I find my way back to it, somehow, that joy, rough hewn rocks that flash
for a moment under a coordinated movement of sun and water,
some friction that passes through me all at once, like a ghost,
but pulsing, like a soul finding its way back to me.
“This is about the last good country there is left.”
from “The Last Good Country,” by Ernest Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway canoeing as a young man in Northern Michigan
Magic ages: thirty-three and ten As a man, his fingers will comb the ready She’s the seed who grows these still hard dates, 1999
when they plant her into the
mouth’s tongue-cut and upturned grass
and its lips which are bruised and swollen
and parted slightly in disbelief
at the boy who is turning to stone.
scent of the blustered flowers. Sister, father
and kids will gather there of course, and each
will take turns to mention first
how the affectionate summer has charmed
the grave’s spruce to a surprising height,
and by instinct, one or the other
will pluck, at their ankles, its pine combs
as if shells, deaf on their sunken beach.
who, in Autumn, sheds spells besides the names’
granite silence. From there, he will glance
across the ruined calendar and see the
braille islands on their blue slivered seas
And when he goes there, he will
know not what to say, and neither will she.
I wash away the river’s crust, I know this because I was a sunny stone, I was There is a man driving into the wind off Churchill River
the muddy springs at the nest of my throat.
The falling dark leans into me, and I steady
myself on the bank against its unquiet silence.
But if you lift me at the waist, I will stretch
from the tips of my toes. Like a constellation, I will
point where the tongue was
cut, to the husk of it.
a gem curled next to the river, fast as honey.
We sang together too, we hummingbirds.
We stretched to morning shores, and we
shrank away shy evenings. I said
goodbye each year, and like seasons,
we greeted each other the next.
He sees Spring brushing away ferocious curls,
combing out winter grey to blush of lucent blue,
sighing a half a smile into a cool scaleless flute,
one inbreath before a wish, and though it is lovely and he
will not forgot, he hardly hears
the hello, the goodbye, nearly misses in the edge of
his rearview mirror, ache sailing in the coves of its lungs
like the smile of a dancer hovering
above the floor on the very tips of her toes.
months of cold silence
then this, the cadence of wrens
warming ears like nests
“Nothing is lost, but it can never be again as it was.” My soul of you I reach into its cold sting and
~ Loren Eiseley
Indian stones sun oysters
In the bottom of a creek
The stream comes to sing around
All my bones.
Amid pale green milkweed Jim Harrison
wild clover
a rotted deer, curled,
shag-like
after a winter so cold
the trees split open.
I think she couldn’t keep up
with the others—
they had no place to go—
and her food,
the frozen grass and twigs,
wouldn’t carry her weight.
Now from boney sockets
she stares out on this
cruel luxuriance.
for Elizabeth “Tshaukuesh” Penashue The Innu woman confided in us this, that I listened once to the breeze off Lake Superior
Shetshatshiu, Labrador
she conversed with the river like a person but a river
said goodbye each year hello the next and like the river
when she paused laid bare its unquiet silence,
saying this, hold me on the bridge above Churchill Falls
Hold me at the waist above its falling dark
I will stretch from the tips of my toes
I will point where the tongue was cut, to the husk of it.
Spring brushing away ferocious curls,
combing out winter grey to blush of lucent blue,
sighing, it seemed, a half smile into a cool scaleless flute,
one inbreath before a wish, and though it was lovely and I
have not forgotten, I cannot say I heard
the hello, the goodbye, though it seems now,
turning back, ache sailed in the coves of its lungs
like the smile of a dancer hovering
above the floor on the very tips of her toes.
There was never any reasonable doubt If only she had counted on the photograph of
about the sky-blue eggs in the nest of his
grandfather’s peach tree or the magic of birds,
born falling into turns, like the cursives
of a letter, born simply out of distance; or the clay-brown
horse that took the mother past the gate and
through the open fence of the yard, along the white sketches of the birch trees,
and away from the car stereo playing “Mellow Yellow” across the stretches of
green tremulous grass until each of them were there inside the house,
teetering and faint like stars signalling the future from light years past,
so that she might glimpse herself from there, from her lookout,
and see how they would soon see her, like that,
tucked away in a coffin, her own hopeless nest to be
squirreled under the loam, and the eggs to be
trampled under the blue sky.
him in the tree having been taken, seemingly,
from the nest in the branch beneath his freckled elbows,
and under the shadows of a star as lustrous as yoke.
If only she had known about the branch that had
carried and saddled him there alighted among the distances
high enough to see her as she spoke to the horse and smiled at it
knowing it would know to take her past the fence and out
through the yard far enough that when she turned and looked in his direction,
she would be blind and so would turn again and ripple through the light of
the white combs of the birches and up into the shoulders of sun and hills,
outrunning the chevy singing “Mellow Yellow” over the green tremulous grass below
would she have reversed the apogee of their orbits with
the unhurried arching faith of a bird, and from the shoulders of the world
return to the boy deep in the tree, waiting, holding his breath like an
unhatched egg, or like a peach poised to fall away
before falling away utterly
into the speckled rinds of earth?
Her window is touched with fingerprints
like braille on a prisoner’s letter
only his lover can see.
Her window is glass on a stove door
where flames of ice melt
into splash of birds’ burning light.
Her window sketches a vapour trail,
airless and distant as a
thought moving through the mind.
Her window holds her breath
like a continent that shrugs across
a glassy sea.
Her window floats her outline,
like a net rotting with the bellies
of rowboats into the clear wordless sky.
Bare – the trees winter by the The creek turns its face away, But it is hard not to stare, and look for words. Will they rise, open-throated, Excerpts of snow moss the creek’s edge. On
creek, plucked naked and
shorn to antlers,
still as the hunted.
gaunt and stricken, the
italics of cracked lips
inflecting a fracture of silence.
Crippled limbs are wound-up like treble clefs,
clenched on knuckles of stone. Crabs
hibernate between them like spring bulbs
pulsed with the green fire that sweeps
the forest’s plumage? Is there a way to know
the words for their wordless songs?
the ice, the sky crawls like a reptile. A fossil,
the creek is hardly moving. Except
for the silent year that rings inside the stands.
Stop the lie — and the presses,
you have nothing to say
No know-how to prepare and to spread
the exiled unsaid cross the air of the page
with a finger that divines the cursives and the lines
from windows stung with gowns of frost.
Nothing true to flush mystery from the nests,
to put beauty in its place,
to wake the sleepy island in the skin.
That tall grassy green dreaminess – it’s outsource for blood rootedness.
Wakey, wakey, that “calling” is the groggy swish of your ear in the shell,
the grovelling ritual of your itinerant heart
and the misshapen leftovers nauseous within the spin of the
wash. Out, damned spot! out, I say.
Shut up. Cease and desist. Move along.
Nothing to be seen here.
Not even the invisible.
