text:
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

_The Weight of Oranges,_ copyright © 1986 by Anne Michaels
 _Miner's Pond_ copyright © 1991 by Anne Michaels
 _Skin Divers,_ copyright © 1999 by Anne Michaels

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

_The Weight of Oranges_ was originally published by The Coach House Press,
Toronto, Canada, in 1986.
 _Miner's Pond_ was originally published by McClelland & Stewart, Inc.,
Toronto, Canada, in 1991.
 _Skin Divers_ was originally published by McClelland & Stewart, Inc.,
Toronto, Canada, in 1999

Following is a list of the magazines and anthologies where some of the poems in this volume first appeared: From _The Weight of Oranges: Writ, Waves, Poetry Toronto,_ and _Poetry Canada Review._ From _Miner's Pond: Saturday Night, The Malahut Review,_ and _What_ magazine. From _Skin Divers: Border Crossing, Event, Toronto Life, Windhorse Reader, Slow Dancer, Fish Drum, We Who Can Fly, Border Lines: Contemporary Poems in English._

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
RENDITIONS PAPERBACKS: Excerpt from the poem "A Second Farewell at the Feng-chi Post-station" by Tu Fu, in _A Little Primer of Tu Fu_ translated by David Hawkes (Hong Kong: Research Centre for Translation of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Renditions Paperbacks, © 1987, 1994). Copyright © 1987 by The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. RANDOM HOUSE, INC.: Excerpt from "Canzone" by W. H. Auden, from _Collected Poems of W. H. Auden_ , edited by Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, Inc.), copyright © 1976, 1991 by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-55913-5
Trade Paperback: 978-0-375-70225-9

v3.1
_The three books collected here were originally published separately, but were written as companion volumes. I'm grateful to Harry Ford for his invitation to publish them together, and for his long-standing enthusiasm for this project._

_This edition of_ Poems _remembers Harry Ford, with many thanks._

# _Contents_

_Cover_

_Title Page_

_Copyright_

_The Weight of Oranges_ (1986)

I

Lake of Two Rivers

II

The Day of Jack Chambers

Anna

A Height of Years

Depth of Field

Another Year

January

Women on a Beach

Letters from Martha

Rain Makes Its Own Night

Near Ashdod

The Weight of Oranges

III

Words for the Body

_Miner's Pond_ (1991)

I

Miner's Pond

II

Sublimation

A Lesson from the Earth

Modersohn–Becker

Flowers

Anniversary

Fresh Mint

Phantom Limbs

Pillar of Fire

Blue Vigour

On the Terrace

Stone

III

What the Light Teaches

_Skin Divers_ (1999)

I

Skin Divers

Land in Sight

Night Garden

Three Weeks

Into Arrival

Wild Horses

There Is No City That Does Not Dream

Last Night's Moon

The Passionate World

II

The Second Search

Ice House

The Hooded Hawk

III

Fontanelles

_A Note on the Text_

_Acknowledgments_

_A Note About the Author_

_Other Books by This Author_
* * *

# _The Weight of Oranges_
_For Rosalind and Isaiah Michaels_

# I

## _Lake of Two Rivers_

1

Pull water, unhook its seam.

Lie down in the lake room,

in the smell of leaves still sticky from their birth.

Fall to sleep the way the moon falls

from earth: perfect lethargy of orbit.

2

Six years old, half asleep,

a traveller. The night car mysterious

as we droned past uneasy twisting fields.

My father told two stories on these drives.

One was the plot of _Lost Horizon_ ,

the other: his life.

This speeding room, dim in the dashboard's green emission,

became the hijacked plane carrying Ronald Colman to Tibet,

or the train carrying my father across Poland in 1931.

Spirit faces crowded the windows of a '64 Buick.

Unknown cousins surrounded us, arms around each other,

a shawl of sleeves.

The moon fell into our car from Grodno.

It fell from Chaya-Elke's village,

where they stopped to say goodbye.

His cousin Mashka sat up with them

in the barn, while her face

floated down the River Neman in my father's guitar.

He watched to remember

in the embalming moonlight.

3

Sensate weather, we are your body,

your memory. Like a template,

branch defines sky, leaves

bleed their gritty boundaries,

corrosive with nostalgia.

Each year we go outside to pin it down,

light limited, light specific,

light like a name.

•

For years my parents fled at night,

loaded their children in the back seat,

a tangle of pyjamas anxious to learn the stars.

I watched the backs of their heads

until I was asleep, and when I woke

it was day, and we were in Algonquin.

I've always known this place,

familiar as a room in our house.

The photo of my mother, legs locked in water,

looking into the hills where you and I stand—

only now do I realize

it was taken before I was born.

•

Purple mist, indefinite hills.

At Two Rivers, close as branches.

Fish scatter, silver pulses with their own electric logic.

Milky spill of moon over the restless lake,

seen through a sieve of foliage.

In fields to the south

vegetables radiate underground,

displace the earth.

While we sit, linked by firelight.

4

The longer you look at a thing

the more it transforms.

My mother's story is tangled,

overgrown with lives of parents and grandparents

because they lived in one house and among them

remembered hundreds of years of history.

This domestic love is plain, hurts

the way light balancing objects in a still life hurts.

The heart keeps body and spirit in suspension,

until density pulls them apart.

When she was my age

her mother had already fallen through.

Pregnant, androgynous with man,

she was afraid. When life goes out,

loss gets in, wedging a new place.

Under dark lanes of the night sky

the eyes of our skin won't close,

we dream in desire.

Love wails from womb, caldera, home.

Like any sound, it goes on forever.

•

The dissolving sun turns Two Rivers into skin.

Our pink arms, slightly fluorescent,

hiss in the dusky room, neon tubes bending

in the accumulated dark.

Night transforms the lake into a murmuring solid.

Naked in the eerie tremor of leaves rubbing stars,

in the shivering fermata of summer,

in the energy of stones made powerful by gravity,

desire made powerful by the seam between starlight and skin,

we join, moebius ribbon in the night room.

5

We do not descend, but rise from our histories.

If cut open, memory would resemble

a cross-section of the earth's core,

a table of geographical time.

Faces press the transparent membrane

between conscious and genetic knowledge.

A name, a word, triggers the dilatation.

Motive is uncovered, sharp overburden in a shifting field.

•

When I was twenty-five I drowned in the River Neman,

fell through when I read that bone-black from the ovens

was discarded there.

Like a face pressed against a window,

part of you waits up for them,

like a parent, you wait up.

•

A family now, we live each other's life

without the details.

The forest flies apart, trees are shaken loose

by my tears,

by love that doesn't fall to earth

but bursts up from the ground, fully formed.

# II

## _The Day of Jack Chambers_

The day of Jack Chambers

we are black smudges on the frozen river.

You're walking ahead—in summer I would've said "upstream"—

sky, blue of veins, air the palest skin.

Old February light, weakest of the year,

casting its tinge like light in paintings

when the varnish has aged.

You're halfway up the river,

it's five o'clock and I can tell

by the way your back's to me, you're measuring pigments,

stealing the contents of this light, and sure enough

it begins to get dark.

We spent the day looking at Chambers' paintings.

Even the earliest have the magnification of dying.

Ten years of leukemia, you have to think what you fear,

not just be afraid.

When he worked from photos

he added what happened before the shutter was pressed—

and what happened after.

Objects hang in the air where they'd been the moment before,

floating like dust in sunlight.

Always the same light—captive, gasping to get out

from Sunday place settings, his wife's hair,

from chrome trim and roofs of cars on the highway.

You explained visual time,

how there's no weight without shadow.

Nothing falls, every figure has a ghostly buoyancy.

You explained how Chambers grounded things with his light,

leaving the ghost inside.

I understood this by thinking "language" instead of "light,"

how everything suspended stays temporal.

I understood it as a grammar of beauty

with its apex of loss,

dishevelled burning trees half leafless.

As a room full of rain and the raft of our bed.

The way we fall from each other like halves of an orange,

skin dark as pottery in lamplight.

I know it, naked in the light of the fridge,

cold plummy resins in our mouths, warm sticky resins

of our bodies. By nights

we drain the pictures from your head and words

from my throat until I find nothing but sounds there.

And today, by way of light closing around itself

until the river is dark and all I see is your white breath.

By way of a young woman's hunger

to taste every part of her lover, even his words.

Chambers' painting of a girl: if the light were stronger

you'd see her bones, the green-blue tributaries

beginning and returning at the heart.

And the sky that's "wrong,"

cloud-mottled, above the horizon,

yet painted as if we're looking straight up.

Your brain tricks you,

like losing your balance in a dream,

being woken by the feeling of falling.

What you paint

are the parts left behind

when two people join.

Your figures look calm,

but their throats are closed

with cries that can't get out.

They are in mourning.

Your canvas finds a weakness in the air's tension,

someone's past seeps out.

We arrive by accumulation.

Time twists us by the shoulders until we're positioned to die,

looking backwards. Twisted into the ground.

Night. Soon we are pushing our faces

into the bin of stars. Lamplight

melts the windows of the river houses.

I can feel your bony fingers in your gloves.

This day belongs to Chambers. This

his river, his light. His eyes

that watched your black figure on the river,

sky the blue of veins, air

a translucent skin over everything.

There are three kinds of teachers, you said.

One who teaches by making you afraid,

one who makes you angry.

The third makes you love him.

## _Anna_

Nothing moved except a green fern pushing its way out of a jar.

In our house, truths were told in the kitchen,

always in the hum of the fridge and in half darkness:

early evening, with what was left of light gathered on rims of things,

or in the pale vibrato light before sunrise

after we'd left our warm bed

and made our way to the kitchen table.

That summer we sat on the porch as if waiting,

as if we knew it was ending.

We waved to Anna, sixteen, in white shorts and sneakers,

already halfway down the street and not looking back.

She flew like a moth into those soft evenings,

restless in the strange mixture

of twilight and the light of streetlamps.

One night we drove to the lakeshore,

past the powerful debris at the harbour,

rows of bins and trucks, train tracks, factories.

Past places we never see inside of.

We watched the water until midnight

and never knew Anna was with us,

calling out in the fish-burnt air,

calling from the shiny embrace that closed around her as it opened.

No one heard.

Boat lights on the surface like the rim of light beneath a door.

She floated, rigid as driftwood to the brim of the lake.

Two miles from where we sat, in the night's slow annulment of colour,

gulls like winter breaths close to the water.

Endings concur: a crossroad.

Grief strikes where love struck first.

Our last morning together we sat with Anna's family in dark rooms.

We watched her mother put a sweater in the coffin.

These are endings that bind,

love still alive, squirming in the rind of the heart.

A voice we don't recognize calls up from ourselves.

We move in closer, trying to make out the words.

That begins love, or ends it—we start to make out the words.

We give to save ourselves. We forgive to save ourselves.

We recognize death and love when we can start calling them names.

Each other's.

The name of a young girl turned ugly by our deafness.

## _A Height of Years_

_in memory of Frank Gordon_

1

The small ship of his bones sinks in the earth.

I cry for my father because of everyone's short sleeves,

the paleness of arms in the first strong sunlight.

Beyond the gate, shirts on a line

point their empty sleeves at us.

Warm spring wind, mud drying under our shoes.

My brother and I stand in the lane

behind the house where we grew up.

We stare, our hands on the wooden fence,

trying to see in through a kitchen window.

We fall from a height of years,

swooping like birds within an inch of the lawn.

2

Old glass wavers the lane, the red garages.

November, season of half days,

slips under the door like an envelope.

Cold floors.

A tangled black tree cuts shapes into a white sky,

makes the yard mysterious as it withdraws

under a black pattern of birds

joined in motive and rhythm,

a black arrow pointing south.

The house withdraws under their high cries,

a red roof among half-bare branches, a twist of smoke.

Soon, just smoke.

Daylight fades the colour of cut fruit rusting.

Leaves give way at their dry wrists.

3

The tarred street becomes a black eel

in the downpour. We watch from the porch,

peeled paint and caked mud scratching our legs.

Rain unearths the dusty smell of lilacs.

Old dandelions collapse into fine ash over the lawn.

The rain stops, drips inconsistently

from an edge of awning.

After supper the street turns molten

under the yellow pollen of moonlight.

4

Every house is a storehouse.

We came back to stand under ours while it fell,

to sit in the debris, to be in the burning place.

We looked out of windows and sat on the porch

while it rained.

5

We become inaccurate.

Someone you love with tubes down his throat

shows you every way you can't love him.

Blood, that euphemism for what moves in us.

## _Depth of Field_

_"The camera relieves us of the burden of memory... records in order to forget."_

—JOHN BERGER

We've retold the stories of our lives

by the time we reach Buffalo,

sun coming up diffuse and prehistoric

over the Falls.

A white morning,

sun like paint on the windshield.

You drive, smoke, wear sunglasses.

Rochester, Camera Capital of America.

Stubbing a cigar in the lid of a film canister,

the Kodak watchman gives directions.

The museum's a wide-angle mansion.

You search the second storey from the lawn,

mentally converting bathrooms to darkrooms.

A thousand photos later,

exhausted by second-guessing

the mind which invisibly surrounds each image,

we nap in a high school parking lot,

sun leaning low as the trees

over the roof of the warm car.

Driving home. The moon's so big and close

I draw a moustache on it and smudge the windshield.

I stick my fingers in your collar to keep you awake.

I can't remember a thing about our lives before this morning.

We left our city at night and return at night.

We buy pineapple and float quietly through the neighbourhood,

thick trees washing themselves in lush darkness,

or in the intimate light of streetlamps.

In summer the planet's heavy with smells of us,

stung with the green odour of gardens.

Heat won't leave the pavement

until night is almost over.

I've loved you all day.

We take the old familiar Intertwine Freeway,

begin the long journey towards each other

as to our home town with all its lights on.

## _Another Year_

Another year and we're together,

crossing your glinting fields.

Five p.m. under a sky claimed in childhood,

claimed in streets connecting your house with mine,

home from another city,

another year of separation.

We pause in our metallic light

and talk—50, 15, 25 years old,

depending on the subject.

Traversed by the treeline,

your body in your mother's jacket.

Nothing breaks the restraint of this grid,

your face held in place by pines,

New Year's Eve, our conversation.

Each year the forest presses our dialogue

into another ring.

One day the wooden record will play itself;

we'll hear each time we chose

one past over another to extrapolate,

each time that path grew over.

Your brother skates on the pond,

moving like pen on paper.

Time emanates from our selves.

