RUSSELL THORNTON

BURRARD INLET SHIPS

2011-02-13T20:18:00.000-08:00

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

2011-02-13T19:06:00.000-08:00

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

2010-10-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T17:00:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T13:24:00.000-07:00

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

2010-10-11T13:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-10-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

...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.

A WAVE

2009-03-02T17:16:00.000-08:00

Now I remember what I dreamt. The wave came to its crest
and was a brilliant animal rearing up
at a barrier, blasting my ears with its roar.

The living froth poured vision. The lit spray contrived a crown.
It halted, swivelled, and in vacant agony
stood tearing itself out of its own time-deep bowels.

It collapsed -- a flung and shattered clay jar;
innumerable lost seashells flying, spiralling whitenesses
around what melody they could. Then the snarl

and the thud of the whole bulk hitting the shingle gulley.
It slung up the beach a foam of running marrow, whispering.
And now the bed, desk and chair hold their notes,

while the small clock ticks to calm a wildly lonely child.
The itinerant particles of dust, lying sparkling on the floor,
seal in what makes the child cry out and the darkness smile.

THE CHURCHES OF SKOPELOS

2009-02-21T10:38:00.001-08:00

Waking suddenly in the island room,
the balcony curtain blowing aside
and flaring as if ablaze in the sun,
I heard a woman singing unaccompanied,
her voice so clear, the melody so strange,
so familiar, it was painful to me,
in her voice every joy and sorrow
was signed up somewhere in clear flowing flame,
and I thought it had to be a dream, as
I felt the singing inside my body,
all my organs singing to each other,
yet here I was wide awake. And I knew
what I was hearing was emanating
from some not far off church. And so I roused
the woman who lay asleep beside me,
and we dressed and went outside, where I heard
other church singing, and rhythmic praying,
all crisscrossing in the crystalline air,
and beautiful and pure, but none of it
was the singing that had awakened me.
We were at the base of a small steep hill,
The church nearest us was at the hill’s crest,
We walked to it and listened at its door,
but neither could I hear the singing here,
so now we began following a path
of our own making from church to filled church
in slow, wandering search of her. We spent
the day in the lit hillside labyrinth
of winding streets, trying to find as many
of the two hundred churches in the town
of Skopelos as we could, some of them
in side streets like crannies, places only
the island’s cats visited, some of them
anonymous in the hushed midst
of the blue and red house doors in cul-de-sacs,
some of them, cliff outcrops, radiant white
in the sun, like calm white birds in their nests.
At the last church we would come to, dozens
of people crowded around the entrance,
and they were all smiling softly, it was
as if we had found a celebration.
It was afternoon now, the sun pouring
down marble light, the shadows on the ground
back as black construction paper. We went
in where it was cool and evening-dark,
lit only by long thin hand-held candles,
and stood there in the small rough-hewn stone church
among those praying for the soul of a man
who had died a year earlier. The priest
was intoning from an aged large prayer
book open before him in its dark stand,
framed icons coated with gold, depictions
carved subtly in wood, and fathomless saints’
presences painted in primary colours
looked out at us from the whitewashed walls,
but no woman singer was here, nor, as
far as anyone we spoke with knew, had one
ever been here. I thought, nevertheless,
she must have sung her mysterious song
in the morning in a church like this one.
At the bright entrance they were handing out
pieces of honey cake, and the gave some
to the woman who had brought me to this place,
she touched my arm, gave me the cake in turn,
and I tasted its sweetness, happy, at home
in the gathering, among the mourners.

NEST OF THE SWAN'S BONES

2009-01-25T14:55:00.000-08:00

She will build a nest of the swan's bones...
-- Robinson Jeffers, "Shiva"

High in the blue air above the dumpster in the back lane,
between the mountains and the tidal flats,
on the thermals and updrafts a summer hawk does slow turns.

