My Heart

This adventure, ready to be told. 

Upstream must be a falls since we hear it, but here on the silty bank it’s quiet and gentle while we watch a woman hold a young boy’s head under the surface of the cleanest stream, pebbles bright and colorful below, resolute while he kicks and bucks and attempts to rear against her grip then slows until his body brooks her assault and his dark hair waves like tendrils of so long.

Between the dog and the wolf lies the fleeting butterfly of youth.

Eventide. Sicily. Zimbabwe.

“Give me your hand. I will hold it now and beyond.”

This cocoon we arrived in, snared between a train’s blare and the stutter-step of the land. Someone told me there were mushroom clouds over New York City and maybe Palermo too. I was two-thirds into my trip, urgent to curl inward, blessed by topography and the sky’s corvid plaint. Mercy me. Lucky me. I never saw the land itself upend.

That whole wood—those quaking dreamland treetops—flinches in the glare of our stopgap moment.

Ain’t no one can bring the news like… Shine Billy Until… Swine Hilly Unwell… Spine Silly Upswell… Crime Filly Upscale.

It’s a silvery muscle caught in a creek and released, a quick last shiver in the treetops.

It’s drama and glamor and the scarlet clamor of a cardinal; admit you never understood Manc swagger.

Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu. Moyo wangu.

Claudia is a woman playing an accordion in the barroom on the headland. She must endure jokes from the regulars, all men, about catching her tits in it. But she isn’t playing for them. A man who might have passed on by is snagged by the wheeze of her songs and changes course to enter the small room. Claudia only thinks of blood in a river. Of a bloodred heart.

“I miss you, my singular boy.”

Slung amid the clatter, clenched like knotted ganglia, the night is mostly silent till a siren blurts, greyed beneath this brickwork, cursing such rodent luck this far underneath the aqueduct. 

Cry, my blackcurrant eyes, my sly rat face.

“Did Anna fall, or was she claimed?”

When did you arrive? How have I missed you? I meant to write a poem or even a song, awaiting your approval, but my aim failed, all these sounds imploding like elastic chatter, some cleansing, cumulative, noteworthy collapse.

Not everything succumbs to appraisal, and much exceeds our grasp.

"Entre chien et loup." 

If you are here, please love it all, most everything, the faraway horizons, the clotheared, ruined, spangled things that mattered. 

________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Maw

Friends tell me this much: after you discovered the body, you drove ardent, rode hell to breakfast, regaled by the eternal winds. Huh. So good, yes? I have eloquent friends. 

Who so much knows vengeance from justice, and when the injury is deep whosoever cares?

I wait. Through a dry season I wait. Through heat domes and then torrents. This tiny cabin is my world. The planet moves smooth the way the planet always moves; how does it never creak? Its birth in fire is imprinted on its bones. Mostly we don’t see the horror… only its sigil.

The rewards in this world commensurate with our toil are sometimes scant. Three decades of bestowal on hard lands mocked in an instant of a dike breach, an oversight. Livestock drowned. Homesteads sunken. All trust ruined. Hard deities beseeched to no avail. The ears of the gods are stone.

Gone from here the breath of fall. Approaching the arctic throat of a new season. Written on the air like wispy staves, tiny murmurations, the melodic winter breath of birds.

Ravens gather rowdy and drink of the air. The little wolves sing high and lonesome under the spilled paint of stars, songs about crags and ridges, the memory of mountains, of how the world once was. 

I live on mushrooms and sundry gifts of a generous forest.

Your voice becomes the discourse of my dreams. I hear you every night as you close in on me. Sometimes these dreams arouse more than fear—a frisson, a dark thrill.

“I will claim you. There is no escape. My hunger and thirst are to balance the ledger.”

I answer you.

“If you’re gonna unmake me unmake me special. You about to eat me make it memorable.”

Out there, today, the sounds of apocalypse ramp up in the dusk; ozone scours my sinuses. You are almost here. I have forgotten who I am. Friend or stranger? Son or lover?

I wonder: did I commit my terrible act to make of me your prey? Does the prey dream of the predator less in fear than in anticipation? Are birth and death the very same, spooled and unspooled by time?

The hour is now. All falls still in the world, a stillness you fill completely. The door bursts inward and all I see are clustered teeth in an endless maw.

____________________

Image © Kathrin Swoboda

Heaven to Touch

There was this time when everyone ignored the springtime gusts and bowed to the prevailing spiel and trailed their pollinated limbs like sugarcoated candy. Honeybees still dream on this.

Stella is gleaming under a sunset, her oil-spill skin an extension of her faith, which only believes in money and loveliness and sweat. 

Her wife is nameless and brilliant, lost in a shadow thing, spoiled by beach proximity, shifting from cheap decaying sushi to plastic pails and tiny spades reeking of chemical falsehood. Glitter and attenuated nudity. What, after all, do you dream?

She wanted to remember all the stuff from before, her oldest friend, her first unencumbered love, and yet she stumbled on it, fumbled her surety, and never quite picked it up. This was the ravens’ time. 

Her sister tried to warn us. She squeezed herself into a space by the Mexican place, the lime of her dress translucent in the late afternoon, Frankie Valli joyous on somebody’s radio. Locale, locale, O margaritaville, I will love you over and again for your sweet fucking face.

My heart so wide, kitty corner, my girl was getting off shift.

“Where is any of this happening?” we heard our mama say. 

“Not entirely sure,” the consensus managed. 

She was right, though, to ask. None of this felt real. Perhaps our stage had been displaced, or endless asphalt suddenly emerged like a new undreamed-of stage, where quiet Canadians might just drive a monster Dodge and jump the curb and grind the bones of the infidel. Or more likely the innocent. Blastocysts and freaks. Thermonuclear glow and schism and shear and bellow and bloom, a groan from bellow. A killing ground upon which our raven idol endlessly chides and scolds.