We run after it

like your retriever let go in a field:

part fluid muscle, part slung leash.

## _January_

_Greetings Giulio Clovio, to your health!_

Today I finished the last panel—"January"—for Jonghelinck

and with the wheel's perfect movement

winter's in the sky again like a shadowy dye,

my footsteps in the wet snow followed me home.

How unlike your Rome. Here the light is dense

with smoke and complaints from the valley.

Mayken says even the hills want change these days.

I say nothing.

When people talk of gatherings and plans

I turn from them. Think what you will,

it's a different life having meat with your soup.

I found my vantage for "January" near Van Mander's,

above the pond. I tell you

sometimes my head aches from keeping the two worlds separate,

the landscape deeply still—even the crows

like stones on the branch—and our little flasks of life,

convulsed with blood and breathing.

Sometimes I feel their heartbeats when I paint,

regular, like a word repeated,

against the drone of the fields.

To clear my head, I focus on the foreground.

My link between life and death is that first figure,

who breathes, but is too large to move across the canvas.

For months after my visit with you

I painted only mountains.

When Martin came to see me

he laughed until he looked drunk

and shouted, "Well I know you swallowed the Alps,

but must you spit them out again?"

Now everyone in Antwerp repeats the joke.

There are no people in my mountains.

Why give them any smallness?

But you, with your Italian heart, would say

how sweeter the contrast,

how sweet man's varieties of pain and love

against that lazy infinity—

how long it's been since we argued!

It rubs my heart to think you'll never see the light

in my country, as you've shown me yours.

Perhaps we know only one place with certainty.

I know what you would say to this:

"Pieter, that place is your heart,"

and I say to you (with respect, of course)

how can this be?

My heart is everywhere. In the front room with Mayken,

and in Italy with you.

So I answer you in this hypothetical dialogue,

that this heart of yours must be God.

After a while you'll poke the fire

and drink from your favourite theme:

"impossible to paint well what you don't love"

and I'll answer with my own obsession,

that there's a feature of each face I love,

in each face, my own ugliness and imperfection

and those qualities I love for their striving,

their movement in the history of families.

So you'll laugh and ask:

"But do not those who are ugly

grow even uglier with time?"

Giulio, you're too quick for me.

Mayken asks why I won't paint her.

I don't know why,

except she's not everyone to me yet,

I can't make her human.

I painted all day and at night

I walked back to the place and looked down on the houses,

lamplight connecting the trees like fabric.

Standing in the damp breath of the forest

I looked in your direction.

Are you on your balcony now?

Tomorrow morning Carel will come for this letter.

Each day he travels I'll look south.

Send me some of your Italian light,

even if it's not mine, I still miss it.

Send me the kind we labelled "before dinner, June"

or "dawn, the day Pieter Brueghel left for home."

## _Women on a Beach_

Light chooses white sails, the bellies of gulls.

Far away in a boat, someone wears a red shirt,

a tiny stab in the pale sky.

Your three bodies form a curving shoreline,

pink and brown sweaters, bare legs.

The beach glows grainy under the sun's copper pressure,

air the colour of tangerines.

One of you is sleeping, the wind's finger

on your cheek like a tendril of hair.

Night exhales its long held breath.

Stars puncture through.

At dusk you are a small soft heap, a kind of moss.

In the moonlight, a boulder of women.

## _Letters from Martha_

I rip the envelope and I'm in Bangkok.

I rip the envelope and I'm in Varanasi

Allahabad Agra Delhi.

Christmas Greetings from the Katmandu Hotel.

I rip the envelope:

my kitchen reeks with saffron,

I'm in a smelly passage crowded with sari'd throngs,

rickshaws, market stalls.

You're at my table, eyes alive with wild boars,

"skinny tea wallahs" carrying clay cups,

streets parting in the wake of a cow,

its cud a cardboard box soggy from vegetables.

I'm sorting your letters,

trying to keep the chronology,

the terrain of your marriage—in one letter

"better than ever, I'm in love all over again"

in another, "torn between distance and desire."

In Rajasthan you're reading a letter from your mother,

a childhood friend getting married, a sister leaving home.

And you, in love with a place.

You hate to leave Nagaur

where they came from all corners of India,

exodus of camels to a cattle fair.

You describe slums decaying

in twilight the colours of silks.

Hating to leave Nagaur, torn between distance and desire.

I rip the blue envelope and hear the jangle of bracelets,

I'm trying to find whose wrist they belong to in the gaudy market,

the flashy sunlight,

and there, your Western face and red hair

above that Indian river.

You pour from these squares, these blue envoys.

And just when I feel I've lost you in the world,

I can't keep up,

your postcard comes with the words

"wait for me."

## _Rain Makes Its Own Night_

Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.

Lean beach grass sticks to the floor near your shoes,

last summer's pollen rises from damp metal screens.

This is order, this clutter that fills clearings between us,

clothes clinging to chairs, your shoes in a muddy grip.

The hard rain smells like it comes from the earth.

The human light in our windows, the orange stillness

of rooms seen from outside. The place we fall to alone,

falling to sleep. Surrounded by a forest's green assurance,

the iron gauze of sky and sea,

while night, the rain, pulls itself down through the trees.

## _Near Ashdod_

_in memory of Yoav Shapiro_

This morning your letter, blue square torn open

like the sea he entered.

"He was flying upside down and didn't know it.

At night the sea to him seemed to be the sky."

You wrote as if I knew him, twenty-five, in uniform.

Dead, he was movement.

Shrieking through water,

suddenly out of the element that kept him alive.

Gravity broken by an engine, safe in speed and altitude,

then tricked by a colour in the dark.

We don't trust suddenness,

not news, not split-second choices.

We move in our direction.

Events fall into place, or out of place,

one day we know which.

Twisting around in the darkness, we know which.

This morning a square of light on the kitchen floor,

the room behind me reflected in the kettle.

Yoav, you had no time.

You tore the commissure

and flew into the place you thought you were escaping.

## _The Weight of Oranges_

_"Now I lodge in the cabbage patches_
 _of the important..._
 _Not much sleep under strange roofs_
 _with my life far away..."_

—OSIP MANDELSTAM

My cup's the same sand colour as bread.

Rain's the colour of a building across the street,

it's torn red dahlias

and ruined a book propped on the sill.

Rain articulates the skins of everything,

pink of bricks from the fire they baked in,

lizard green leaves,

the wrinkled tongues of pine cones.

It's accurate the way we never are,

bringing out what's best

without changing a thing.

Rain that makes beds damp,

our room a cave in the morning,

a tent in late afternoon,

ignites the sound of leaves we miss all winter.

The sound that pulled us to bed...

caught in the undertow of wind in wet leaves.

I'm writing in the sound we woke to,

curtains breathing into a half-dark room.

I'm up early now, walking.

Remember our walks, horizons like lips

barely red at dawn,

how kind the distance seemed?

Letters should be written to send news, to say

send me news, to say

meet me at the train station.

Not these dry tears, to honour us like a tomb.

I'm ashamed of our separation.

I wake in the middle of night and see "shame"

written in the air like in a Bible story.

I dreamed my skin was tattooed,

covered with the words that put me here,

covered in sores, in quarantine—and you know what?

I was afraid to light the lamp and look.

Your husband's a good builder—I burned

every house we had, with a few words to start the flames.

Words of wood,

they had no power of their own.

"The important" gave them meaning

and humble with gratitude

they exploded in my face.

Now we're like planets, holding to each other

from a great distance. When we lay down

oceans flexed their green muscles,

life got busy in the other hemisphere,

the globe tilted, bowing to our power!

Now we're hundreds of miles apart,

our short arms keep us lonely,

no one hears what's in my head.

I look old. I'm losing my hair.

Where does lost hair go in this world,

lost eyesight, lost teeth?

We grow old like rivers, get shrunk and doubled over

until we can't find the mouth of anything.

It's March, even the birds

don't know what to do with themselves.

Sometimes I'm certain those who are happy

know one thing more than us... or one thing less.

The only book I'd write again

is our bodies closing together.

That's the language that stuns,

scars, breathes into you.

Naked, we had voices!

I want you to promise

we'll see each other again,

you'll send a letter.

Promise we'll be lost together

in our forest, pale birches of our legs.

I hear your voice now—I know,

everyone knows promises come from fear.

People don't live past each other,

you're always here with me. Sometimes

I pretend you're in the other room

until it rains... and then

this is the letter I always write:

The letter I write

when they're keeping me from home.

I smell your supper steaming in the kitchen.

There are paper bags on the table

with their bottoms melted out

by rain and the weight of oranges.

# III

## _Words for the Body_

_Landowska, overheard during a heated argument on interpretation: "You play Bach your way, and I'll play him his way."_

1

We knew we'd reached Dunn Lake

because the trees stopped.

Chilled and sweating under winter clothes

we stood in the damp degenerated afternoon.

We grew up waiting together by water,

frozen or free,

in summer under the cool shaggy umbra of firs,

or in the aquarium light of birches.

It's always been this way between us.

We reach lakes and then just stand there.

Silence fills us with silence.

2

When we were fourteen

you read to me about Landowska, who

"tottered the world and stopped the sun when she held a note."

We argued over interpretation

until we were sixteen and discovered Casals:

"the best musician learns to play what's not on the page."

We decided music is memory,

the way a word is the memory of its meaning.

•

The first time I knew what we were trying for

I was waiting on the back porch while you practised.

Piano flickered the leaves,

evening in perfect summer,

temperature the same inside and outside my body,

night a pigment in my skin.

In that swathing twilight

I knew you'd had a lover.

Everything became part of that new perception.

The yard disappeared.

Sudden as my sense of your body,

I knew you were attempting silence.

To move an audience

until they aren't listening.

We believed in our head's perfect version,

but you couldn't make your hands, and

I couldn't make my words, pronounce it.

Even now when I hear you play

I think of a lover, gasping at the gate

of another, who suddenly knows

love has no power to make it right.

3

The summer you stopped playing

we were driving home from the farm,

windows full of stars on the dark highway,

legs bare on vinyl seats, night air

cold and new as from the sea.

In a voice that came from the highway

you described the blackness where music waits,

tormenting until you draw it out,

a redemption.

Then the fear of forgetting notes

disappears, the fingers have a memory of their own.

You spoke of a kind of hunger

that makes pleasure perfect.

Then you said how it was to be opened

and tasted by a hall full of people.

When we reached home

you were crying.

Within a month you stopped playing.

You stopped sleeping.

Eighteen years old, exhausted,

holding to the idea of perfect sound.

End of summer, rainy morning,

your head in my hands.

Across the room a jar of flowers

made its small fire.

Curtains held their breath against the wet screens.

4

Dunn Lake.

We skied there gracelessly through the woods.

Desperate light pressured black trees

to hold their pose.

The moon reached under the ice

where the lake moved, obedient.

Night pressed its thumbs over our eyes.

Too dark to take the way we came, we went by road.

You reached the farmhouse ahead of me,

I saw your figure in the porch lights.

We ate watching the fire,

logs collapsing under the weight of flame,

flames collapsing with their own weight.

Almost no word spoken since our silence at the lake,

you said you'd play again.

Over two years since your hands were yours.

You asked, smiling,

face torn with shadows from the fire:

"haven't you given up the perfect word yet?"

•

Fingers have a memory,

to read the familiar braille of another's skin.

The body has a memory:

the children we make,

places we've hurt ourselves,

sieves of our skeletons in the fat soil.

No words mean as much as a life.

Only the body pronounces perfectly

the name of another.

5

This morning your letter.

A photo of redwoods in winter,

the half-frozen pond.

Remember the way we walked each other home—

one block further, one block further—

the way we skated in the ravine,

late winter afternoon,

so cold the air seemed to magnify the world,

sky the colour of plums.

We sang in harmony on the ice, breath echoing white

under the bridge, our fifteen-year-old bodies

perfect and young under winter clothes,

warm from skating and singing,

trees along the ridge a black lace picket fence

against a plume of orange like a comet's tail

where the sun had been.

Remember climbing the hill, already dark, and stopping to hear

trees shake their branches,

how we'd enter your parents' warm house

in a daze of images.

Remember once, mauve and yellow tulips on the dining room table,

remember the music when we said

_play those colours_

and turned Bach's "Anna Magdalena" the colour of yellow,

the colour of mauve.

Remember that October, standing in your farm's back field,

half a mile apart, while daylight collapsed

under the weight of darkness, and trees

thick with burning leaves

shouldered the stars.

Music emerged from those moments, from air,

like a room's white dimension in the window at nightfall.

•

Any discovery of form is a moment of memory,

existing as the historical moment—alone,

and existing in history—linear,

in music, in the sentence.

Each poem, each piece remembers us perfectly,

the way the earth remembers our bodies,

the way man and woman in their joining

remember each other before they were separate.

It's over twenty-five years and every love poem

says how your music and my words are the same:

praising the common air, the motive, the memory.

To praise memory is to praise the body.

And I find myself describing

the joining of hips and eyes,

the harbours of thighs and lips,

as the singing of two small bodies in a dark ravine,

as two small bodies

holding up the night sky in a winter field.
* * *

# _Miner's Pond_
_For Martin, Arlen, and Howard Michaels_

# I

## _Miner's Pond_

_in memory of Elie David Michaels_

1

A caver under stalactites,

the moon searches the stars.

In the low field, pools turn to stone.

Starlight scratches the pond,

penetrates in white threads;

in a quick breath, it fogs into ice.

A lava of fish murmurs the tightening film.

The crow is darkness's calculation;

all absence in that black moment's ragged span.

•

Above Miner's Pond, geese break out of the sky's

pale shell. They speak non-stop, amazed

they've returned from the stars,

hundreds of miles to describe.

It's not that they're wild, but

their will is the same as desire.

The sky peels back under their blade.

Like a train trestle, something in us rattles.

All November, under their passing.

•

Necks stiff as compass needles,

skeletons filled with air;

osmosis of emptiness, the space in them

equals space.

Their flight is a stria, a certainty;

sexual, one prolonged

reflex.

Cold lacquering speed, feathers oiled by wind,

surface of complete transfluency.

The sky rides with tremors in the night's milky grain.

•

Windows freeze over like shallow ponds,

hexagonally blooming.

The last syrup of light boils out from under the lid

of clouds; sky the colour of tarnish.

Like paperweights, cows hold down the horizon.

Even in a place you know intimately,

each night's darkness is different.

They aren't calling down to us.

We're nothing to them, unfortunates

in our heaviness.

We watch at the edge of words.

