No Ordinary Place
BY PAMELA PORTER
I’ll Be Watching,
Groundwood Books, 2011
This Awakening to Light,
Leaf Press, 2010
Cathedral,
Ronsdale Press, 2010
The Intelligence of Animals,
The Backwaters Press, 2008
Yellow Moon, Apple Moon
,
Groundwood Books, 2008
Stones Call Out
,
Coteau Books, 2006
The Crazy Man
,
Groundwood Books, 2005
Sky
, Groundwood Books, 2004
Poems for the Luminous World
,
Frog Hollow Press, 2002
NO ORDINARY PLACE
Copyright © 2012 Pamela Porter
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior
written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian
Copyright Licensing Agency).
RONSDALE PRESS
3350 West 21st Avenue
Vancouver, B. C., Canada V6S 1G7
Cover Design: Julie Cochrane
Ronsdale Press
wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing
program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through
the Canada Book Fund, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province
of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Porter, Pamela, 1956–
No ordinary place: poems/Pamela Porter.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN EPUB 978-1-55380-152-8
I. Title.
PS8581. O7573N6 2012 C811'.6 C2011-906411-1
for Rob, Cecilia
and Drew
from no ordinary place
do we come, and there
will we find each other again
Acknowledgment is gratefully extended to the following publications
in which some of these poems first appeared:
Arc
,
Cirque
,
CV2
,
FreeFall
,
Fiddlehead
,
Prairie Fire
,
Room
,
Tiferet
,
Vallum
.
The poem “My Father’s Grief” won the 2010
Vallum
Poetry Prize.
“A Table in the Wilderness” and “Like I Told You” first appeared in
chapbooks published by Leaf Press, edited by Patrick Lane.
“Tenebrae” is the Latin word for “shadows.” The twelve anthems of the
Tenebrae service are sung on Maundy Thursday in the Orthodox tradition as the congregation keeps vigil throughout the night, waiting for
the light to return.
“The Night of My Conception” was inspired by Lorna Crozier’s two
poems, “The Night of My Conception 1” and “The Night of My Conception 2,” from her volume of poems,
What the Living Won’t Let Go
.
“The Restive Angel” was inspired by “What I Gave You, Truly” from
The
Apocrypha of Light
.
“The Heart Is an Argument with Darkness” was inspired by Lorna
Crozier’s series of poems taken from lines in Patrick Lane’s volume of
poetry
A Linen Crow
,
A Caftan Magpie
. The lines used in this series are
taken from
A Linen Crow
,
A Caftan Magpie
, and from
Too Spare, Too Fierce
.
I would like to thank Russell Thorburn for his help with the manuscript
that became this book. His vision and intuitive logic are invaluable.
Also, I wish to thank my fellow writers in the WayWords writing group,
in the Ocean Wilderness and Honeymoon Bay retreats and at Planet
Earth Poetry for their support and encouragement. Finally, with deepest gratitude I want to thank Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, my best
and most beloved teachers and mentors.
Many bring food. Some carry flowers.
I’ve brought poems —
bouquets in profusion, armfuls,
a cacophonous disarray
the wind, magnanimous as a father,
sweeps into his arms,
petals strewn underfoot,
imprinted into mud, cleaved
to the soles of our shoes.
Many bring food. Others,
flowers. I’ve brought poems
for every season — of dreams born,
burning, broken, and the one
when, after protracted grief,
a scrap of melody begins
like a perilous grace —
dishevelled,
discordant as my frangible
offering, mud-smeared,
naked and tender and wanting.
Some bring food. It is
what they do at such times.
Others carry flowers.
I’ve brought you poems.
They had begun to whisper among themselves,
hesitant at first, but it was cold you see,
and had been months cold. They had begun
to whisper as the ice loosened and thinned
on the trough, as the moon’s startled face
rose above the blackened hills. I heard them
whisper, but did not know the moment
they began, or the precise dawn
in which they wakened from their stiff
and dreamless sleep. I know only
the horses bowed their heads to thatch,
I pushed the wheelbarrow toward the fence
where thin shoots blushed with colour, and higher,
the trees’ red sap set the sky on fire.
To be blessed
said the leaf,
is to lie finished
in dark earth,
my edges starry
with frost.
To be blessed
said the branch,
is to stand naked
in winter sun,
my blood rushing gold
and singing.
To be blessed
said the gate,
is to be rusted open
so that all may pass:
deer, leaves, wind,
mice, God.
After lightning, after thunder broke
the darkness brooding over the sleeping houses,
after rain, in silence morning bloomed.
The grasses lay mudded, rose petals
littered the dirt, and in that quiet, a bird
tried her tentative song. The cat
set a paw outside the barn; the horses,
rumps shining, weary with running, stood steaming
as the sun, that minor god, peered
from behind the clouds
as if to make some proclamation.
Then the horses lowered their muzzles to the plain,
and it was the beginning of the world, again.
She’d come home at last
mewling all night on the porch,
runt bundle of wild
fright in her bones
from the owl
sweeping the dark,
and the uncouth cries
of her owlet young filling
the trees and the night
with the black bells
of their sound.
She’d come home,
some furred creature
swallowed up in her, but now
she’s had enough of wild,
the open mouth, needle teeth
of that life;
she has brought us
a strangeness riding
in her eyes: a sky
of dark cloud built up,
and the pelting rain.