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Because there were no hands, they were
completely absent. I don't mean this as a joke. Nothing
prepared me for it: it was like a dream.
That's why. Because I've tried hard to forget.
And, without warning, I could tell that I was
seven storeys in the air. The fragrance of the earth
when I lay down on it. Because
I'd pulled the fuses from my heart
and every corridor was suddenly ablaze.
Because things like that don't happen on the bus.
I mean that when I stepped out on that plain,
I'd been alone for years - it was
the breath of spring, and it was snowing.
Because it was a river in my heart, because
it moved like winter underneath my skin. A tree
came into leaf behind my eyes.
It woke me up.
The silence sparkled. Imagine
singing without sound, because it was
like that; and when I think of it at lunch,
Liz, Shelley talking about movies, Gerry
hockey, Bruce about the mayonnaise,
I start to cry. Because my body
was a flock of horned larks and my bones were
bells. It didn't care - that's how I knew.
Because it was the opening of an eye. And, yes:
because it was against all reason.

Bee Music

Keepers of the secret
sound of sunlight, no job
too small, this
is the cheerful
earless tuning of the music
of the spheres: O
lunchpail Pythagoreans,
who'd have guessed
the crystal nocturne
of the cosmos was first
scored for miniature
fun-fur kazoos?
Deaf as tiny
Beethovens, you bend
the goldenrod
beneath your weight.
In your toolbox, Euclid
and the sextant of your
sunstone eye.
Ah, little nectar-
mules, you
scholars of the azimuth! Ah,
perfumed geometers
of the fields!

Wolf Willow

    Once
I walked out in the evening
to the hill's brow: air
a kind of ocean,
the first night currents
velvety and wet,
sharp in the nose
as menthol, or
like distant flute-song,
like the sound of running water
when it can't be seen;
and the day-scents,
jumbled, dissipating
in the long awns
of the light: rose,
bedstraw, poplar, spruce;
and caraganas, road dust,
field dust, clover;
car exhaust and cut grass,
dog hair and manure - and then
the dark viola
of your fragrance: sweeter
than allspice, heavy
as a hank of hair,
or as the light
inside the dim folds
of the curtain -

    once
I woke to a rustle
close above me, faint
glint of a necklace, then
the closing door - it had been
a kiss,
warm, flushed:
o, that perfume!
the tawniness
that wreathed me,
lifted me through dark
like thirst, like
hunger.

Work

    On Tuesdays,
we would drive into the town.
Small town, long drive. Sometimes,
there might be something wrong,
a machine part broken or a twitchy
tooth. But mostly we just picked up
tea and flour and the mail. For the work
was on us then; we needed
next to nothing: work
like a spell of good weather
you know is going to hold, that mix
of surprise and deep contentment
in the morning when you draw the blinds:
of course. Something about
the arc of destination, its
updraft of light: work carries us
the way love can, but with
less sorrow. That whole summer
I wore mismatched laces in my boots,
one red, one white, because I knew
no order could improve upon
the one that gripped me: the world
unrolling like a field of daisies
in July, the truckbox full of tinned beans,
bread and beer, the road
tireless in its rise along the cutbank,
seared cries of the cicadas,
the dust, the heat.

Black Spruce

     A late-May evening, the fields straw coloured, only a touch of green ghosting the pastures because of the drought. The tuft of aspens on the gravel bar just coming into leaf in the last day or so, late, because of the cold. The soil in my mother's garden looks like black face powder - as though, if you touched it, it would feel that fine. Bits of dried peatmoss collect in the depressions of rows where beets and carrots have not sprouted. It's always windy now, she tells me; and cold; and overcast - though never any rain.

     I'm out walking after supper. As often on a cloudy day, the sun has broken through as it drops west, and the winter-white stubble glitters in the low-angled light. The clouds begin to break up, rifts of blue opening between the great swales of the cyclone slowly churning its way out of the northwest. As it sets the stubble gleaming, the sunlight also seems to loft the dark underbellies of the clouds higher, firing their crests a dense, incandescent white. The air is sharp with shadow and with light.

     A stretch of river glints up across the flank of the west field. It was visible as soon as I stepped through the windbreak west of the house. This is partly because the foot of the west field sweeps down close to the river and beavers have felled all the aspen and balsam poplar along the river's edge, and partly because, in spite of the drought, the river is exceptionally high: dammed repeatedly over the course of its meanderings by the same beavers. My mother has warned me there are no fords left.

