BURRARD INLET SHIPS

At a window overlooking water -- container ships

and bulk carrier ships lying at anchor

framed in front of us. They’re always there,

I hear a voice say. As if the ships were the same ships

that sat there twenty-four or forty-eight hours ago.

As if, in the middle of the night, the ships did not

arrive and drop anchor at exact latitudes and longitudes. 

And tugboats did not come and bring the ships to dock,

and other ships not arrive and take the first ships’ places --

in the middle of the night. As if the ships were not

emptied of what they brought here and loaded up again

while the ships’ sailors took their hours’ shore leave

to go to a bank, visit a doctor, talk with a priest,

buy a blouse or bracelet for a woman back home.

As if, between sundown and dawn, the ships did not depart.

And every two or three days, a new ship and new crew

did not sit at each terminal wharf. As if it was not

now a new ship visible outside the window.

All night, out on the water, the ships’ horns send out

sound signals for the ships’ arrivals and departures,

and all night, in inlet-filling fog, the ships’ horns

send out long blasts, long repeating notes -- accompaniment

to the circuit of sleep in the houses along the shore.

New ships and crews come, new products are brought

from faraway locales, and new loads of coal, sulphur,  

lumber and wheat are taken to faraway locales.

All night, when gulls come up from the inlet

through cloud and rain, gull after gull takes up

the same insane-sounding cry of unfathomable

emergency in a wilderness of water, and circles with the same

single message that seems wound and unwound

as on a wire anchored somewhere unknown to any gull

in the inlet circling and circling through its tides.

All night, the outsized ships come and go -- all night.

As if they were not, each of them, the same ship powering

over the glowing deep blue water-globe. As if the voice

at this window had not been with me all along,

waiting inside my hearing. As if it was not

the voice of one more myself than I can know.

As if this one’s home had not always been here

where he could see an anchor place and hear gulls.

As if he had not always returned here. As if he would not

say of the ships he saw, They’re always there.

WHEN THE BIG HAND IS ON THE STARFISH

When the big hand is on the starfish

and the little hand is on the crab, you’re looking up

at the lobby clock. It's six o'clock. Now a flock

of sea-green Canada Geese, the sun’s rays

blazing over them, flies past a mass of sea life --

lobsters, turtles, sea snails, skate, make their way

through forests of seaweed. This is outside,

within the arched entranceway. Seahorses, pufferfish,

traced in terracotta, swim the front wall face

as along inlet shore rock. The same biplane

flies by twice, three times, then the same Zeppelin --

here, it is, after all, 1930, and has been since 1930,

when this was the tallest edifice in the entire

British Commonwealth. When the big hand

is on the starfish and the little hand

is on the lobster, it's three o’clock. Boats and ships

go by -- the Resolution, the Golden Hind,

the HMS Egeria, the Sonora, the Empress of Japan.

Inside again, at the five brass elevator doors,

above which sailing vessels burst out of waves

with lighting in their prows, stand five female

elevator operators, chosen for their beauty,

wearing sailor uniforms, female usherers

into hardwood interiors like ships’ cabins’ --

1930 is also 2009, and now they’re the flowing light

that chooses the lobby’s stained glass windows

for their beauty, and the zodiac pictured

on the polished marble floor. When the big hand

is on the starfish and the little hand

is on the turtle, it’s two o’clock. Terracotta

Canada Geese fly along the building’s sides

to meet above the brass-framed main glass doors.

This is the Marine Building, address, 355

on a street named for Sir Harry Burrard,

ex-shipmate of the captain who, at the behest

of His Majesty's Royal Navy, sailed here

to find a mysterious sea-route, and failed,  

yet mapped the area’s every intricate coastal mile.

When the big hand is on the starfish

and the little hand is on the sea snail, it’s nine o'clock,

and I'm nine, or is it seven, years old, turning

the page in Haig-Brown’s Captain of the Discovery

where the captain and a dozen of his crew

sail in the ship’s yawl through the tree-branch-

overhung narrows into the inlet. Now people

from the nation whose home is the north shore

put off in canoes to greet them and offer

freshly cooked smelts. The Englishman at once

orders his men to shorten sail and allow

the canoes to keep pace. Now he looks out

across the inlet -- which he will name for Sir Harry.

The geese that fly across his sails, and past

the bright brass buttons on George Vancouver's

blue naval coat, fly now through the brass rays

brightening the Marine Building entranceway

and framing a Discovery. When the big hand

is on the starfish and the little hand is on the crab,

it’s six o’clock again. For an instant,

or is it a lifetime, terracotta geese pass

into living geese and back again -- Art Deco.

They pass through where illustrious ships

sail by and famous buildings stand. They pass

through to living geese like the seahorses pass

through to living seahorses, like the starfishes

to those with feet fastening onto rock,

purple arms slowly decorating time.

THE CHERRY LAUREL

The women who would gather in the vale

chewed cherry laurel leaves; when the poison

took hold and ushered them into frenzy,

they would see the vale was a hovering

of matter, a glittering haze; the earth

their bare feet danced on, and that had brought forth

everything around them, would -- if they

threw off the names they had used for themselves --

begin to reveal to them what there was

of eternity in the world.

                                    The vale

could open into a being, human,

yet other, whose name was a limitless,

pure embrace in an instant with no end;

then could close again and be a chaos

of innumerable identities

interspersed with abyss upon abyss.

