872 Life poems

Defend me. I am not capable. The river sweeps by three minutes at once cleansing me of guilt. But the bear crashes through it and breaches my innocence. He rages and frightens my innocence. The psychologist says, "You are the bear. You are the river. You are the green car crossing the bridge. Defend yourself." But the green car is in a forest I have failed to speak to. The green car was never intended to drive in that forest, not cross a bridge that must not exist in a real dream. Further, the real dream defends itself.

1 This blank sky between parallel wires reserved for penmanship practice. 2 The cold rays of the bristle cone, she writes — she who admires imitations. Such sparse coronas surrounding every knobby fist! 3 “Naught” must follow “for” which will come after “all.” Come as “always,” walking backwards

We are dropping one and gaining two—. The things I cannot do include to sleep, to calm the spillway of the blood, to face an auditorium, wishing it were churchy pillbox hats— recital mothers’— with no sense of Vogue or the Baroque. I’ve other pills to tramp on grief, estrange pain, and hatch the part of waking that is dreams, double one dose to un-depress and to write less and less a chronicle of anxiety. I spot-treat a spate of addiction in this faint dusk world of peach sky and plum leaflets— a woman in her prime, pilled together.

let’s start there. let’s start there.   (3 /9 new oddcouple friendship raised many eyebrows one thing he doesn’t want “I come in peace and basketball some hungover blue blue a doe-eyed girl, I was trying to tell you a simple story did you want me back on Celebrity Apprentice yes yes yes yes a real human being who let his guard down ((he’s not his dad I’m sleeping in your bed while you sleep smothered in stars, a foreign city not the dirtbag you fight to shrug off inside he says that he don’t want war

How much of everything is pure Getting ready. Dressing, pushing the button Asquint through its machined furl Only to unbutton, the eyes-open moment Revealed. Ask any animal: nudity isn’t The same as nakedness. Once you’ve seen A dangling, you can’t unsee it, and From that anything might ensue. There’s the rub. Taking the long view You could say the future is romantic I suppose. Also something you Could never do without, though its bric- a-brac is purely theoretical, until It’s arranged. Or not. Then, a miracle?

Fame is a bee. It has a song— It has a sting— Ah, too, it has a wing.

We don’t get any too much light; It’s pretty noisy, too, at that; The folks next door stay up all night; There’s but one closet in the flat; The rent we pay is far from low; Our flat is small and in the rear; But we have looked around, and so We think we’ll stay another year. Our dining-room is pretty dark; Our kitchen’s hot and very small; The “view” we get of Central Park We really do not get at all. The ceiling cracks and crumbles down Upon me while I’m working here— But, after combing all the town, We think we’ll stay another year. We are not “handy” to the sub; Our hall-boy service is a joke; Our janitor’s a foreign dub Who never does a thing but smoke; Our landlord says he will not cut A cent from rent already dear; And so we sought for better—but We think we’ll stay another year.

