Winter Cranes , livre ebook

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48 pages

English

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781770901032
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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for Teresa, Hannah and Noah

I hide behind simple things so you’ll find me;
if you don’t find me, you’ll find the things,
you’ll touch what my hand has touched,
our hand-prints will merge.
Yannis Ritsos from “The Meaning of Simplicity”

Darkening
•
The simple joy of riding with good friends
in a car coming back from a barn dance
on the edge of a great lake in mid-March,
driving through falling snow on blizzarding
country roads, past farms, silos, cattle barns
recessed in deep shadows as Stand By Me
spills from the radio. But on that night
our car hit black ice and skittered across
the road’s slick surface like a water bug
— twenty-odd yards — before coming to rest
in a snowbank beside a farmer’s house.
A man appeared out of the dark, walking
down his laneway. He asked if anyone
was hurt. Are you okay? Seeing the car
was undamaged, he said he could tow it
out with his tractor. I remember that
night walking up the road, a hundred yards
or more, in the moonless dark, without so
much as a flare or a flashlight to wave down
passing cars, wondering why my friends
and I had survived the crash. Wondering
why I was not dead. I can still see myself
standing impatiently, wind barreling
across fields, over snow fences, the cold
licking raw the flesh beneath my jacket,
trying to hail the drivers of three cars
not bothering to stop, not quite certain
whether they saw a figure half-glimpsed
in the helixing snow at that late hour,
a messenger risen up from the ground,
to warn them of some impending hazard
until too late they found an old tractor
upon the road. And what I remember
of that night will not call back anyone
from the past. Not the vehicles swerving
to carve a wide groove in a winter field
crusted with thin ice and eddying snow.
Not the farmer on the tractor cursing,
his breath rising, a white scar, mixing in
plumes of diesel smoke in the chilly air.
Not even my younger self, who I see
standing roadside like an apparition
turning his body to stare back down
the dark hallway of a moment ago.
Exodus
•
The wind in the white birches
moves across the valley’s floor,
the farms, the fields, the orchards
where fruit pickers long gone
work each new harvest season
singing laments and drinking
rum in the cool evenings
of cheap roadside motel rooms.
It rushes past the villages
and townships, the stone fences,
the barbed wire, as if looking
for its name etched, chiseled
among white cemeteries
with historical bronze plaques
beside gas stations for sale,
or underneath small bridges
in the storyless silence
of creeks and rivers flowing
through generations of lives
built along their muddy banks.
Wending through every shape
— ravines, gorges, and forests —
it moves deeply inside even us,
wanting to lie in our bodies,
and not keep moving, looking
always for a place to rest.
Winter Cranes
•
My wife saw birds pass over the frozen pond
and wondered aloud if they were cranes,
desiring proof of their corporeal existence
to mark them as either a tangible reality
or a fantasy born of some lack in our lives.
Their wings beat exultantly, blossoming,
a wild spume of feathers backlit by morning sun
so they looked like more than just creatures
but symbols ferried from myth or poetry
to satisfy my wife’s wishes or my need to place
a few lines down upon the blank sheet
of this morning’s latest offering of snow.
I said they were only herons. The same ones
from last summer come back a little early,
guided by an instinct, a faint signal, hard-wired
in their brains to the earth’s magnetic fields
allowing them to navigate their way here
each year to stand like sentries, silhouettes
against the pond’s grey light, if only to teach us
how even patience can be a kind of violence.
“I want them to be cranes,” my wife said again,
a little more forcefully this time, so her words
were now a truth or a sacrament of experience
fully grasped, making us hungry for the dynasties
of the past we believe such birds emerge from
like after-images of a dream only now recalled.
“I wish they were cranes too,” I said, watching
the pair descending towards the farthest end
of the pond where the ice was the thinnest,
the city hardening its shell in the background,
still waiting for the winter storms to come.
Locations
•
Meadowlark, sweetgrass, milkweed bursting like cotton-fluff:
all of nature’s excesses burgeoning in a vacant lot
bounded on one side by a suburb full of blasé dot-com-ers,
vassals of the new economy, who drive expensive SUVs
and marinate their lawns in chemicals, and on the other side
a meat factory whose workers sit on little picnic benches
and smoke in the summer sunshine while on lunch break
beside tiny purple flowers whose name I have forgotten
and which are probably weeds anyway. Nearby,
a little boy in a Batman mask stands at the end of his street
waving at strangers as a river of cars washes by.
Young mothers push infants in strollers, exchange numbers,
sipping chai lattes, while even the elderly are out
teetering on sidewalks in small groups of two or three
(they hold onto each other like survivors of a small war zone).
Each step is a battle they wage with their bodies
so full as they are of old griefs and consolations. Little birds
strafe the air. Their mellifluous voices breezing past
a young blind man out walking with his shirt off — the tick tick
of his white cane on the cement taking a constant
measure of his contentment. An army of lawn mowers
sound warnings to civilization in the distance. Back across
the road, who is crouching in the middle of the lot
deep inside the wild phlox and red clover, staring through
the tall grasses at the black gates to the underworld?
What has he found among the anthills, the grasshoppers,
the com

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