for George Whalley 

An hour after the storm on Birch Lake 
the island bristles. Rock. Leaves still falling. 
At this time, in the hour after lightning 
we release the canoes. 
Silence of water 
purer than the silence of rock. 
A paddle touches itself. We move 
over blind mercury, feel the muscle 
within the river, the blade 
weave in dark water. 

Now each casual word is precisely chosen 
passed from bow to stern, as if 
leaning back to pass a canteen. 
There are echoes, repercussions of water. 
We are in absolute landscape, 
among names that fold in onto themselves. 

To circle the island means witnessing 
the blue grey dust of a heron 
released out of the trees. 
So the dialogue slides 
nothing more than friendship 
an old song we break into 
not needing all the words. 

We are past naming the country. 
The reflections are never there 
without us, without the exhaustion 
of water and trees after storm.

~from The Cinnamon Peeler (Vintage International, 1997)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

I never lived far from my country.
However I suffer from farness.
In my childhood my mother had the illness.
She was the one who gave it to me.
Later my father went to work at a place
that gave this illness to people.
It was a place without a name or neighbors.
People said it was the nail on the toe at the end of the world.
We grew up without any other houses nearby.
A place that offered only birds, trees, a river and its fish.
There were unbridled horses in the scrub grass,
their backs covered with butterflies.
The rest was only distance.
Distance was an empty thing we carried in the eye,
what my father called exile.

~ from Birds for a Demolition,  translated from the 
Portuguese by Idra Novey.  (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2010)

Do not expect that if your book falls open
to a certain page, that any phrase
you read will make a difference today,
or that the voices you might overhear
when the wind moves through the yellow-green
and golden tent of autumn, speak to you.

Things ripen or go dry. Light plays on the
dark surface of the lake. Each afternoon
your shadow walks beside you on the wall,
and the days stay long and heavy underneath
the distant rumor of the harvest. One
more summer gone,
and one way or another you survive,
dull or regretful, never learning that
nothing is hidden in the obvious
changes of the world, that even the dim
reflection of the sun on tall, dry grass
is more than you will ever understand.

And only briefly then
you touch, you see, you press against
the surface of impenetrable things.

~ from Daily Horoscopes (Graywolf Press, 1986)

A man walks through his life
as he did when he was a boy,
taking a pear here, an apple there,
three peaches.

It is easy. They are there, by the roadside.

I want to say to him, stop.
I want to say to him, where is the plum tree you planted?

But how can I say this?
I suck on the pit of my own question,
I who also eat daily the labor of others.

~ from After (HarperCollins, 2006)

The calm days of September with their sun. 
It’s time to harvest.
There are still clumps 
of cranberries in the woods, reddening rosehips 
by the stone walls, hazelnuts coming loose, 
and clusters of blackberries shine in the bushes; 
thrushes look around for the last currents 
and wasps fasten on to the sweetening plums.
I set a ladder aside at dusk, and hang 
my basket up in the shed.  The glaciers
all have a thin sprinkling of new snow.  In bed
I hear the brisling fishermen start their motors 
and go out.  They’ll pass the whole night
gliding over the fjord behind their powerful searchlights.

~ from The Winged Energy of Delight, Selected Translations 
by Robert Bly (Perennial, 2004)

The rose
was not searching for the sunrise:
almost eternal on its branch,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for darkness or science:
borderline of flesh and dream,
it was searching for something else.
The rose
was not searching for the rose.
Motionless in the sky
it was searching for something else.

~from The Winged Energy of Delight, poems from Europe, Asia and the Americas, translated by Robert Bly (HarperCollins, 2004)

It isn’t winter that brings it 
out, my cowardice,
but the thickening summer I wallow in
right now, stinking of lilacs, green 
with worms & stamens duplicating themselves 
each one the same

I squat among rows of seeds and impostors 
and snout my hand into the juicy dirt: 
charred chicken bones, rusted nails, 
dogbones, stones, stove ashes.
Down there is another hand, yours, hopeless,  
down there is a future
in which you’re a white white picture
with a name I forgot to write 
underneath, and no date,

in which you’re a suit
hanging with its stubs of sleeves
in a cupboard in a house
in a city I’ve never entered,

a missed beat in space
which nevertheless unrolls itself
as usual.  As usual:
that’s why I don’t want to go on with this.

