A book of snow

I am a book of snow,

a spacious hand, an open meadow

a circle that waits,

I belong to the earth and its winter

- Pablo Neruda, Winter Garden

I wanted this to be a love poem,

stanzas which began: my dearest love.

I wanted words like bookends

to embrace the library between us,

iambic loops to fill white spaces on the page.

I could not predict the approaching shadow,

pain which burned our words to ash,

a world transformed to endless winter.

Now, undone by things I did not know,

I am a book of snow.

It took away a way to grieve,

tested the limits of compassion,

forgiveness which might never come.

This glacial landscape I live within

has no gradation of rescued light

to read me by – no open portico

to guide me to my former self.

The line drawn is so indelible

there might never be an ample window,

a spacious hand, an open meadow

where I might find a meeting ground

between what is now and what is gone.

The world has changed – yes, utterly,

and I am its co-joined inhabitant

of frozen words, unending ice,

of memories for which no opiates

exist to free the heart, if not the soul.

My tenure here is undefined.

I am everything that hibernates,

a circle that waits.

Cold has altered my DNA,

rediscovered the old reptilian brake

which slows the heart,

invaded my bones, besieged my brain,

encrusted memory with a colder code,

allowed enduring frost to enter,

to glaciate heart’s febrile pace.

Everything moves now in polar time:

I mime a life of white on whiter.

I belong to the earth and its winter.

And there was light

These are the fields of light, and laughing air

And yellow butterflies and foraging bees

And whitish, wayward blossoms winged as these

And pale green tangles like a seamaid’s hair.

The Pea-Fields by Sir Charles G.D. Roberts

Shadows become you

in the new half-light.

Our blindness falls away

and black and white images become rainbows

on the iris of each eye.

Colours overact with so much flair

our trip through darkness

is left behind. Only sun

can hold us here, to stop and stare:

these are the fields of light, and laughing air.

We learn to love the sun,

the cast of light

which fills a room with amber

to the brim, and spills

its golden droplets one by one

as sun and shadow blend to form a frieze.

Patterns hint at memory

we cannot recall, and yet

the heart still knows the language of the trees

and yellow butterflies and foraging bees.

Tears, this first response

to touch of light and air

will carry always, salt

from the womb

and sea bed,

will spill unbidden with symphonies

of music, or of love,

the plaintive call of loons

across the lake, with lilac trees

and whitish, wayward blossoms winged as these.

Before day and night divided,

before fin found form,

finger bone connecting

to wrist bone, arm and shoulder

slipping through water like ache

through heart, the bare

skeleton of the rib cage caught

our memory in a net of dream,

left it in dark and shadow and azure air

and pale green tangles like a seamaid’s hair.

Dust covered the table

Desert dust covered the table

we hadn't eaten from.

But with my finger I wrote in it the letters of

your name.

In the Middle of This Century - Yehuda Amichai

(translated by Chana Blocha & Stephen Mitchell)

The dream returned so often

it became a part of me,

entered the pores of my skin

with its dust-filled whispers

of a place I'd never seen.

Eventually I became unable

to separate my day from night,

and when the place I'd never been

became more truth than fable

desert dust covered the table.

My parched throat yearned

for seed-red pomegranate,

bitter-sweet sting of orange.

I wanted to live in this exotic rime

of dream land, an oasis

where a heart no longer numb

could rest, remembering

our summer and our spring of love:

there wasn't left a word or crumb

we hadn't eaten from.

Where then did it go and why,

and harder yet, the question when?

When did it slip so silently away?

By stealth it seemed, because

no angry word or deed had

marked its passing, no little shove

had tipped us into emptiness,

the pain of absence.

Only dust remained of love,

but with my fingers I wrote in it the letters of

an alphabet I never knew,

though it seemed familiar to my moving hand.

It wrote me centuries of lovers lost

among a million million grains of sand.

I dream now only oranges and desert's call

and warm myself alone in sun's bright flame.

Your face I will not see again,

its shape obscured by dust and desert storm:

I only know that hand and memory will always frame

your name.

How the light is sad.

How it will not leave us alone.

How we are tugged up staircases

by the way it angles across landings.

April by Jan Zwicky

How light cannot exist

without darkness.

How the absence of one

makes the other unimaginable.

How the path out of night's dark womb

comes from knowledge we've always had,

from fingers searching the ancient braille

of the rib cage.

How the reasons for this are myriad.

How the light is sad

because we are.

How our memory of light

is unique and sacred,

How light pulls us towards

our unforgetting

of things we've known.

How it ignites a longing

we can't define

as it drags us over field and stone.

How it will not leave us alone

even when we want it to.

How night captures light

by stealth.

How in the black and blue half-light

our skin becomes transparent,

and ghostly x-ray captures our faces,

exposes what lies beneath.

How a sliver of light under a door

Can send us scrambling for its final traces.

How we are tugged up staircases

as we attempt to postpone

a return to night.

