The after-silence of his death becomes porous
To the gossip of regret that follows failure.
Through the cold, quiet nighttime of the grave
underground,
The earth concentrated on him with complete longing
Until his sleep could recall the dark from beyond
To enfold memory lost in the requiem of mind.
The moon stirs a wave of brightening in the stone.
He rises clothed in the young colours of dawn.
THE ASCENSION
With waves the ocean soothes the dark stillness of
the shore.
With words the mind would calm the awful, inner quiet.
Offerings to the nothingness on which we trespass.
Our imprint no deeper than breath on a mirror.
Though delighted by the wonder of your return,
To glimpse you is already too much for their eyes.
At your cadence of voice a bird stirs in the heart,
Its wings spread such brightness nothing can hold its form.
You are no longer from here, yet you still linger
In the lightness, wed to the dance you awaken,
As if in drudged-down lives, the song of your new hands
Could raise the soul towards horizons of desire.
You slip through a door of air. Memory comes home,
Bright as a dead tree drawn to blossom by the moon.
THE DESCENT OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
Somewhere in our clay remembers the speed of cold,
Overtaking the surge of colours with grey breath,
And the shudder of fields, as they smother beneath
The white infinity of ice paralysing the world.
How swiftly fear touches this relic-cold in the bone.
After his second going, they hide from the crowd.
Then, like manna from a red wind, a tongue of
flame swirls
Into each mind huddled there in the fear-filled room.
The language caul they lived in falls, leaves them wordless,
Then, a kindling, words they never knew they had come
Alive out of nowhere sprung with awakening
That will not cease until winter sets the heart free.
Out in the open now, voices of new belonging,
Needing no courage beyond the fire of their longing.
THE ASSUMPTION
Perhaps time is the keeper of distance and loss,
Knowing that we are but able for a little at a time.
And the innocence of fragments is wise with us,
Keeps us from order that is not native to our dust.
Yet, without warning, a life can suddenly chance
On its hidden rhythm, find a flow it never knew.
Where the heart was blind, subtle worlds rise into view;
Where the mind was forced, crippled thought
begins to dance.
As if this day found for her everything she lost.
Her breath infused with harvest she never expected
From the unlived lives she had only touched in dream;
Her mind rests; memory glows in a stairs of twilight.
Her hair kisses the breeze. Her eyes know it is time.
She looks as young as the evening the raven came.
THE CORONATION
It was a long time ago in another land.
Who can tell how it really was before belief
Came towards you with a hunger that could not see you
Except against white air cleansed of the shadow of earth?
No inkling that you were a free spirit who loved
The danger of seeing the world with an open mind,
How you strove to be faithful to uncertainty
And let nothing unquestioned settle in your heart.
You loved to throw caution to the wind when you danced.
To be outside in the dawn before people were,
Letting the blue tides of your dreaming settle ashore.
The village said you put the whole thing into his head.
In the glow of your silence, the heart grows tranquil.
No one will ever know where you had to travel.
DISTANCES
The antelope are the only creatures swift enough to catch the distance.
—LOUISE ERDRICH
Every thought should recall the ruin of a smile.
—E. M. CIORAN
Because the outer walls of God are glass.
—ANNE CARSON
WORDS
For Ethel and Sheila
Words may know the way to reach the dark
Where the wild sweetness of a hillside
Is distilled in a hive under grass.
Words may tell how the rhythm of tide
Can soften its salt-voice on the shore
Through music it steals when stone confides.
Words may capture how the ravens soar
In silk black selves far into the blue
To seek the nest of night’s colour hoard.
Words may live under ground out of view
Holding a vanished world etched in scrolls
Under sands where streets lay and youth grew.
When the red vapour breathes through the soul
And pain closes down the ease of the day
Words stagger back to silence and fold.
WINGS
For Josie
Whenever a goose was killed,
My mother got the two wings.
They were placed on the rack
Over the black Stanley range
And taken down to sweep
Around the grate and the floor.
Local women said: no matter
How you sprinkled it, every time
You’d sweep a concrete floor,
You’d get more off it.
As if, deep down,
There was only dust.
Often during sweeping,
A ray of light
Through the window
Would reveal
How empty air
Could hold a wall
Of drunken dust.
Instead of being folded around
Each side of a living body,
Embracing the warmth
And urgency of a beating heart,
The wings are broken objects now,
Rubbed and rubbed, edge down
Into an insatiable floor,
Smothered and thinned,
Until they become ghost feathers
Around a cusp of bone
Polished by motherly hand.
Never again to be disturbed
Every year by the call
Of the wild geese overhead,
Reminding them of the sky,
Urging them to raise the life
They embrace, to climb the breeze
Beyond the farm, towards horizons
That veil the green surge of the ocean.