At Miner's Pond we use the past

to pull ourselves forward; rowing.

2

It was the tambourine that pushed my father

over the edge in 1962. His patience

a unit of time we never learned to measure.

The threat to "drive into a post"

was a landmark we recognized and raced towards

with delirious intent,

challenging the sound barrier of the car roof.

We were wild with stories we were living.

The front seat was another time zone

in which my parents were imprisoned, and from which

we offered to rescue them, again and again.

That day we went too far.

They left us at the side of the road

above St. Mary's quarry. My mother insists

it was my father's idea, she never wanted to drive away,

but in retrospect, I don't believe her.

This was no penalty; drilled in wilderness protocol,

happy as scouts, my brothers

planned food and shelter.

The youngest, I knew they'd come back for us,

but wasn't sure.

Hot August, trees above the quarry like green flames,

dry grass sharpened by the heat, and

dusty yellow soil "dry as mummy skin,"

a description meant to torment me.

They were rockhounds howling in the plastic light

melting over fossil hills;

at home among eras.

It was fifteen minutes, maybe less,

and as punishment, useless.

But the afternoon of the quarry lives on,

a geological glimpse;

my first grasp of time,

not continuous present.

•

Their language took apart landscapes,

stories of sastrugi and sandstreams,

shelves and rain shadow.

Atoms vibrating to solids,

waves into colours. Everything stone

began to swirl. Did the land sink

or the sea rise? When my brothers told me

I'd never seen the stars, that light's too slow,

that looking up is looking back,

there was no holding on. Beyond my tilting room

night swarmed with forest eyes and flying rats,

insects that look like branches, reptiles like rocks.

Words like solfatara, solfatara,

slipping me down like terraced water, into sleep.

•

Full of worlds they couldn't keep to themselves,

my brothers were deviant programmers of nightmares.

Descriptions of families _just like ours_ ,

with tongues petrified and forks welded to their teeth,

who'd sat down to Sunday dinner

and were flooded by molten rock;

explorers gnawing on boots in the world's dark attic;

Stadacona's sons, lured onto Cartier's ship and held hostage,

never to see home again.

When the lights were out

my free will disappeared.

Eyes dry with terror, I plummeted

to the limbo of tormented sisters, that global sorority

with chapters in every quiet neighbourhood, linked by fear

of volcanic explosions and frostbite, polar darkness,

and kidnapping by Frenchmen.

•

The ritual walk to the bakery, Fridays

before supper. Guided by my eldest brother

through streets made unfamiliar by twilight,

a decade between us.

I learned about invisibility:

the sudden disappearance of Röntgen's skin—

his hand gone to bones—and the discovery of X-rays.

Pasteur's germs, milk souring on the doorsteps of Arbois,

and microbe-laden wine—"what kind of wine?"—

the word "microbe"

rolling in my brother's fourteen-year-old mouth

like an outstanding beaujolais.

On these walks, frogs came back to life with electricity.

Sheep were cured of sheep-sickness.

Father Time, Einstein, never wore a watch.

Galileo saw the smooth face of the moon

instantly grow old,

more beautiful for being the truth.

The Curies found what they'd been looking for

only after giving up; they opened the lab and saw the glow,

incorruptible residue, radiant stain!

In winter, Glenholme Avenue was already dark,

with glass trees, elms shivering in their ice-sleeves.

As we walked, the essence of fresh bread

whirled into the secular air,

the street hungry for its pure smell.

Even now, I wrap what's most fragile

in the long gauze of science.

The more elusive the truth,

the more carefully it must be carried.

Remembering those walks,

I think of Darwin—

"no object in nature could avoid his loving recognition"—

on the bunk of the _Beagle_ ,

green with sea-sickness and the vertigo

of time. He was away five years

but the earth aged by millions.

Greeting him at Falmouth dock, his father cried:

"Why the shape of his head has changed!"

Stepping from cold night into the bright house,

I knew I'd been given privileged information,

because the excitement in my brother's voice

was exclusive to the street, temporary,

a spell.

•

Brother love, like the old family boat

we call the tin can: dented, awkward,

but still able to slice the lake's pink skin.

•

A family is a study in plate-tectonics, flow-folding.

Something inside shifts; suddenly we're closer or apart.

There are things brothers and sisters know—

the kind of details a spy uses

to prove his identity—

fears that slide through childhood's long grass,

things that dart out later; and pleasures like toucans,

their brightness weighing down the boughs.

Who but a brother calls from another hemisphere

to read a passage describing the strange

blip in evolution, when reptiles looked like

"alligator-covered coffee tables,"

evolution's teenagers, with a "severe case of the jimjams

during the therapsid heyday"—

remembering those were the creatures we loved best,

with bulky limbs and backs like sails.

Memory is cumulative selection.

It's an undersea cable connecting one continent

to another,

electric in the black brine of distance.

3

Migrating underground, miles below the path of the geese,

currents and pale gases

stray like ghosts through walls of rock.

Above and below, the way is known;

but here, we're blind.

The earth means something different now.

It never heals, upturned constantly.

Now stones have different names.

Now there's a darkness like the lakes of the moon;

you don't have to be close to see it.

•

My brother's son lived

one fall, one spring.

We're pushed outside, towards open fields,

by the feeling he's trying to find us.

Overhead the geese are a line,

a moving scar. Wavering

like a strand of pollen on the surface of a pond.

Like them, we carry each year in our bodies.

Our blood is time.

# II

## _Sublimation_

Since the day he followed me into the train station,

uniform under his coat,

I've had no language.

Stuttgart to Paris in your car,

no belongings or papers

just the words inside;

useless in France,

meaningless in America.

I've written nothing without your help.

For twenty years you've been my shadow bride,

calling me back to myself.

In every city of my escape

I've heard your voice.

In Paris we spoke our mother tongue

in each other's arms.

You wept for the familiar sounds.

When I was forty-three and met you for the first time

in Berlin, you cut my life in two.

I began again.

Today I'm sixty-eight years old on the docks of New York,

gulls swerving and wailing

above our broken faces.

We say goodbye for the first time.

Once you called at midnight

to talk about Hindemith,

to tell me how his overtones connect each bar,

invisible thread, sounds we can't hear.

These harmonics guide us through the music, resolve

the twelve tones like mist in a valley,

the reflection of sky in water,

the illusion that what's unnamed remains unformed.

Our voices connected by black wire,

words carried on waves.

We are the strain and stress of a line,

the poem's tension singing in each black wire

of words, and between the first line and the last.

We are the angle of light that burns water,

the point of intersection that creates perspective.

You have lived Brecht's parable of the Chalk Circle.

When I was caught in the middle, you let go

so I wouldn't be torn to pieces.

Your actions have taught me what it is to love—

that it's holding back, as well as holding.

For the first time I'm going

where you can't join me. I know that home

is the one place you won't come.

But you of all people must understand—

the need to hear my language in every mouth.

I can't think in America.

I've never let myself describe you

and now that there's no time left

your meaning spills out of me

like the essence of an atom cracking

on the edge of speed's bowl,

liquid in its longing to become part of something else,

transformed.

Flesh moves to become spirit.

You were the only one to understand my conversion.

Many people have asked me about God;

my proof is manifestation,

that God can be called

"getting over fear."

I wanted badly that truth be a single thing;

now I know it won't be measured.

It wasn't Heisenberg or Hindemith, but you

who convinced me

that nothing can be unravelled to its core,

that truth is a field, a cage, a cloud of sound.

How else to reconcile the faces of those running away

with the faces of those turning away,

with the faces of those in uniform—that hair-shirt

that says more about a man than his eyes

because you can't tell the parts of his face

that are his.

How else to encompass both that crying and those

orders; the sound of my own voice

begging, and my voice telling jokes to the man

without shoes beside me on a train;

how else to encompass the moon's chilling scream

as it calls out in its bad sleep above the earth

and your voice on the phone,

waking me in Paris, Los Angeles, New York.

How else to reconcile you

with my family;

our knowledge of each other

an invisible hypotenuse

connecting your marriage and mine.

You are like the church bells in Heidelberg:

walking through Philosopher's Way,

no sound of the city passes through the wall of trees

except the intermittent bells

calling me back to the place.

I've woken many nights

sweating from the same dream,

my body sprouting hands,

ripping from my sides with the pain

of broken bone parting skin.

Last night I looked out

to the grocer's across your street,

baskets of flowers lining the sidewalk,

trembling in the dark wind.

The gasp of paper and leaves

made me eighteen again—

nothing about the feeling had changed,

the ambush of longing October calls out.

I'm living proof

we don't stop wanting

what we can't have.

New York's a bad place to say goodbye,

but you're right—

it's no worse than any other.

For over twenty years

we've been joined: magician's hoops

caught and free, held together and apart

in desire and idea.

Like loons we travel underwater

great distances, to surface next to each other.

We burst up from water to air

to drift beside the serrated horizon of firs.

No matter where you are

or who you're near,

we come up for air together.

No matter my pace or distance,

it's you I surface to.

## _A Lesson from the Earth_

_"God... began to play the game of signatures, signing His likeness on to the world; therefore I chance to think that all nature and the graceful sky are symbolized in the art of geometry."_

_"Mine is the task of the mathematician."_

—JOHANNES KEPLER

I begged scraps from the Rudolphine Table—

the rinds of orbits, stars scattering like pips spat

from Tycho's chewing mouth.

His servants hovered the meal, poured wine

into everyone's glass

but mine. I was angrier than an incomplete equation!

Until Tycho gave me Mars. A feast

of numbers. Starved so long,

my eyes were bigger than my belly;

I'll have the answer in eight days, I cried,

leaning into my plate. But it took eight years

to lick it, clean.

We were sent to each other, Tycho and I;

nothing is casually

causal: all motion the result of invisible force.

We were sent for a reason,

like curtains blown in from an open window

to knock over a cup.

Everything fell.

Even the beloved circles of planetary paths

spiralled down,

empty as a swirl of apple skin.

My Martian obsession: I was a dog

prowling the dark, stars stuck in my fur like burrs.

Tycho's house was a box of noise,

numbers shook in my head like seeds in a melon.

No escape from the stamping and shouting

of masons and cooks, the hunters home with dinner,

and above all, Tycho's interfering howls.

So I worked at night, straining to hear

the sacred chant of geometric love!

I sharpened my compasses on the window ledge

and felt the breeze of planets in their nightly procession;

all night I tramped the sky, wearied by gravity,

tidal forces pulled my hair! Naturally,

I slept in. At lunch

there was a sneer under Tycho's moustache,

a look to remind me he'd stayed up late

every night of his life. Tycho,

who'd even fought a duel in the dark

and forever after rubbed metal polish

where his nose used to be. Every servant had a joke

about tarnished cutlery.

A true nobleman, Tycho smelled of silver.

Sometimes, during the day, I hid outside,

my favourite place behind a pile of broken dishes

that seemed always shiny with blisters of rain;

or else any place quiet enough

for the effort of turning chaos

into cosmos.

Prague crumbled around us.

The Church turned its children against each other,

set fires in its own house.

Over the city smoke hung purple, ripped with sunlight;

ravens sewed up the sky with their black stitches.

An eleven-year-old girl prophesied the end of the world—

we had every reason to believe her.

Wounded shapes leaned against walls;

daughters and sons slipped between cannons and

through the fumes, to steal horse meat from the mud.

Amid all this—the problem

of Mars, god of war.

In the early hours I believed

only when I'd found the pattern of its orbit,

the hidden sense of it,

would the horrors end.

Priests point to sparrows, to rain,

to fruit falling from the trees,

in order to prove the earth stands still.

In the name of faith they only proclaim their doubt

by refusing to look through the telescope.

They say the truth is at stake; yes,

the truth seems nowhere else.

In Rome's Piazza dei Fiori

they burned Bruno, for believing in infinity.

We must learn at least this lesson from the earth,

that the greater must make room for the small,

just as the earth attracts even the smallest stone.

Just as the entire planetary system

rests on the plainest pattern.

As cathedrals replaced cross-beams and pillars

with a single arch,

so the Church must someday give up

hundreds of perfect circles,

for the simple, blasphemous ellipse.

In error begins truth.

I spent my life in dogged computation

to prove a sun-centred heaven. For years

my reasoning was a ball circling the curve of a hole,

but I believed I'd find an equation simple enough

to move the earth.

For twenty-two years I looked for ratios—

in sizes of the planets, in solar distances

and lengths of orbits—until God whispered:

measure not from the earth but from the sun.

And the heavens opened.

I know now why sailors sing.

The sea is so big it swallows geometry,

but not time.

Heaving and hauling with one voice,

they shift the sky on their backs.

So it is with the planets; dancing,

their skirts flare out behind them—

equal areas in equal time—

harmony of the spheres.

I used to think we escape time

by disappearing into beauty.

Now I see it's the opposite.

Beauty reveals time.

I saw my first eclipse when I was nine, above Emmendingen,

the moon rising from the clouds like an infant's head

in its web of blood; the last time

I held my father's hand.

Everything human and broken

depends on perfection.

Imperfect man, left unfinished

with the purpose of becoming whole.

A prisoner moon, I'm caught between papal earth and

Lutheran sun, heretic to both.

I've been pushed from Tubingen, Graz and Prague.

In Linz they took away my books

until Paul Guldin got them back—

he may be a Jesuit, but first

he's a mathematician.

They asked for me in every town; they'd be happy

with even false confession.

From Linz we travelled upriver

until the Danube froze, and I had to leave

Susannah and my daughters in Regensberg.

My head banged like a turnip against the back of the wagon

all the way to Ulm. But in my arms

the only copy of the Rudolphine Tables,

including a map of the world, a chronology of history, and

the positions of one thousand,

one hundred, and thirty-six stars.

Two lifetimes of devotion,

one spent bent over paper,

the other—Tycho alone in the dark,

his face red from leaning back, hand in his pocket

around a fist-sized globe of the sky

he carried with him since he was a boy.

Now Tycho's gone. His instruments—

the finest, none to match them anywhere—

rust in Tengnagel's cellar.

Gone, Tycho's Castle of the Stars,

the printing press and paper mill,

his forest, fish ponds and flower gardens,

his compass-makers and measurement-takers.

And Emperor Rudolph—gone;

with his imperial library and mechanical treasures,

the singing fountains and glass orchestras.

Tonight, arriving in Ulm,

I remembered a night as cold as this,

years ago, when the recognizable sky saved me

from the unrecognizable world.

From a bridge over the Moldau, all mystery poured up

and complex Prague fell away.

