New and Selected Poems (26 page)

                                 This evening

The river is a beautiful idle woman.

The day’s August burn-out has distilled

A heady sundowner.

She lies back, bored and tipsy.

She lolls on her deep couch. And a long thigh

Lifts from the flash of her silks.

Adoring trees, kneeling, ogreish eunuchs

Comb out her spread hair, massage her fingers.

She stretches – and an ecstasy tightens

Over her skin, and deep in her gold body

Thrills spasm and dissolve. She drowses.

Her half-dreams lift out of her, light-minded

Love-pact suicides. Copulation and death.

She stirs her love-potion – ooze of balsam

Thickened with fish-mucus and algae.

You stand under leaves, your feet in shallows.

She eyes you steadily from the beginning of the world.

Tonight

From the swaddled village, down the padded lane

Snow is hurrying

To the tryst, is touching

At her hair, at her raiment

Glint-slippered

Over the stubble,

                             naked under

Her light robe, jewels

In her hair, in her ears, at her bare throat

Dark eye-flash

                         twigs and brambles

Catch at her

                  as she lifts

The raggy curtains

Of the river’s hovel, and plunges

Into his grasping bed.

The lithe river rejoices all morning

In his juicy bride – the snow princess

Who peeped from clouds, and chose him,

                           and descended.

The tale goes on

With glittery laughter of immortals

Shaking the alders –

In the end a drowsy after-bliss

Blue-hazes the long valley. High gulls

Look down on the flash

And languor of suppled shoulders

Bedded in her ermine.

                                   Night

Lifts off the illusion. Lifts

The beauty from her skull. The sockets, in fact,

Are root-arches – empty

To ashes of stars. Her kiss

Grips through the full throat and locks

On the dislodged vertebrae.

                                            Her talons

Lengthened by moonlight, numb open

The long belly of blood.

                                       And the river

Is a gutter of death,

A spill of glitters

                            dangling from her grasp

As she flies

Through the shatter of space and

Out of being.

Dawn. The river thins.

The combed-out coiffure at the pool-tail

Brightens thinly.

The slung pool’s long hammock still flat out.

The sea-trout, a salt flotilla, at anchor,

Substanceless, flame-shadowed,

Hang in a near emptiness of sunlight.

There they actually are, under homebody oaks,

Close to teddybear sheep, near purple loose-strife –

Space-helms bowed in preoccupation,

Only a slight riffling of their tail-ailerons

Corrective of drift,

Gills easing.

And the pool’s toiled rampart roots,

The cavorting of new heifers, water-skeeters

On their abacus, even the slow claim

Of the buzzard’s hand

Merely decorate a heaven

Where the sea-trout, fixed and pouring,

Lean in the speed of light.

                                        And make nothing

Of the strafed hogweed sentry skeletons,

Nothing of the sun, so openly aiming down.

Thistle-floss bowls over them. First, lost leaves

Feel over them with blind shadows.

The sea-trout, upstaring, in trance,

Absorb everything and forget it

Into a blank of bliss.

And this is the real samadhi – worldless, levitated.

Till, bulging, a man-shape

Wobbles their firmament.

                                        Now see the holy ones

Shrink their auras, slim, sink, focus, prepare

To scram like trout.

Jumbled iceberg hills, away to the North –

And a long wreath of fire-haze.

The Gulkana, where it meets the Copper,

Swung, jade, out of the black spruce forest,

And disappeared into it.

Strange word, Gulkana. What does it mean?

A pre-Columbian glyph.

A pale blue thread – scrawled with a child’s hand

Across our map. A Lazarus of water

Returning from seventy below.

                                                   We stumbled,

Not properly awake

In a weird light – a bombardment

Of purplish emptiness –

Among phrases that lumped out backwards. Among rocks

That kept startling me – too rock-like,

Hypnagogic rocks –

                                  A scrapyard of boxy shacks

And supermarket refuse, dogs, wrecked pick-ups,

The Indian village where we bought our pass

Was comatose – on the stagnation toxins

Of a cultural vasectomy. They were relapsing

To Cloud-like-a-boulder, Mica, Bear, Magpie.

We hobbled along a tightrope shore of pebbles

Under a trickling bluff

That bounced the odd pebble onto us, eerily.

(The whole land was in perpetual, seismic tremor.)

Gulkana –

Biblical, a deranging cry

From the wilderness – burst past us.

A stone voice that dragged at us.

I found myself clinging

To the lifted skyline fringe of rag spruce

And the subsidence under my bootsoles

With balancing glances – nearly a fear,

Something I kept trying to deny

With deliberate steps. But it came with me

As if it swayed on my pack –

A nape-of-the-neck unease. We’d sploshed far enough

Through the spongy sinks of the permafrost

For this river’s

Miraculous fossils – creatures that each midsummer

Resurrected through it, in a blood-rich flesh.