(I’ll want to make a hole in the earth 
the size of an implosion, a leaf, a dwarf
star, a cave
in time that opens back and back into
absolute darkness and at last
into a small pale moon of light
the size of a hand,
I’ll want to call you out of the grave 
in the form of anything at all)		

~ from Poetry by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Your friend is coming, I say 
to Percy and name a name

and he runs to the door, his
wide mouth in its laugh-shape,

and waves, since he has one, his tail.
Emerson, I am trying to live, 

as you said we must, the examined life.
But there are days I wish  

there was less in my head to examine,
not to speak of the busy heart.  How

would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not
thinking, not weighting anything, just running forward.

~  from Dog Songs (The Penguin Press, 2013)

Walk as far as you can,
then farther, past
the chain-link barring the road, 
tire tracks deep as the rut of your mind, 
the place you always get stuck.
Wanting more, or wanting
less, to be rid of the word 
called wanting. Boulders, 
tall grass, shrubs you can't name, 
birds you can't name,
the ocean. Being a stranger sneaks you through 
the latch of language — briefly. Bottles, you know.
Condoms, you know. And the weight 
of being human where other humans have been. 
Back of the sea like one line of thought, 
slight variation of foam at the shore 
where artifice gives itself up. Farther out, 
a ledge in the rock 
as though attention might help. Turning 
for home, hands in your pockets, night mists in 
like animal breath, the black-brown shapes 
of gathering mammals
bending to drink at the silent pool 
of mind submerged in the mind. 
If a gap in awareness exists, it's there 
you might have slipped through.

~ from Breathing Fire 2 (Nightwood Editions 2004)

I want to get up early one more morning,

before sunrise. Before the birds, even.

I want to throw cold water on my face

and be at my work table

when the sky lightens and smoke

begins to rise from the chimneys

of the other houses.

I want to see the waves break

on this rocky beach, not just hear them

break as I did all night in my sleep.

I want to see again the ships

that pass through the Strait from every

seafaring country in the world—

old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,

and the swift new cargo vessels

painted every color under the sun

that cut the water as they pass.

I want to keep an eye out for them.

And for the little boat that plies

the water between the ships

and the pilot station near the lighthouse.

I want to see them take a man off the ship

and put another up on board.

I want to spend the day watching this happen

and reach my own conclusions.

I hate to seem greedy—have so much

to be thankful for already.

But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.

And go to my place with some coffee and wait.

Just wait, to see what’s going to happen.

~ from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water

(Random House, 1985)

The dead end that I dreaded
confronts me in this
true statement!

It’s apt, manageable, but 
valid only in its locked cabinet.
There’s no finality out here: a sphere 
too vast, too growthful, too
mischievous’ subject as well to swellings, violent
combustion, whizzings off
along the light-years.

There’s too much 
of us for us to know.
But closing heart, and ear 
is a terminus I 
fear, too.
	We slam 
into it, often, though knowing is a peril 
almost as terrible as 
never being sure
where
the dead end will
appear.

~ from Concrete and Wild Carrot (Brick Books, 2005)

I like the generosity of numbers.
 
The way, for example,
 
they are willing to count
 
anything or anyone:
 
two pickles, one door to the room,
 
eight dancers dressed as swans.

  

I like the domesticity of addition—
 
add two cups of milk and stir—
 
the sense of plenty: six plums
 
on the ground, three more
 
falling from the tree.
  


And multiplication's school
 
of fish times fish,
 
whose silver bodies breed
 
beneath the shadow
 
of a boat.

  

Even subtraction is never loss,
 
just addition somewhere else:
 
five sparrows take away two,
 
the two in someone else's
 
garden now.

