From Word To Word

The ragged clouds of gulls come over the trees,
frayed and straggling, black against a grey sky,
chasing the last fragments of the sun,
and each is tethered to the next by stray wings,
in two or threes, clutches, small sprays of shadow
that spring from the occluding forest,
that are swallowed by the indefinite brightness of the horizon,
like bits of ash returning to the fire that first flung them
into the high and cooling air of a still un-starred sky.

The poems that I most need to be poems are always the ones that disappoint me most, and I very much need this poem to be a poem, not for myself but for another, and I only hope that he is less dissatisfied with it than I am.

The Tree Trembles

The tree trembles beneath the axe’s blow,
But its strength is sound, and its roots are deep,
And its heartwood is true, and it stands firm,
Stands a moment more proudly than it did,
Because it soon must fall, because the bright axe
Has whispered to it from the whetstone’s edge
That its time approaches, but still it stands,
Not to defy, but to fall from its height.

These True Things

Of these true things God made the North:
Of rock and water, trees and sky;
All else comes falsely, even earth,
And like the earth we thinly lie
Upon its face, condemned by birth
To cling in wonder til we die.

I am on Manitoulin island for Easter weekend, and I have been spending some time in the woods down at what our family calls “the camp” on Carter Bay.  This poem was written there.

A Vertical Sky

The trees make the sky stand vertical,
the birches,
the cedars,
the spruces,
the balsams,
vertical and reaching.
They rupture its vastness,
and trouble its expanse,
and urge it still higher
to the terror of its beyond.

This poem is for my wife, because I do not write her nearly enough poetry, and because she deserves poetry if anyone does.

First Sky of August

I have always thought you loveliest
When I catch you unaware, and you stand,
Half-turned and still, your eyes on something else,
Something quite apart from me, some bright thing,
Like the book on the thrift store shelf that day
When you, for me, were first transfigured;
Like the apples, red and gold in the light
Of a morning dimmed market, halo lit;
And like the sun, redder and golder still,
And sinking through our first sky of August.

My friend Lauren Anderson has just posted about finding an old binder full of her juvenile writing, some of which she was brave enough to share, and it made me reflect on how much of this kind of writing there must be, lying in the neglected folders and binders and boxes of even the most accomplished writers.  I found myself wondering what might happen if everyone were brave enough to share this kind of thing with each other, whether this might not encourage people to see writing and writers a little differently, a little more accurately, a little more humanly,  and so I thought that I might also share some of my own highschool writing as a beginning to that end.

Now, my juvenile writing is certainly as horrible as Lauren’s, but it is horrible for all different reasons.  Mine is horrible because I was reading far too much Coleridge and Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley and Shakespearean romance, and because I desperately wanted to be a Romantic poet, more than anything, which produced poetry of only the most painfully maudlin sort.  Let me give an example from a poem called “The Prayer of Sir Gawain”.  I am particularly fond of the affected archaisms and the constantly inverted, yoda-like, sentence structure:

A solemn vow to Knight of Green
I made before my King and Queen
That, if my stroke did fail to part
His mighty head and stop his heart,
Then when a year and day had gone
Should I my fullest armor don
And ride from Camelot away
To where that Knight doth hold his sway.
So reaching that unwelcome place
There give myself unto his grace.

So now I kneel ‘neath awesome fear
As quick the payment stroke draws near.
My mind does see the chapel there
That fearsome Knight’s most dreadful lair.
And in his hands an axe of steel
which on my neck I soon shall feel.
I see that helmless head before
My eyes, and here his roar
Forever ringing in my ears,
Forever playing on my fears.

Unfortunately, the melodrama of Sir Gawain seems almost restrained in comparison to these lines from the fabulously titled “I Hamlet Unto Thee Ophelia”:

These tears, great sobbing tears, adorn my cheeks.
Why did I stay away so long a time?
For Fate did take within those absent weeks
Your mind, soul, heart and very life betime,
Forever stole from me, your grace sublime.

