let it go. He must agree, or say he does. A war
ended here not long ago. We drove through villages
in battle zones, saw the charred wreckage
of shelled farmhouses on the way to the coast.
Moonlight is on the sea outside but
the wind is like the mistral in Provence
(they tell me); it puts everyone on edge.
To carry this conversation anywhere else
tonight is as hard as, in the morning,
it will be to pull one heavy suitcase
out from under another in Neven’s trunk,
at the end of the long drive back
through the mountains to Zagreb.
Kol Nidre
Remembering
a frosty morning,
awkward in a jacket and tie,
running ahead of my father,
waiting for him.
The night before,
a colder walk under stars,
the synagogue ahead,
ablaze with light.
At five years old
there are no symbols.
There’s a cold night,
brightness inside,
the slow spelling
of illuminated names
under a roar of whispers.
And then, passing
through crowded doors,
there will have been
out of a sudden (why?)
silence the sound of a prayer
drawn up from a voice
dealing with music and pain
on difficult terms, wavering,
and my father.
And the safe, close room,
guarded by warmth
and the height of men,
would have changed
to hold something else,
that did not bring
the urgency of fear
but was not comfort.
Why should the men
be swaying in their listening?
Why the aching?
How the beauty
in what must be grief?
And Diving
Late night
in a cold bed,
far away.
Yesterday I dreamed
that you had died,
arcing from a bridge
to black water.
I arrived too late
and diving,
could only bring
your body back to be
whitened by moonlight.
I was crying, holding
your still hands.
Late night,
cold bed, telling myself
I do not love you,
remembering your voice,
your hands in my hair.
Reunion
Night; your lips
on mine have not changed,
but neither have you
nor I with you. We breathe
a brittleness into each other,
saying too many things—
lacking the gentleness
of silence or else fearing
the demands of silence,
unsure if we are safe.
Realizing this, how can I
reproach your quick,
careless words,
filling our hesitations?
Not loving you,
I want to speak of love,
if only to allow us stillness,
permit us silences.
Annotation
Should there be love
the soul may ride
the river of the blood
through rapids
over falls
past breaking rocks
into a harbour
safe from time,
or so the story goes.
Not yet prepared
to denounce the text,
I can say, nonetheless,
that the falls
rapids rocks
aren’t just
scenic attractions.
Shake you pretty good,
they do.
Hereabouts
Touch hands.
Form line.
Let the one
with the cat’s eyes lead.
There are said to be
chasms
hereabouts.
In the now dark
there is no light
to speak of.
Once, yes,
but none
to speak of now.
Tunnelwind
roaring into us,
hurling
bits of dust
and gravel
that draw blood
in the black
when they bite.
If the cat-eyed
one is blinded
we may be in trouble.
PART
FIVE
Beyond This Dark House
1.
And I was coming home
these past two weeks,
feeling my way,
letting the pace of walking
ease over barefoot stones.
Moving again
into the rhythms of
summer on the prairie,
rediscovering the steps,
hesitations,
the afternoon languor.
Last night over coffee
someone told me
you were also home.
2.
You’ve walked beside me,
never knowing,
for six years now.
We’ve been together
in so many places
as I travelled, under skies
with doubled moons.
Beyond this dark house
a train is running away
into the night plain.
We’ve all had
dreams break,
fantasies we shaped.
3.
Your restless fingers
in mine. A night lane.
Streetlamps before and behind,
shadows thrown two ways,
you will tell me:
‘If I think about walking,
about actually walking,
I find it hard to move my feet.’
Still, a moment,
both of us,
suspended
like midsummer
at the centre of all
turning things.
You will raise your hands to my shoulders.
There may or may not be a moon.
4.
The train has long since
followed its tracked path
among the farms.
Far out in the very dark,
summer wheat is rising
from the rich, cared-for soil.
The shortest night wheels
past this window, stars
dropping behind the trees.
Somewhere there are bonfires
for St. John, somewhere
fires for the summer king.
5.
It’s so late. For this,
for everything, for being still
awake beside a window.
Sure of very little tonight,
I do know, or remember,
as if from birth,
that here where we’ve both
returned, the yielded grain
has always been the oracle of earth.
And so it is that risen wheat
I will try now to invoke,
without any easings of use
to guide me with rounded words
out beyond light
into the swaying fields
where the silos wait.
And lacking not only words
but also an unspinning thought
to thread upon the dark,
I will ask only that
we may each be whole,
together or apart,
in this unstrange place,
under the one moon of this sky.
A Few Leaves
1. Simple Pleasures
Simple pleasures:
Earl Grey, Robert
Frost, single malt,
a Sunday brunch,
cribbage games,
long-distance
on the telephone,
a midnight walk
in the east end
with Mike and Sue,
a pun, a letter,
work to do—
and then this poem
that wants so much to be
about you.
2. Winnipeg: North End
Not that his heart would never make it . . .
only it was taking a much later plane.
Scotia Street,
fishermen
with bobbing flashlights
looking for night crawlers
up from back lawns
by the river.
Susan easing late
into some gentleness,
still bitter about her day.
I’d like to have
answers for her
as we walk.
The proud
stone themselves,
all the time.
What can we do
but wait? She takes
my hand, surprising
both of us as we turn
back down Scotia, past
the searching lights,
walking in the night
between the river
and the traffic.
3. Changes
Minden, Ontario
Thought I knew my countries
but this is a different place.
sound of the night lake
owl in the trees
Landscapes change irrevocably
in the naming of an absence.
shade of summer grass
shape of the moon
The restoration is almost complete.
