Signal Fires Read online

  BY CHRISTOPHER DEWDNEY

  POETRY

  Golders Green 1971

  A Palaeozoic Geology of London, Ontario 1973

  Fovea Centralis 1975

  Alter Sublime 1980

  Predators of the Adoration 1983

  Permugenesis 1987

  The Radiant Inventory 1988

  Demon Pond 1994

  Signal Fires 2000

  NON-FICTION

  The Immaculate Perception 1986

  The Secular Grail 1993

  Last Flesh 1998

  Copyright © 2000 by Christopher Dewdney

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Dewdney, Christopher, 1951-

  Signal fires

  Poems.

  ISBN: 978-0-7710-2739-0

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-55199-538-0

  I. Title.

  PS8557.E846S53 2000 C8II’.54 C00-930402-9

  PR9199.3.D48S53 2000

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  v3.1

  This title contains long lines of poetry. The line of characters below indicates approximately the longest line in the text:

  bodies smudged with soil. Our reflection in the picture

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Disclaimer

  CONCORDAT PROVISO ASCENDANT

  (Book III, A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario)

  Long Tooth

  Killbear

  Gravid Lux

  Without Him

  On the Beach

  Desert Angel

  TIME WIND

  (Book IV, A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario)

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgements

  CONCORDAT PROVISO ASCENDANT

  BOOK III

  A NATURAL HISTORY OF SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO

  David Heath, an English teacher at Xenia High School in Xenia, Ohio, was conducting an after-school drama class on an unusually hot June afternoon. Around 4:25 a student burst into the drama workshop, which was located in the school auditorium, and announced that a tornado was approaching.

  “I came very close to telling everyone to forget it and to go through the dance number we were rehearsing again. Instead I jumped off the stage and told everyone to follow me so we could get a good view of the tornado. I imagined a funnel cloud in the sky that we could look at and then return to rehearsing. When we arrived at the front doors to the school we were astonished to see a viciously twisting column less than two hundred yards away. Then, cars parked in front of the school began to bounce around. It was beyond belief. Someone said we’d better take cover, so we all ran towards the centre hall of the school. The lights went out just before we turned the corner and crouched against the walls on both sides of the corridor.

  “Then the tornado struck. The weird thing was the sound of it, like the clattering of a thousand sets of Venetian blinds, along with tremendous crashing and grating sounds. When I opened my eyes a couple of times I saw large pieces of dirt and wood flying horizontally down the corridor. Then, for a moment, the wind stopped. One of the boys stood up, but I yelled at him to get down. Then the wind struck again with seemingly greater force. We were all hit with dirt, broken glass, mud, wood, heaven knows what else. I was still picking glass out of my scalp two days later. Finally it stopped, and there was total silence.

  “When we stood up it was lighter than usual, and I looked up and noticed that the roof was entirely missing. Later we found out the ceiling of the auditorium had collapsed and that a school bus lay upside down on the stage where we had been rehearsing.”

  She is beyond you now. Her piscine features embryonic & dissipated with wisdom. Her nakedness possessed each time a seething harlequin of erectile sequins. Her lips aching with honey. The sky darkening with dreams.

  There is a language to predicate the adoration.

  And the water, its essence an alarming grace unfolding past the edge of your control. Breeding miraculous witness. Command spillover. Trembling mica electron thunder. Distant blue spruce shimmer vaguely, their translucent pagodas rising like glass temples in the dusk. The ammonoid’s nacreous lustre, iridescent stage lights in a Cretaceous theatre. Slow-motion August trees, the Huron clay bluffs blue in the lake haze & at night the stars rain glittering onto the beach. Pyritized mother of pearl a refraction so ancient the dreams are blackened. This most Devonian of raptures. A vowel away from the discrete crystals wherein her rude beauty gives way to angels. As the planet turns into the photon irradiation of dawn. Our debt to the truth.

  Beneath the lake a room. The water electric. The smallest ripple transmitted undiminished through the whole. For its membrane is the progenitor of the cellular envelope, budding cauldrons at the base of the falls. It is living. It whispers & moans a thousand voices within the rapids. It is the medium of choice for internal predators.

  Day lilies waxen cups of orange & red conspiring under the late afternoon sun. Dazzling cellular lattice. Rattlesnake Point.

  Dusty milkweeds at the roadside. Summer cricket fields phasing a pointillistic audio plane. Waves of wind transparent molasses in the leaves. Insect voyeurs.

  It is night and there is a yearning in the wind. Your heart a dusky corporeal fragrance streaming into the stars. In the moonlight you can see the underwater trees. Devonian ocean floor commands the summer sky a fossil sea. Spicebush, oak & sassafras. The mouth of the Ausable. Blue evening dunes of the Pinery. This sunrise a coral fire through the hardwood crowns. Leafless spring forest glowing tide against the sun-fissured escarpment. Incremental heat of the vernal arc high over Collingwood.

