before.
We watched from the house
as the river grew, helpless
and terrible in its unfamiliar body.
Wrestling everything into it,
the water wrapped around trees
until their life-hold was broken.
They went down, one by one,
and the river dragged off their covering.
They say I am excitable! How could
I not scream? The Swiss monk’ s tonsure
spun till it blurred yet his eyes were still.
I snapped my gaiter, hard, to stuff back
my mirth. Lords, he then began to speak.
Indus catarum, he said, presenting the game of cards
in which the state of the world is excellent described
and figured. He decked his mouth
as they do, a solemn stitch, and left cards
in my hands. I cast them down.
What need have I for amusement?
My brain’ s a park. Yet your company
— Pretty Shield,
Medicine Woman of the Crows
transcribed and edited by
Frank Linderman (1932)
All night I am the doe, breathing
his name in a frozen field,
the small mist of the word
drifting always before me.
And again he has heard it
and I have gone burning
to meet him, the jacklight
fills my eyes with blue fire;
the heart in my chest
explodes like a hot stone.
