The Dream World Page 3

  Ten minds perk like coffee pots,

  turned on and promptly forgotten.

  Teacher is busy bestowing gold stars

  for compliance, submission;

  behind her back, little Nietzsche

  aims to copy Hegel’s paper.

  Teacher shoots a look that says:

  duty requires you do what’s right!

  God is Dead, Friedrich replies, and bonks

  young Georg over the head with a robot.

  RAPHAEL HYTHLODAY ARRIVES FROM UTOPIA

  He tells the story of his town

  where things aren’t owned

  but rather bound and

  passed around: a manuscript,

  a book among infinite readers.

  A crimeless land, no poverty,

  shared property, no upper class.

  We wonder: can this place exist?

  He’s homesick but he aims to convince,

  groups us here in one big ring

  to talk through all our doubts.

  Someone brings up opposites –

  we turn to beg his answer:

  where is the pleasure in life without sorrow?

  Hythloday?

  Sir?

  Are you there?

  TALKING

  Someone thinks a steady voice implies a steady self.

  How, he asks, could humans exist in absence of some solid core?

  He sees this like an apple’s spine, the sweet flesh bitten away.

  His neighbour says the self is spread like seeds throughout

  the centre; like separate personalities, or fruit throughout a tree.

  A woman in bangles tosses the trope – the core thuds into the trash.

  She wipes her hands on the back of her jeans and names the pull

  of Reason; points out just how language serves, translating

  concept to sign. This is swiftly refuted (of course):

  there’s no removed viewpoint to stand on. The woman persists:

  she knows she exists. She pinches her cheeks. Here I am!

  A voice in the corner: What about trauma? Doesn’t it shatter

  the self? Talk turns fast to tight-lipped texts,

  always holding back. It’s all downhill from here. The setting sun

  applies itself to table, chalkboard, percolator, painting the room

  a unified pink. For a moment, the fragments look whole.

  NOT TALKING

  When you leave I go to the wood

  that wears its being like a loose down

  vest. Windfall, deadfall, I duck under

  words, the quiet forest assembling itself

  around the thought of thought. Lie in the snow,

  my face turned up. Somewhere close,

  the river’s mouth is choked with last fall’s

  leaves. Nothing left to say about

  all our endless nothing-said, talking

  held in place of touch like slides held up

  to light. Naked maples, empty-handed,

  reach toward that potent height where

  things unseen return as form. Magic

  trick, mysterious flicker: you turn and take

  my hand. Lead me down the trampled trail

  where language beat a fast retreat;

  show me the hollow behind your heart

  where all the cold’s pressed down.

  We’re up to our knees now, headed for silence.

  Come and lie down with me there.

  THE DREAM WORLD

  NATURAL SELECTION

  The black sleeve of history is rolled at the cuff.

  Beneath it, a flash of red silk. Say it’s the red

  of someone’s umbrella – a woman at the bus stop,

  already late. Say the rain is pocking the gutter,

  the gutter is rushing, unstoppable: fate?

  Empedocles saw the start of the world

  as chaos with body parts floating around it.

  Think of pure blackness; a foot sailing past.

  At the far end of town a man turns the key,

  backs down his driveway, craning behind him.

  The woman gives up and decides she will walk.

  The rain is still falling like what’s coming next:

  at some point the foot will collide with a leg.

  The man hits the brakes and the car hydroplanes

  into a version of what we expect, smack of the male

  up against female. Love was the glue, Empedocles said –

  but let’s call it chance. Let’s say the year is 1831:

  a man boards a ship, bound for a future he’s never

  imagined. Restless and bored, unmoored and drifting,

  his uncle has pushed him to take the position.

  He’s pleased with his title, repeats it to himself.

  Charles Darwin: captain’s companion.

  THE MAPS OF THE LABRADOR ARRIVE

  The first expedition: 1903.

  Leonidas Hubbard, George Ellison, Dillon Wallace

  set out for the Naskapi hunting grounds,

  hoping to find the caribou herd,

  enough meat for the winter.

  Thousands of miles of uncharted forest,

  blackflies swarming their noses and mouths,

  trap-like tangle of willow and alder

  reaching and pulling them down.

  Must not all things be swallowed up in death?

  My paddle, my single canoe.

  POOR ME

  Three days camped at the edge of this lake,

  summer light of a dime-store novel, that gauzy softness

  dusk can make. Lonesome, heartsick. Now,

  after dinner, after the loon has opened her songbook,

  started in practising scales, after I’ve poured

  a shot of whiskey under one raised eyebrow of moon

  nursing my ache for the people I miss and after darkness

  unfolds its wings, prepares its descent: a moose.

