Signal Fires Read online

  Watersnakes bask on sunny riverbanks. Ion shadow of the thunderhead hovering sightless over this forest a charmed garden. Fabric of reality parting slightly just before lightning. Swimming naked in the warm night river. Umbilical tornado. Copper oxide & limestone chambers. Lynx rampant on a field sable. The crown of night. The margin of heaven and earth blurred this evening. Moonrise.

  The water is continuous music manifesting the bias of the valley. Adolescents shimmer in the corruption of self-consciousness, their limbs bronze & gold under the summer sun. The sunlight pale stained-glass green, the forest a cathedral, its floor studded with remains of ancient temples dedicated to unknown gods. Elora Gorge an erogenous wound in the surface of the limestone. Dusky salamanders, translucent licorice speckled with silver. There is a landscape that corresponds to each station of the heart, a geography for every phase of our lives.

  The Elora Gorge is a rift valley in time, an amphitheatre of cedar & limestone. Hot green twilight of the forest depths. Decaying Hindu temples, each built on the crumbling summit of its predecessor. Roots & vines form a twisted webbing over limestone walls. Umbrella magnolias & blue ash. Giant swallowtail butterfly momentary cadmium in the shadowy interior of the forest. Water wrestling with rocks in the depths of the rapids. The gorge air still & heavy, the sky misting over into a featureless bright grey haze, maximum heat of early evening. Distant thunder. Nighthawks, crickets, bats & raccoons, wild continuum into the centres of the Great Lake cities.

  Karst topography. Bright hypnotic splendour of the solstice noon. A dragonfly lands on her shoulder, its rainbow wings glittering in the June sunlight. Endless summer night of the high Arctic Eocene. Her ancestral Devonian arms sinister. Giant catalpa trees bear signal standards of white blossoms, profound and lucid in the cloudless solar morning. On still nights their fragrance cascades in sweet penumbras, nocturnal skirts of perfume. Limestone trestles of the railway bridge are erotic monuments in the television foliage of an industrial age summer. Barberry blossoms’ spermy pungency on hot June nights. Cartilaginous sex. Grey diffuse light of memory, a sensualizing texture irrupting & sweetening everything with cosmic nostalgia for the moment. Each second a prodigal return, reality re-corporealized with recognition.

  Fess engrailed. Mammatocumulus illuminated from beneath by the setting sun. Night hardwood on the summer campus, Corinthian columns ascend through successive tiers of concentric leaf mobiles, deciduous candelabra. Their outlines slowly ripple in the hallucinogenic mist of the nocturnal forest, indiscernible from the veritable animation of the night wind. Delicate wallpaper clouds approach the full moon in this cinema blue night. The forest is a room we dissipate into, particularize. Involute masters of uncertain dimensions.

  Muscular black night wind dusty with stars. Blowing clear & hot from the boreal summer. The faint brown band of skin around the middle of my cock. Jerusalem wind through northern valleys, dark mountains stir within the alchemical night, giant sensual gods sculpted in basalt. Desert wind a thousand years old and clear as deuterium pools, a wind blowing empty through our hearts, their mysterious longing. A wind that pulls us wordless from our bodies, the rushing final wind. The historical wind erotic & spiritual, stone deities coupling on the walls of jungle temples. Eocene nachtmusik.

  So fair our green. Testicular sacs of the oriole nest, winged persimmons in her green vigilance. The honeysuckle’s buzzing insect aura. Sun sporadically through hazy cumulus clouds, the lake impenetrable with mist. Stiff, incremental surge of growing trees. Forest light is the perpetual, internal twilight of dreams. I am the fisher king of my unconscious. Root cascades on rocks, gnarled retainers for terraced humus waterfalls, the re-enactment of a fossil rapids. Delightfully uneven terrain. Forest rocks luminous with condensation, green antler-velvet congealed into stone. The clamour of the storm lags in noisy streams.

  Distant apartment complexes become moody empires of light, subdued orange constellations in the twilight haze. Revelation of the rainy day. Late night resurrection of a forgotten love, a vanished civilization where the waning moon is the accusational eye of a discarded lover. Metaphysics in dusty light on the trunks of the Norway spruce, cicada husks at their bases. Windbreak colonnade. Love’s absence is love still, the heart a celestial wound. August a certain Aegean light through us all. The beach a commotion of light and waves, cries of gulls and children blend in the wind. Honeysuckle vines redolent of evening, a dusky corona of ruby throats. Surprising articulation of children’s backs, their advanced hominid wisdom. Wild cherry gum on raw copper. The dull gleam of tin roofs. Field of hydroelectric power flickering in the darkness at the lake bottom.

