Signal Fires Page 4
Middle Island. Sandusky, Ohio. Neutral rimsherds catch the evening sun on the forest floor. This site continuously inhabited since the mammoths. Smooth, low-grade ecstasy of summer evenings – soon giant moths and shining chestnut-coloured beetles. Tornado music drifting up the Thames valley from Windsor. Spencer Davis Group faintly on the windy radio tonight. Morning mist over the lily pads, zebra swallowtails weave pointillist diagonal nets above the milkweed blossoms.
Sitar drone of cicadas in the understorey of the coppice, hills covered with young hardwoods. Brief stroboscopic flicker of a bird passing overhead. Pathless living-room forest of trunks, leaf-litter and patches of sunlight beneath the leaves. Vultures ride hot thermals above the crest of the Escarpment.
Late nineteen-sixties basement rec room, wood-panelled summer trapped in the cool, windy September night forest. Summer with walls, summer interiorized by coolness and finiteness – intimate, desperate summer. The faint scent of skunk. Summer self-confident and mortal riding maximal the dreams of September. Summer like gimmick mountain. Synthetic, autumnal summer.
Lust under the industrial floodlights. Aromatic with new leaves and warm soil the night sky is a cavern filled with stars. Dark emerald wind blowing through the trees. We walk under the constellations out onto the lawn. Oak Ridge Moraine conceives ravines to the north. Layers of brown lignite with lenses of carbonized peat. Glassy vugs filled with anthracite crystals. Hibernating lungfish sleeping in their dried mucus sacs. Their 300-million-year exile.
In the twilight a giant sphinx hawkmoth hovers among the nicotinia flowers, its long, wiry tongue glinting in the streetlight as it threads the necks of the blossoms. Distant traffic on the Lakeshore Expressway. Waning moon rising like a stained memory, a maculate reminiscence of its fullness. The evening sunlight on these pink, finite flowers, only once – eternal in the certainty that this tableau will never be again. An infinite series of such moments, each nesting a thousand inner moments. All illuminated by the metallic, golden light.
In late March a comet effloresces at the zenith, its pale areolus like a supernumerary nipple. The comet an omen, an emissary of cool summer darkness. The eye of the comet is a soundless moaning fetish, its tail a blown phosphorescent æther, alarming smudge of infra-moonlight. Tonight the comet is an apostrophe of time hanging in the night sky while March mud congeals and freezes under the trees. The comet a tenuous continent, a presence in the stars, a vanishing spectral finger pointing with monotonous, empty grace at the sun. Such silence, such distant commotion.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Books III and IV of A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario were written between August 1981 and March 1996. “Concordat Proviso Ascendant,” Book III of A Natural History, was published by The Figures, Massachusetts, as a monograph. Excerpts from “Time Wind,” Book IV of A Natural History, have appeared in Grand Street, Matrix, and Poetry Canada Review. The poem “Long Tooth” appeared in the Queen Street Quarterly.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank Stan Dragland for his attentive reading of these poems; his commentary was valuable to me during the final stages of editing. I also thank Barbara Gowdy, whose ear is as finely tuned for poetry as it is for prose, and who helped me in the final preparation as well. Much thanks go to Ellen Seligman, who guided the manuscript through the publishing process and provided a friendly office. I thank Avie Bennett and Douglas Gibson, who continue to support and publish poetry. Thanks are due also to those who assisted at McClelland & Stewart: Peter Buck, Anita Chong, and Sari Ginsberg. Finally, I thank the Toronto Arts Council, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Canada Council, who all contributed to the preparation of this book.