  Hooves the size of salad plates, legs

  the height of my shoulders. He walks, regally,

  out of the woods, as though arriving fashionably late,

  then swims the narrow channel leisurely,

  antlers high and proud. He climbs the bank,

  hindquarters bulging, an athlete going up for a medal.

  One minute later he’s gone. The moose is nothing less

  and nothing more than temporary –

  and yet there’s mud marking the surface where

  halfway across he paused. What to make

  of his slow glance behind him, the single blink of eyes?

  He took in the lake’s unflinching reflection,

  the rippled blaze, clear and pink, of the season’s

  imminent end. Then he turned his gaze

  on me. A simple gesture to summer light.

  Look, it asked. Do you see?

  ETHICS

  The field guide shows a stork-like bird

  whose likeness I fold

  from Japanese paper.

  The careful work demands a mind

  with as many complex pleats,

  the kind of mind we elevate

  to the height of flight.

  Meanwhile snow geese

  migrate for miles to reach

  their nesting grounds. They angle

  through the dull white sky, wedging

  winter open. High ground gone,

  simple instinct slides them south

  at season’s end, a gosling

  with a broken breastbone left behind

  to die. My own heart flutters

  at this ousting, wings

  held out like an origami crane’s.

  Why the ache to fly with the flock?

  Smooth out the paper:

  my animal creases remain.

  AESTHETICS

  A rotting cod, the shine

  of spine, the skeletal secret

  named in sleep, and in

  that other, sounde
r sleep

  that gleams like wet sand,

  unto itself, as though

  in wanting nothing at all

  the glint of something

  appeared. The water

  tosses, turns in its bed,

  tide’s wide blanket

  thrown briefly back:

  form without use, backbone

  of beauty, washed up

  on shore, picked clean.

  GONE FISHING

  The rainbow trout has lost its life

  and stays, mounted, liquids drained,

  displayed atop the fireplace, a foot above

  that steady flame like some protracted

  hell. Heaven, for this fluid one, existed

  as a quiet pool, a place where something swift,

  piscine, could slide beneath the water’s

  ceiling, elude the rod ingeniously

  as in the truth of dreams.

  For three months the river narrowed,

  tied its thread round summer’s finger,

  reminder of oxygen’s final failure –

  how we’ll all hang, one eye glassed,

  some reluctant trophy. Take the fish above

  the mantle – vigour dimmed, snuffed-out

  wick – why should I be different?

  Yet faced with death I somehow see

  my own escape, a sweet release,

  a swish receding through the reeds –

  the one that slips away.

  THE OUT-BREATH

  The cabin at dusk is the body, contained.

  Tall grass slopes down into sleep. From here

  the stream that slips through the willow: a visible

  ribbon of longing, of time. To cast without

  intent to catch; to stand on the bank of a beautiful

  ending, fireflies floating out over the water,

  lost children swinging their lanterns.

  CHILDHOOD

  Triscuits, cheese cubes, fingers

  of celery, cool grooves filled

  with peanut butter – sourdough,

  made by my mother’s hand,

  the starter yeasty, stored

  in the dark. The plate appeared

  at noon precisely,

  cleaving the day into unequal halves,

  an apple split, then split again, a wedge per year

  of life so far. School was approaching,

  reckoning day. I drank my milk

  and knew the world

  as child-sized bites to cram in my mouth,

  token bits of something bigger. Late

  at night the world was lost, the way

  a hunger fills and empties, plate

  or planet, round and white:

  look up. Look up and marvel.

  THE COSMOS: Reading Lacan

  The baby is learning

  to eat soft foods. Fruit

  of experience puréed

  by father, simplified into

  minuscule mouthfuls that manage,

  still, like wayward missiles,

  to miss their target and splatter

  the faces of innocent

  children. This one here

  begins to glean that evening

  means betrayal. Meal adjourned,

  bathed and changed, kissed

  and laid in the cell of his crib,

  his hunger remains. He fits his fist

  into its shape, fills his face

  with fingers. That other flesh,

  that milky moon, comes less often,

  sets too early – mobile above

  a stellar distraction, wild constellation

  cleaving the cosmos, baby peers up

  from the crux of his cradle,

  mouth as wide as its absence.

  He searches the spheres like

  an early astronomer starting

  to question his central position;

  unsure what exactly he’s lost

  but already desperate to find it.

  PRINTS

  Late afternoon, alone in the trees,

  the quiet creak of skis through snow,

  a shy approach, your stealth.

  A pattered line of rabbit prints

  veers off into evening.

  Think of shadow, someone

  leaving, somebody else bedding down.

