No Ordinary Place (6 page)

When I climbed down the cliff by rope,

a heron fished from a boulder below, stretching her neck

the way a monk in prayer

leans toward a page of chant.

A seaplane, blustering animal, took flight,

but did not distract her, nor did I,

nor the migrating clouds,

the massed choir of pines.

From their nest of twigs

a pair of eagles rose,

hovered in wind over the stone

crest of the hill,

and like the presence felt in a room

where someone has died,

I almost glimpsed

what I was before entering this world.

Sometimes my father is big.

Sometimes he is small.

 
There are nights

when my father is young,

and days when he is old.

Tonight he is his father’s

 
father’s father,

reading by light of an oil lamp

in this rough cabin.

The print strains his eyes.

He holds his glasses aside,

tilts the page to catch

 
the light of flame.

He cradles the book like an infant

in his workman’s hands.

If I enter the room and say his name,

what would it be?

Winter Moon? Wind-shaped Cloud?

 
Rose past bloom?

And yet he is as perfect there

as the complicated arrangement of stars.

Tonight, wind circles the logs of this house,

forms the words on the page.

 
His eyes grow weary

following their swirl. The words

do not want to be still.

They tell him how much time

he has left in this life.

They form a clock with recalcitrant hands;

they chime the hour

 
with the owl’s fluted song.

One day, they say,

he must leave his books behind,

his papers, the shapes his hands

have rendered.

 
He will travel alone,

a susurrant sea, the night

a darkness without stars.

At this place in the story,

God climbs in your window

 
while you sleep,

while the moon and the sea

pray to each other:

hallowed be thy name
. . .

and God stands beside your bed

watching your breath rise

 
and fall in your chest,

as it has without fail since your birth.

He opens his book of names

and pressed flowers fall

 
from the pages.

The cats rub themselves

on the frayed hem of his robe

while God studies your scars

and whispers,
Don’t believe

 
everything they tell you

of your own failings,

it’s just that ancient sorrow,

 
the same old stones

weighing your pockets down,

the endless failure

 
of the blossom

to remain blossom,

of clocks to keep still.

The first morning is inside you

 
waiting to be born.

And God sweeps the floors of your house

and gathers up the dust

which small birds carry to their nests.

All you see when you awake —

the moon setting, and the sea,

 
and God’s shadow,

rumpled as a cloak

at the foot of your bed.

counts the solitudes, restless hours,

quickening days, every small

birth and death

 
of my father's life.

Each moment significant, each

must be counted:

the time between darkness

 
and birds,

between waking and the dream

that walks backward into night,

the instant just before

 
he pours tea into his cup —

my father's watch must keep account,

mark the ledger

of his accumulated years.

Its quiet ticking is the sound of dripping water

which is the first music —

 
concerto for heartbeat,

continuous percussion of the feet.

Sometimes his watch

 
counts back into memory,

and then my father's hair loses its silver,

the colour of moonlight

 
on still water;

his hair grows darker, thicker,

and my father, briefly young.

But the watch will not keep still.

It counts the hours my father sleeps

 
and each second

sleep stands outside the house

 
and refuses to enter.

My father's watch, stoic, deliberate,

marches into the future.

 
Iris swell and blossom

and dry like inky paper on the stalk.

Leaves uncurl their fists,

 
become the colour of blood

and sail into air.

And the moon face of my father's watch

keeps counting,

 
alone in its lonely task

as my father grows old

and the stars, like distant porch lights,

 
switch on, and on.

 
for Patrick

With needle and thread so fine

 
I can’t see,

you stitch the pond to the blossom,

leaves to their stems, stones

to the damp earth.

Your threads a thousand hues,

 
this garden

your coat of many colours

the birds fly to each morning,

 
where they unfurl

the bright embroidery of dawn.

On your knees as though in prayer,

you carve rivers in a map

 
of the known world

that furred creatures visit

and might mistake for Eden,

its curious god and his wide hands

pulling chaos,

 
planting order.

And if you sing or pray

 
to the small gods of stones,

or to the hand that ripples the water,

I won’t tell. And if at times

you leave your body

 
to view your creation

as our Father in Heaven looks upon it,

I won’t tell that, either.

Both day and night are gates

 
in and out of this life.

Our shoes dream dust and shade.

Our hands move like the shadows

birds make when they fly.

 
And when I ask,

set down your stitching and tell me

of the past lives of roses,

and how Time tangles itself

in the basket

 
where its threads are kept,

our past and future

impossibly knotted together,

then tell me again how this garden

 
is a book of poems

the moon memorizes when you sleep,

and how you’ve wakened nights

and lain in the dark,

 
hearing him

whispering verses to the sea.

 
after lines by Patrick Lane

I went searching for you. The voice

I heard behind my head, fierce,

quiet, was my own soul singing

above the moving tide, over the stones

shining and wet beneath the moon. Already

she had flown to you on the other side

of the mountains, beyond the shadowed

face of snow. I wasn’t afraid.

I have found and lost you many times

on this earth. There is no other way

to come home but by walking

past ponies grazing in their winter fur,

rusted skulls of abandoned cars,

past the unconcerned grass, boulders

in constant prayer. It is what I must do:

wash my face again and again in the stream

until it drips with the sun’s light,

the soles of my shoes worn

to a holy O.

 
for Rob

You didn’t choose me, I chose you.

I chose to come back. I missed darkness,

dogs barking all night, the lament of geese

on a journey they’ll never know the reason for,

but fly because they must, because the sky

longs for the bells of their loneliness.

I wanted grief again, my back wet and cold

against the earth, your slender finger raised

toward each constellation, changed into the shape

of someone or some thing we have loved.

Around us, trees mapping their new buds,

green stars pointing the way to summer.

for Nancy

The delicate hand of a mole

our cat discarded on the path.

In January, all that’s left:

the skeleton of last summer’s leaf.

What my dog carries home. Once

it was a whole frozen turkey.

Winter trees lined with snow.

The stumps our slash fire didn’t burn.

Tonight’s sliver of moon.

When your body went up in flame.

Now you are everywhere, my sister,

and nowhere. In the air

inside that bleached skull of a deer

with spring grass in its eyes.

for Drew

My heart, blind fish, dreams light,

love, its oxygen.

My heart, little rabbit, has memorized

your smell, your handprint on my skin.

My heart, little snowflake, leaps out of sky,

dizzy for its own cold joy.

I can take a little boat across the night.

I can find you again and again.

How did we make a language only we understand?

I have known you a long time.

There is no end. Only a veil, illusion, a mirror.

Astonishment the oldest song.

Even my breath flies into the past.

At wind’s touch, the bell shivers,

but, faithless lover, wind moves on.

And don’t get me started on how many dead

we’ve laid in the ground. Long ago,

I climbed down from the sycamore

and became a woman. What

was the sense in that? And just last night

I touched your stubbled face in dream.

How like breath you vanished at dawn.

But I shall sing

 
to the bloodied dawn

and settle the stars

 
into their nests

my darting eyes

 
quick among the stones

and blossoms oh

 
how I will dazzle you

 
with my song

where you waited, little moth, just before

you fluttered into the womb of your mother,

and where you will wait for your body

to release its last held breath. Don’t go

looking under stones, or sea foam, or petals

strewn at the edge of the road.

It is right behind you.

You can’t turn fast enough.

Quietly it follows you,

picking the wildflowers

it holds in the small of your back.

The rose is an argument with grief.

Birth, an argument with death.

Music, with silence.

The fence, with infinity.

Love, with finality.

My ragged shoes, with your distance,

the road a vehicle for longing,

the wind arguing with my hair,

this heart who has set her face

and will not give in to despair.