The crows pick at the waste on the asphalt.
The men push jingling shopping carts. Or stand and mimic life
in a prison yard. The wild white swan is dead. Where I caught

trout as a child, no trout swim now. The drives
and crescents gouge ravines, make creeks disappear. Where wild
baby fish run, they run gauntlets of penned fish. Are eaten alive,

eyes popping out as sea lice eat right through their heads.
The hawk dances. Circles, dances. Its shadow flits
unnoticed across men, spreads over a rodent or bird

it dives to, inserts claws into, and clamps large feet on, stomping it
as if beating time. It splays flesh and flies
away with it into the sunlight. The hawk takes up an owl’s hoot

and a sparrow’s last chirp, a heron’s bill-snap and a smelt’s silence,
into its disinterested scream. The swan
glides in beauty in the hawk’s sight, and fills all the hawk sees

with brilliant, blinding whiteness. Moment by moment,
the men go back and forth. They search out what they trade
for a full bottle or syringe or pipe. In my room with the lit up screen,

I lie and dream my dream. I feel it must also be God’s,
this dream of the person of persons. Where the dream comes through,
it punctures me, and I breathe dark air. The air thuds

into pockets like a plummeted elevator. Oh monster home. Oh
specialty wine outlet. Oh auto mall. The wild white swan
is dead. The hawk hunts and kills the swan for love. It will build a new

nest of the swan’s bones. It will keep this nest unseen.
I am a person, I soil the cage in which my heart flings
and flings itself against the bars, I try to own

the view of every murderer, and yet I try to sing
the way out through the hawk’s claw holes to the repose
in the nest of fire at the tip of the hawk’s wing.

A CIRCLE OF BONES

2009-01-25T14:49:00.000-08:00

As you go ahead of me, yellow steeples silhouetted above you,
through a plaza with its pigeons and little children selling crafts,
through intricate-carved cedar doors, arched hallways,
past walls of holy paintings, reliefs of saints, each covered in gold leaf,
through a courtyard filled with brilliant slow light,
and into the ornate colonial cathedral, I follow,
and as you go down below all this, into half-dark,
small and slender, half-turning to me in quietness and knowing
out of the straight-falling bright black of your hair, I follow.

I go down an enclosed narrow stairway of rough stone,
into a tunnel, crouching but hitting my head, drawing blood --
the air the breath in the mouth of the dry sand and stone --
and I follow farther through the turn of a second tunnel, a third,
until we reach a storage-way, a footledge along a wall,
to the side of us large open wooden boxes that hold stacked human bones,
and after this, open vaults in the earth that hold piled human skulls.
I follow still farther, down more steps, through a final tunnel
until we walk out into the deepest and largest chamber.

In front of us is a white core, a cluster of about a dozen skulls.
Around the core, as if issuing out in every direction,
are leg bones laid side by side touching at the joint ends,
white rays emanating out to a circular band, two skulls thick --
then an extension, an expansion, a second set of bones, twice as numerous,
then a second ring of skulls, the completion of a corona.
You explain to me that it was all arranged in this way
by a discoverer of the catacombs, and kept this way,
with an enclosure built around, and no one can say why.

The mass graves those who would lie in them were told to dig,
the dirt crypts into which the human corpses were bulldozed
tumbling over and under one another like adult rag dolls
but with skeletons sticking out of the starved bodies, dead eyes staring --
images of these come piercing into me, then disappear.
This half-lit cemetery beneath a church, this collection of bone
centuries ago divested of flesh, the flesh vanished into a now-scentless air --
if uncovered and re-excavated with expert care, how is it
it was re-ordered into a radiating sphere if not out of spontaneous love?

It is like a Tibetan monk's container of essences --
that art performed by the devoted and meticulous, that months-long work
placing coloured particles of sand on a design set on a platform,
completed only to be erased, only to be deliberately swept away,
every particle of sand poured into a river or stream.
Except, in the hard, solid substance, in the colour no colour at all,
of its host of skeletal pieces, it is known
as nothing else is in the play between us and what sweeps us away,
and made to stay, and made of what has stayed of forgotten ones.

All these hundreds of eyeholes that flashed in the light
when they held living eyes, when they opened into the blackness of pupils,
have been taken up in an eye radiating in the direction of the sun
that once shone on the skulls' flesh -- and is still burning in this eye,
in its each carbon cell, like an awakening one seeing nothing but the first light.
And as you go ahead of me, and as I come around alongside you,
we stand gazing with eyes that are our only maps, and are the maps
of this eye that has been waiting for us and will gather us in
and show itself to us as us, this bone sun, this circle of bones.