1 The first ten steps from the house to the shed, I break two or three promises the night has strung like spiders’ webs across my path. The morning is sprung with secrets the night’s been spinning all night and now they’re trapping daylight between the oak and the mendicant poplars and snapping 2 Before me on the broken trail to my desk. In the cowshed the spider hangs on the cross of herself above the first stall door, where, these seven days, she’s been dying, and I bank a fire and shoo the children when they follow me in and I sit to work. Winter’s come, and down on the river the kangaroos 3 Know it. I winter here all day, the poplars, wasted saints, laying on their hands, and nine hours on there’s a shoal of cloud in a cold sky and a blue moon loose in it like a man overboard. Why is it so hard to keep a fire burning all day? You turn your back and it’s gone out somewhere, and yet you sit here still, every thought broken, your feet cold in your boots 4 Two nights later the moon rises nicotine-stained and peaceable into the fingers of the silver trees, and the floodplain is a smokefilled basement. Out of the blue sprawling mist the plover’s mad call: why will a river not stay in the ground? Out on the deck, I draw down deep on the evening and turn and walk 5 Its balm inside and search again briefly for the frequency of family life and I find it in the bath, my girl and our three children, sleek as seals, and in that moment a truck passes on the road and snaps the powerline from the eaves. The house shudders and we fall back in time to candles and stories by heart and reading news from memory. 6 The earth, it seems, has caught a fever, and where will she lie to rest? When the men come and plug us back in, I believe I hear her groan. How will she begin to forgive us, or is that what she’s been doing all along? In the night the mist rolls away, and at dawn there’s a frost over everything. 7 You’d call it a blessing if you hadn’t been woken four times by minor deities, pyjamaed like children and frantic in the dark with oracles. Why do our children not know how to sleep? Do they fear we’ve left our waking late? At first light they dawn and have you rise and lead them out into the story 8 The river has told the grass again, a parable the day has forgotten by nine. And by ten, at your desk, you’ve forgotten it, too. A man so easily distracted by himself. But what are you here for and what do they love, if not the way you leave each day to change the world’s mind and return with the night, your fire spent, your face lined with secrets? 9 One night, you arrive home late and tongue-tied and the child wakes choking. For three hours you wait in emergency and the boy sleeps himself well against you, while an old man and then a woman come with broken-down hearts and don’t leave. You drive home at three and you stand with the boy in the cold outside and you look up and show him the perfect celestial circle 10 Ringing the imperfect moon, and you wish you could tell him what it means. This is what silence looks like, you think later, and a possum lands like ordnance on the roof, and down in the paddock a dozen souls are reborn in the bawling cattle and the fox plays the geese like oboes with broken reeds. Night is the world in its other life. 11 One’s own life is an absurd miracle, waning as long as it lasts, in beauty or poverty, it makes no difference in the end. One is nothing anymore. Our works are our children. They carry us on. They tell us, as though we meant something more than our mere being here. Landscape is another way, a practice longer than love and death. 12 For instance, the brown horse alone in the paddock all day, the canting of the black cockatoos, the grass parrots parsing the morning, the grass trembling with afternoon, the paratactic catechism of sulphur-crested cockatoos in the orange trees, the patience of the river. Go the way the place goes; die beautifully to yourself. 13 Adopt the lively practice of the bluewrens in the hedge and the yoga of the hens. Learn the rules, and forget the rules, like Basho in the naked birches on the river, flaring now under blue cloud in the late light of winter. A small death. A second coming. Drink tea and watch the landscape forget itself. Think of your life 14 in place, not time. Another time, you’re walking home beside the same river. Evening is crimson along the horizon. Look, you say to the child, pointing west. It’s over there, too, he says, pointing east. The place has you almost surrounded. And there’s a dragon, he says. (There’s always a dragon.) Wingecarribee Zen. 15 But it’s no good pretending; we are creation’s anchorites. The places don’t sing, GS said to me once;in particular they don’t sing you— George, a father to me, who died in his garden last week, a man with a river in him when we met, until we fished it out, and I’m still in it. They don’t sing, GS; they just are. That’s how they sing, and that’s what they teach 16 And what you taught me. Time, that bad idea, is passing anyway, like water. If you’ve been sleeping, you once said, you’ve been missing nearly everything. Meaning, the world wakes up at night; but what if it doesn’t wake again? Another time you said,You’re either writing, or you’re not; so why aren’t you writing? Well, I’m writing now. It’s either raining, or it’s not, and it’s raining now 17 Like a life sentence on the roof and the paddocks and horses and the roos, and deep down below the syntax of the river and up a bit my friend wakes from the anaesthetic dark into the clinical noon of an American summer and wonders how the sun got inside her and cast these shadows, and how much afternoon she’ll get to keep. 18 Over east, beyond the ridge I can see from the desk and under the basalt hills and the feet of the Holsteins and the potato fields and brown-barrel gums an aquifer runs where it always ran; but they’re mining it now, and if they draw it all down, it’ll keep the city in water a week. And how much rain and time will it take to make it rise again? 19 But seven days is all eternity for a people with no memory; the future is someone else’s country to care for. Landscape, though, has all the time in the world; it’s we who are running out. Cars careen like idiots through the dusk, and in the roof the possum calls it a day, and the rain keeps on. It won’t be enough, but it’ll do. 20 My friend in Virginia who’s singing her cancer down looks on cows with love, and I think of her and it pleases me to work where cows came and stood each day and let men drain them dry. This is still their concrete floor. This is still their draught, coming off the edge of night and under the barn door. Poems come like that, she told me once, on the wind to where we labour in wait. 21 But, listen: no one reads poems to learn how to vote. Verse can’t change the future’s mind. You write it like rain; you enter it like nightfall. It isn’t for anything; a poem is country, and it needs you to keep walking it, and I walk out into it now, carrying my friend and smelling the paddocky wind and feeling the rain cold on my face.