Now my lament must seek to cleanse my soul
Of grief, deep seeded guilt which rends it now.
My inaction, only mine, made this bell toll
Which now decries dread Death upon your brow,
The icy grip of hell I did allow.

Now Death alone can give me my desire.
This life can never show to me your grace.
Right gladly will I face Death’s fearful fire,
For only in that dark and unknown place
May I look once again upon your face.

I could go on, but you get the point, or I hope you do, because I would be very pleased to have people share their own such youthful secrets with me in turn.

For Alina Carere

That They Should Grieve

The crabapples,
so red today,
candied by the sun,
but cool still,
and firm on the branch,
and crisp on the teeth,
and sharp on the tongue,
and full of joy:
They have not yet learned
that they should grieve.

I have written this poem for Dr. Kenneth Graham, my first university English professor and perhaps the only professor who actually taught me English Literature rather than Literary Theory or Literary Criticism.  He is now retired, but I see him at the market not infrequently, and he wrote me recently with a request that I attempt again one of the more formal sonnets that I used to write for his class.  So, though I have chosen a rhyme scheme that is, as far as I know, of my own devising, I have otherwise tried to keep the sonnet form as traditional as possible, without much enjambment and without punctuation in the lines, but with a clearly distinguished octave and sestet and with a mostly regular iambic line.  I hope he enjoys it.

The Prayers that All Things Pray

These moments drifting on the edge of day
Lose time itself and make its time delay,
Like dreams that see what only dreams can see
And let their seeing draw all dreams astray,
Or prayers that find no prayer to make them free
But pray that praying might yet come to be,
Or words that wait for words until they die
And fall unworded into memory.
Here mysteries in their mystery humbly lie,
And visions grant their vision to the eye,
And earthly things their earthly selves betray,
And suns reflecting suns wait in the sky.
Here silence says what silence comes to say,
And nothing speaks the prayers that all things pray.

This poem is one of the forms that my obsession with the threshold has taken over the years.  It began with a file of quotations on the idea of the threshold.  It then became a sort of experimental prose piece that was comprised more of these quotations than my own words.  Both of these pieces still exist, and I am still working on them, more or less, but neither will see a finished form any time soon.

I only began working on this current form of the project when my brother Andrew asked me to write a spoken word piece to be read over some music for a concept album that he is writing.  I have never written for music or for a specific time length before, and I have seldom tried to turn prose into poetry either.  I am still not entirely happy with the result, and I still have to reduce it by something like thirty seconds, so any suggestions would be welcomed.

Also, because of how it came to be, this particular poem borrows, even plagiarizes, from any number of authors.  It has gone through so many iterations that I am no longer even able to list them all with any certainty, but I know at least that I am drawing text from Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Martin Hiedegger, Annie Dillard, Jacques Derrida, Leon Rooke, Emmanuel Levinas, Robert Graves, and Maurice Blanchot.  If there are others I have missed, they have my sincere apologies.

On the Scaffold

Where I have fallen, my eyes can feel the bruises in the door,
and the flecks of paint that have escaped the remover,
and the grain,
and the varnish,
and deeper too, to its cutting edge,
the edge that has cut me from myself like a guillotine cuts a head from a body.

I am waiting,
waiting for the blade to be hoisted again,
to fall again,
to cut me again,
through skin and muscle and vein and throat and bone,
to spill my blood again on the scaffold,
again on the threshold.

I am bleeding myself empty,
covering the floor,
the threshold,
all of it,
in my blood.

This door,
with the bruises and the flecks of paint,
my door,
its blow is true.
It bereaves me of myself.
There is no escaping it.
It is always a guillotine,
a mandaia,
a sharpened and a dividing blade.
It makes the threshold an altar stone.

I am there
on the altar, the scaffold,
before the blow I cannot escape,
seeing everything with extraordinary distinctness,
passing through the moments as if they were an infinite time,
a vast wealth of time,
an endless time left to live,
an infinity on the scaffold,
on the doorstep,
where every moment is an age,
where I feel the obligation of counting,
every minute,
as it passes,
of not missing
one.