  

There's an amplitude to long division,
 
as it opens Chinese take-out
 
box by paper box, 
inside every folded cookie
 
a new fortune.

  

And I never fail to be surprised 
 
by the gift of an odd remainder,
 
footloose at the end:
 
forty-seven divided by eleven equals four,
 
with three remaining.

  

Three boys beyond their mothers' call,
 
two Italians off to the sea,
 
one sock that isn't anywhere you look.  

~ from Red Studio (Oberlin College Press, 2007)

The frog half fearful jumps across the path, 
And little mouse that leaves its hole at eve 
Nimbles with timid dread beneath the swath; 
My rustling steps awhile their joys deceive, 
Till past,—and then the cricket sings more strong, 
And grasshoppers in merry moods still wear 
The short night weary with their fretting song. 
Up from behind the molehill jumps the hare, 
Cheat of his chosen bed, and from the bank 
The yellowhammer flutters in short fears 
From off its nest hid in the grasses rank, 
And drops again when no more noise it hears.
 
Thus nature's human link and endless thrall,
 
Proud man, still seems the enemy of all.  

~ from Poems (Ulan Press, 2012)

When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable

yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are

in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,

but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
If I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room

without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer

feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts

when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck

she didn't doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,

perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead woman

who I think permits me
to love women easily,
this poem

is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient

and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

~ from New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994  
(W.W. Norton and Company, 1995)

In June and gentle oven
Summer kingdoms simmer
As they come
And through flower and leaf and love
Release
Their sweetest juice.

No wind at all
On the wide green world
Where fields go stroll-
ing by
And in and out
An adder of a stream
Parts the daisies
On a small Ontario farm.

And where, in the curve of meadow,
Lovers, touching, lie,
A church of grass stands up
And walls them, holy, in.

Fabulous the insects
Stud the air
Or walk on running water,
Klee-drawn saints
And bright as angels are.

Honeysuckle here
Is more than bees can bear
And time turns pale
And stops to catch the breath
And lovers slip their flesh
And light as pollen
Play on treble water
Till bodies reappear
And a shower of sun
To dry their langour.

Then two in one the lovers lie
And peel the skin of summer
With their teeth
And suck its marrow from a kiss
So charged with grace
The tongue, all knowing
Holds the sap of June
Aloof from seasons, flowing.

~ from Poetry by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan (Oxford University Press, 1989)

Fishing for a word in the Pam Pam Café.  Our lunch dishes stacked, pages on the table.  ‘Worn,’ you say, ‘or tarnished.Used.’  I try ‘blackened’ and ‘eroded.’

Your eyes fix on a lamp above your head; mine get lost among table-legs, chair legs.  Finally we settle for ‘old.’

Discovering the justness of the obvious.  It has the right ring, this plain work: like reading the whole menu and ordering soup and a sandwich.  We look at each other and laugh, and our laughter multiplies, drawing stares.  When the waitress comes, with coffee and that smile you want to dance to, we know that later we will go outinto the humid afternoon and walk five or six blocks together for no good
reason, rain wetting our faces.

~from Questions About The Stars (Brick Books, 1998)

Open little box

We kiss your bottom and cover
Keyhole and key

The entire world lies crumpled in you
It resembles everything
Except itself

Not even a clear-sky mother
Would recognize it any more

The rust will eat your key
Our world and us there inside
And finally you too

We kiss your four sides
And four corners
And twenty-four nails
And anything else you have

Open little box

~ from Another Republic (Ecco Press, 1976)

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.

~from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems  
(Harper Collins Publishers, 2003)

We must not turn on the lights in our houses 
until the sun has been down for one hour.

We must sit here at the window, or there 
on the porch, or just around the kitchen table,

wherever it catches us,
and watch it leave.

We must remember the time when 
we had nothing against the dark.

We must remember the easy grace 
of letting darkness fall.

~from The Spirits Need To Eat (Nine-Patch Press, 1999)