The sudden gift of the comet—

like a word mouthed, a sign,

a rock thrown across a lake without a sound—

and looking down, I saw the whole sky floating in the river:

"as above; so below."

Looking up again, I saw what has always been,

suspended since time began, for anyone to discover—

God's eternal clue:

the moon in its wet skin of light,

the moon not less in its halfness.

What I learned then sustains me

through every sorrow:

it's the believer who keeps looking for proof.

## _Modersohn—Becker_

_"There are many degrees of power in the world, and nowhere is the difference in degree greater than in the case of human will and human desire, just as water boils at one temperature, and molten iron at another."_

—FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY

1

It did not free me to leave him.

All day at Worpswede rain stretches to the ground,

air like wood grain; burls of cloud.

Bark puckers on thin trees:

fingers too long in water.

By the end of the path, my sweater is beaded

with mist, a silver armour.

Where road wedges forest,

workhorses stagger like bodybuilders.

Snow is messy with spring, mud stains

under trees, like pools of shadow.

These are days when day doesn't arrive;

at night the same darkness falls into place.

I could smell pipe smoke in his hair.

Before I left,

in the peculiar quiet of a winter house,

windows startled dumb with ice—

we sat together on the stairs.

His head leaned on the banister.

Everyone said I was selfish.

Fear is selfish.

From Paris I wrote his name on a year of envelopes

until I finally saw

the shape of it: Otto—two bodies, two mouths.

The gutter ran with lights

and in the empty street I heard our loneliness

in a dog's throat.

Every way into myself

fills up with blood.

The joy that's close to terror; colour,

the hot pulse that hurts through veins.

In this light his eyes are clotted with oil.

The studio smells of wood smoke.

The birds ask their same questions.

My hands are stained with his face.

2

In 1900, Cézanne's paintings were stacked against a wall

in Vollard's basement. I couldn't believe

those secret squares of colour, fermenting in the dark,

unrecognized.

Paris wasn't the same after that.

And watching Rodin shape thought,

like a blind man learning a face,

I saw what it means to merge with work.

Rodin, who felt the sculptor Clara could become,

cut away the excess.

My friend emerged in his hands.

Watching him gather hair like flowing water

from a stone scalp,

pulling the face open

into love—

breasts like leaves dripping with rain,

legs taut as roots—

I suddenly understood that painting too

never lets you escape

awareness of the human hand:

the source of light

is the painter's body.

I thought that finding my own hot centre

would teach me colour.

Clara circled her clay while I stared so long at the canvas

I was dragged under.

Even the spirit has limits,

humility rising like silence,

the silence of light, gold rising from the fields.

•

We left Paris, the Pont des Arts

still lined with violets.

At Worpswede, the hills burned under September's glass.

Clara and I wore white to soak up the last light,

like bread the last bit of soup.

We first saw Rilke pushing furniture

through a doorway. I named the scene:

Struggle, With A Table;

later learned the truth of it.

By the fire, listening to a chamber concert,

the kind of music where loss wears gloves.

Rilke's eyes were on us.

That night he said things like "let me stay in the storm!"

and "give me autumn!"

Everyone was aware of him.

He followed me outside;

we washed our faces in the cold air.

•

What was missing in me, Rilke knew.

Nights together, midnight tea

in my studio, where, he said,

"everything becomes mysterious."

He talked about Tolstoy, and how we must earn

death. From Rilke you can learn about love

just watching him hold a cup or peel an orange.

Black roofs bled through thin snow,

words on a page. At the window, our legs

long against each other, grass in a current.

But his kind of love deepens

only with loss. He smells what's burning

better than what's fresh.

Rilke, don't be a "writer," stay

a man who writes!

"What do you know about it, Paula?"

That's how it was. To him, I was Paula.

But he was always "Rilke."

•

Skating on the Christmas pond;

lamps like owls in the trees.

I crushed fans of spruce and buried my face in my hands

as if in a book. While Rilke read inside,

his beautiful head bent from his body

like a stem "broken" by the line of water in a vase.

He married Clara and soon she was moving horizontally,

a figurehead on a ship, pregnant with their daughter.

His invisible barrier between them;

birds hitting glass.

•

Married, my aesthetic turned physical,

a knowledge I couldn't paint:

a heap of coltsfoot,

its yellow points curling on the table;

the white bedroom of birches, our faces cold,

the warmth of us under clothes—sometimes

chocolate, a blanket—until darkness

rolled on top of the light, leaving only

the small breathing spaces of stars.

The accidental beauty

of things brought in from outside,

leaves and crushed mignonettes carried in on sweaters:

the unplanned life that purled our days.

Following his trail: chair still rocking, lit pipe,

the apple changing colour on the plate.

Only love sees the familiar for the first time.

The light changing Otto's face, changing

him.

Winter turning the walls blue.

Imagining him naked, even as he stood there,

naked.

•

Opened by hills;

unnerving metal yellow of birch leaves

between my teeth;

forest's green chill on my shoulders.

Ice filled my veins,

the pond the colour of drowned ghosts, ragged as a shadow.

Trees pushed up through my throat,

leaves crowded my eyes and

I looked. Grateful, bursting with shape and colour.

I held my husband until I felt his face inside my own,

until my skin was blind with attention—

and still I didn't know anything, still

my hand was stupid.

My eyes went black, I held the brush,

choking on a thread of song.

•

I started again; where everything starts:

at the body. Classes in life-drawing,

training my hand to see.

In Paris alone,

my family waiting for me to give up

so I could go back to being "happy."

Every day, failure boiled up into my throat

and stayed there.

•

Obsession is the sacrifice of light

to the richness of submergence.

But love is separation,

the membrane of the orange dividing itself,

the surface of silver

that turns glass into a mirror.

There's failure in every choice.

Art emerges from silence;

silence, from one's place in the world.

•

Not that paint captures light,

but that light breaks free from the paint.

I imagined autumn in Worpswede, the tangled red

wire of empty bushes, a ceramic sky

crazed with branches. I sank deep in myself,

breathing in as if my bones were cedar.

Nowhere have I felt closer to love

than there, alone in that city.

Stars are flickering tips of snakes;

starlight, their fragile skin cast behind.

My dreams longed for Otto, for forest, for home.

I woke and the space was empty, except for paintings:

my step-daughter playing recorder,

hollow vowels slipping through the trees,

streaming behind her;

my sister's black hair pulled tight,

sleek as a mink, her braid a watery tail down her back.

Then I felt crazy—my two lives, simultaneous.

Two whites: snow on the birches.

•

Fulfilment is wordless,

the silence when skin takes over.

But when you're not speaking with skin,

you must love with language.

Rilke would say that's even more intimate—

the instant words become picture,

leaping from his throat, to my inner eye.

•

The first spring day, with Otto in the garden.

My mother crossed the grass, her arms open,

like a child waiting to be lifted.

Since five in the morning she'd travelled towards me.

We pulled the table out to the verandah,

set the blue dishes.

My dress round as the billowing cloth.

3

Branches dip, dripping.

Rain gets in everywhere, its animated shadow

fills every surface.

Dreams that usually evaporate in the light

stay wet with darkness.

That I'm looking for something I can't find

makes me strangely satisfied.

It fills me with time.

All my life I've been saying grace

for hunger: invisible, smelling of earth,

heavy as cattle down a darkening field,

their bodies pushing their heads close to the ground,

their necklaces of bells.

•

Every painting is a way of saying goodbye.

## _Flowers_

There's another skin inside my skin

that gathers to your touch, a lake to the light;

that looses its memory, its lost language

into your tongue,

erasing me into newness.

Just when the body thinks it knows

the ways of knowing itself,

this second skin continues to answer.

In the street—café chairs abandoned

on terraces, market stalls emptied

of their solid light,

though pavement still breathes

summer grapes and peaches.

Like the light of anything that grows

from this newly turned earth,

every tip of me gathers under your touch,

wind wrapping my dress around our legs,

your shirt twisting to flowers in my fists.

## _Anniversary_

Tonight a Buick's our bedroom,

cold wind off the lake muffled by closed windows.

Thirty years ago we drove through dark mountains

on a narrow road, as if under blankets with a flashlight.

Three days and two nights to the sea,

past grain elevators leaning against the horizon

like the heads on Easter Island;

under stars like ibises

swooping through mangroves.

Thirty years from our wedding and still

we're sleeping in cars. Still

awake as the moon, foreheads burning.

## _Fresh Mint_

Fresh mint slinks towards us through the dark kitchen,

crowds the table,

loud with its own good suggestions.

Persuasive as an extra electron, it changes

conversation, reminds us of

something. Insidious.

The way there's always

more glasses than guests at the end of a meal.

It binds us in its loose weave,

thread of moonlight in water.

Soon we don't notice

the wild smell,

being so filled with it.

## _Phantom Limbs_

_"The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart."_

—CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

So much of the city

is our bodies. Places in us

old light still slants through to.

Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,

like phantom limbs.

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.

Longs to be touched in places

only it remembers.

Through the yellow hooves

of the ginkgo, parchment light;

in that apartment where I first

touched your shoulders under your sweater,

that October afternoon you left keys

in the fridge, milk on the table.

The yard—our moonlight motel—

where we slept summer's hottest nights,

on grass so cold it felt wet.

Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,

a steel banner, a noisy wall.

Now the hollow diad

floats behind glass

in office towers also haunted

by our voices.

Few buildings, few lives

are built so well

even their ruins are beautiful.

But we loved the abandoned distillery:

stone floors cracking under empty vats,

wooden floors half rotted into dirt,

stairs leading nowhere, high rooms

run through with swords of dusty light.

A place the rain still loved, its silver paint

on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.

Closed rooms open only to weather,

pungent with soot and molasses,

scent-stung. A place

where everything too big to take apart

had been left behind.

## _Pillar of Fire_

At Katimbang, dead birds rained out of the sky.

Statues walked.

Whole forests—strewn like driftwood.

Tides so fast, fish were stranded,

then picked from the ground like a crop.

Father, I remember when we first

sailed through together—

how simple fear was, then.

Docked at Merak you told the story

of Sunda ghost, a sailor

who paid for the sins of this life

in the next, by having to gather

all the islands in the Strait.

The lights of port behind you;

breeze snapping the ropes:

"at night you'll hear him howling,

his hands full and his work half done."

My hair jumped when I first heard the sound.

You kept me scared. Then told me

about orangutans, who'll howl like babies

when the weather's shifting.

Now I can tell you,

Sunda Strait is surely haunted.

Our destination was Hong Kong,

carrying cargo from Belfast.

As usual, the first day we pull from shore,

each man was busy with his own thoughts.

And as usual, Willy—John's son—was below,

sleeping off his leave;

he never came aboard on his own legs.

At first it sounded like cannon fire, a distress;

but not a ship in sight.

The threat of damnation isn't always

something you can see.

Then a line of weather covered half the sky.

I shortened sail, turned southwest to face the wind.

Like meteors, like white comets chained with flame,

the pumice fell—stones bigger than a man's head,

the size of pumpkins—

then smaller ones, almost worse

because they came so fast; in seconds

we were deep in ash.

The sea was a swaying field of pumice,

frozen foam.

And then—a jungle floated towards us,

palms standing straight up;

as if we sailed through dry land.

Midnight, suffocating

on a sea that looked like dirty ice.

Choked with sulphur,

eyes burning into our heads.

Cinders everywhere, the air itself was on fire.

The sea boiled.

Father, at thirty fathoms,

the lead came up hot!

Mastheads and yardarms—lined with spark.

By morning, the strait was clear.

We even laughed when Willy,

who'd slept through it all,

came up for watch and wouldn't believe a word.

But then we saw the lighthouse at Fourth Point

snap like a stem.

And day was night,

land was sea,

the earth fell out of the sky.

Noon, and we were in a darkness we could feel.

Burning mud, glowing green and blue,

slapped the deck—

the sound that hits a coffin.

We shouted constantly, because we couldn't see;

and dug, for fear of sinking under the weight.

I called for the sidelights

and sent the two Jameses forward.

The mate and second in either quarter,

and someone to keep mud off the binnacle glass—

though we were blind as the dead.

Lightning lit our faces,

ugly with work.

The air—smeared solid.

When it stopped

we fell where we stood, as if we'd had only

the exact amount of strength.

The dark was full of stories,

of names of wives and children;

stories that, when light returned,

would never be spoken again.

It lightened enough to see the horizon.

Our first sight of land was West Island.

A mist of sand began to fall.

Krakatoa roared, ear-aching loud,

though we were a full seventy-five miles away.

The _Charles Bal_ —from truck to waterline,

spars, sails, and ropes—

hard with mud;

as if she'd been raised from the bottom.

A miracle, not a man hurt.

But—in Anjer, Merak,

all the villages of the Java Coast!

Father, the places you stopped so often

for water and wood, meat and fruit

have vanished.

They say that when the blast came,

in the streets of Katimbang

mud galloped fast as horses;

that burning ash pushed through floors

like pillows bursting their stuffing.

They say that when people ran through the streets

they left red footprints of fire.

That their bare arms looked like torn sleeves.

We knew them.

They say that even now, even far as Ceylon,

when you cut open fish

you find jewellery that belonged to the dead.

The town of Tjiringin is now ocean.

## _Blue Vigour_

I think, if you have lived through a war

or have made your home in a country

not your own, or if you've learned

to love one man,

then your life is a story.

Eight thousand feet above the sea's devotions

sail the four Ngong hills.

The East Wind—"King Solomon's favourite horse"—

rides over the plain to the foothills;

you follow the monsoon's path to my farm,

desert in your clothes and hair.

If you love a man who's not your husband,

your life becomes the story everyone else tells.

For months we were still as animals

alert to an enemy. We stalked each other with the charged

passivity of the inevitable.

With the patience and impatience of obsession.

I learned about you

the way I learned about the river

at the edge of my farm—

I can't see it from the house,

but know its path by the acacias

that grow along it.

What I couldn't foresee

led me to you.

During the act of greatest trust

my husband gave me a lasting gift.

I was rotten with his _mal d'amour_ ;

they had to send me home.

Almost thirty, back in my mother's house.

When I could walk again, her narrow arm

steered me through the garden,

green peony hands glistening

like the acres of coffee I'd left behind.

I leaned against her,

missing her youth as well as my own.

Home, yet not home.

Although the marriage was over,

I had the farm.

Although we hadn't yet touched,

I longed for Ngong and your body.

Sleepless on the boat

I pressed against the railing,

leaned into my future.