Church of San Francisco catacombs,
Lima

THE OCEAN AT LONG BEACH

2009-01-25T14:46:00.000-08:00

The huge edge of the wind cuts away from me what I think I know.
That is how a man more myself than I can know
is visible in the surf -- spray twisting to a lit screen,

a man like a brilliant diagram. Every moment, he steps out of hellfires
with the one he is rescuing his arm's length behind him --
his grief an ecstasy now as they arrive at blue air.

There they are within chaotic, unearthly rays. Then the wave's jolt,
its single pulse at its height, spuming thick white --
he turns to her, her hand losing hold of his hand, its fingers suddenly bleak

and reaching out of nothing into nothing, she vanishes. Every moment,
the wave shatters and is his abandonment and laceration,
it hurls and is his dispersal in the froth-lined, sliding tidewater.

I know I stand, living and named, in the place of my skeleton --
If I imagine the marrow within it I am touched awake
and I look out at a wave travelling to the far end of the ocean and back.

And what is not human turns, and is also human;
it turns, and as out of the throats of the presences, lets loose calls;
they echo in the wild driftwood, the wind-spiralled trees, the sky.

That is how a wave lifts and is a winding man and woman --
their dark way to and from each other is through the interior of the crest;
their chant fills and fills the skull of each waiting sandgrain.

The whole air here has a face -- the face of an infant those two
break from as it rises out of immeasurable sleep,
the ocean gazing out of it with its opening eyes, and the face of the one

we hold in our arms when we hold each other, the one
we create and can never turn back to see -- yet turn, as we have to,
to try to see, when it leaves us and becomes us looking.

THE FIRE'S TWIN

2009-01-25T14:43:00.000-08:00

In orange glare, in smoke -- the fire keeps growing, keeps approaching.
It shrieks at what it comes upon, it takes things up into a whipping brilliance --
though there are things it does not touch,
things it only hisses at and surges past. No one knows why.
It is as if the fire is searching, desperate
to learn what it is searching for, desperate to see what is around it,
everywhere swinging its enormous smashed lantern.
It touches, it incinerates; and in that instant
it is as if it becomes a thing, and remembers -- then the thing is gone
and the fire must keep searching, blind and lost;
the world is the elsewhere in the fire-gouged eyes of a doll.

Now over the charcoal of towns, of trestles -- the fire hidden away somewhere --
the light that does not harm, that simply shines, that comes after,
the gentle light arrives. It, too, is searching.
It finds us, it takes up into itself much of what we are. Arrives
feeling the places the fire has been -- smiling over the beds of ash.
And like the black hunger that swept through, it too is a command.
The ones who return to the homes they fled --
each of them is the fire's weeping twin, wrapped
in exquisite flesh, come to a mansion burnt
except for a threshold or a part of a door frame,
and must make up a song to be sung for a child.

HARBOUR SEALS

2009-01-25T14:41:00.000-08:00

They're driftwood, or worn buoys --
now as they stand up out of the water
and stare towards the shore, they're living mineral,
like people with only rudimentary eyes.
And now I see one closer, see it dive,
and realize they're seals. Lifting slicked
black heads, disappearing back down --
they're seals. At this distance, soundless,
though at other times I've heard seals cry:
pure non-human cries that go
to the human bitter root. They're out
of some unknown watery testament
made of their cries, their wavering gentle
screams. Now I see a dozen of them
farther off, sunning themselves on a log boom --
solid blacknesses bathing lazily
in the long late rays. They roll,
all black torso like the mummified
Pharaohs, the immortals of the once-imagined
Egyptian ancestors of the familiar ones,
the Gypsies who flit in and out of sight,
baptizing themselves in the dark nothing
at the savage margins. They roll over
into the water and are gone. Then bob up
new and black, being born again and again
into their blackness. Now I see that same one
swimming close, almost to the shore,
lifting liquid-like black and craning -- it comes closer
as if I had whistled it up, asking for it,
and it had come, one of my lost ones,
my Gypsy dead. Seals all I can know now
of any of them. Seals that look out
in insouciant, terrible love -- and can only
be other than seals because they're seals.