It went perfectly well, everyone agrees.
striations on the rock face
red sunset
In the process of recovering
we learn how much was lost.
angle of light on brown hair
body in my arms
4. Fallen Leaves
She walks the sidewalks this fall
through intersections of his memory.
Dark raincoat. Burgundy purse.
Her sister on the telephone,
‘She’s been going to concerts in the park
by herself.’ He sees this too:
black corduroys, light blue blouse,
the black knit vest her mother
made. Plum-coloured jacket
against the late-September chill
down by the lake. He feels
the wind that moves her hair.
In the morning she rises early
to iron a dress for work. She was
awake at five o’clock, though, lying
in a wide bed. She will be tired
all day. The office hours
drain towards twilight.
She is the last to quit her desk.
Walks home on streets chosen for their quiet,
under falling, over fallen leaves.
He sees them spinning,
feels them underfoot.
5. A Few Leaves
Love’s a shape in our dark.
Winter’s coming: the light’s
gone earlier each day.
Played a football game
this morning, a few leaves
falling as we ran.
Could have gone
to a party tonight.
Could have gone
for dinner with friends.
Are you asleep? If I
called you now, so late,
would we just speak or would
the stars hesitate, and then
make room for us again?
6. A Private Clamour
Rain in late November.
The season hangs,
undecided and ambiguous.
Forebodings trouble the nights.
A knock at the door downstairs?
The insistent telephone?
Nothing so substantial,
only the private clamour of the pulse,
imperious.
Driving home through rain
from dinner uptown this evening,
trying again to assimilate
how completely the future
lacks you.
7. Northern Lake
‘I’m terrible. Jay died.’
His youngest brother.
Picked up the phone again,
called my own
to hear his voice,
paced the narrowing
of two rooms
and at sunrise
discovered
that a northern lake
had claimed us, too.
Your not being here,
a night my need sang so loud
in love you
surely must have heard.
Mourning him all night
I said good bye to you.
The Guardians
Perhaps her hair
will fall again from a balcony,
and she will pierce my heart
with the sharp points of her
tears, to keep me there.
—Pablo Neruda
At every entrance
to the forest
there are towers.
Women wait
at the top of stairwells
that spiral like their hearts.
Some are chained.
Some would have him
believe so.
All are lovely enough
to occlude the image
of the white hart’s
wild running in the wood.
Their hair will
loosen
and with movements
of the sea
remind him of how hard
the way is that winds
to the one glade that matters.
‘Oh, rescue me!’
they will cry
as he rides past,
and some will be trying
to save him. Truly.
One or another
is likely to succeed.
The hart is unlikely to care,
not even knowing
the stalk had begun.
Naiad
So wide the space between now and then,
between remembering and reclaiming, how
and when those long arms held me,
slender as water reeds, a naiad’s
strong with need. Yellow hair,
the wide, wide mouth,
adept at quirking into irony.
‘My sister and I used to fight all the time
about which of us my mother hated more.’
One New Year’s Eve we threw a party,
the two of us, two other friends. Fifty guests.
She wore a 30’s gown, white gloves
to the elbow, martini in one hand,
cigarette holder in the other. Hepburn
with golden hair. The summer night
of my wedding to her friend she waited
until the band was almost done to claim
the groom, once her lover. Slow dance,
hips tight to mine, raising eyebrows
around the room, mouth to my ear,
‘Make her happy or I’ll kill you.’
Her ashes are north of here. She scattered
all she owned among her friends. I sign my name
this bright autumn morning again and again,
on sheets for a leatherbound edition of a book
I wrote the year she died. The desk I use was hers.
It is oval, mahogany, austere, brass fittings
slender as she was. The curves remind me
of her arms. The sleek grace gone now, unclaimed
by anyone in life, in death. The space, so wid
e.
Finding Day
You’d brought
two tennis racquets so the four of us
took turns playing and sitting courtside
making clever remarks. I hadn’t expected
to be doing this and so wore only cut-off
jeans (as best I now recall). I was impressed
with your play: not a country club metronome
forehand backhand years of lessons drilled
game, but athletic, reacting, chasing-
the-ball-down tennis, improvising shots
when footwork failed and, once, dissolving
into laughter when I sent up,
on the run and forced very deep,
a ridiculously high lob.
Scrabble, after,
on the grass. (You’d brought that too:
one didn’t cross to the island,
clearly, without supplies.) The same
unabashed improvisation, forcing
the three of us to call you
on invented words, offering
an ad-libbed definition
and that laugh again.
On the ferry back,
waiting for everyone to board, we stood
alone, looking at the downtown towers
across the water. You told me
you had a job offer in Calgary
and were inclined to go.
I’d known you for three hours.
I launched myself,
without preparation or evident purpose,
into a paean of praise, a lyric panegyric,
discoursing upon Toronto’s many
and varied virtues as the boat got underway
and the towers neared, rising. Still
no clear idea, looking back, why I did so.
To that point I couldn’t have said I did
more than tolerate the city.
In the event,
you didn’t go west. Even now
(and twenty years have run,
carrying us) you’ll shake your head
and murmur that you, too, aren’t sure
what role anything I said, or did—an absurd,
running lob sent halfway to the sun—
played in your staying here.
But if I
had any least part in that, my love,
before the ferry blew its raucous horn
and we all disembarked, it is
entirely true that an extravagance
of grace, life-altering, was with me,
resting upon my shoulder
like a jauntily carried racquet