On Wednesdays all over the internet bloggers post a photo with no words to explain it. The idea is the photo says so much it doesn’t need a description.
Photo by Peter Bowers, Gull River, near Eagle Lake, Haliburton County
Wordless Wednesday, 15 May 2013
On Wednesdays all over the internet bloggers post a photo with no words to explain it. The idea is the photo says so much it doesn’t need a description.
Into the Fields
What was it you said to me. What was it
You said when you turned away
The trail of sound extinct while
Seabirds keened effervescent between the towers.
And all the signs were flowers, and all the weeds were slender
rudders from the port. Those windows shuddering their rippling sails.
I stepped away from the city like a ship. I made
Then found my way inside the sun of the country. It followed
In the low distance like erosion that stalks
The cowering inroads and the gravel air
and the stooped clutches of trees where nothing is invented
Because the only hands are birds
And they are the only eyes, signaling the stripped
Extinction of creeks and the palmistry of tire treads
Criss-crossing delicately the bruised grace of fields.
The eclipsing fields are their waves of night.
The rotting waves are their delirious sun.
A dead sea that, when you turn away, blooms like agony.
Feet on Fire
Beasts shimmering from the backcountry,
the legs that bore him here from there.
Their sleek light undone now, their skin shed
of rise and return. They are rabid with recoil.
They hiss like fire over water
at the doctor who aims his camera.
A prisoner of Heaven
now he is in the country of people.
Skin on the legs flag like third place ribbons
at the country fair, the feet of a sow
domesticated, naked, sloppy to the bone, and
after each snapshot slap he winces
Not blindingly; instinctively.
Instinctively as fire. Instinctively as flight.
Instinctively as the gaze migration holds,
that wavers, then leaves behind.
Haiku for Spring
months of cold silence
then this, the cadence of wrens
warming ears like nests
Creek
I find my way back to it, somehow, that joy, rough hewn rocks that flash
for a moment under a coordinated movement of sun and water,
some friction that passes through me all at once, like a ghost,
but pulsing, like a soul finding its way back to me.
Death in the Family
Magic ages: thirty-three and ten
when they plant her into the
mouth’s tongue-cut and upturned grass
and its lips which are bruised and swollen
and parted slightly in disbelief
at the boy who is turning to stone.
As a man, his fingers will comb the ready
scent of the blustered flowers. Sister, father
and kids will gather there of course, and each
will take turns to mention first
how the affectionate summer has charmed
the grave’s spruce to a surprising height,
and by instinct, one or the other
will pluck, at their ankles, its pine combs
as if shells, deaf on their sunken beach.
She’s the seed who grows these still hard dates,
who, in Autumn, sheds spells besides the names’
granite silence. From there, he will glance
across the ruined calendar and see the
braille islands on their blue slivered seas
And when he goes there, he will
know not what to say, and neither will she.
Firmament
I recall the boy beneath the sky,
in the streetlamp and nebula of snow.
A starling straining across its emptiness,
like longing; like premonition, diminishing
a little into the snowblind strand
past vague ruins and cold scratches of air,
scintillating like minnows in a shattered star’s
dandelion ash — dust to dust, to sea,
shivering in a no man’s land,
a boy’s land under a river moon.
Snow on the skull is the memory on fire,
fever without the certainty of weight —
like bags of sugar, or rice, or a pale
body against another — the firmament that
lays open the world it takes in, in one breath,
and then another, like the barren kisses departing
into the still lived-for nothingness.
Enclosing
Double-decker bus two children propped up against the window
pooped out from Charlottown mother still paying the driver
all the change left from the binocular machines
Kathy thought the whales were inside of the ocean
the mother felt against her body her husband held
the new camera from the street craned towards the children
in the upper window Paul pretends to be a boat in a bottle
of glass where the shutter closes and opens again without her
there he watches them float away losing them
in his hand the camera enclosing what remains.
Rite
Stop the lie — and the presses,
you have nothing to say
No know-how to prepare and to spread
the exiled unsaid cross the air of the page
with a finger that divines the cursives and the lines
from windows stung with gowns of frost.
Nothing true to flush mystery from the nests,
to put beauty in its place,
to wake the sleepy island in the skin.
That tall grassy green dreaminess – it’s outsource for blood rootedness.
Wakey, wakey, that “calling” is the groggy swish of your ear in the shell,
the grovelling ritual of your itinerant heart
and the misshapen leftovers nauseous within the spin of the
wash. Out, damned spot! out, I say.
Shut up. Cease and desist. Move along.
Nothing to be seen here.
Not even the invisible.