MY MOTHER AND THE RAIN

2009-01-25T14:38:00.000-08:00

Early in the morning, she wakes the four of us
and marches us into the kitchen -- while we rub sleep out of our eyes,
our pajamas awry, our hair sticking out (one particular cowlick
even more pronounced than it is during the day),
the two middle ones on the verge of quiet laughter,
bewildered and canny and secretive all at the same time,
the youngest alert-transparent, taking everything in.
"Wait," she tells us, unlocks the back door
and leads us out onto the porch, along the house wall
under the overhang, where she sits us down together in a row,
drapes a big blanket over us and nestles in. Little looks
go back and forth between us: Is she what's called crazy?
Is this a dream we're all having? "Listen," she says.

The rain's falling wildly, roaring down the pipes
that drain the eavestroughs, tap-dancing on the porch,
spraying out everywhere like happily splashing-sounding stars;
out at the edge of the tree-filled backyard, the rain's
hushing itself, filling the trees, making the tree branches
heavier and heavier, making them rise as if to embrace the rain.
And rain mist is whispering in the grass, polished steel
rain hoops are spinning and ringing down the back steps
off into the air and into the grass, and unfamiliar,
ever-metamorphosizing bright musical instruments
made of rain are appearing and appearing, while mysterious
half-visible half-human-sized musicians -- ghostlike, glowing
and made of mist -- play the instruments. Is what we hear and see
what she has meant us to hear and see? All she says is: "Listen."

Later, out in the day, we will be at a bus stop. Those middle two
standing alongside me now next to a post, their four and five year olds'
odd about-to-become-grins on their faces, the youngest
on the bench with her, spilling out of her lap. "Make the bus come, Mom."
She lights a cigarette. Thirty seconds later, like magic,
the bus comes lumbering up. My brothers grinning outright --
and my mother's greenish eyes shining, the rain
falling into the green backyard. Me and my brothers
looking up at her, laughing, and though we don't know it, beginning
the lives we'll have, whatever happens, listening to the same rain.

LARISSA NEW YEAR'S

2009-01-25T14:30:00.000-08:00

If you were lucky, you said, by the end of the night
we would have the money for a holiday
on Evia or Alonissos, on Thassos
or Halkidiki -- or we could even go to Crete.
All New Year's Eve you beat men at cards --
one by one they exited the game.

I sat back at the bar and watched
and thought of the night we had met,
when you stated you foresaw deaths
then tried to forget -- the neighbour, the relative,
the stray kitten you introduced to a mother
and her brood that hissed it away.

And you told me you were a thief. I admitted
I, too, had stolen things -- for a time --
but now to find metaphors was to pocket
new money. I wanted to steal a thing
from its class and marry it to an alien other.
You nodded at that -- all contradiction,

calculating, vicious in an instant,
yet frightened and soft-hearted
in a way you had to hide. People either died on you
or deserted you. But I had no choice --
I had to stay to see the constant startled look
in your green eyes, to see you perform

your ritual behind a half-closed kitchen door
with olive oil and floating flame
to keep away the evil eye, to see you dab
holy water on your throat in crazily driven taxis,
to see how you stood as at an interface
where gods and goddesses appeared.

Nicotine addict, gambler, who thieved
everywhere, who also gave without thinking,
you foresaw nothing of the thief
who came for you yourself. Or did you?
Every holiday you took, you might have half-meant
to lose him in a lit street. That startled look,

you sensing he had begun his work in you --
the way you somehow knew what cards
were in players' hands. What I knew was the cutting
of the New Year's Day cake going wrong,
the coin wrapped in waxed paper not to be had
by you or me that year -- and then not any year.