  Specific mist of August, pink & gold. A morning light all day. The forest shade almost colloidal, darkening under the looming thunderheads. Lilacs. Nicotinia. A penetrating dampness, limp clothes & paper, the subway floors sweat under her sandals. Gracile her slim body. Gamelan the thrill of her hands. A proton decay detection chamber under the south shore of Erie. Her toes an almost Fibonacci sequence, her lips tasting of unknown cities. Rain shimmers in the Zildjian forest. A bat flying through Allen Gardens. Glass membrane ruptured into the June night sky, itself an infernal mosaic of irregular cobalt tiles, prismatic sparks at their interstices. Her sex flushed by the fire lithe under the trees. Words unable me to speak to you. There is a path for you hear if you see it. She was paradise renewed a tangible & immaculate vision. Blu
e the colour of opium once in a dream.

  Awkward mammalian blossoms in cool sunlight the memory of a childhood not our own. Occidental blue of April afternoons, distant north an aerial clarion in the heavens. As if the sky would quicken and reveal another scale of perspective, a giant immanence of dreams born in wordless childhood musings. The April plainness of building materials on cold grey afternoons. Provisional shelter. At night the glistening celestial machinery. Sky deepening with stars, crescent of the new moon just setting above the glow of sunset. Concrete technical reality. There is a heraldry in creation unseen. Stony morning brook, sparkling water beads the optical distillation of the previous night’s stars. Star dew. The rain we pray for. Recognition in the May foliage, secret arboreal house of dreams & wind. Star corridors. The axis insatiable. Labialithe.

  A temporal music, each successive note justified only by its predecessor. Such subtle harmony that the edge of dissonance suspends the speed of beauty. Grey and gold escarpment the October rain. Let them all see it. May night a reality of precise darkness gushing the wildest hot metals into her red shift depths. Bronze rivers sinuous with age. Boreal rawness of early June foliage. Huron palisade the plateau forest of the Escarpment. A single firefly, portentous intermittent star wending silently through dim canyons of spruce. This meandering green ember insinuates the solid obsidian glass night, a supernumerary planet adding its strange light to the stars. Unearthly machinery of the forest darkness. Nightshade. Low frequency rumble of the planetary surface. The night before the day after. Summer sun a cool furnace in the furthest depths of the moon. The avenues we drive home on. Solstice moon waxing pale in the afternoon sky. Evergreen. Chlorophyll & haemoglobin. Red Haven. The music frightening & joyous. I have the vehicle to take you there, its gleaming fuselage a landscape foreshortened by velocity.

  Take command of the senses. You are all that you see. Cardinal in the redbud. The lake milky blue green under the purple sky of an approaching electrical storm. Something ironic in you which is not fully formed. This moment gone too far. Delirium in the summer wind. Midnight cicada. Proliferation of crickets. The horizon a window of impossible perspective, multi-layered stratus & cumulonimbus. A path the least resistance.

  Cap & talus of the Escarpment diminishing into perspective haze at our sides. Grimsby ravine an irresistible river of gravity, sensual cushion over the unwavering creek. Her abdomen pale cream curdled with muscles. Her power a private delight arched & supple. Her thrall of nakedness. Pseudoscorpions under shoes on the landing. Fruitflies. Peaches. October moon a glaucous eye through altostratus. A life refined to one unbearable moment. Love a semantics you invent between. Her touch a thrilling cellular wind racing through my nervous system. This wet skin & sweet absence. The mild labile hysteria of gulls.

  Lustful engine of summer metal quickening within the late March railway soil. Hot shaft of the vernal axis naked under bare sumac branches. Her breath exquisite musk reminiscent of the osmoderma. Elora Gorge, summer reptile sunbanks the cool morning cedar forest aloft on each side. Ocular water sliding lager beneath quick ledges. Limestone caves. There is an ineffable music that lingers in the charged air over the rapids. A single note triggers intangible symphonies, their strange harmonies blend into the fabric of all sound.

  Late night rhapsody of the ecliptic, ultramarine spangled with planets. The looming almost frightening wisdom of children. The still city a crystal lattice dreaming under the bright shoals of Lake Iroquois. Our orgasm an embodied mutual description. River mist pungent malt of liquid leaves. Branches, roots, boulders & niches, the landscape proffers itself for our progress on the slopes. Seminal blue electric glow within the waterfall. Demerara floor of the cedar forest striped with sun. Limestone terraces mark the descent of an ancestral river. Ramparts encased in cedarn foliage, a photon greenhouse evanescent in July heat. Each bank of the gorge an interior unknowable to the other.

  Darkness comes early in the valley, twisting along the paths like warm river wind, a corporeal zephyr. Time skewed with silence in the chiming afternoon. An autumn indistinguishable from morning proceeding like no other. The gorge sweats above the white heat of the rapids. Cedar, hemlock, white pine & birch. Elm & ash beyond. Gorge patrol. Dry riverbed of twilight & night in the cedar forest, fragrant darkness spills down the shallow fossil valley.

  Toronto interglacial overcast. A temperate, deciduous freshwater marine light. Metal at high speed. White clay bluffs & summer interiors burgundy & pale dusty green. Purple stone. Wood smoke and evening mist the water pellucid jelly. Moiré of ripples an inverse solution to the equation of shoreline. The wind a sudden aerial rapids in the leaves. This nightriver, gentle grade & bowl & groove.