To deny another's happiness

by denying your own—

that could only be an adult misery.

I know your value

because you give yourself

just as you're leaving.

Each sojourn refines our feeling—

together we are stones tumbling to jewels,

beans polishing in the coffee-dryer,

gleaming under the lanterns.

When we stayed at your house

on the Takaunga, the moon was firm

in the shaking sky.

We were alive as coral pools,

where water shapes the rock

and rock shapes water.

Each time you return

you ask for another story.

Your expectation lets me love you

when you're gone.

My wanting would have both encased me

and driven me out of my skin

like an insect under the canopy at night—

were it not for words.

Each day I write to greet you.

Those mornings when one side of my bed

is cool with your absence,

I rise to the window and loving you,

the Ngong hills gather me in.

With each parting

my heart is forced to grow,

because the only way to love you

is to love each particle of green and

each animal part of life—

muscle, skin, and bone—

that dots and darts and hides

in the view from my room.

And now that you've learned to fly,

and really ride King Solomon's East Wind,

I have to love the air.

## _On the Terrace_

They say the brush is strapped to my hand—

it's not true.

My palms fold in and Gabrielle wraps them,

in powdered gauze, to stop the chafing.

In fact, the brush fits nicely in that crevice,

my fingers like vines around a trunk.

Sometimes it startles me;

my twisted joints, the brush so straight.

All morning, sweating over the olives—

those leaves use every colour for grey.

Years ago, when I stopped working outside—

what a commotion

because a man came in out of the rain.

Raphael didn't have to drag his canvas through fields

in order to paint sunlight.

I was tired; every time I looked up

the light was somewhere else.

Clouds, the wind, made a sleeve change colour or

leaves turn over their other green.

It's lonely, letting the world wash over you.

Those days, everyone looked away. In love;

or drinking, heads leaned back,

eyes focused on the bottom of a glass.

But now I'm kept company.

Women look me in the eye when I take their clothes off.

I'm a fine son of a tailor, painting nudes!

Gabrielle gains twenty pounds under my brush.

When I was young, I wanted to move with the world,

didn't realize the world moves in us.

A still life isn't about fruit, but about

time.

And there's a stillness inside things

as they move; think of waterlilies—

Poor Monet, his blind eyes filled with water!

The lilies float in his mind.

That's why I can't agree with Zola—

so concerned to describe the surface,

he forgets the spaces between things,

forgets that touching isn't holding.

Too busy with "iridescence" and "shimmering,"

he forgets to say it's raining.

It was my mistake too, forgetting space.

When I was a student of the Seine

with Monet at Bougival,

we learned how colours vibrate.

But space vibrates too.

That's what musicians know.

If Zola were here, he'd sit in that chair,

eyes burning everything in sight—

convinced that's the way to see—

and in the end, like all the others,

he'd deduce:

the brush is strapped to my hand.

Stillness in motion. I illustrate my point.

They carry me like a king from one room to another;

when I shout,

they rush to pick the brush hairs from the paint.

And now that I have no hands,

I long for clay.

Why begin sculpture now?

Riviere's the only one who'd ask.

I couldn't tell him

it was because of a dream,

that I'd slept back, thirty years,

to _The Bathers_ at Versailles.

Girardon himself had become limestone;

he looked so happy there, among them.

Now I want a woman

who'll wait for me in a garden,

in any weather, every light.

In the afternoons I watch them work the stone.

One day, without lifting a hand,

the form in my head

will be exactly what I see.

## _Stone_

Beatrice called him a pig and a pearl.

But she also liked to say,

lovers are equal only when so steeped

in corruption, knowledge of the other

is no longer a weapon.

Modi was a fallen king,

royalty in trousers held up with rope,

quoting Dante and Petrarch on park benches.

Cocaine and absinthe made him

play the naked bull in the street.

I've heard all the stories from everyone

who never knew him.

Modi wandering the halls, ripping wallpaper,

gouging at plaster until his nails bled—

because he was drunk. No. Because

he wanted to get at brick,

to feel stone under his fingers.

At night he used to steal

blocks from construction sites, until

the war, when no one was building any more.

He resented his own walls,

hundreds of stone women surrounding him,

unreachable.

He was close to Rivera

and painted him as a balloon;

Diego will never get stuck, he said,

Diego's free.

His old self clung to him,

an open mouth on his sleeve; a shadow

that turned him around in the street,

or in his sleep. His last nights were spent

with a stranger, the Greek, who knew nothing

of his failures, but knew

the Mediterranean.

He drank himself back to where he was born.

There are two kinds of spiritual biography:

Modi stuffed his soul with life.

I starved for the sake of my soul.

At first it wasn't passion, felt more

like memory—as if, in remaining true to myself,

to everything in my life that had come before,

there could be no direction but towards him.

We even met in an old embrace.

Modi was alone in Nice,

months after we'd been introduced,

when suddenly he knew me.

He came back to Montmartre. For weeks

we walked the city, resting in a cinema

or crémerie and he never stopped talking.

His baroque attentions, his rococo tongue!

The whole city in his face.

We drank to his _cara Italia_ , his mother,

to Giovanna who he'd never see grown;

but he stayed sober and no hashish,

which he used to take like dinner mints

after meals at Rosalie's or the Rotonde.

He accepted beauty wherever it was offered,

black iron fences against the snow,

bare trees smeared like charcoal on a wet sky.

We sat together at dozens of tables,

so poised for love, if I moved an inch

I would've caught one wing in the sea

and toppled, squawking, water-logged,

everything spoiled by closeness.

Faith turned to hunger

like a sweater pulled inside out, over my head.

Our walks transformed Paris: desire

clinging like windy paper to legs;

sharp as gasoline and leather polish, wet wool and

Modi's scent in my coat;

hopeless as the horses patrolling a vanished city,

pulling beans and potatoes in crowded streets.

The higher the ledge of his art,

the more the world pulled at his feet.

It wasn't only his lungs not strong enough.

The last trip home, he showed photos of his heads.

His friends brayed and barked, begged him

to put the stone out of its misery,

to smash it back into pavement.

He spent months on a single carving.

Five or six years

of happiness, nights when he lit candles and

embraced the day's work, a pagan.

Later he endured the portraits abused too—

as a roof for rabbits, as walls for a chicken coop—

by Libion and the butcher who took them

in exchange for cheese and eggs.

Nobody tells that part of the story.

When he was dead and worth ten times his life,

of course they tried to sell them.

But the canvases were too damaged.

No one cares about Modi now, another painter

from an old avant garde,

a man whose faces have been cut

into postcards, puzzles, ashtrays.

Only limestone loved him perfectly,

resisted with integrity, showed him

what to do. Demanded slowness, will,

mistakes not easy to fix.

But paint submitted to frenzy.

He was powerful. His love

was less.

His great dream—to sculpt a temple of women,

the "pillars of tenderness" he believed

held up the world.

Instead—his nudes. Outside of time and place;

no fruit, no flowers or furniture,

just the glowing body,

the certainty of pleasure.

A scandal—

to paint the body no longer anonymous:

each woman with a different knowledge.

It was Picasso's work that was immoral—

he tore off the woman's clothes then

tore apart the woman.

Modi's models simply... disrobed.

He wasn't a cubist, because he believed

if you break the bowl you can't describe

what's in the bowl;

destroy a shape—its spirit dissipates.

He was only a cubist when it came to love.

His portraits—every face a eulogy to stone

but without its calm.

The concentration of a last glance or

an approach;

as if, as he held them in his gaze,

they were already melting away.

He believed it was better to burn with time,

to match its speed with your own,

like the moment you can follow rain with your eyes.

When he painted,

he found you.

Beatrice was fire, Jeanne was nectar,

I was clear water, affected by the slightest touch.

He focused on my throat, that long river between

brain and body, between what you say and

what you give. The line of my neck

graceful, elegant as the handle of a pitcher.

My face flushed under its whiteness,

so covered with his touch, yet

so untouched, so—tragic!

Jeanne looked like a gypsy, with her violin.

But all she knew was Bach.

Her devotion was a fugue,

he got tangled up in himself, trying to leave her.

He did everything to push her away;

she did nothing but remain still.

He judged her gently,

painted every weakness, her double chin,

but the whole story came out on canvas,

everything she was thinking:

how Modi looked at four in the morning,

how he slept, close, without forgetting her.

Jeanne was a woman who could look at one face forever,

if she knew how the arms held.

When he died, she jumped,

big with Modi's life.

I feel certain it was a son.

No one believed in him, not even Jeanne,

who in the end, believed only in his body.

A few years ago

on a train to London, a man

brought Modi back to me.

He was Welsh and lived in a place so set aside

it was like the detail of a painting.

I liked him right away; when he sat down he said,

pardon me if I smell of horses.

He'd walked through fields to reach the station.

Half his life in Africa, and now

he spent his days drawing farm animals

in a motel room by the sea.

We talked our way across England;

he said, I belong nowhere, half here,

half there.

I'd give anything to see this place

as I used to—when I was young.

When my life was still imagined.

We passed fields smoky with rain

hay lying loose, flat as wet hair.

The glass was ghostly bark, wrinkled with water

and it was like looking out a café window—

I'm an old woman but I could smell wet wool,

horses, the sweet brown breath of coffee.

The Welshman said,

some people regret not what they've done

but what they haven't, and then decide:

this is my life. No;

you've missed your life.

But even the truth can't change the past.

When you're old, time is like a toothache,

still—you're happy to have teeth in your mouth.

Pardon me if I've upset you.

Better to let the past dissolve in you,

grow small; still as

smell.

I love horses, the man said,

they're the most noble of animals.

They're beautiful even while they're working.

It's the _Iliad_ , isn't it—

where even the horses weep on the bloody field.

It was cold, late afternoon, the room was dark—

Paris winter—but the window

was a painting, thick with light.

Modi's arms around my waist.

He told me that in Cagnes

the light was so bright it drove him crazy,

so he and Soutine stepped into a barn;

it was cool and dark

and suddenly he felt the warm

breath of a horse on his hair.

Our gratitudes were heaped against the day.

In the dimness, the room was a garden,

silk waterfalls of robes down the closet door and

flowing from sill to floor.

Keep everything you can't.

# III

## _What the Light Teaches_

_"I break open stars and find nothing and again nothing, and then a word in a foreign tongue."_

—ELISABETH BORCHER

1

Countless times this river has been bruised by our bodies;

liquid fossils of light.

We shed our ghost skins in the current;

then climb the bank, heavy and human.

The river is a loose tongue,

a folk song. At night we go down to listen.

Stars like sparks from a bonfire.

We take off what we are,

and step into the moon.

2

When there are no places left for us,

this is where we'll still meet.

Past the white fountain of birches,

green helmets of willows.

Past the boulder that fastens the field

like a button on a pocket.

Here, where trees you planted are now twice our height.

In winter we'll haunt your kitchen, our love

an overturned bowl, a circling lid.

We'll visit the creaking bog with its sunken masts;

fly over a death mask of snow

and the frozen pond striped with grass—

to our river, humming between closed lips.

Attentive as your favourite poet,

Tsvetaeva—who listened with the roots of her hair.

3

Birds plunge their cries like needles

into the thick arm of afternoon.

Beyond the closed window, soundless pines—

a heavy green brocade; and the glowing, stiff

brushcut of the corn.

Wands of wild calla.

Lilies tall as children.

You're asleep on the couch, head up, as if in a bath;

summer heat turns thin white sleeves

pink against your skin.

Sleeping as if you'd waited years

for a place to close your eyes.

Everything familiar:

dishes and smells, faces in oval wooden frames,

tins of Russian tea

with their forest scenes, their borders of black and gold,

lining the shelves.

We float in death,

the ordinary world holds together

like the surface tension of water,

still and stretched, a splash of light.

The shadow pattern of leaves,

a moving tattoo on your bare legs.

4

Sometimes I was afraid to touch him,

afraid my hand would go right through him.

But he was alive, in a history

made more painful by love.

I prayed to the sky to lift our father's head,

to deliver him from memory.

I wished he could lie down

in music he knew intimately, and become

sound, his brain flooded by melody so powerful

it would stretch molecules, dismantle thought.

5

Suspended in flux, in contortions of disorder,

in the frozen acrobatics of folding and faults,

the earth mourns itself.

Continents torn in half and turned into coastlines,

call for themselves across the sea.

Caves, frantic for air, pull themselves up

by the ground, fields collapsing into empty sockets.

Everywhere the past juts into the present;

mountains burst from one era to another,

or crumple up millennia, time joining at its ends.

We also pleat time.

Remembering, we learn to forget.

The kind of forgetting that stops us, one foot

in the spring soil of your farm,

the other in mud where bits of bone and teeth

are still suspended, a white alphabet.

The kind of forgetting that changes

moonlight on the river into shreds of skin.

The forgetting that is the heart's

filthy drain,

so fear won't overflow its deep basin.

Even in its own confusion,

in its upheavals and depressions,

the earth has room in its heart.

Carefully, part by part, it replaces us.

Gently, so bones may embrace a little longer,

mud replaces marrow.

The dogs slip like mercury through the long grass.

How can we but feel they're here,

in the strange darkness of a thermosensitive sky,

even as light gushes over rocks

and the sun drips sweet fat the colour of peaches

over fields. Here, in the noise of the river,

a mother gives birth in a sewer;

soldiers push sand down a boy's throat.

Theirs are voices we hear

but can't hear, like the silence

of parents rounded up in a town square,

who stopped their tongues in time,

saving children by not

calling out to them in the street.

Our father's daughters, we can't dream ourselves

into another world, see things differently.

Instead, we try to withstand memory

with memory, to go back further, to before:

back to the dacha in the high forests of Kochtobel,

to the Moyka in our mother's silvery photo of Petersburg,

to the wooden sidewalks of Kiev.

You read poems in the old language

even our parents can't speak—

what we save, saves us—

and in your mouth the soft buzzes are natural as cicadas,

the long "ayas" like bird calls.

Language is how ghosts enter the world.

They twist into awkward positions

to squeeze through the black spaces.

The dead read backwards,

as in a mirror. They gather

in the white field and look up,

waiting for someone

to write their names.

Language remembers.

Out of obscurity, a word takes its place

in history. Even a word so simple

it's translatable: number. Oven.

Because all change is permanent,

we need words to raise ourselves

to new meaning: tea and dacha and river.

6

It stopped me, the first time

I looked out at our father in the yard and saw

how she leaned her head on his shoulder—

familiar, and full of desire.