  She is delightfully augmented. In the distance vandals break windows in a deserted factory, disembodied locus of fear. Meander. She walks almost laboriously around her endowments, a libidinous & circuitous elegance. She is crippled with sex, ripe fruit on a slender bough. Resume the broken discourse of the gods. Quick vertigo of lust. The Milky Way wheeling on the axis of an immense black hole through abandoned zodiacs in the mysterious depths of an intergalactic summer night. A continuous indoor atmosphere extends uniform & infinite in all directions.

  LONG TOOTH

  We are fire monkeys,

  soft itchy hunters with

  warm stingers sheathed in fur.

  We are skinny apes

  who mime both hunter and prey, whose

  kindness lies in pain, whose

  sacrificial instructions are the singular

  charity of our deathly logic.

  We are electric apes

  who hunt our own children

  to teach them the higher way,

  the path that sharpens

  claws and teeth,

  the path within

  they must clear

  for themselves.

  We are weary hunters,

  our bloody mammalian inheritance

  cast in stars and dreams and words.

  We are thin, famished poachers waiting

  at the edge of the world. We are pedagogical

  savages listening for the footfalls

  of our students, apprentices

  to be sacrificed in our jaws,

  honed to the lessons of our teeth,

  the whistling shape of our skulls.

  We are smart worms

  who eat our way

  into the carcasses of animals, then

  rise up in malefic parody,

  grotesque marionettes,

  ripped and skinned and dyed.

  we gnaw within, fashion

  lethal technologies from skeletons and

  slaughter others with their own bones, worked malign

  into deadly revision of tooth and claw.

  Tooth and claw improved,

  tooth and claw in monstrous service,

  the carnivorous disarticulation of

  beasts, our monkey fetish

  unsheathing still more bones

  from their muscled red pockets.

  We are fire monkeys.

  The long tooth

  betrays us.

  KILLBEAR

  The last summer moon

  high over the trees,

  the forest splashed piebald

  with moonlight.

  Tristan dreaming

  in the tent beneath motionless leaves.

  In the moonlight

  our camp shows clearly.

  Tent under the tarpaulin,

  wash basin, water jugs,

  seats improvised around the smouldering fire.

  Towels and bathing suits

  on a sway-backed line.

  Wilderness home.

  This moment forever,

  and never again.

  Tonight our dreams rise

  to the second world

  above this lunar checkerboard.

  Tomorrow

  the vortex

  of the city.

  GRAVID LUX

  for Barbara in Antigua

  Tonight the Antillean sky
is unnaturally clear,

  the moon’s faint, perennial halo is gone.

  South of Orion’s sword the tropic stars

  spangle a trail to the equator.

  By the lagoon, coconut palms

  rustle and slide their leathery wings.

  Beyond the beach,

  a faint susurrus of waves

  breaking on the crest

  of the reef.

  The warm trade wind is stronger

  on the hill above the bay.

  It moans in power lines and the screens

  of houses near the road. It whistles

  through the shutters of our hotel room where

  ceiling fans slice the ocean air.

  Their bleak, electric hum a counterpoint

  to the low-grade bliss

  of dreaming in the tropics.

  Under the thraldom of our idyll,

  in the mute cosmic witness of this night.

  there is a poignance,

  as if such mildness could purge the north,

  climate of steel and asphalt.

  By the lagoon,

  in the buttress forest of the mangrove,

  a large white crab delicately stilts

  over the mud flats. We

  are dream factories, underwater gardens

  hang in our heads.

  The trade wind is filled with mad lovers

  while in northern darkness

  pale fields sleep

  under the red wings

  of winter.

  WITHOUT HIM

  A eulogy for Bob Gowdy

  To come to an end, finally

  exhausted by the effort

  to remain in the world.

  Not a relief to die.

  Numb flesh, so abandoned in death.

  No relief to die in the night, to abandon

  your work, what

  you would have finished.

  Not the life work, but the framing

  of wood and steel and glass.

  The table you were building

  at Balsam Lake.

  Towards the end you resembled

  a Mayan deity, your eyes huge,

  alert, crystalline and shining

  in your spectral face.

  You became Ah Pook, the skeleton god of death,

  your head illuminated from within,

  like a carved quartz skull.

  A certainty there,

  terrible and clear.

  To say goodbye

  to nights by the water,

  to the house you built, to your children’s

  children. To say goodbye to all this,

  more than goodbye.

  So much more than goodbye.

  And to come to the end, alone

  where none can follow.

  And now these

  eulogies. Maybe we’ve got it wrong.

  Maybe that is death,

  getting it wrong,

  while the dead

  wane into fiction

  and we, the living, carry off bits,

  like ants, a piecemeal dispersion.

  But above it all

  caught some notes of your music

  the other day,

  sketches you finished

  the week before you died.

  Let what you made

  scatter into the world.

  It never regretted

  a minute of you.