  Faintly pungent, acrid limestone river rank from trickle falls luxurious with moss. Still grace the rainforest mist intermittent showers retained by the canopy released. Mercurial chipmunks, warm tubular & insistent, their lingering stripes. Blue ash. The forest roots a semiology we just barely comprehend. I have the music to take you there, its gleaming fuselage just beyond the curve of this hill. Drone of cicadas adorning the beech temple, serpentine roots burst the foundation stones. Underwater shelves of limestone. Salamanders moist beneath dry forest rocks. Dolomite gleaming with crystals, calcite vugs within. Bracken. Quantum flight of a hoverfly. Still, heavy air, thunder low in the distance. Elastic twang of a bullfrog locates the shallows. The night gorge pulsing with fireflies, moonlight on waves. Trembling mica electron thunder an underground city.

  She is liquid darkness occult with desire. Scattered curls of corrugated steel litter the floor of an abandoned airplane hangar. The naked air electric we unite glistening in the light from giant atmospheric machines rising above the horizon. The sky filled with sound, furious insistent joy as she cries, aching chorus of electroluminescent orgasm. Heat-bleached August fields. Cool green lawns under humid tree caverns. Lambton forest a cool sensual intuition, earthen paths packed & powdered. Night perfume of the magnolia blossoms drifting through the limestone trestles under the railway bridge. Cicada shimmer in the late summer trees. Storm flooded city streets and aromatic twigs. Her incendiary hands stoke the September heatwave, a single katydid rasping from the silver maple at midnight. In the humid wind magnified leaf shadows enact a restless cinema under the backyard floodlight. Wild grapes purple on the vine. Particulate smoky blue haze of hot October afternoons. Indian summer in the Berkshires. Manhattan. Wild rhododendrons of the Hudson valley.

  Becoming myself, I have become someone else. My adoration the natural fulfilment of her sacral narcissism. She is Eros displayed. Lank salience of her thighs as she consumes me. She drew a shade of stratus. Chunks of stone erode into Mayan friezes. Gold scarabs at Clark Point. She won’t stop until you’ve come unnaturally again and again. Creek newts frankly relaxed in the sandy aquarium delta foliage. An otter near the forks of the Ervin and Grand. Cedar roots dowsing Silurian strata. Prodigious acrobatics of cliff swallows. She is here now. Her face a dark lantern blossoming in the twilight. Every path the most expedient solution of opposite destinations. She lies down amongst the ferns. Manitoulin cecropias. A flute lost in the sound of rapids.

  Scarab grubs harboured in scrub oaks. We merge in the windy forest, in the rushing neo-silence of a hot August wind, in the mute aqueous clamour of leaves under the wild hush of the forest. Our clothes sullen layers of skin. Our giant bodies’ moist electric surfaces continuous with the forest. Close upon us now this afternoon an atmosphere of flesh. The smell of rain on the wind. August hypnotized in cool depths of the lake. Mudpuppy. Hellbender. September heatwave stone temple haze along the beach distant signal fires glimmering orange. Her water broke the slow fall of evening leaves, waves of silver green above human creatures coupling wondrous beneath. Chlorophyll mist. The sky ringing with our music.

  Our path a dark sweetness, musky tribute to your surrender. Your face miraculous stone sweating in the August heat. The sky a dream of cirrus & aquamarine, purple silhouettes of distant airplanes descending into the edg
e of night. High evening this secret joyous darkness internally illuminated by a fossil sun. Night windows of a large home near the river. In the cool dark of the basement nocturnal children interlock within the necessities of desire. Their faces animal flowers insensate with beauty. Tropical leaf theatre under stadium lights.

  The stars through hot leaves our bodies dusted with forest & surely engaged by a slender path. Indistinct in twilight we rub ourselves with dirt & slide mucous pink into each other again and again, the merging earth our union & we ache for the river music, a blanket of silence. Its impassive interior a mute concourse. Night eyes. We are intruders in our own house, incandescent lights a peripheral flicker our bodies smudged with soil. Our reflection in the picture window, night trees behind. You come rubbing against me we come androgynous we come as two boys & then as two women. A cistern of rainwater in the cellar. A rainbarrel in the garden & in the stream our bodies indissoluble within the warm river currents there. Gradual accumulation of insects at the porch light, a glittering raiment. Our bodies quick & light through the night air. Dusty pink evening at the botanical gardens. Neural storms in her pupils. A magnetic field suddenly explicit around two trees as a flock of birds erupting from one is sucked into another. Avian prominence the lines of force. There are salamanders nearby.

  Gothic geometry of the lycopod forest. The axis of symmetry explicit in the angular lattice of fern canopy. Rustling flight of a giant dragonfly. Cellophane wings glint in the Carboniferous sunlight, a vanishing, airy chain of after-images. The humidity of the gorge forest higher than the surrounding area. A world millions of years in the past. Snake Doctor, helicopter, red Doppler Shift. My camp a rainforest vigil here at the transition zone. The camouflaged wings of the moth are pure representation. A path is an inter-species collaboration. Distant rumble of thunder older even than the shark. Iridescent blue scarab deep within the petals of a rose.