Together they looked at a nest in the bushes,

inspected strawberries.

Although the air was humid with lilacs,

heavy with insects and rain,

she was cool in a dress the colour of the moon.

You were reading by the open door.

The sound of a lawn mower made everything still.

Then a moment like night cereus

that blooms only in the dark, waking us

with its alarm of scent.

It wasn't seeing your face so suddenly like his,

or the sight of death in her white dress;

or the glaze of summer light

hardening into crust. Not the accustomed sadness

of what we'd lost,

but a new injury, a gash

bleeding into everything:

what we were losing.

7

When there are no places left for us,

we'll still talk in order to make things true:

not only the years before we were born,

not only the names of our dead,

but also this life.

The simple feel of an apple in the hand.

The look of the table after a meal, _en déshabillé_ ,

rings of wine like lips staining the cloth,

the half-eaten fish in its halo of lemon and butter.

Nights of tastes, of different smoothnesses;

nights when the twister of desire touches down

and tears up sleep;

of drowning in the shadow of your own body.

But if memory is only skin,

if we become dervishes spinning

at the speed of the world, feeling

nothing,

we spend hours by the river, telling everything.

So that when we are gone, even our spirits

weighed down with stones,

the river will remember.

8

It was a suicide mission, to smuggle language

from mouths of the dying

and the dead; last words of the murdered mothers—

Germany, Poland, Russia.

They found that what they'd rescued

wasn't the old language at all;

only the alphabet the same.

Because language of a victim only reveals

the one who named him.

Because they were plucked from the centre,

because they shared the same table, same street,

there was no idiom to retreat to.

What was left but to cut out one's tongue,

or cleave it with new language,

or try to hear a language of the dead,

who were thrown into pits, into lakes—

What are the words for earth, for water?

The truth is why words fail.

We can only reveal by outline,

by circling absence.

But that's why language

can remember truth when it's not spoken.

Words in us that deafen,

that wait, even when their spell seems

wasted;

even while silence

accumulates to fate.

Prayer is the effort of wresting words

not from silence,

but from the noise of other words.

To penetrate heaven, we must reach

what breaks in us.

The image haunts me:

the double swaying

of prayer on the trains.

9

Whole cities were razed with a word.

Petersburg vanished into Leningrad, became

an invisible city where poets promised to meet

so they could pronounce again

"the blessed word with no meaning."

A writer buried his testimony

in the garden, black type in black soil,

trusting that someday earth would speak.

All those years of war and uncertainty after,

no one knew the power of his incantation,

calling quietly from its dark envelope.

From his notebook grew orchids and weeds.

Words are powerless as love,

transforming only by taking us as we are.

Reading letters from Tsvetaeva to a friend

we cried together in your barn:

"you're the only one I have left."

After all these years I still feel closest to you

in the hours reserved for nightmares,

even in our distant bedrooms.

Because I know you're awake too,

if not this night, then another,

watching your husband's sleeping body

rise with breath.

10

For years I've driven towards you in spring rain,

storm sky of green marble,

slow traffic a caravan of swinging lanterns,

windshield wipers like clock hands.

Poems by Tsvetaeva on the seat beside me,

flowers in wet paper.

As the hours pass, the hard seeds in my heart

soften and swell as I think of your kitchen

with its stone floor

like a summerhouse in Peredelkino,

and of Mandelstam, exiled to Yelabuga on the Kama:

"if you must leave the city,

it's best to live near a river."

You fly out of the darkness at me,

twisting open the tin sky.

The thunderstorm becomes other storms:

darkness steeping like tea above Burnside Drive,

with its slippery crease of rusted leaves;

or the night on High Street, rain

streaming like milk down the windshield

the moment the streetlights clicked on.

I think of young Akhmatova,

under a black umbrella with Modigliani,

reading Verlaine in the Luxembourg.

All the languages they spoke—

Russian, Italian, French—

and still, their lovemaking was with roses!

Language not enough

for what they had to tell each other.

Never to lose this joy,

driving to one who awaits my arrival.

Soon I will be standing on your porch, dripping

with new memory, a thin dress soaked with May rain.

Rain that helps one past grow out of another.

11

Language is the house with lamplight in its windows,

visible across fields. Approaching, you can hear

music; closer, smell

soup, bay leaves, bread—a meal for anyone

who has only his tongue left.

It's a country; home; family:

abandoned; burned down; whole lines dead, unmarried.

For those who can't read their way in the streets,

or in the gestures and faces of strangers,

language is the house to run to;

in wild nights, chased by dogs and other sounds,

when you've been lost a long time,

when you have no other place.

There are nights in the forest of words

when I panic, every step into thicker darkness,

the only way out to write myself into a clearing,

which is silence.

Nights in the forest of words

when I'm afraid we won't hear each other

over clattering branches, over

both our voices calling.

In winter, in the hour

when the sun runs liquid then freezes,

caught in the mantilla of empty trees;

when my heart listens

through the cold stethoscope of fear,

your voice in my head reminds me

what the light teaches.

Slowly you translate fear into love,

the way the moon's blood is the sea.
* * *

# _Skin Divers_

# I

## _Skin Divers_

Under the big-top

of stars, cows drift

from enclosures, bellies brushing

the high grass, ready for their heavy

festivities. Lowland gleams like mica

in the rain. Starlight

soaks our shoes.

The seaweed field begs, the same

burlap field that in winter cracks with frost,

is splashed by the black brush

of crows. Frozen sparklers of Queen Anne's lace.

Because the moon feels loved, she lets our eyes

follow her across the field, stepping

from her clothes, strewn silk

glinting in furrows. Feeling loved, the moon loves

to be looked at, swimming

all night across the river.

She calls through screens,

she fingers a white slip in the night hallway,

reaches across the table for a glass.

She holds the dream fort.

Like the moon, I want to touch places

just by looking. To tell

new things at three in the morning, when we're

awake with rain or any sadness, or slendering through

reeds of sleep, surfacing to skin. In this room

where so much has happened, where love

is the clink of buttons as your shirt slides

to the floor, the rolling sound of loose change;

a book half open, clothes

half open. Again we feel

how transparent the envelope

of the body, pushed through the door

of the world. To read what's inside

we hold each other

up to the light. We hold

the ones we love or long

to be free of, carry them

into every night field, sit with them

while cows slow as ships

barely move in the distance.

Rain dripping from the awning of stars.

Waterworn, the body remembers

like a floodplain, sentiment-laden,

reclaims itself with every tide.

Memory terraces, soft as green deltas.

Or reefs and cordilleras—

gathering the world to bone.

The moon touches everything

into meaning, under her blind fingers,

then returns us to cerulean

aluminum dawns. Night,

a road pointing east.

Her sister, memory, browses the closet

for clothes carrying someone's shape.

She wipes her hands on an apron

stained with childhood, familiar smells

in her hair; rattles pots and pans

in the circadian kitchen.

While in the bedroom of a night field,

the moon undresses; her abandoned peignoir

floats forever down.

Memory drags possessions out on the lawn,

moves slowly through wet grass, weighed down

by moments caught in her night net, in the glistening

ether of her skirt. The air alive,

memory lifts her head and I nearly

disappear. You lift your head, a look I feel

everywhere, a tongue of a glance,

and love's this dark field, our shadow web

of voices, the carbon-paper purple

rainy dark. Memory's heavy with the jewellery

of rain, her skirt heavy with buds of mercury

congealing to ice on embroidered branches—

as she walks we hear the clacking surf

of those beautiful bones. Already love

so far beyond the body, reached only

by way of the body. Time is the alembic

that turns what we know

into mystery. Into air,

into the purple stain of sweetness.

Laburnum, wild iris, birch forest so thick

it glows at night, smells that reach us

everywhere; the alchemy that keeps us

happy on the ground, even if our arms embrace

nothing, nothing: the withdrawing

trochee of birds. We'll never achieve escape

velocity, might as well sink into wet

firmament, learn to stay under,

breathing through our skin.

In silver lamella, in rivers

the colour of rain. Under water, under sky;

with transparent ancient wings.

Tonight the moon traipses in bare feet,

silk stockings left behind

like pieces of river.

Our legs and arms, summer-steeped,

slapped damp

with mud and weeds.

We roll over the edge into the deep field,

rise from under rain,

from our shapes in wet grass.

Night swimmers, skin divers.

## _Land in Sight_

All day the sky

whispered into the sea and the sails

would not fill. On the pier,

dogs drank the air dry

with searching tongues.

We were seared wherever clothes

revealed us. Down the boulevard,

shutters clapped loud against the sun.

Children slipped messages through the slats,

flecks of paper drifted into the street.

All through the city love looked for us, through

the crooked Altestrasse, under Lenin's balcony,

past the terrace where Goethe drank his coffee.

Into cafés where coolness turns its key

in a shadow. All day love followed us

as we climbed, from fountain to bridge.

A gull hovered as if

broken. All day love drew its finger

across my belly, ascended my damp spine.

I kept turning my face

from its breath.

The city woke. Dogs unfolded their legs

and stood. One by one, shutters parted,

glimpses of voices

pressed the air.

The same loneliness that closes us

opens us again.

Like hair loosened by the sea,

slowly the darkness opens into darkness.

## _Night Garden_

Your mouth, a hand

against my mouth.

Pressed to earth, we dream

of ocean: heat-soaked, washed

with exhaustion, our mariner's sleep

haunted by smells of garden—fresh rosemary

thirty miles off Spain. Long grasses

sway the bottom of our boat.

We follow a sequence

of scents complex as music,

navigate earth places, sea places, follow

acoustics of mountains,

warbler instinct in the dark—

Siberia, Africa, and back—

phosphor runways guiding us to shore,

moonlight half eaten by the waves.

Across the lawn, a lit window floats.

Welts of lupine. You remember

an open window, Arabian music

through wet beeches. We know we're moving

at tremendous speed, that if it could be seen

the stars would be a smear

of velocity. But all is still,

pinioned. In the night garden,

light is a swallowed cry.

Naked in the middle of the city

the stars grow firm in our mouths.

## _Three Weeks_

Three weeks longing, water burning

stone. Three weeks leopard blood

pacing under the loud insomnia of stars.

Three weeks voltaic. Weeks of winter

afternoons, darkness half descended.

Howling at distance, ocean

pulling between us, bending time.

Three weeks finding you in me in new places,

luminescent as a tetra in depths,

its neon trail.

Three weeks shipwrecked on this mad island;

twisting aurora of perfumes. Every boundary of body

electrified, every thought hunted down

by memory of touch. Three weeks of open eyes

when you call, your first question,

Did I wake you...

## _Into Arrival_

It will be in a station

with a glass roof

grimy with the soot

of every train and

they will embrace for every mile

of arrival. They will not

let go, not all the long way,

his arm in the curve

of her longing. Walking in a city

neither knows too well,

watching women with satchels

give coins to a priest for the war veterans;

finding the keyhole view of the church

from an old wall across the city, the dome

filling the keyhole precisely,

like an eye. In the home

of winter, under an earth

of blankets, he warms her skin

as she climbs in from the air.

There is a way our bodies

are not our own, and when he finds her

there is room at last

for everyone they love,

the place he finds,

she finds, each word of skin

a decision.

There is earth

that never leaves your hands,

rain that never leaves

your bones. Words so old they are broken

from us, because they can only be

broken. They will not

let go, because some love

is broken from love,

like stones

from stone,

rain from rain,

like the sea

from the sea.

## _Wild Horses_

Minarets of burdock

clang in the copper marsh, the grapes'

frozen skins flood with sweetness.

Winter trees burned to black wicks.

Harnessed, longing cuts

with every turn. Time has one direction,

to divide. Invisible, it casts shadow

canyons, tools furrows into leather fields,

carves oxbow rivers of birds

into cold November skies.

Then, the first stars' faint static,

the sacred transmissions, the hair's

breadth of the intimate

infinite. Iron-oxide sun stains travertine sky,

sudden colour like the ochre

horses of Dordogne, stampeding into lamplight.

Liquid grasses overflow like dark ale.

Twilight is a cave, pungent

with wet hides, torches of resin.

Under the pulling moon, the strap of river

digs into the flesh of field.

## _There Is No City That Does Not Dream_

There is no city that does not dream

from its foundations. The lost lake

crumbling in the hands of brickmakers,

the floor of the ravine where light lies broken

with the memory of rivers. All the winters

stored in that geologic

garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway

at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones

under the rumbling track. The storm

that lit the city with the voltage

of spring, when we were eighteen

on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,

wind wet with wedding music and everything that

sings in the carbon of stone and bone

like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.

## _Last Night's Moon_

_"When will we next walk together_
 _under last night's moon?"_

—TU FU

March aspens, mist

forest. Green rain pins down

the sea, early evening

cyanotype. Silver saltlines, weedy

toques of low tide, pillow lava's

black spill indelible

in the sand. Unbroken

broken sea.

•

Rain sharpens marsh-hair

birth-green of the spring firs.

In the bog where the dead never disappear,

where river birch drown, the surface

strewn with reflection. This is the acid-soaked

moss that eats bones, keeps flesh;

the fermented ground where time stops and

doesn't; dissolves the skull, preserves

the brain, wrinkled pearl in black mud.

•

In the autumn that made love

necessary, we stood in rubber boots

on the sphagnum raft and learned

love is soil—stronger than peat or sea—

melting what it holds.

The past

is not our own. Mole's ribbon of earth,

termite house,

soaked sponge. It rises,

keloids of rain on wood; spreads,

milkweed galaxy, broken pod

scattering the debris of attention.

Where you are

while your body is here, remembering

in the cold spring afternoon.

The past

is a long bone.

•

Time is like the painter's lie, no line

around apple or along thigh, though the apple

aches to its sweet edge, strains

to its skin, the seam

of density. Invisible line

closest to touch. Line of wet grass

on my arm, your tongue's

wet line across my back.

All the history in the bone-embedded hills

of your body. Everything your mouth

remembers. Your hands manipulate

in the darkness, silver bromide

of desire darkening skin with light.

•

Disoriented at great depths,

confused by the noise of shipping routes,

whales hover, small eyes squinting as they consult

the magnetic map of the ocean floor. They strain,

a thousand miles through cold channels;

clicking thrums of distant loneliness

bounce off seamounts and abyssal plains. They look up

from perpetual dusk to rods of sunlight,

a solar forest at the surface.

Transfixed in the dark summer

kitchen: feet bare on humid

linoleum, cilia listening. Feral

as the infrared aura of the snake's prey, the bees'

pointillism, the infrasonic

hum of the desert heard by birds.