It could pour blind currents of life, of death,

through the women's living skulls, and plunge them

into metamorphoses -- so they might

suddenly know more than any mortal,

having become the vale itself, knowing.

Some would never return from such knowing,

and collapse and die. But others would now

be called Daphne, the name for the laurel,

and be priestesses.

                             The light of the vale

is in love with those frenzied ones -- the rays

sent as from Apollo still following

the woman who ran from him and escaped

when she was changed into a tree; the fate

of even Apollo's love is held here

in the laurel branches. Here, your own fate,

though you do not know that fate, pours through you,

while the light, the vegetation, and rock,

so bright, so mysteriously exact,

are a moving stillness, about to speak.

Vale of Tempe/Larissa

from A TUNISIAN NOTEBOOK

We look out a train window -- on the way south.

Are those olive trees?

Oh yes. Oil from the fruit of their ancestors

lit the lamps of the ancient world. Floated flames

to keep away the evil eye. Those silvery lights

that flit around the leaves -- were gods and goddesses.

Last night, small bluish black olives on our plates --

the fruit soft and bitter, and irresistible.

You glimpse the new, unripe ones, small,

and still hard and green, shy-seeming,

but which will be ripe, be one of the different kinds of joy,

the way a love will have been a long fast,

then a feast made from a glimpse-beginning, a flitting --

be the dark, sharp-rich fruit. Here are the trees.

BLACKBERRY WINE

The moon in octagonal windows, twin portholes,

passing silver over her half-the-couch-long hair.

All evening, she bottled wine, now she sleeps,

her face a figure's on a prow. It must be that in her dreaming

the house is a sailing vessel filled with the scent

of blackberries. The ship lifts anchor, the tide is with it,

the wine of her is beginning to flow -- and she is leading

the ship, giving it life, she is brewing the wine.

The cache of ripe berries is stirred and crushed

in boiling water, the mixture strained and stored,

the juice poured into bottles and fine cloth fastened

over the glass mouths, and the juice collapses its structure --

all as she sails out into endless scent and transparent

purple-black gloom. And it must be that in her dreaming

she has searched for and found the ship's lost helmsman.

If she awoke now, she would find her hair wine-damp,

and find the one she allowed to stand within her

was one within whom she herself had always stood --

the two of them out under the full sail of the invisible,

in the moment of the wine steering through the wine.

THE MAN WHO SLEEPS IN CEMETERIES

Refuse recyclable paper yard bags. Refuse gloves.

Collect yard trimmings the way you know how --

I’ll do likewise. My friend, don’t hurt your head.

Afternoons, slide down the avenue. At every intersection,

karate kick crosswalk buttons. Show up mornings

a very macho character, a little threatening. Show up

fawning, a little flirtatious. Talking religion, bitches.

Going on about your lady -- in the mirror, lipsticked.

Gang boy in Colombia. Gang man. You left that life.

Yes, they found you in Miami. They killed your wife,

your two kids, they threw you off a balcony. Now lay

down your head. With strands of yourself off in the trees,

running quiet and clear in the quick creek water.

With your arms wrapped around surgical scars.

With your collection of scars. Miami to Vancouver? I think

I walked. Lay down your English. Por favor! Scowl

and explain to me in Spanish that you don’t speak

Spanish anymore. Or Portuguese. Or the Quebec French

that jumps out of you. Explain to me that North Vancouver

has the most beautiful cemetery you’ve ever slept in.

No landlords, no need to pull a knife. With different

parts of your head in proper places, explain it.

With your jumble of words, lay down your head.

With your jumble of words. With your single joint

per day and the pain gone out of your head. Let

the sections of your head click into a proper machined fit.

Yes, killed so many times, scattered in so many places,

you can’t say -- say a loud Fuck you in the direction

of your every past boss. Say it at your every refugee board

hearing, at your every income assistance interview.

Consult the cemetery’s visiting bear, coyote and deer.

Consult the community of the dead flowing in unison

beneath your head. Then make your many decisions

and rule the parts of your head. My friend, my co-worker,

here’s a coffee, a set of garden tools and plastic yard bag.

Come do your expert work. Whistle all day the songs

that came to you in the night through the cold clean dirt.

THE RAIN BUSH

...and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush
was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside,
and see this great sight...
-- Exodus 3: 2-3




I heard kindlings, full flames, a furnace fire
and singing ore. I turned aside and saw
rain blowing into the branches of a bush --
the molten metal cooling, magnetic,
its memory of directions, its brilliant
dream of the earth, come back. The bush stood,
living, intricate, a hollow sphere lit
in a theatre blackness with circling
mirror-drops. New wind arrived, and the array
of branches swerved on the stalk, and the bush
caught new rain, was still again, and the mirrors
continued circling, losing their silver
and becoming glass. So whatever a mirror
displayed through the air was as soon released,
whatever memory it let appear
in any image as soon disappeared --
in the mirror a rememberer could meet
himself in immediate new transparency
haloed in haze and glitter. Each mirror,
as it arrived, resolved itself in multiple
weddings of gazes, in gazes dying
into waiting gazes. The entire bush
was a changing mask, radiant with desire,
charged with identity, and turning aside
with what is given to us. The mask said:
Our unremembering, when we turn aside
to what turns to us, and are nothing
of what we have been -- that is the gift of all
we can desire. That is to hear our names
spoken clearly, and look and see no one.
That is to know a voice, and know the voice
is an elsewhere saying we are what is not us,
while the elsewhere brings rain, pours bright
ore into our always darkening day.