How darkness vibrates with expectancy,

with a frisson of danger,

ache of excitement

for hidden longings.

How moonlight is there

to reassure us of dark's impermanence,

banishing all misunderstandings

by the way it angles across landings.

I love you as certain dark things are loved

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz

Or arrow of carnation that propagates fire:

I love you as certain dark things are loved,

Secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Pablo Neruda - One Hundred Love Sonnets, XVII

Not understanding the complexity

of the human heart,

I learn about you slowly,

about ancient ghosts

who trouble your dreams,

who find vulnerable places

and replay them like old melodies,

music you only half-remember.

But I don't love you for what is Strauss or jazz;

I don't love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz

or care if the music is too soft or loud.

but only if your ghosts

can co-exist with, mine,

if this joint darkness

can carry the burden of two lifetimes,

or what more we may require

to embrace shadow as a form of longing,

to understand blindness as another way to see,

to know that the philosophy of desire

or arrow of carnation that propagates fire

can gather us into the arms of light.

I want to take your darkness into mine

so you become the wild in me

and I that quiet centre you cannot find

because its tenuous patterns are felt

as though your fingers were gloved,

the indistinct whorls of distinctiveness

carrying you deeper into uncertainty,

I love you though my love remains unproved.

I love you as certain dark things are loved,

past the visible, and with a knowing I cannot utter,

into the place the heart hears

the beat of other lifetimes.

I love you the only way I can,

where our nakedness is clothed

in penumbral shadow and the toll

of bells for lost souls

echoes the spaces between our words,

where silence is the way we can console

secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Stardust

I would like to be the air

that inhabits you for a moment

only. I would like to be that unnoticed

and that necessary.

Margaret Atwood - Variation on the Word Sleep

All day your chest rises and falls:

inhale, exhale, pause,

as if you had suddenly mastered

the Buddhist art of meditation,

discovered how to count each breath,

what it means to be aware

of this moment only.

Inhale, exhale, pause, and pause again

It is these shallow breaths I'd like to share.

I would like to be the air

That inflates your lungs, to be the bellows

that fans the flame to light your way,

to be your built-in CPR, to dwell inside

this non-space you've travelled to,

this quiet speechless place you found,

with no prior announcement of intent.

There are road to be explored alone.

And you never liked the long farewell.

And so, my love, forgive the small lament

that inhabits you for a moment.

There is no shame in the long and painful fight.

You need not speak again of gun or knife,

of quick release from phantom pain

which haunted the corridors of your night.

We'll stop all the clocks, as Auden said,

but we won't pack up the moon. It must remain focused

on the growing radiance behind your eyes,

even as your body merges with all our bodies,

as spirit's alchemy reduces you to something chaliced

only. I would like to be that unnoticed.

and that distilled, our conjoined bodies

melted down to what will fit in a silver cup

our own holy grail. You move now beyond sorrow,

beyond fear, into that thin and sacred space

which is more than the sum of disparate parts,

more real than what fits into this onyx ossuary,

more intimate than your remembered breath and thought.

Ashes to stardust, you are launched on stellar flight,

and this sudden welling up of love is both that momentary

and that necessary,

The Dream

Come away, O human child

To the waters and the wild,

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.

from The Stolen Child by W.B. Yeats

The mountains - Ballyhoura - their name

a long drawn out moaning of the wind

as it slips into her hunger

and the dream begins again,

carries her to where the sea grieves

and its losses are piled

against the harbour wall - Cobh.

And by the voice in the dream and the wind's cry

she is beguiled:

Come away, O human child.

Her heart turns over in reply.

Her "yes" is a whisper, a sigh

escaping from half-closed lips

to rest on the midnight air.

"Yes>" The word has taken shape --

one word, deceptively mild,

but it carries her off with its sound of the sea

as "yes" she breathes, and "yes" again,

and the waves take this forgotten child

to the waters and the wild.

The waters rise inside her head,

flow over onto her cheeks.

Máire ni Bhríain is aim dom,

Máire ní Bhrían her name again.

But only the wind can hear her cry,

the wind and a haunted lane,

and all she wants is the dream to endure,

moon and stars to light her way

to run and dance in sea and sand

with a faery, hand in hand.

The magic breaks with morning mist.

Dream dissolves in ghostly light,

and back, she slips

into the familiar gnaw of huger.

Máire, Máire, her mother's name,

a soft remembrance claimed by the land,

as she repeats the lesson learned by rote:

there can only be forgetting

of all the things we've planned,

for the world's more full of weeping

than you can understand.

The Garden

Some of us are here

as messages

because in the small womb

lies all the lightning.

Why We Are Here Dorothy Livesay

Snow must have been falling when the earth began,

covering our blue lips,

sealing belief

behind eyes frozen with tears

of lost faith.

How could we guess a miracle would appear,

cold give way to golden light?

Or was it just

that crocus whispered in our ear:

some of us are here.