The nighthawk spans the ceiling;

swoops. Hot kitchen air

vibrates. I look up

to the pattern of stars under its wings.

•

If love wants you; if you've been melted

down to stars, you will love

with lungs and gills, with warm blood

and cold. With feathers and scales.

Under the hot gloom of the forest canopy

you'll want to breathe with the spiral

calls of birds, while your lashing tail

still gropes for the waves. You'll try

to haul your weight from simple sea

to gravity of land. Caught by the tide,

in the snail-slip of your own path, for moments

suffocating in both water and air.

If love wants you, suddenly your past is

obsolete science. Old maps,

disproved theories, a diorama.

The moment our bodies are set to spring open.

The immanence that reassembles matter

passes through us then disperses

into time and place:

the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.

The mother who hears her child crying upstairs

and suddenly feels her dress

wet with milk.

Among black branches, oyster-coloured fog

tongues every corner of loneliness we never knew

before we were loved there,

the places left fallow when we're born,

waiting for experience to find its way

into us. The night crossing, on deck

in the dark car. On the beach where

night reshaped your face.

In the lava fields, carbon turned to carpet,

moss like velvet spread over splintered forms.

The instant spray freezes

in air above the falls, a gasp of ice.

We rise, hearing our names

called home through salmon-blue dusk, the royal moon

an escutcheon on the shield of sky.

The current that passes through us, radio waves,

electric lick. The billions of photons that pass

through film emulsion every second, the single

submicroscopic crystal struck

that becomes the photograph.

We look and suddenly the world

looks back.

A jagged tube of ions pins us to the sky.

•

But if, like starlings, we continue to navigate

by the rear-view mirror

of the moon; if we continue to reach

both for salt and for the sweet white

nibs of grass growing closest to earth;

if, in the autumn bog red with sedge we're also

driving through the canyon at night,

all around us the hidden glow of limestone

erased by darkness; if still we wish

we'd waited for morning,

we will know ourselves

nowhere.

Not in the mirrors of waves

or in the corrading stream,

not in the wavering

glass of an apartment building,

not in the looming light of night lobbies

or on the rainy deck. Not in the autumn kitchen

or in the motel where we watched meteors

from our bed while your slow film, the shutter open,

turned stars to rain.

We will become

indigestible. Afraid

of choking on fur

and armour, animals

will refuse the divided longings

in our foreign blue flesh.

•

In your hands, all you've lost,

all you've touched.

In the angle of your head,

every vow and

broken vow. In your skin,

every time you were disregarded,

every time you were received.

Sundered, drowsed. A seeded field,

mossy cleft, tidal pool, milky stem.

The branch that's released when the bird lifts

or lands. In a summer kitchen.

On a white winter morning, sunlight across the bed.

•

Try to keep everything and keep

standing. In the tall grass,

ten thousand shadows. What's past,

all you've been,

will continue its half-life,

a carbon burn searing its way to heaven

through the twisted core of a pine.

At night, memory will roam your skin.

Your dreams will reveal the squirming world

under the lifted stone.

While you sleep, the sea

floods your house, you wake

to silt, long brown weeds

tangled in the sheets. You wake

in the bog, caked with the froth of peat,

stunted as shore pine,

growing a metre a century.

The bog bruised with colour,

muskeg, hardpan, muck.

Matted green sphagnum

thick as buffalo fur.

Sinking into, buoyed

by spongy ground;

walking on water.

In time, night after night,

we'll begin to dream of a langsam sea,

waves in slow motion, thickening to sand.

Drenched with satiety we'll be slow

to rise, a metre a century.

Our brown bed is peat,

born of water, flooded,

burning with the smell of earth.

## _The Passionate World_

is round. For days we sail, for months,

and still the way is new; strange stars.

Drawn to you, taut over time,

ropes connect this floating floor

to the wind, fraying into sound.

To arrive is to sleep

where we stop moving.

Past the shoal of clothes

to that shore, heaped with debris

of words. A hem of salt,

white lace, on sea-heavy legs.

Love longs for land. All night

we dream the jungle's sleepy electricity;

gnashing chords of insects swim in our ears

and we go under, into green. All night

love draws its heavy drape of scent against the sea

and we wake with the allure of earth in our lungs,

hungry for bread and oranges.

Salamanders dart from your step's shadow, disappear

among wild coffee, fleshy cacti, thorny succulents and

flowers like bowls to save the rain.

We are sailors who wake when the moon intrudes

the smoky tavern of dreams, wake to find a name on an arm

or our bodies bruised by sun or the pressure of a hand,

wake with the map of night on our skin,

traced like moss-stained stone.

Lost, past the last familiar outpost,

flat on deck, milky light cool on our damp hair,

we look up past the ship's angles to stars austere

as a woodcut, and pray we never reach

the lights of that invisible city, where,

landlocked, they have given up on our return.

But some nights, woken by wind,

looking up at different stars,

they are reminded of us, the faint taste of

salt on their lips.

# II

## _The Second Search_

_"Yesterday at the cemetery, I did not succeed in understanding the words 'Pierre Curie' engraved on the stone."_

—MARIE CURIE, 1906

The truth likes to hide

out in the open. Even then,

alone on the bridge, in the solitude

of desire, our moon flooded

the gorges of Truyère. Even then

the satin muscle of a melody

twisted over water, waiting

to be heard: over the Wisla, the Bièvre,

the Seine. Rain tugged with invisible hands

on cedar beards, dug into riverbanks,

squeezed the smell of earth in its fists—

as if it knew someday I'd reach

into powdery brown ore

flecked with needles of Bohemian pines,

stand forty-five months under umbrellas or wet

under sun, stirring the blue spirit

from the bitter breath of pitchblende.

So much to burn through, years, to reach

that colour. As if Polish rain already knew

our flooded garden in Paris: I waited

while you were carried

home from Rue Dauphine, half your skull

hardened into pavement; moonlight's blade

against the throats of flowers, pink flesh

soaked, purple mouths open,

shouts turned to dust on their tongues.

Sepia damp like the forests of Minière and Port Royale

you'd described, guiding me to sleep: even then

instructing me not to fear

the ground, to give thanks

to the worm-churned paths

of failure that brought us together,

to refuse the shroud, cover you instead

with hawthorne, iris, the black cloth

of earth you loved.

Before we married

I stood above the river

pulling at my hands

as if I'd already lost something so beautiful

my skin was stained. How similar

the leap of faith and the leap

of fear. While a bird

signed its name on the sky. Even then

I felt you through my clothes, like the radium kiss

through Becquerel's vest pocket, the kiss he never forgot,

burning into his belly.

I pulled apart your coat

looking for you. I kissed your cloth shadow and kept

your blood under my nails. I screamed at Irène

for closing a book you'd left open on a table.

The longer we lived together, the more

I loved you. Day after day

I poured something purer

into basins and jars. I watched you

bent over your table like a jeweller,

setting things that can't be seen. The joy

of concentration, the elements

love precipitates to. By then our hands

never stopped moving, our skin

was wool, long gloves eating us

to the bone. We opened the door to

the aurora borealis, to icebergs, to distant

mountains lining the shelves.

The blue residue that clings like scent,

fogs everything with its breath.

At night, at work, we sat as if

under stars. The glowing distillation

of time.

You laughed when I marked cookbooks

with the same care as notes in the lab

but for me it was the same: the same

details of love—dissolving, filtering, collecting

until truth is so small it fits

on the tongue. My body sore from standing

in the yard, stirring. Or from stretching

under you.

Night sounds on the lawn

at Sceaux, lamps on the porch,

wooden legs scraping flagstones

as your father followed the moon with his chair.

Listening to a song on dark drifts over the river

knowing there was no difference, your hand

asleep on my side, whether you were thinking

of essential salts or atomic numbers or the secret

effects of moonlight: it was the same love,

radiant with memory, simple as skin.

Everything we touch

burns away, whether we give ourselves

or not, the same April day spreads to thinness,

the same winter afternoon

thickens to dark. I was thirty-eight years old.

Every time a door opened

I expected you. For months I hid your clothes

stiff with blood.

Only the street understood. I walked

and shut my eyes, gave myself up to the God

of trams, horses, cabs.

You are the glass that silences

wet leaves, the silence of the winter river.

I no longer see the world

with your eyes, but see you

in the world: invisibility bending the branch;

the moon wobbling, just halved;

skin vanishing under the rays.

When Albert in the middle of a proof

suddenly slung off his rucksack

to stare down the chasms of Engandine,

grabbing my arm, wild: "I need to know

what happens to passengers

when the elevator falls into emptiness"—

and I held our girls, afraid

they'd laugh themselves over the edge—

it was you I'd been thinking of,

as we crossed the Majola Pass.

I take our daughters

to the rivers you loved.

We walk along the Bièvre

where you spent whole nights

fishing ideas out of the water.

I think of silver skin,

invisible in the current, yet

separating cold bright blood

from the colourless river. Invisible

as oxygen sealing water and ice,

so the line between river and sky

won't break, hydrogen aligning itself

in one direction, under skaters' blades.

Moving faster with each slow stride.

Nothing warms like motion,

speed in our thighs.

I can only find you

by looking deeper, that's how love

leads us into the world.

My hands burn

all the time.

## _Ice House_

_"I regret nothing but his suffering."_

—KATHLEEN SCOTT

Wherever we cry,

it's far from home.

•

At Sandwich, our son pointed

persistently to sea.

I followed his infant gaze,

expecting a bird or a boat

but there was nothing.

How unnerving,

as if he could see you

on the horizon,

knew where you were

exactly:

at the edge of the world.

•

You unloaded the ship at Lyttleton

and repacked her:

"thirty-five dogs

five tons of dog food

fifteen ponies

thirty-two tons of pony fodder

three motor-sledges

four hundred and sixty tons of coal

collapsible huts

an acetylene plant

thirty-five thousand cigars

one guinea pig

one fantail pigeon

three rabbits

one cat with its own hammock, blanket and pillow

one hundred and sixty-two carcasses of mutton and

an ice house"

•

Men returned from war

without faces, with noses lost

discretely as antique statues,

accurately as if eaten

by frostbite.

In clay I shaped their

flesh, sometimes

retrieving a likeness

from photographs.

Then the surgeons copied

nose, ears, jaw

with molten wax and metal plates

and horsehair stitches;

with borrowed cartilage,

from the soldiers' own ribs,

leftovers stored under the skin

of the abdomen. I held the men down

until the morphia

slid into them.

I was only sick

afterwards.

Working the clay, I remembered

mornings in Rodin's studio,

his drawerfuls of tiny hands and feet,

like a mechanic's tool box.

I imagined my mother in her blindness

before she died, touching my face,

as if still she could

build me with her body.

At night, in the studio

I took your face in my hands and your fine

arms and long legs, your small waist,

and loved you into stone.

The men returned from France

to Ellerman's Hospital.

Their courage

was beautiful.

I understood the work at once:

To use scar tissue to advantage.

To construct through art,

one's face to the world.

Sculpt what's missing.

•

You reached farthest south,

then you went further.

In neither of those forsaken places

did you forsake us.

•

At Lyttleton the hills unrolled,

a Japanese scroll painting;

we opened the landscape with our bare feet.

So much learned by observation.

We took in brainfuls of New Zealand air

on the blue climb over the falls.

Our last night together we slept

not in the big house but

in the Kinseys' garden.

Belonging only

to each other.

Guests of the earth.

•

Mid-sea, a month out of range

of the wireless;

on my way to you. Floating

between landfalls,

between one hemisphere and another.

Between the words

"wife" and "widow."

•

Newspapers, politicians

scavenged your journals.

But your words

never lost their way.

•

We mourn in a place no one knows;

it's right that our grief be unseen.

I love you as if you'll return

after years of absence.

As if we'd invented

moonlight.

•

Still I dream

of your arrival.

## _The Hooded Hawk_

_for A.W._

_"... I had come into my own; painful to the extreme limit of endurance as that place and state might be."_

—KATHLEEN RAINE

History chokes on the little bones

of meaning, the little bones

of love. Early winter, late

afternoon, the room went dark.

We sat a long time

before noticing. You were recounting

a trip to Rome, not the conference

but a woman who remembered those who hid

or fled. You stood to turn on a lamp, instead

sat down again. Your voice

more distinct in darkness.

You knew it like a secret:

the chalk body outlined

under the skin, "the line," you wrote,

between "what's permissible" and "what's

possible." History: the silver spoon

in your kitchen drawer,

swastika on its handle. The "tulips and daffodils"

escaping children were told to run to, who

remember instead "bloodhounds and rats."

Your mother's dolls—all the refugee parts

we're made of. History is the love that enters us

through death; its discipline

is grief. You never forgot the floating ghettos:

landlocked in north Winnipeg, listening with your father

to the radio, while the boat was refused

at every port. Eleven years old,

you were with them, those who had no place,

while the streetcars squealed to a turn

on North Main, and in the front room

the sewing machines and wooden steaming blocks

thudded all night; with them

listening to your mother tell of her

escape across the river—

"we must bring our children to a shore";

and again in '55, alone on deck,

anxious to begin as a writer;

with them when we spoke of

exiled Walter Benjamin, who devoured books

"the way a flame 'reads' wood,"

or when later you wrote of your childhood:

"I belonged where I read."

•

The dolls your mother made

were stories. "He's the French type...

dresses just so... he likes to chase after women..."

She holds up an Englishman and in her other hand

his pregnant wife: "Now he's more mature

for his responsibilities." When the stories were sad

she dressed them in finery

so we wouldn't turn away. After a pogrom, when she was young,

your mother rooted out buttons and bits of glass,

"scraps of this and that" and never stopped: wooden spools,

used light bulbs, leftover leather, bottle tops,

lids of jars, labels, beads,

bone. Her one requirement: that the object

had lost its purpose. So what was torn

transformed to something whole:

a hat, a foot, a hand.

Your mother sewed all night

and fell asleep on the cutting table.

All your writing life, you worked at night.

•

One Thanksgiving it took two

to carry the platter—your idea,

a cauliflower steamed whole,

cerebral and surreal, regal

as the head of a saint. Elevated

to a centrepiece. I understood the symbol:

they harvested cauliflowers

from the fields near Terezin...

At the table, your favourite ghost sat with us,

the poet, Heine, who knew home

is in the mouth: not just language but

carp in raisin sauce, lamb

with horseradish and garlic—

even in Paris, surrounded by _cuisine._

•

In your unlit apartment.