OUZO

2009-01-25T13:40:00.001-08:00

You add water to a glass of ouzo
and a genie-less smoke rises in it asking: What is it you wish?
the ardent clear spirit distilled from the lees of wine
suddenly wreathed in opalescent fumes,
and boiling away the sediment of your life, and distilling the day
while you sit at a rough table in the mid-morning in front of the sea --
so you see there in the glass the vaporous myth of Plato's cave,
the man bound in chains, the theatre of shadows,
and beyond this, the sun's world-filling light;
the day becomes simpler and simpler,
the day wakes you into light, you drink thick coffee,
walk and swim and sleep in the afternoon,
sit and wait for the blackness of the night to bloom,
the small brilliant white multitudinous flowers of the stars
to bloom from infinitely within the night's blooming.
And there is nothing here to wish for except what is --
nothing except the instant opening,
the sea clear as alcohol, the collapsed waves' foam bubbles
crackling along the sand like a delicate fire,
the distinct self-scoured sand grains, glasses of ouzo themselves,
and the nearby profusion of houses, all exquisite white words
strung around the hills, and the hills a smile of death.
And the old waiter who sets down the ouzo,
who makes his way without effort and with a strange beauty
around and around the perfectly arranged tables --
I see now he is the man who broke free of his chains
and walked out of the cave into the light of day --
it is as if he is the first person I have ever seen;
I do not know how it is that the wrinkles of his face
seem to multiply in the sun, nor how I now look at him through eyes
that are not mine, and he only smiles, for they are his eyes,
nor how it is that he is also young;
his eyes ask me what it is I wish, and he already knows
that it can be nothing except to wait for all blackness to deepen
and become one with all light, the hills here as they darken
and the sun's fire, come into clarity,
to wait for the world to re-collect the world,
and every question I have ever asked to return to me
and place me in the chains of metaphor, in the absolute
made of the chains' flowing, of what is transparent.

THE FUNCTION OF THE PUREST GRASS

2009-01-25T00:16:00.001-08:00

at each moment sorrow grows in the world,
it grows thirty minutes per second, step by step,
and the nature of sorrow is double sorrow,
and the condition of martyrdom, carnivorous, voracious,
is sorrow, double sorrow,
and the function of the purest grass, double
sorrow
and the joy of living we suffer from doubly.

-- Cesar Vallejo, "The Nine Monsters"

The function of the purest grass
is to wait for a wind to rake it, for the sun to explore it
and kill it, for summer wildfires to use it
as a path and leave little of the path behind,
to wait, to tremble, patient and forlorn, for thunder
to fold down into it and clouds to roll rain down each blade.

The sad singer, the murderer, the lover
who is the bright eradicating one -- they pass like grass.
The shiver, the loss, the comfort moving deep
through the flesh, the trespass that opens its abyss --
transpire like the wavings of grass.
And the war beginning and the war over,

and the dance of uncanny joy through the streets --
happen while sorrow grows like grass.
Grows more and more pure and more and more vast.
And remains -- it flies free, returns, remains. And might remain,
the prayer inside prayers, though everything
we know, including grass, is gone.

NOGALES PROSTITUTES

2009-01-24T23:27:00.000-08:00

All I could do while I stood there
dazed in the dim bare room
was wonder why the price of one
was five dollars more than the others.
The three sat down and faced me
in a line, nearly indistinguishable,
legs tucked in at their sides,
leaning on the heels of their hands.
All were lolling and demure,
junior high school cheerleaders
on a gym floor of rough boards,
trying to look kittenish, cute --
but pockmarked, sick-looking,
counting out their smiles,
and hiding in their pupils,
perfect glinting pictures
of a blackness that plunged me
into a strange sadness,
as if I had recognized
something I could not remember
but was desperate to return to.
I asked the man at his bar
with the rifle lying beside him
if he would sell me a bottle of brandy,
the amount of my offer higher
than the cost of the expensive girl.
I had one drink, and left the bottle,
and walked out into the afternoon,
the light glassy-red like a candy heart.
The rutted road now sifted me,
each particle of dirt a skull's eyehole,
the pure depth of a gaze
robbing me of any direction I knew.

WINDOW CURTAINS HALF-DRAWN

2009-01-24T20:36:00.000-08:00

In the upstairs room, the half-drawn
window curtains swell and flutter and flare.
Here she sat at a table and sang to herself,
spreading out a square of fine white canvas.