  ON THE BEACH

  I

  That afternoon we walked

  along the beach, you

  turned to me,

  the sun in your hair,

  with your eyes saying goodbye, forever

  goodbye. Abandoned. The wind

  flickered through your hair, filled

  the sails of an armada of desertion.

  You told me it was the wind

  not our will

  that moved the world,

  though your eyes were empty.

  That day, above all the days before,

  the beach rang with the commotion

  of waves & wind, the heat of the sun.

  Through the October chill it lingered.

  The emptiness you spilled then

  opened the afternoon, arched it

  higher than blue could possibly arch

  so the stars came out.

  Though our sad euphoria

  could not fuel such stars as these.

  And the beach spread beneath us,

  a white expanse, winged, as if

  harpsichords played invisible in the air,

  as if we walked on microscopic cobble

  laid by the waves.

  II

  Later, alone in the evening,

  after the wind had died and the sun

  had set, I found

  our afternoon steps and saw

  that our footprints, like all footprints,

  were blind.

  Night’s machinery was concealed

  behind the blue-violet eastern sky.

  There was a presentiment of moonlight,

  a silver mist rising behind the dunes.

  the calm evening light, a lucidity

  beyond loneliness, loneliness

  beyond consolation. I

  remembered the day, the wind,

  the way you turned to me,

  the sun in your eyes,

  and the hollow

  of the sky, receding

  like ice.

  III

  Outside this country house

  November weeds are sparkling

  with hoarfrost in starlight.

  I have turned off the lamps

  to see the ornate fields, the

  occult splendour of an evening

  only I will ever know. The quick, strange music

  of a winter’s night. This

  beauty unknowable,

  unspeakable. Through

  my mind a wind blows

  along an October beach.

  IV

  Hot wind through the summer fields,

  a thrill that brushes

  lovers entwined like ciphers in relic barns,

  that bends dusty milkweed beside

  cottage lanes. The inexorable

  succession of grace, of love,

  if only secured by great sadness, is

  love’s paradox. Those we cannot bear to leave

  we must leave, those

  we most adore we must abandon

  to the stars – who dare

  to burn unique

  in the darkness.

  V

  That day on the beach, our only reunion,

  a nation in diaspora.

  Now we wait, listening

  to the heart of our silence,

  to ice forming in the moonlight.

  VI

  If I fall into my life,

  if I fall back into my life, if

  all the nights I was afraid, alone,

  rose in great white rings of fear,

  would love unravel like broken art,

  in the irresistible,

  unwavering bliss of an understanding

  beyond comprehension? Would this evening return

  again and again, stand

  outside time and inhabit the moment

  tragic in transitory beauty?

  Then the clouds, frozen in memory, would shift,

  the October beach be animate once again.

  The thrust of time

  its sheer rocketry

  carries us far beyond that day,

  and yet to be propelled

  so effortlessly is splendid.

  VII

  Now time

  has found the edge of our footsteps

  and we are in the last place, our life

  reduced to a series of spiral chambers,

  containing each of our ages,

  enclosed in the next, each

  surrounded by darkness,

  and in each a silence, a conversation

 
interrupted by our absence.

  Within your greed for my soul

  I watch the night arrive

  through the evening

  of the day you left.

  DESERT ANGEL

  The door of the desert has opened,

  skeletons of words

  tumble in the frozen wind like dead leaves.

  I have awakened

  from the dream of meaning

  into the implacable narcissism

  of the word.

  For within words is the progeny of words.

  and I am caught in their honey.

  In the transparent desert air

  the angel appeared, flattened

  against a dividend of reality so temporal,

  so variegated, she was consumed

  by the blank empire

  of its shadows. She shone,

  dustily iridescent in the

  waning light of the setting sun

  and I saw the ghosts of words,

  painful, beautiful,

  pluck her sides

  like kites.

  Now, within the fossil dance of words,

  when letters are hung like insects

  in mind’s amber, I sing

  this dusty kingdom of Braille,

  while the skeletons of words,

  the shadows of shadows

  intone our empty names

  across the dusty plain.

  TIME WIND

  BOOK IV

  A NATURAL HISTORY OF SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO

  “About 9:15 in the evening we heard a loud roaring sound southwest of the house which we believed to be an advancing tornado. We went immediately into our storm cellar, an underground dugout. I was the last one of the family to enter the cellar – I had just closed the door, and was preparing to secure it with a logging chain, when the tornado struck. The door burst from its hinges and the chain was ripped out of my hand. Both went sailing into the wide open spaces. It became very dark as the edge of the tornado went over but inside the vortex there was considerable illumination. I am sure I could see up to a height of five hundred feet or more. The colour of this light was a purplish pink, like the light that comes from brush discharge of static electricity. I saw parts of our house, the out-buildings, and a large tree carried into the already debris-filled vortex. I ducked down into the dugout before the other side of the tornado went over us.”