Surely this is the place of epiphany,
this infinite moment.
I wait,
and tremble,
and know,
stretched on the block,
and suddenly hear above me the clang of the iron,
the clang that I must hear,
that I am sure to hear,
the clang for which I will listen purposefully,
though it takes only the tenth part of a second.

I am face down,
tasting the earth,
eavesdropping on the blade and the whetstone whispering to one another.
This waiting,
this moment,
this minute,
is forever real,
as real as death and eternity,
a moment and a sound that no longer belong to their time.

It is this sound for which I listen continually,
again and again,
with the closing of each door behind me,
because it bears the consolation
of no longer having to live in the shadow of death,
in the infinite time that approaches death.

It consoles,
because my greatest fear is not that I will die,
but that I will live,
that I will be reprieved,
that I will endure the agony of a falling blade that will never fall,
that I will be condemned,
not to death,
but to life,
one infinite moment following another,
in the shadow of the death that never came,
the blade that never fell,
the door that never closed.

It is not death that is intolerable.
What is intolerable is that I might be robbed of death,
that I might not take it in my arms,
savour a last breath on its lips.

Yet, there is a greater fear,
that the blade will fall,
but that I will nevertheless survive it,
even if only for a moment,
to know that it has fallen,
to know,
for a second,
or for five seconds,
or for an eternity,
cut from life and from self,
but counting out the moments of eternity,
counting the beats,
the bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats,
and to know that living with the living is no longer enough,
that now it is also necessary to live with the dead,
to know that death that will not let me die,
but will leave me waiting always for a further death,
where drops of blood count the passing of time,
until I must die once more,
again
and again,
for the door always remains to be entered,
and the threshold always remains to be crossed,
and the death always remains to be suffered,
however often it is suffered.

I will always be among the poor dying that are going from threshold to threshold,
because nobody goes beyond the threshold,
except by madness.

I die continually.
I die always, and every time alone,
because no one can die this death with me,
because there will never be anyone who can bear my lonely death with me,
because my death is in every case mine.

Yet even so,
my own death is not only for myself,
but also for those who are witnesses to it.
It is for the crowd who will see it only as a carnival,
for those few who will see it for the first time in horror,
for those fewer who saw it once with horror,
then with indifference,
and now with curiosity.

My death is for these others.
I am responsible to them
and for the deaths that they will die,
though each of us dies alone,
and so I will endure the aloneness
of the scaffold and the falling blade,
of the threshold and the closing door,
because the spectacle of my death,
of the blow that I cannot escape,
do not wish to escape,
which I anticipate,
am always anticipating again,
this spectacle makes me responsible for those who witness it.

In this moment,
only in this moment,
death tears off the mask of life,
and the true face is revealed,
and the severed head is held above the gathered crowd,
still warm,
so that they may recognize themselves in it,
my see their death in mine,
bloody and severed,
held before them.

This is the only place where the fear of death becomes a salvation.

This place,
this threshold,
is always hard,
always stony,
because it bears the doorway,
because it sustains the middle in which the two,
the outside and the inside,
penetrate each other.
This threshold bears the between,
and pain has petrified it.
Pain has made the threshold stone,
and I must cross this place,
pass and surpass it,
the last instant of my own life,
a life that will have been,
in any case,
so short.

I like words best when they do not pretend to be adequate, though this means that I am not often a fan of my own writing. This is why I write poetry, I think, to let my words be inadequate, as much as I am able.

In Hesitation

The day hesitates, draws a lover’s breath,
A gasp, poised and waiting, on pleasure’s edge,
And lifts its face to the still coming rain,
To the long-promised rain, coming, still to come,
And it waits, the day, it waits and expects
A dampness on its cheeks, like sudden tears
That wash the stone feet of the door, that kiss
And betray the touch of the threshold’s lips,
And all things come to be, here, in this breath
And in this hesitation, here, alone,
In this gasp that offers and withholds them,
Like a true gift, ungiven, unreceived,
To a lover, whose pleasure comes to be,
But only in the breath that makes it wait.