1 They go down to the expressways, baskets In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels And watering cans, they go down to pick Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down Remembering the glide of automobiles, the Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching, Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s In the trunk of the car. They go down, past The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport Soil from deep in the earth, and are content To have the day before them, are content to imagine Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of Plant life, sustainable abundance, An idea of sufficient that is global. Or, Because cars now move on rails underground, The elevated roads are covered in earth, Vines drape around belts of green, snake Through cities, overgrown and teeming With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall Of our own devising, and the night Watchmen with their machine guns Keeping humans, the intoxicated, Out. I am sorry for this version, offer You coffee, hot while there is still Coffee this far north, while there is still news To wake up to, and seasons Vaguely reminiscent of seasons. 2 Web-toed she walks into the land, fins Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau, Quaint, at least that is my dream of her, Big shouldered, out there daydreaming The world into existence, pleasuring herself With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries To reattach things, but why? What if the world Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing? She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling Itself on to the next. 3 Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless. She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is Always picking up after someone. But what? What Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns, Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out, Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers In the knotted oak, classic movies run on The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over, She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular, Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked. It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned. Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic Self and sees mariners floating, Ben Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting From the river bank, planked skirts on Front, China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good. Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities. 4 Abondoned mine shafts on either side, those Tight curves between Kaslo and New Denver, Hairpin at glacial creek, splash of red Bellies muscling, streaming up, we see them From the open window. Or once did. Even here? Salmon stocks diminish, mammals dying off. No, he said, not in your lifetime. Vertical; Traces where the charge went off, Ruggedness is your only defence, he Said, be difficult to cultivate, navigate. Offer No hint of paradise, no whiff of Golf course. Uninhabitability your only Recourse. Lashed, that moment, prolonged Leaving, her father on the roadside Dreaming his world fitting in some place, Without being reigned in, her father’s fathers Throwing rocks down on Hannibal, Straddling the last large elm in the valley, Knowing where and how to lay the charge, or Sucking shrapnel from an open wound, The lambs all around, bleating. 5 Which liftetime? Beyond what brawn? Who Knew where the road would take us? Neat, neat, the rows of apple trees There in the valley, red summers, the heat Of Quebecois pickers, VWs in a circle, Firepit and strum. Men from Thetford Mines dreaming peaches, dreaming Clean soil. Hour upon hour the self Becomes less aware of the self. Beautiful, beautiful, the centre line, the road, This power station and control tower, these Weigh scales, these curves, that mountain Goat, those cut lines, these rail lines, that Canyon, the Fraser, the Thompson, The old highways hyphenating Sagebrush, dead-ending on chain Link, old cars collecting like bugs On the roadside, overturned, curled, astute, Memory of the Overlanders, Optimism, headlong into Hell’s Gate. Churn of now, The sound barriers, the steering Wheel, the gas pedal, the gearshift, The dice dangling, fuzzy, Teal, dual ashtrays, AM radio Tuned to CBC, no draft, six cylinders, The gas tank, the gearshift, easing Into the sweet spot behind The semi, flying through Roger’s Pass; the snowplow, the Park Pass, sun on mud flap, the rest stop Rock slides, glint of snow, the runaway Lanes, the grades steep as skyscrapers, The road cutting through cities, Slicing towns, dividing parks, The road over lakes, under rivers, The road right through a redwood, Driving on top of cities, all eyes On the DVD screen, All minds on the cellphone, The safari not around, but inside Us: that which fuels. 6 No matter, the slither of pavement is endless, Today the rain, a gold standard, all the Earmarks of, never mind, all is well, all Is well, and who doesn’t want to hear that? She gets on her scooter and roars, she gets On her skateboard and feels the air under Foot, she shakes out her hair, thinking of California, Thinking of allergies, thinking of the wreck Of place: who ever promised more? The iris With its feigned restraint, the daring tuba, The horn of shoe, utilitarian, delicate. Such Useful domesticity, such hopeful electronics. Once she disappeared by turning sideways. Now she finds it difficult to reappear. She lifts The sediment of time to her palm, feels it sift Between her fingers: bone, bits of event. Aren’t We all a bit fluish this century? Nothing bearing any Mark of otherwise. No prescript, nothing a bit of hope Won’t cure. Such a churn of optimism: That which consecrates will not kill. Maybe New York? She fits herself on an easterly course: been done, Been done, but what better than the well-trodden Path? Beautiful, beautiful, the seams Of the rich, their folded linens, Their soft bags of money. If it ain’t broke Don’t fix, if it ain’t resistant, don’t Wince, if it fits like a boot, then boot it. And so she does.

While clearing the west quarter for more cropland, the Cat quarried a porcelain doorknob oystered in earth, grained and crazed like an historic egg, with a screwless stem of rusted and pitted iron. I turn its cold white roundness with my palm and open the oak door fitted with oval glass, fretted with wood ivy, and call my frontier neighbor. Her voice comes distant but clear, scolding children in overalls and highbutton shoes. A bucket of fresh eggs and a clutch of rhubarb rest on her daisied oil-cloth. She knew I would knock someday, wanting in.