Pilgrims for a fish!

Prospectors for the lode in a fish’s eye!

In that mercury light, that ultra-violet,

My illusion developed. I felt hunted.

I tested my fear. It seemed to live in my neck –

A craven, bird-headed alertness.

And in my eye

That felt blind somehow to what I stared at

As if it stared at me. And in my ear –

So wary for the air-stir in the spruce-tips

My ear-drum almost ached. I explained it

To my quietly arguing, lucid panic

As my fear of one inside me,

A bodiless twin, some doppelgänger

Disinherited other, unliving,

Ever-living, a larva from prehistory,

Whose journey this was, who now exulted

Recognizing his home,

And whose gaze I could feel as he watched me

Fiddling with my gear – the interloper,

The fool he had always hated. We pitched our tent

And for three days

Our tackle scratched the windows of the express torrent.

We seemed underpowered. Whatever we hooked

Bent in air, a small porpoise,

Then went straight downriver under the weight

And joined the glacial landslide of the Copper

Which was the colour of cement.

Even when we got one ashore

It was too big to eat.

But there was the eye!

                                       I peered into that lens

Seeking what I had come for. (What had I come for?

The camera-flash? The burned-out, ogling bulb?)

What I saw was small, crazed, snake-like.

It made me think of a dwarf, shrunken sun

And of the black, refrigerating pressures

Under the Bering Sea.

We relaunched their mulberry-dark torsos,

Those gulping, sooted mouths, the glassy visors –

Arks of an undelivered covenant,

Egg-sacs of their own Eden,

Seraphs of heavy ore

They surged away, magnetized,

Into the furnace boom of the Gulkana.

Bliss had fixed their eyes

Like an anaesthetic. They were possessed

By that voice in the river

And its accompaniment –

The flutes, the drumming. And they rose and sank

Like voices, themselves like singers

In its volume. We watched them, deepening away.

They looked like what they were, somnambulists,

Drugged, ritual victims, melting away

Towards a sacrament –

                                         a consummation

That could only be death.

Which it would be, within some numbered days,

On some stony platform of water,

In a spillway, where a man could hardly stand –

Aboriginal Americans,

High among rains, in an opening of the hills,

They will begin to circle,

Shedding their ornaments,

In shufflings and shudders, male by female,

Begin to dance their deaths –

The current hosing over their brows and shoulders,

Bellies riven open and shaken empty

Into a gutter of pebbles

In the orgy of eggs and sperm,

The dance orgy of being reborn

From which masks and regalia drift empty,

Torn off – at last their very bodies,

In the numbed, languorous frenzy, as obstacles,

Ripped away –

                            ecstasy dissolving

In the mercy of water, at the star of the source,

Devoured by revelation,

Every molecule drained, and counted, and healed

Into the amethyst of emptiness –

I came back to myself. A spectre of fragments

Lifted my quivering coffee, in the aircraft,

And sipped at it.

I imagined the whole 747

As if a small boy held it

Making its noise. A spectre,

Escaping the film’s flicker, peered from the porthole

Under the sun’s cobalt core-darkness

Down at Greenland’s corpse

Tight-sheeted with snow-glare.

                                                    Word by word

The voice of the river moved in me.

It was like lovesickness.

A numbness, a secret bleeding.

Waking in my body.

                                    Telling of the King

Salmon’s eye.

                           Of the blood-mote mosquito.

And the stilt-legged, subarctic, one-rose rose

With its mock-aperture

Tilting towards us

In our tent-doorway, its needle tremor.

And the old Indian Headman, in his tatty jeans and socks, who smiled

Adjusting to our incomprehension – his face

A whole bat, that glistened and stirred.

Join water, wade in underbeing

Let brain mist into moist earth

Ghost loosen away downstream

Gulp river and gravity

Lose words

Cease

Be assumed into glistenings of lymph

As if creation were a wound

As if this flow were all plasm healing

Be supplanted by mud and leaves and pebbles

By sudden rainbow monster-structures

That materialize in suspension gulping

And dematerialize under pressure of the eye

Be cleft by the sliding prow

Displaced by the hull of light and shadow

Dissolved in earth-wave, the soft sun-shock,

Dismembered in sun-melt

Become translucent – one untangling drift

Of water-mesh, and a weight of earth-taste light

Mangled by wing-shadows

Everything circling and flowing and hover-still

Crawl out over roots, new and nameless

Search for face, harden into limbs

Let the world come back, like a white hospital

Busy with urgency words

Try to speak and nearly succeed

Heal into time and other people