We’ve been hearing auroras and cicadas wrong all this time. Loneliness is breaking us.

Sometimes you think I know you love me, but I just jumble all those words. 

I met her out back, and we merged our hands and strolled beside the canal after sunset. Lights in some of the barges orange-cozy hearts. Inns and taverns looming and leaning, a night of sheer, an urgent whisper: be here, stay here, be heard, always heed the night birds. 

A lonesome drunken song lamenting paucity. 

“How is it we only meet when everything is wrong?” she asked.

I was quiet. I had no answer. 

“Well?” she tried again. 

Perhaps, I thought, it takes our twisted theory of string to find some unravelled knot and tie a new entire universe atop our flailing premise, but thankfully I never got around to voicing such a desperate and stillborn thing.

____________

Image © Rebecca Loranger

Splendour Without Diminishment

Here a dark house cached in a deep, dark wood when the wind awakes.

Spiralling unlikely in the riled air, torn switches of cedar and fir ride the bluster, ripped and rising and falling, brief and tiny brooms to sweep the fitful air nonetheless ordained to meet the littered ground. The roar through lashing branches primal, the howl of some great maddened deity, a shriek of tragic choruses, oceanic, passionate of its ownself, nonchalant of all others. 

It’s like we forgot the incendiary pulse of fire. Forgot the faces of our grandfolk. 

Forgot that balance isn’t symmetry, and all the rest.

***

This isn’t my apocalypse. I don’t know why it’s fallen on me to tell it. But tell it I might. 

Nothing happens for any reason whatsoever. It’s all just fluke. Finding these legal pads and a clutch of old lead pencils was a random thing. But it ended up conferring something on me. Like, the tribe has spoken and I am its scribe, or some such portentous bullshit. No, it’s fluke. It’s chance. It’s stupid. 

***

I dreamed of Tekahionwake. She and Chief Capilano were seated in a longhouse at a large elliptical table filled with a great spread: venison, buffalo, succulent salmon, steaming bannock. Quiet people moved in the shadows. At the table, the two great friends were discussing Emily Carr in a way that made me feel strange and uncomfortable. At last I spoke up.

“Emily isn’t here to defend herself,” I said, keeping my tone neutral.

“Did you know my given name is also Emily?” asked Tekahionwake.

“I didn’t. You mean English? I thought it was Pauline. But wait, no, I kind of did. E. Pauline, right?”

She didn’t say the word itself, but her face was eloquent enough. “Precisely.” 

And already she was lost in another of Joe’s big tales. Already I’d forgotten why I’d cared. I only know a poet must be treasured by her tribe.

Awake, if pressed, I’d guess this dream related times long gone and now forever lost.

***

No one stands alone. 

This place. This dark and shining place. This arid dripping place. This flat and craggy place. The Salish Sea to the Kootenays, the Chilcotin and the Cariboo. Haida Gwai to the great Peace River. Similkameen. Musqueam. This edible grass that grows in the sea. At last we can drop the quotidian and give it the name it always craved. 

I hereby name you Konaway Tilikum. 

“Every people.”

The forests sigh in relief. The mountains sigh in relief. The inlets and islands sigh in relief. Orcas filter dawnlight through expelled mist. The small coastal wolves do a shuffle on the pebble beach. The spirit bear yawns and licks her lips and walks the balance beam of a downed hemlock. The sockeye dream of a comeback. The monarchs too. The raven chuckles and nods. The eagle ignores it all. Silverthrone awaits his day.

The role of storyteller dismembered, parcelled off, each character its own perspective, as it always was. The mosses. The sword ferns. The nurse logs. The living green breath of the understory.

No one will ever paint this now. No one will know what a painting even is. 

The House Carpenter

“When a woman gets in trouble, everybody throw her down.” — Robert Johnson

“It’s about a woman in trouble.” — David Lynch

_____________________

Tumbling, stuttering, a guttural stammering. Coyote in the dark hills yammering. These are the finish lines we contrive when we are cruel. When we dam the staggered voices of the anguished.

“Somebody died here tonight. A terrible killing. Let me clean the ground.”

(Shirley and Jamie carved in a tree,

M-I-S-S-I-N-G.

First comes dread, then comes malice,

Then comes the fruit of the poison chalice.)

“No time. Let it pass.”

Hot liquid days. Blessings, our daemon English hearts ablaze.  

Death in the bike lanes. Death in the bay. A kindness, unacknowledged.

You’ve seen her tight to her shadow, pulled in like shellfish, fussed over and fingered by the matriarch. Don’t assume that’s all she is. Don’t. Oh, she waits. Bides her time. But take a breath or two, sit tight, hang fire, her killing time is coming.

“I need to do this.”

“Two people die every second. Give it up.” 

How is it you stumble on trouble every day? You are a slavering bat with your sonar tuned to strife. 

You’re in the West End, the water beyond the palms placid as a cataract. Driftwood logs punctuate the beach. In daylight everything is green; at night we’re all cetacean. You ask a gull why pain exists. A shadow transits the sun, your momentary skin a-flinch, volatile like waves. The gull only laughs, glimpsing and rebutting its own ephemeral ghost.

It’s a single second plucked from all the generous seconds offered us.

Are we to be returned to the manufacturer? Is this our fate as hosts?

The man in your house is wrong and strange. The quieting of night makes you wait.

He spreads all his tools and his face won’t ever change.

Why are the times you least feel like talking always the ones you need to most?

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Image © Viktor Jakovlev