  This kind of softness brushes your shoulders,

  keeps your secrets

  safe. Hush, hush, your human tracks;

  your binding’s metal tick; you’re moving through

  the natural world and understanding

  nothing. Day’s last sun gives up the fight

  like something in you

  sacrificed, something bright that glints like blood

  staining the snow beneath the trap,

  that melts in ice and light on spruce and finally

  ends as glistening.

  THE CROSSING

  The snowshoe dreams a frozen lake

  as the mind dreams thought –

  pulled inside out, a mitten drying

  next to a campfire. You’ve crossed the ice,

  a dim line of reason: turning, turning

  and doubling back. Finding your way,

  losing it. Birch bear witness,

  arms thrown up. The snowshoe dreams

  a quiet mind where breaking trail

  leaves no mark, a sharpened cold as dusk

  drifts in, woodsmoke over the lake.

  You draw your knees up to your chest,

  hold yourself as night holds day.

  The final light leaks out. It leaves

  its pink and gentleness on the snow

  you’ve come across: the broken surface

  thinking leaves. The endless criss-crossed tracks.

  STUDY FOR MORTALITY: Charcoal on Paper

  Woodsmoke drifts across the cove

  like memory rising off the mind.

  What’s left is thought, and deeper, being,

  that shimmering coal in a heap of ash.

  You turn for home across the low hills –

  three or four houses scattered behind you,

  a child’s toys hastily abandoned

  in favour of the eternal life.

  PREMONITION

  The early snow-removal trucks

  arrive like liberating troops. Up and up

  the streets they charge to roses tossed

  from windows. Winter’s a war almost won.

  Throw back the drapes: warmth sashays in,

  a kink, little inkling: we’ve felt this before,

  forgotten it too, in the womb, in an earlier

  life. Dreaming is easy in hours like these,

  the mind’s backyard awash in new light,

  but troops are troops, welcomed or not.

  Still I haven’t said what I mean: something lost

  will clear a space for something new to follow.

  Ice in the harbour, for instance, melting,

  starts the swell of spring. The Quakers,

  for instance, worship in silence that breaks

  in an outburst of words. The shattered things,

  which is to say the cool of your palm against

  my thigh, which is to say there is no saying

  for the dark and shady. No perfection.

  My broken parts have always been broken –

  touch me. Touch me there.

  THE DREAM WORLD

  Shake up envy. Shake up

  the impulse toward acquisition –

  it batters you nightly, a moth at a bulb.

  Shake up the trope of the moth at a bulb:

  words take shape in fresh combination,

  cheerleaders on court at half-time. A girl

  tossed skyward, bent at the waist, a check mark

  against a ballot’s blank box. Vote for the moment,

  vote for atonement, for taking a long walk alone

  through the forest. Morning is raising

  its snapping white flag. You ex
it the alders, hands

  in the air, and wake: your final surrender.

  NOTES

  The first epigraph is taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Margaret Hunt, Dover Publications, 2007.

  The second epigraph is taken from Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 10: Civilization in Transition, Princeton University Press, 2nd edition, 1970.

  “Acquainted with the Night” borrows its title from Robert Frost.

  The italicized line in “The In-Breath” is from Li Qingzhao, as quoted in Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women, ed. Jane Hirshfield, HarperCollins, 1994.

  The italicized line in “Full Moon” is from The Lost Love Letters of Heloise and Abelard, ed. C.J. Mews, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.

  The italicized line in “The Maps of the Labrador Arrive” is an abbreviated quote from Plato’s Phaedo dialogue, Plato Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, translated by G.M.A. Grube, Hackett Publishing Company; New Ed edition, 1981.

  The epigraph to “Winter Landscape” is from Gertrude Stein’s lecture “Poetry and Grammar” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lectures 1909–1945, Penguin Books, 1967.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  These poems, often in different versions, first appeared in Arc, The Malahat Review, Grain, The New Quarterly, CV2, The Columbia Poetry Review, PRISM International, Atlas, Descant, Prairie Fire, and in the anthology Breathing Fire II: Canada’s New Poets. Several were published in the online journals nth position and slingshot, and others in The Current, The Walrus, and the Globe and Mail. “Winter Landscape,” under the title “December,” and accompanied by an image by the brilliant Will Gill, was published as a “poemphlet” by Running the Goat Press in St. John’s in 2005.

  The House-Hunting poems were commissioned for the 2004 CBC Poetry Face-Off, recorded on a CD of the same title, and broadcast on Sounds Like Canada. Ten others, under the title “The Mind’s Eye,” won first prize in the 2005 CBC Literary Awards, were broadcast on Between the Covers and published in enRoute Magazine. “Robin” was an Editor’s Choice in the 2006 Arc Poem of the Year Contest, and a finalist in the 2007 National Magazine Awards.