After another stage of illness.

All the years were with us.

Of your mother's death

you wrote, "My loss is endless... its only closure

will be my own." This winter afternoon, two years after

your death, sorrow magnifies

through the generations, each human's part

heaped upon the next, in this way our griefs

are joined. For all the talk,

for all the speaking up and

out, the core sample

is silence. We made a pact

of dusk. In your kitchen so many afternoons,

in your last apartment, in this apartment.

This November afternoon.

•

Almost forty, childless,

so much of your life

given to ghosts. You lived with your story

longer than they were stranded

on that boat, on the verge of war.

Longer than the war.

Years later, you pushed the manuscript across the table

without comment. Your daughter almost as old

as the abandoned pages.

In a dream

the hooded hawk is sometimes

love, sometimes

death; everything stops at the moment

of unmasking.

Colette said, when one we love dies

there's no reason to stop

writing them letters.

Since you died,

love has opened every place

that won't open.

In a dream you said,

I am being reborn in

the womb of the earth.

You were with them,

those without place.

In your last apartment,

early winter

late afternoon.

Your face had the tenderness

of a hand.

# III

## _Fontanelles_

_"How much must be forgotten, out of love,_

_how much must be forgiven, even love."_

—W. H. AUDEN, "Canzone"

Chalk and beeches. The winter sea

looks for itself in the new dark,

turning the smallest colour.

We brought our daughter here

before she was mortal. Before I knew

a person can be a prayer. Before

I had ever bathed a child, before

I felt another's death

could be my own.

We've gone on, each year

a little deeper, to the place

where land is geology, where objects are defined

by the space in them.

Where proteins assemble themselves

into souls. We've come in winter,

in the rain. To islands, to the abbey, always

cold, always looking,

to remember. Photographing the ruins

near Roan Fell. At North Beach and

Melmerby Fell. All the places where the earth

crumbles into edges.

The landscapes we saw

from love. From love,

to a marram field roaring under two thousand

Atlantic miles of moonlight, scent scoured

in the salt, as if an invisible woman

embraced us in the dark; the clover's

trace in cow's breath, in sweet milk,

woven by wind into the tall grass,

roots binding the sand. Arable islands

of porous lava, and islands so rigid the rain

bruises into peat, parietal

thumbprints in the gneiss

like the soft lakes

in an infant's skull.

Islands that are outer. Not barren

but precise. Not a wildflower

wasted.

The narrow channel, a gap of two thousand

million years. The inner basalt islands,

a green fifty million years old, where peacocks

fertilized lush gardens, darted

from massive hedges of rhododendron

while sugars and phosphates, thymine and

cytosine, guanine and adenine

aligned and divided with their three degrees of freedom;

in the winter, in the rain.

There is no song the sea

will not put in its mouth.

•

November mountains

the colour of marmalade,

mineral shadows. A thread of road clings

to the coast. Store, hotel, distillery.

The mysterious ways of the peat

can capsize a lorry like a toy;

the tides swallow a boat in seconds.

A glacial sea has nibbled caves and left behind

raised beaches, stranded high above the waves.

From Ardlussa, where the road ends,

seven miles through dense oak forest

to dying Orwell's farm,

the silent eyes of five thousand red deer

surrounding him in the night.

From Ardlussa, where the road ends.

•

Together we've looked to limestone and to apoptosis,

to discarded theories and the Abbés Glory and

Breuil, who followed children into the painted caves

of Altamira and Lascaux. To Jacques Loeb and

Jacques Monod, whose faith was biology,

who knew that awe is like an apple,

sweetest where the light collects,

under the skin. To everything

science breaks open to learn

what's inside, Irène Curie looking for truth

in a block of paraffin. To facts as unprovable

as one's own death. To icebergs

old as stone. To the granite sphinx

and the two-hundred-and-fifty-kilo priest

of Isis,

winched from the dusk

of Alexandria Harbour, from a sea bath

of sixteen hundred years.

And to how long

the handprint has marked the cave,

and to the nine months, and the time

twice that, for the fontanelles to close.

I've watched a woman swim

at North Beach, her pink belly

an eclipse rising from the waves; later,

the story she told, so close to me—

smell of coffee, rattle of ice, soft click

of billiards, through her Europe and her forests—

eager to speak before love made her

forget

where to begin. Long before

the first twenty cells, before

the corpus luteum, before

the microscopic heart,

long before hands and eyes.

I returned to North Beach and to

her words, the lake

winter-empty, tide trailing a branch

along the sand, while neural folds

fused. Before the brain, before gills

became bones or ears; "the ancient

genetic information shared with the fishes."

The distance a child travels,

tens of thousands of years,

one cell at a time. Cells that know

how to heal a wound from seam to seam,

from the depth. Cells that know

to assemble or re-

assemble themselves.

To regenerate blood and skin,

like a starfish that loses its arms

and grows them back again.

The body is a memory palace;

like Simonides' "inner writing,"

where each detail of each room corresponds

to one of the ninety-seven hundred lines

of Virgil's _Aeneid_ ,

or like tribes who use the whole Sahara

to remember a story.

Entropic catalogue.

The primitive streak, the blood islands.

Blessed protein.

•

We came to photograph night. At the cliff,

to blacken film with the last atoms

of day. Later we'll look with faces

almost to the paper to see the waves,

creases of shadow darker than the dark

unlocking. Recall our

invisibility,

but for our white

breath.

A task, this waiting

for the dark, the slow disintegration

of sunlight, impossible to record

the moment one overtakes the other,

as it is to name the moment embryo

becomes foetus; the only time of day

quantum theory seems reasonable. When sight

is feeling. I think of Heisenberg's twilight

walks in Faelled Park, determined

to rid the universe of waves,

holding his head, minding terribly

his p's and q's. Or walking Copenhagen's

Langelinie, watching a freighter "fabulous

and unreal in the bright blue dusk...

biological laws exerting their powers

not merely on protein molecules but

on steel and electric currents..."

Or at four a.m. on the roof reading

Plato's _Timaeus_ , neither

day nor night, the moment he knew

"that the smallest particles of matter

must reduce to a mathematical form."

Like sacred sites built from secular

stones—the priory filched from Hadrian's Wall,

or the Cistercian monastery built around pagan

altars to Jupiter and Silvanus—

spirit snags in the quantum mechanism.

Daughter cells, organelles, morula.

The shape of the belly

becomes the shape of the head.

From Ardlussa to North Beach.

From stones to atoms.

From atoms to stones.

The chemistry of looking;

to look until the river

swallows us, until the redness

of the stone fills our veins.

To look until we're

seen. But this is only longing.

We leave our heat shadows

in moss shocked with frost.

Even your camera

sees more; the detail you crave.

We strain to see even

what the camera sees,

what the eye can't; and this is as good

as a philosophy. An embrace

of failure, as if

just once, impossibly,

we'll catch the visible reflection

of what's invisible.

Our white breath in the dark.

How to photograph this,

the dark when one has said

too much. The dark

of sudden feeling. Love's

darkness.

The sea, folded paper;

rain filling each crease.

A twist of bright salt,

a twist of foam.

Phosphene.

Dark with hope.

•

A winter Sunday.

On the surface,

pilgrims to limestone, the cavers lay,

the earth's breath in their hair,

the breath of profound darkness,

ten metres and thirty thousand

years. Headfirst,

they dove into the draught.

They shouted into a chamber

too deep for lamps to grasp,

a sweating mineral space

white as exposed film in the darkness.

They unfurled a black plastic path

across the glinting calcite floor;

so their progress wouldn't disturb

the scattered bones and teeth and

tracks of ancient animals.

Aurochs and mammoths in charcoal and ochre.

In the gallery of horses

they shouted without words,

their joy

unpronounceable.

Near their feet,

under the gaze of pensive horses,

the imprint of two hands.

They ascended into the clean

chill of the gorge, dusk,

fine cold starlight

crystallizing their breath.

Dazed, they could only descend again.

And again, into the smell of wet clay;

the third time through the passage,

almost midnight, at last

bringing one who wouldn't believe

without seeing it herself—

a caver's daughter.

"We had lost all track of time."

•

You carry your camera

under the earth.

Rain wounds the snow. Gashes of mud

blacken a path. We light the lamps

and dive. Your sixty trillion cells

and mine. In the caves of Aldène and

Fontanet, paleolithic children played

while their parents painted. Small knee

prints and footprints in the clay.

Thousands of years later, the children return:

Maria who found the bison

on Altamira's stone sky;

Marcel who followed his dog, Robot,

into the mouth of Lascaux.

After eight weeks, the hands.

A mouth without lips.

After twenty-five weeks,

filaments follow a trail

of chemical scent through the cortex:

wiring ears and eyes.

After thirty weeks,

quantum whispering: thought.

•

Almost in deference

to geologic time,

it takes generations

to become an islander.

Only ghosts earn a place.

The wind scrubs the air so clear

even the most crowded heart

remembers all it loves.

•

We bathe our daughter,

a prayer for every part,

as if we were washing her

with song.

Fingers frail as blades of grass.

Her thousands of eggs,

already inside her.

•

To love as if we'd choose

even the grief.

•

All love is time travel.

Scoured shore, painted caves,

limestone gorges.

Plums and cold water in the desert.

The winter river. This far.

# _A Note on the Text_

_Sublimation_

Writer Alfred Doeblin, perhaps best known for his novel, _Berlin Alexanderplatz_ , escaped Germany during the Second World War; he was one of the few exiled writers who made the difficult decision to return after the war. The poem's "shadow bride" was photographer Yolla Niclas.

_A Lesson from the Earth_

Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) pursued mathematical harmonies in a Europe torn by the counter-reformation and the Thirty Years War. His Three Laws freed thought by marrying astronomy and physics for the first time, paving the way directly for Newton's theory of gravity. By proving that planets follow elliptical not circular orbits, he dismantled a false and cumbersome view of the solar system, which had been tied to theology. He met and worked with Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe in 1600, a year before Tycho's death. Brahe's remarkably accurate observational data was published later in the Rudolphine Tables, named for Emperor Rudolph II, the patron of both Brahe and Kepler.

_Modersohn—Becker_

German painter Paula Becker (1876–1907) regarded both commitments—family duty and her art—with equal seriousness; her short life was marked by a wrenching struggle between the two. She left the artists' colony of Worpswede, where she'd been living with her husband, the painter Otto Modersohn, for Paris. She returned to the marriage and later that year, at age thirty-one, she died suddenly, shortly after giving birth to their only child.

_Blue Vigour_

Before she became the highly acclaimed short-story writer, using the pen name Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen emigrated from Denmark to Kenya, where she ran a farm from 1913 to 1931. Her love and respect for the land and its people are documented in her paintings and memoirs.

_Stone_

Lunia Czechowska, a Russian émigré, met the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani in Paris in 1917, three years before his death. At the time, Modigliani was living with the painter Jeanne Hébuterne.

_What the Light Teaches_

Marina Tsvetaeva, Osip Mandelstam, and Anna Akhmatova—three of Russia's best-known modern poets—suffered profoundly during the Stalinist regime. In order that their words not be lost to censorship, enforced exile, and imprisonment, friends and family often memorized complete poems. In Mandelstam's case, the poems were preserved in his wife Nadezhda's memory and survived even while the poet himself perished in a labour camp.

_The Second Search_

The Polish physicist Marie Sklodowska Curie (1867–1934) and her husband, the French physicist Pierre Curie, shared an intense and productive parnership, both in their marriage and in their professional lives. In 1903, they earned a Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery of radium, together with the French scientist Henri Becquerel. When Pierre Curie died suddenly, in a traffic accident in Paris, Marie Curie began a private journal, "the grey notebooks," where she wrote out her grief.

_Ice House_

Kathleen Scott was a sculptor, and the wife of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott. They had been married two years, with an eleven-month-old son, when Scott went south to the Pole. Upon parting in New Zealand, they made a pact to keep a daily journal for each other. Scott perished on the return journey from the Pole, and when his body and the bodies of his companions were found in the spring, his diary was brought back to England. On the inside cover, Scott had written "Send this diary to my wife." Then Scott drew a line through the word "wife" and wrote instead, "widow."

# _Acknowledgments_

Thanks to the editors of the magazines and anthologies where versions of some of these poems first appeared. From _The Weight of Oranges: Writ, Waves, Poetry Toronto_ , and _Poetry Canada Review;_ from _Miner's Pond: Saturday Night, The Malahat Review_ , and _What_ magazine; from _Skin Divers: Border Crossings, Event, Arc, Toronto Life, Windhorse Reader, Slow Dancer, Fish Drum, We Who Can Fly,_ and _Border Lines: Contemporary Poems in English_. "There Is No City That Does Not Dream" appeared as part of the Toronto Transit Commission's _Poetry on the Way_ program.

The quotation in "Miner's Pond" is from John Noble Wilford's _The Riddle of the Dinosaur,_ on this page from John McLoughlin's _Synapsida: A New Look into the Origin of Mammals,_ and on this page from Timothy Ferris's _Coming of Age in the Milky Way_. The quotations in "The Hooded Hawk" are from Adele Wiseman's _Old Woman at Play_. The quotation in "Fontanelles" is from Boyce Rensberger's _Life Itself,_ and on this page from _Dawn of Art_ by Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Deschamps, and Christian Hillaire.

My thanks to the authors of books that were especially helpful in the research of various poems; for "The Second Search," _Marie Curie,_ by Eve Curie, and for "Ice House," _A Great Task of Happiness,_ by Louisa Young, from which the list of the _Terra Nova_ 's supplies were itemized. "Pillar of Fire" is based on the log entries of Captain Watson, of the H.M.S. _Charles Bal_.

"What the Light Teaches" is for Janis Freedman. "Fresh Mint" is for Vivian Palin.

My thanks to Sonny Mehta.

Thanks to Ellen Seligman. And to Heather Sangster. And to Anita Chong.

Thanks to Marilyn Biderman.

Thanks to David Laurence.

To T. F. & P. And to John.

# A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anne Michaels's first novel, _Fugitive Pieces,_ was translated and published in more than two dozen countries and won several awards, including the 1997 Lannan Literary Award for Fiction and, in Britain, the Guardian Fiction Award and the Orange Prize. She now teaches creative writing in Toronto, and is at work on another novel.

# ALSO BY ANNE MICHAELS

POETRY

_The Weight of Oranges_ (1986)

_Miner's Pond_ (1991)

_Skin Divers_ (1999)

FICTION

_Fugitive Pieces_ (1996)

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