A rain of lemons, 1946
(Excerpt from The Custom of Killing Rabbits)
We were gone when the earthquake hit.
Father had caged the rabbits, wrapped our glass in shawls and
Taken the meat from the hooks in the rafters.
The warning was a witch’s rattle,
Her voice cast like fallen rock across the dell.
She sang thunder and it fell beneath her;
The first earth, stone, leaf.
We saw it tumble and packed our stockings
While the priest rang bells to drown her counting.
La notte, La notte, La luna, she comes.
She sang us to the orchards of Castellano,
Beckoning soprano, reading the height of sun against mountain.
Only the priest remained by midnight,
Clutching psalms and rocking when the mountain woke
shaking roof and shingle into his lap.
It rained lemons until morning.
We stood in the orchard and collected the fruit
To seed new groves among the ghosts of our village.
Lucy
There is a dead star named Lucy
whose core is 2,500 miles of diamond
Just imagine how many fingers you could fit in its heart.
Soon to be kitchen wives
with pre-pregnant abdomens
dream float through atmosphere
and stick their ring fingers in it
like they are checking pie.
They do not enjoy waking.
There are miners in Alberta
who have built slingshots from maples.
It takes ten men to load the boulder
then fire westward
and imagine the rock
into a vacuum of light.
So far they have brought down
the neighbour's antenna, two deer and a wolf.
Three billion years ago
a neighbour of Lucy
fell to Sierra Leone.
It was split by gravity,
the crown throttled into the ocean
the base sent into a cataclysm of trees.
Divers search pearl beds for the comet
they sometimes return with hands full of stones.
Crustaceans once made their homes
from these fragments
binding sediment grains
from the ocean floor.
They were amoebic,
born from single cells and yet able
to judge the clarity, carat and cut.
Rockland
I am with you in Rockland
beneath skies that break
like your mother once broke the china
launching Aunt Mary's porcelain
through the shut window
red borscht sunrise, yogurt cloud
she painted lunch over the kitchen
beet juice in hair, teeth purple
shaking with currents of laughter.
You never saw it coming:
that puberty, comedy, tragedy
could arrive in the same bowl of soup.
I am with you in Rockland
beneath rivers of your body
that ebb, flow; turn my bone
to sand. Run over me.
Tell her story in stream.
First came the inability to stew beets
then a habit of nudity, a concern for the blood
of strawberries. In sleep
she wove like an eel, spilling from the bed.
But there was laughter; she would kiss you,
flip pancakes - here. Oatmeal. Your favourite.
I am with you in Rockland
where you wake me, dusted with flour.
There is sugar burning,
breakfast is ready. Eat. Have another.
You bend down, kiss the flat of my nose.
Lover, patient, daughter. Here: the hospital illuminates itself,
we both hear your mother's call.
Self-love is more than masturbation
I believe your poetry could make me fall in love again.
I believe this because sitting in a pitch of sand I pictured
ten boys on low riders wheeling themselves into the lake
mouths open;
the lemmings you spoke about
who sacrifice to show love.
You say this is possible:
That something would crash to the rocks
just to tell us
we are beautiful.
Shane, I could make your words my moon
hang a sign above my bed
that says
You are beautiful
until I start telling dog walkers
or the woman in front of me in the grocery store aisle
You are beautiful.
I believe your poetry could make me fall in love again
because I left your show so hot with metaphor
that I had to break into the sprinklers of Central Technical High School
with a blue-eyed boy I'd just met
until my dress clung white to my chest
and we didn't even kiss.
Just walked with the heat of one another
until I arrived home dry and laughing
falling back in love with my life.
Because while I have no divining rod for love that will lead me
no abacus to count the likelihood that certain sentiments + certain circumstances
= that inexplicable flooding, that drowning to a place you call Atlantis
I do have this:
Every seven years I am reborn
all my cells rekindled.
This is the genius of creation:
We are given chances. Upon chances.
Even now the fabric of my heart builds new capacity.
Which means that yesterday is no more than real than tomorrow
and today isn't even something I can hold to.
We are oceans, we are storm clouds
we are constantly in motion.
And if yesterday, today and tomorrow are inexactitudes
then my body is a quantum universe of chance
and there is always a chance.
I believe your poetry could make me fall in love again
because somewhere in the space
between dream leaving your lips
and hope reaching my lobe
I forgot to believe in absolutes
and the basement you were shaking baritone
burst into a flock of applause
my blackbird shout circling the ovation
now carrion, now jay, now stool pigeon,
now macaw.
How basic
to remember
that our capacity for transformation
is no more, no less brilliant
than cloud becoming snow.
