A monochrome adventuring: the chemicals
spread on polymer and exposed to a flash of light
hatch this peephole's-worth of look, but glimpsed in reverse,
black snow, slate skin, branches in ivory silhouette,
haunted snow-shadowed eyes, abstracted from the heat
and breeding and decay of the gaudy universe,
landscape pressed to the transparency of night,
air's inversion of plenitude, volume to line,
all of it mediated, miniature, its code
freezing one sixtieth of a second transposed
into this misty creation, shades cast in light,
a black dove descending toward a field of ash.
As X-ray transparencies reveal what we hide
in the roots of our teeth, forsaken memories
display themselves to us in swirling flecked black smoke,
pigmentation abandoned, the rainbow spectrum.
A monochrome yesterday gleams in pure shadows
of design; sharpness of line and lucent texture
sketch in grisaille an architecture of the past,
your bare toes grey upon grey, outlined in silver.
This surging instant and beyond
sheer fire, the prolific dissonance in each cell;
green-veined saffron gapes to the pollinator,
all mouths suck, nuzzle, as unmind
compels
seed into furrow and down course water,
muck sluggish, soil drenched with the fall
of rain, universe alluvial, at hand
no metaphysic of the sperm,
only itch of summer in the grip of summer,
rose pink the membrane, crimson its shed blood,
the goddess through her gates of storm
come, her
nakedness so splendid, her bright flesh fed
to the bare land. Scan the glimmer
on every skin of the luminous swarm
of atoms, boys, girls caressing
each self and other in barns, biffies, the shadow
of ruby-throated hummingbird on tall
azured stems of delphinium, shades passing
by meadow,
marsh, plains of nameless grass, upland to all
sunken emptiness, damp willows,
pollen in exercise of excess, coursing
the ditches of the rising road,
(petals show orange upon red, red upon blue)
time's quick generation, soft tumults grown
unwieldy with joy, lilies in bindweed,
bitter rue
in the grasp of vetch, then space and air gone,
devoured, sunk, nothing to do
but gulp, swallow, among newt, frog, toad,
amphibious, drowning while wet
filaments vibrate in portraying each colour,
greedy gardeners stare and bright as gold.
on tatterdemalion skies fat
miller
moths beat one uncertain wing past wild
cloud-busted cowgirls, the teller
of tales occupied with remembering yet
more blind unlikelihoods. It'll
roll on, the cycle when the cooling light grows thin,
morning and evening dark approach and touch.
Attendant upon planets the battle
goes in-
ward, obscured in division, a such-
ness of particles that roll and spin.
Wintering rose hips packed with seed rattle.
The dignity of a considered rhythm: today
the school year begins. Across the dappled green lawn
of Lower Canada College children of privilege
kick a soccer ball, foregather in little groups;
by the fence a red-head and her friend exchange news.
The ghost of Hugh MacLennan in his teaching days
observes from the shade of a tall tree. He can hear
the plock of tennis balls from further up the street,
the sacred precincts of the Monkland Tennis Club.
A seasonable invention, all these memorable
hours, a cherishing of slowness, as eyes might observe
the infinite seconds of fine craftsmanship,
afforded to some in their best bargain with time,
the finely grained and cut and carved, its artifice
emulating the splendour of the eternal,
the existential calm of the elegiac.
Then turn the wrong corner. A house has disappeared.
As if entrapped in the suicide's murderous mistake
or the muddle and depletion of dementia,
you come upon maddened wasps in all the cities,
sea giants, monsters, dragon, roc, sphinx, mermaid,
a phoenix tattoo paints resurrection on a pale skin.
Retrace your steps toward the pragmatics of freedom
in the grace of the familiar, that shape of our being,
the chosen hour of the chosen day, though the lost
slip from the slender thread of their living, yet first
and last the taut and shining wire vibrates
with tunefulness, proposes such fine music.
If the bear becomes aggressive, speak
quietly and walk backwards.
Mi'kmaq we assume, in red hat tall with feathers, the smiling man
steps from an arriving car
announces to the crowd
(polyglot on the look-off) that as he made the run
up, he caught sight of a bear
above the sheer-cliff-cut road.