     Even so, I am unprepared for the extent of the change. What used to be a series of clear, brown pools linked by rapids of fist and ostrich-egg-sized stones, is now a thirty foot wide sheet of currentless and cloudy grey. I can see the lip of a dam about thirty yards downstream, and hear the surprisingly loud gush of water over it. Beyond it, another flat expanse, backed up around the first of two right-angle bends.

     The riverbank from the dam to the bend forms the west edge of a little wild area my grandfather never cleared. There's a sink of sorts in the middle which, during the wet years of my childhood, was always squelchy, even in August; and the eastern end rises very steeply to the horse pasture - both good reasons to have left the area in trees, assuming he wanted any beyond the simple beauty of the result. When I was a kid and wanted to be alone, I came down here. Not by way of the open slope of the west field and south along the river as I've come this evening, but less visibly through tunnels in the caragana-and-poplar windbreak, a dash across the north end of the horse pasture, and a plunge into the woods at its easternmost corner. Deer and the dog had worn a trail just along the fenceline - the crest of the steep slope up from the sink. It was rough - there was a lot of deadfall and wild rose and tangly saskatoon-and-poplar-sapling undergrowth - but it was marginally better than bushwhacking. The trail led along south, to just above the second of the right-angle bends, where it petered out, branching along and down toward the river in several directions.

     Right on that second bend was a big black spruce. Actually, there were three stems, but I thought of them as one tree. One stuck out from the bank above the water a good foot before shooting straight up; the other two were set back into the bank, leaving a kind of platform of roots and pale clay-ey soil between themselves and the one that stuck out. It wasn't exactly a hiding place - the spruce was so old it had lost its lower branches, so anyone sitting in the middle was pretty visible - but it was a bower of sorts. The other side of the river was too steep to be farmed and so was also wild land as far as you could see in either direction. It was shady, but not dank - sunlight dappled in across the water and filtered down through the dog-tail branches of the spruce. You could sit on the stem that stuck out and dangle your feet in the water. There was a narrow ford just upstream where you could fool around on stepping stones, and once I found a freshwater clam. But mostly I just sat and swatted mosquitoes and did nothing. The rill of the water through the stones was faint, not as loud as the aspens unless the day was very still. Some birdsong - robins, jays, a song sparrow, chickadees, the occasional wren - but significantly less than nowadays. We didn't feed - no one did - and it was the heyday of DDT.

     This evening, as I turn from the river toward the woods, it's clear the beavers have been at work there, too - not just along the bank, but deep inland. The whole grove looks sparse, and the closer I get, the worse the damage appears. Three in four trees are down, in places the sixty-foot trunks toppled, stacked, criss-crossing, splayed out like a bomb site. A lot of it is very fresh, some trees chewed through but still standing, balanced on the pencil-point of heartwood, tilting into a neighbouring tree, both just coming into leaf. Nearly every sapling has been taken, too - but in a single, clean upward slice, like an axe-blade might make. There are beaver slides, heavily worn, every eight to ten feet along the bank. I can't stop thinking about all those teeth, how, even while I'm thinking about them, they keep growing.

     Beavers were a rare sight along the river when I was a kid. I remember being taken down at dusk one summer night - well after eleven, the whole incident so surreal in memory I may have been woken up after having been put to bed - and just making out the wide V, wider than any muskrat's before the huge slap startled us all so much we gasped and someone - Uncle Keith? - slipped in the mud. They have been steadily growing more numerous over the years. Among other things, they have no natural enemies - we have the odd coyote, but no wolves, and only rarely a bear down from House Mountain to roll in the oats in the fall. I'd been thinking the water couldn't be too healthy for them, what with the pesticides and herbicides used upstream. But maybe the pollution has been making them more fertile?

     Of course, having seen the levels on the river, and the damage upstream to the soft clay banks, I'm ready for the spruce to be submerged and tilting, possibly even toppled into the river. But when I get around the debris piled up behind the trees still standing near what used to be the ford (there's another dam there, and another, it will turn out, downstream from the next bend, and another and another after that), there's nothing. The whole hillside has slumped and been absorbed into the river, leaving a cutbank, pale and raw, some fifteen, eighteen feet high. A couple of fenceposts lean drunkenly out from the horse pasture, barely held in place by the barbed wire that once stretched taut between them.

     A dissolution that complete, taken by water in a year without rain. The cold weight in the pit of my stomach - something awry where I thought I was least vulnerable, in the place that was stable when other things weren't, that was solace because unchanging, or changing cyclically, slowly, on a rhythm large enough to serve as a backdrop against which other losses might be made sense of, and I am stumbling up through the cutwood, the deadfall and the prickered undergrowth, not crying but suddenly in a hurry, bursting out the northeast corner into the winter-white hayfield, under those dry, swollen clouds, in my home place, lost.