Measured, cut and folded it, made flawless
elegant stitches in it. Hung it and it began
to glow as if a temple dancer turned
within the drifting folds -- bringing forth

the dancer and bringing forth the man
torn apart, scattered and collected up
while in the dancer's embrace.
In the upstairs room, in the full sunlight,

I follow the turnings of the singing
and the contours of slowly dancing air
out across rooftops and high tree branches.
It is how I come to stand in a stone street

beneath a window at which a woman
waits, subtly leaning. I follow the way
through the black glass of that hair,
the charcoal and pearl of that shoulder.

How I feel the pulse in the flesh I wear
travelling from the invisible to the invisible.
Yet how, from where I stand in the room,
the quick ray in the curtains, the small gust

and swaying, is a breathful of syllables,
the name of the one who lives in the house.
How the syllables are a sewing
of what I see to what I cannot see.

FOOT OF ST. GEORGES AVENUE

2009-01-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

The boxcars couple, they shunt into the rail yard,

their wheels cry all night, they play. The late work

at the dry dock beneath the hull-filled vault,

at the grain elevator, at the shipping terminal

where the freighters lie up against the pier

and the tall cranes lift floodlit containers,

at the crossing where I chewed car-spilled grain
and made a rough gum -- is play. No one sees

beyond what he sees when he runs, swings, screams,

no one knows more than a child knows. A boy

will look up, call for a father to put

a crashed electric locomotive back

on its perfect circle of rails. He will see no one,

and leave the room to look up the rest of his life.

The tracks laid down along the pale insides

of a man's arms gauge the same loneliness. The train

makes its pass the way his blood makes its pass.

In the festering he will focus on it,

in the hole he tears he will find it, the one

thing that is real, and any memory kill --

the slamming of boxcars into a vein. Now he can go

anywhere he wants in the night. The train

will take him, the switching will never stop. Below

the city block where my balcony hangs

and the avenue ends, the work keeps on. I don't know.

I don't know how it is that paradise is so wide,

the junction in the head so narrow. If you shut

your eyes, in the dark behind them you will

watch while eyes are riveted into you.

If you listen to the coupling, crying, clanging

continue down through you, it will become a chant,

and that chant, what you know; and whatever you are

will be forsaken then finished. The sleep

you crave yet fear will come, the sounds and lights

die into what rises within you. A ferry

sits in fittings, a freighter rests, its deck loaded,

boxcars stand still, ready to be hooked up again.

What you dream, what transpires while you lie there,

is the beginning of the day you will wake to --

a world assembling itself, both workshop and toy,

a Christ entering metal, never to return.

A MEMORY OF A DEER

2009-01-24T19:27:00.000-08:00

It had come down into the city
out of the mountains in the night
and gotten lost, had sensed the dawn,
heard car noises at the corner,
heard the police station and hospital
across the street, and, bewildered,
come into this silence and deeper dark
within the still-dark morning to hide.
Now I, a human, had approached it.
And the deer stood there like a child
caught doing something wrong.

Once I was told that years ago
in summer, deer would come down
out of the humming mountains
through the night and keep going,
swimming the mile-wide inlet
from North Van to downtown.
The city wharves would stop them,
and they would struggle for hours,
trying and trying to get ashore.
In the morning, men would drag up
the exhausted or dead deer
like fish into the nets of their arms.

And once, desperate and dazed, I entered
those cold dark waters, held on
to a broken old wharf that sat there
near the foot of Lonsdale Avenue,
then pushed myself into the inlet
with the intention of swimming out
farther than I could swim back.
But came back, with no idea why,
with no need to know why,
only my own weeping and laughing.

It must have been the memory
of that underground parking lot deer
already coming to life in me
that took me down to the water
that night and made me swim out
and also made me turn around.
Then, the memory must have been
just a pinpoint hidden in my body,
but a light which would begin to burn
and lead me without my knowing it
through time to another night
and to where the deer stood in the dark --

so the light could become the deer,
and the deer, a vision of the deer:
its strong delicate-looking head
and neck as it swims across the water,
its forelegs, flexed haunches, and hind legs
as it lifts itself onto a wharf,
and begins its run through the city
to a forest and a secret herd.