The news spreads like sex gossip or wild tales of blood, death,
arson, alien invasion. All eyes,
we lift them up unto the hills,
to trees, a ledge of bare rock, necks craned, mouths
agape with the rare breath of today's
naturological marvel,
though at least one man overhears instruction yet for inept long
minutes looks every wrong way, sees
nothing up the mountain slope,
damns the tourist-glamorous falsity of rumour, as the strong-
lensed glasses focus, show
foliage, trunks, no living shape
until, yes! yes! there! there! at last, blackness, a shape goes
across the steep hillside, passing
behind the green leaves, a hunch
of black-backed shoulder as the omnivore's potent claws
scrabble for grubs, or seizing
berries snap a brittle branch.
As for the little crowd of thrilled chattering observers,
whose outlandish scent rises from a mile below,
the beast has little interest in them.
But even so we all prepare to walk slowly backward. A bear
will catch you if you run away;
a bear is a marvel and a bad dream.
Acolytes aspire toward such elemental splendour, what overgrows,
transfigures all symbols,
to an absolute hunger
as gorging toward a winter's sufficient fatness, the animal sways
its great head, ambles
on, will not linger.
If the black pelt is dreamed white you have met the spirit bear
who's everything at once to deconstruct you,
a post-modern totem, most in-
ward in transgression, rapacity, stable on all four
legs or towering, roused on two,
a terror among the unseen,
the spirit bear claws apart sweet atoms, feeds
on electrons, reduces fervid enzymes
to streaks of pallid spittle
dropping from the roof of the mouth as time broods,
like a god inventing thumbs.
And so much later and earlier it'll
come about as always before, darkness, fire, laughter, an old joke,
fingers running through black fur
as liturgist voices repeat:
it is night on the look-off, ocean below, the leaves shake
in an unseen wind, in darkness, the bears
above wait.
On this still October morning, the falling leaves
click, whisper, fall, dropping straight down, lie still.
Wild dogs have torn the soft throat of our singing.
There is hunter and there is prey; the little one,
overtaken by the suddenness of beasts, falls
from the hours of music and laughter and love
to the hill of ancient stone; blowing hair, pale skin,
soft mouth and all the ways that she was beautiful.
Among us now a skeletal comedian reigns.
At vision's edge a finger points, and a figure
vanishes, the universe performing for an audience
of one--hallucinatory fragments flicker
on the borders of the perceived, as when the air
grows animate with the glory of our desire,
our wisdom measuring the span, the eventual,
melting; yet nothing slakes the hunger of the dogs.
While the slash and scream of a motorbike deafens us,
the unstanched fire of the jets bleaches a sky
that blinds us with shining, the lines of melody
modulate, the leaves fall quietly into light.
Say I should write to you in a beautiful hand
each discrete character calling the eye to observe
its form, sweep, the density of black upon white,
you to stare with delight at the stenographic page,
how it can evade life's gestures of disorder
the slash of anger like projectile vomitus,
swift slopes of caress, blanked gaps of repulsion,
anaesthetized by the linear perfection.
Say in reply you would sculpt me an alphabet,
bare trees on snow, crows placed in a winter field,
the careful strokes of the hieroglyph for madness,
designs abstract as bald anatomy on walls,
drawn drifts of windspeak, maps, the ballerina's foot
the skater's turn, frozen in contemplation,
where symmetry of fishbones, of seal skull, seedpod
discountenances the running water of mere scrawl.
Always each arm is locked in place, the shoulder poised,
a pivot as the eyes invent new gallantries
of pure text, unstoried, backward against time,
all beauty on each facet of its unmeaning.
So script without import will dwell in its stillness,
as the eye escapes elision, intuition,
follows stroke by stroke what is set down, pictograph
of man, ox, horse, rider, fish, bird, house, sword, sun.
And the lovely body too is an ideogram,
holograph, the author's hand marking the token
incisions, changing minute by minute, the clay
wrinkling until the tablet crumbles in fragments.
A lifetime later, stored in the album's
tiny image, what my eye didn't see:
vast enlargement frames
a swim of light on a window, reflected tree,
behind glass, she
slender, passive, hands held in her lap,
tumult of blond hair covers the right eye,
behind her, toward the top,
the blur enacts a shape of leaves, the sky,
palest of grey
hers, halftone precursor of a love to be
or dream undreamt, portrayed as through a veil
of unreality,
pixel and spot and blotch, muddled detail
to half-reveal
her face and body, breastless, elegant, thin,
a watching ghost who might have spied
me spying her within
the window, but I didn't, what was inside
undescried:
shadow of soul, she comes here in my age,
dim avatar looming in folds of time,
an unturned page,
augury of remembrance yet to come,
perfect as rhyme.