Bright Pathway

Posts Tagged ‘Canada’

Silver carp,
fat goldfish in a cosmic pool,
you were my little-girl god;
you were where the thread
crooked
filled the invisible spool
head to tail.

Still swimming like a shuttle
you weave bright
lightyears
between the stars,
those silver pegs where
knots of matter are
on the black frame
of the spacetime loom.

I’ve made a toyfish,
much like you.
Slender, three-finned
it ascends, heaping an overspin
of fire behind it
a trail too fast
unravelling

My new fish dives
like a needle
toward the cratered button
of the moon,
and threads it,
and heads for the dozen big
buttons, grey and marrow-red
and the asteroid
scattered necklace of seedpearls
flung between the worlds.

Silver carp,
slim goldfish in the cosmic pool,
when you’ve unwound
from argent head to tail,
when you’re a skeleton,
a fishbone wishbone
by that first knot
dangling from the finished thread,

My toyfish
that is much like you,
and you,
will make a dark rendez-vous,
a docking manoeuvre
over the last black rent;
will bring you thread enough
to silver the separate spaces
into one whole sun.

 

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The wet path struggled
to hold me back.
Spring’s tough bracken
and branches hunched with rain
slapped my face.

Out of breath
I stopped midway.  Swung
to stillness, the limbs that overhung
dangled new green beads of elderberry,
and each suspended in a clear globe of
++++++++++++++++++++++++rain
the upended image of the trees.

In that magnified miniature
my green path curved toward the sky.

 

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My art is like the mirror in the hand
of Utamaro’s shaded-blue lady;
it marries an angle of seeing
to an illusion of being.

Each line is a clear strand brushed
up from the nape of the mind and pinned
before the placing of the veil:
art is my wedding veil.

My art is also craft.
To show my love, I conceal it,
flesh bone with articulate light,
heighten detail between folds of shadow.

Now I hold the white sheet
bound with words.
It is even more perfect than a veil,
a contract subtler than a given name.

 

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For Dorothy Livesay
 

Her sterling softness
and the halting shuffle
of arthritis
convince you
she’s a gone old woman.

You will not expect
the little handcarved people
in Swiss dress who dance out
of her pupils on the hour
hammering the rusty air
with bells; they vanish in a blink
of light.

Then you’ll hear the quiet
counting itself down
on the fingers of two hands.

 

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On the painting
by Jan Vermeer, 1669
 

Under his left hand, the unopened
volume; in his right, the twin-
legged gauge of expanding centres
hovers over a blank parchment
unfurled — translucent wave
where a map will come to be.
To his inward and distracted
gaze these objects, like a shoreline
blur; he speeds through stillness —

Dipped in a dream he leans
like a trader’s prow
away from the known
into encompassing
light from the quartered window

while in the foreground, thick wool
from Turkey or Persia
folds over the table trenches of blue
surging into stunned peaks of light
above spice-coloured borders.

Put away, almost ignored,
the conscripted globe
on the back corner cupboard glows
from darkness like a moon. Near full it sails;
fixed above his forehead
as though to the spire of a plunging mast.

 

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For Emily Carr
 

The stones that eulogise the lilies
where you thrived
are rough unspeakable seeds.

Bride of the painted field,
sister of sea and sky,
loved by the unloveable,
unloved by the one beloved,
you gave yourself to the Haida,
godtrees carving themselves
out of the burnished ground,
saltburnt faces old
and puckered as the young maize
stripped
from its ancient roots.

Now earth contains you
like a silenced tongue a word.
Yet asleep in a tent of sun and rain
the seasons’ girl is again
the trees’ divine interpreter!

Boldly still your spirit brushes
the changing line
flesh of ocean/
++++++++++ bone of land.

Your eloquent silence stuns
and honours us.

The big blue raven praises you,
Klee Wyck,
O Laughing One!

 

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