The garden falls open like a book,

tracing favourite passages

snowdrops holding lantern heads

to light our way

to forest's edge

Trees converse in languages

we used to know

and beneath the soil

worms write hieroglyphs of the ages

as messages.

It is all here:

memory which holds us captive

because we cannot forget

which pushes to the surface,

gulping in air,

revisiting corners of the small room

where it all began,

circling to where it begins again.

There will always be thunder

in the tomb

because in the small womb

the thorns of memories

prick at the skin

of dead dreams,

remind us of the flight of days,

the inevitable returning cold.

The end of summer has a mordant ring,

and in the approaching eye

of the autumn storm,

inescapable and frightening,

lies all the lightning.

The message of water

We cannot think of a time that is oceanless

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage

Or of a future that is not liable,

Like the past, to have no destination.

T.S. Eliot - Four Quartets, Dry Salvages

We end where it begins,

the river rushing out of itself

brooding down the long backbone of Cambrian rock,

carrying with it the season's detritus,

while our own losses bury themselves in the midden,

where each new beginning is of us but not us

and we ask if it is enough, this repeated process of becoming,

as we discard one life form after another.

In a cycle of tides and lost love that is endless

we cannot think of a time that is oceanless,

cannot sense if what we see

through the dark cracked glass of memory

is that there will never be a return to innocence,

that the boundaries between love and hate shift

even as we decipher maps to negotiate each day.

If a tree falls, if words lie mired in the wreckage

of empty pools of misunderstanding, what has failed?

Do we hope that water flows both ways,

believe in lives that are free of all breakage?

Or of an ocean not littered with wastage?

We enter water blindly,

through a fine mist of longing.

Somewhere in its depths we believe is absolution,

an escape from the indefinable ache

of heart trying to re-construe itself as bone,

as a calcium filled appendage more capable

of repair with plaster, walking cast, crutches,

than this drawn-out effort to stay the haemorrhaging

of loss, this distrust of anything being possible

or of a future that is not liable

like the river to drown us.

What is the message of water

as it springs from rock, an illusion of complacency,

then bursts into rapids, the froth of a thousand lattes

capturing morning and sunlight, water eating rock

with a perseverance inviting emulation?

As it hangs its sound high in the throat, each intake of breath becomes

prayer, a door opening in the chest cavity,

like a future we know to have no limitation,

like the past, to have no destination.

They tell me despair is a sin

They tell me despair is a sin.

I believe them.

The hand moving is the hand thinking,

And despair says the body does not exist.

Jan Zwicky, The Geology of Norway

Polar bear claws receding ice tide,

shakes his too-warm coat,

slips slowly towards oblivion.

Earth flexes its long spine,

its momentary shrug an eternity

in human terms, each contraction

a drawn-out moan of warning -- 

earth's rib-cage coming undone,

millennia splitting into a new configuration:

They tell me despair is a sin.

They tell me earth dreams through me,

ask that I listen

as ice-melt discovers ancient rock,

as its tongue, raucous with drowning words,

re-enters old alluvial spaces,

but hope snaps off at root and stem,

feet sink deeper into muskeg.

They ask me to measure melt.

They tell me this is but the tip of mayhem.

I believe them.

Earth is uncomfortable in tenebrous skin.

Not since birthing moon and stars

has anticipation been so double-edged,

or rested so heavily in her molten heart.

Sensing a turning point of great mistakes,

she tips to final reckoning,

traces black dots of melody

against the sky, traces the seamless signature

of word and song dissembling:

The hand moving is the hand thinking.

‘this invented world’’

... the cloud preceded us

There was a muddy centre before we breathed.

There was a myth before the myth began,

Venerable and articulate and complete.

Wallace Stevens, Towards a Supreme Fiction

Image preceded word.

Etched in deepest brain,

inscribed there in time

before remembered time,

it is elusive, an image which only hints

at truths too precious

to lose in shifting ancient mist,

so fleeting we fear they might be beautiful lies,

not understanding as we struggle thus,

... the cloud preceded us.

The gentle closing of the fontanel

sealed the door to other worlds,

to time when knowing how we began,

with a clarity we'd seldom feel again

was gone - our first life loss,

a separation we have grieved

forever, the not-quite-us-ness of our wanderings

amidst valleys of absent memory

suggesting that, in all we've achieved,

there was a muddy centre before we breathed.

What is this constant search for why,

or how. the rhyme or rune

which ghosts our path?

What soul-companion beckons us to destiny

or death, rejects our claims of innocence,

demands, as compensation for the shortest span

on earth, a propitiation to Olympian gods

who whisper from eons before our birth:

there was a plan,

there was a myth before the myth began.

And now, this moment, grounded in word and metaphor,

in a learned arrangement of symbols,

the search for clarity remains elusive,

heart song still tugs at the edges of recall,

images slip endlessly from our grasp,

our brushes with past life remain heartbreakingly fleet.

We cling to the thought of one eye to see and one to feel.

and question if we need such twinning to find our way,

such balance to make us feel replete,

venerable and articulate and complete.