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. 

Window

“Heal, heal, little frog’s tail

If you don’t heal today, you’ll heal tomorrow.”

*

These are life’s moments sans frames.

Uncle Fred loans him his classic convertible for the day. Tyrell revels in the breezes of the city, even if they’re redolent of asphalt and bitumen. He feels his maleness distilled. He imagines a simpler time, a world of clean skies and sullied earth, of bright busy crowds and dirty, scheming besuited men and acid women leaking betrayal.

His smile is a midsummer signal. 

When he hears the brief yelp of the siren, the sun at its noonday apex, he’s so honey-sated pollinated and sure he isn’t speeding that his guard is down. 

There’s a shadow at his window ’bout to fall across his whole life.

“Hello, officer. How can I help you, my dude?”

“Hands on the fucking wheel! Now!”

We don’t need to see it; we’ve already seen it. Some mother will see her son’s last moments on some stranger’s body camera.

***

“They didn’t take his life; they took the rest of his life.” 

“What’s the difference?”

“I just like accuracy.”

***

Through a smeared window, I watched her. She stared ahead, at a wall. The wall had some old school swirly design in red that I can’t describe, and probably has a name, yet it stayed with me, this moment, this scene, her yellow hair around her architectural shoulders, her still eyes, a room smoky with age and all the mundane moments it had held.

A choice came to me. Leave now and this would dissipate, or go in and rewire destiny.

I went in.

***

It’s an eye. An eye isn’t a window to anything. It looks out not in. If it offends, pluck it out. Be my guest. Take that razor and slice, my Andalusian dog.

Let’s get biblical and trade. Leave the whole world blind.

For the sake of the sacred and the profane, please, obliterate the pane.

*

“Sana, sana, colita de rana

Si no sanas hoy, sanaras manana.”

______________________

Image © David Humphrey

Malevolence

Inside the tumbledown tavern, the young man from the north with the black beard sits beside the grey-bearded men like a raven among toothless old wolves. Lanterns gleam weakly. Tobacco and salt and fish mix with the tang of whisky. Quick glances are all they spare him until one of them speaks.

“New to these parts?” He doesn’t look his way.

“Aye,” says the young man.

Then the old fisherman looks for a moment and nods at the scars and scrapes on the younger man’s knuckles.

“See you work with yer hands.” 

“I do at that. Make stubborn things do what they durstn’t.”

The greybeard clears his throat. “Mite isolated out here.”

“I prefer things that way.”

“Mayhap a poet too?”

“I didn’t mean for me.”

A few of them grimace as if they’ve tried to smile but can’t quite.

***

She walks outside as night falls in a cadence to match her heart. The ocean is silent, the Milky Way a scarf of glitter.

He will be home soon, having wooed the locals, laid traps for any thoughts of escape.

Behind the cottage, the early winter fields, dun and featureless under the stars, seem like a place loneliness might go to meet its own ghost and succumb.

Then, as always, his brisk footsteps along the path. Her nails making moon shapes in her palms. The airless, cheerless land without breath.

Someone has robbed even the gulls of their voices.

***

After he hits her the last time, harder than usual and partnered by a flash of savage joy, she waits for his storm to abate then leaves the cottage and walks to the clifftop and watches the slow grey heave of the sea. It looks brutish, forsaken, near dead. She keeps her gaze distant, not on her feet but on the damn-fool horizon, a thin downturned line of woe, so she cannot tell how close she is to the edge. 

Perhaps she will see a mast. Find a brittle message curled in an ancient bottle. Or someone on the rocks below might hail her. Marvels. Phantasms. Delusions.

Her hitching breath louder than the surf, her stymied heart a church bell in a blighted land, pealing unheard.

We will never know if her next step finds land or falls hopeless through tenuous air. All we know is she is there and she is alone and we’ve left this story now. 

__________

Image © Thomas Holmes

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?

_______________

Image © Viktor Jakovlev

Atrocity

Love, regardless.

Not only ghosts but people. Even the ones who faded. 

Recall delivering letters amid narrow ice-filthed brick-shored places, breath a whorl of futile, fingers iced, eyeing gun-shy frown-marked dogs, brown and surly with an inkling to hurt.

A battalion of believers moaning surety. True balloons. Obliterated grooms. How does your compliance make them come? 

“Let Jesus in; I promise you’ll be saved.”

This place amid the human tribe is crushing, our tracheatic wheeze an outlier where birdsong once prevailed.

Policeman. Copper. Sworn to protect. 

Ever hard.

You crossed paths with her and thought it better to erase her path. 

Such unmitigated hubris.

Not only the path but every step she took upon it. 

You read that map, you read each step, you nightmare godforsaken failed reptilian fuck.

“I can’t even bring myself to trust a cop, so why choose Jesus as my guide?”

We don’t want this to grow into a poem by default, so listen, pay attention. Reinforce this. You’re weak and low and appalling, and you always will be. Worthless, I want to say, but what we lack we boost, reshape into what we can hardly tolerate.

How glorious our acts of charity, how unrehearsed. Make this our cenotaph. Our radical, ramshackle, gimcrack tribute.

“What the almighty fuck is a Jesus?”

No longer will I turn away from cataclysm, especially when it’s made, especially once the red-streak gaze, the blaze of shame, the razor-face of naked blame spans the climb and ropes the bleating escapee, coveting exoneration, floating jailbreak, tempting everlasting flight.

Oh baby bird. 

You darling fledgling underneath the rain.

“Will you come back at last and hold my trembling hand?”

What untenable schemes unravel and bring you face to face with all things lacking face? What untrammeled endless waterways remain and even drain beyond this thing we deign absentia? 

Claim this. Claim your phantom legacy of pain. Let’s not let the boorish blamelords block the meritful petition of the rest.

“I’ll come back. Yes. Whenever I am right, I promise I’ll come back.”

Avenge this, all my dearest compañeros, walk in numbers shouldered by the highways as they flit and dash, reminding them of how our multitudes will some day trounce their flimsy hold, how sheer exuberance will rout their angry grasp, how dreamscapes wake from sleep, how such astonished love surprises overreach, how this damn good thing eclipses all of this and most of that.

____

Image © Rebecca Loranger