OTHER BOOKS BY RUSSELL THORNTON
The Fifth Window (2000)
A Tunisian Notebook (2002)
House Built of Rain (2003)
The Human Shore (2006)
Russell Thornton
Copyright © 2013 Russell Thornton
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].
Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0
Edited by Silas White
Cover art by Golya Mirderikvand
Cover design by Angela Caravan
Print edition text design by Mary White
Printed and bound in Canada
Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Thornton, Russell
Birds, metals, stones and rain / Russell Thornton.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55017-601-8 (paper)
ISBN 978-1-55017-657-5 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS8589.H565B57 2013 C811'.54 C2013-900212-X
Birds, metals, stones and rainare mother, father, daughter, son,birth, death, heaven, hell, prison, rescue, blindness, sight, the only time, the only place,birds, metals, stones and rain.
I
Squall
The clinking becomes a ringing,
solid and clean. The spikes go straight
into the wide earth, the four poles
into the sky. The canvas bells
and flaps, and stays taut in the wind.
That is the tent in a lost camp.
The drumming deepens and quickens.
Wild and intricate, it allows
a melody to break from it,
a mist to lift off it and through.
That is the wet ghost that will ride
along the edges of the flesh.
The plane surface stands brilliant
within the vastness of metal,
and a winged drop of a small bird
flies chirping out of a keyhole.
That is the newborn that unlocks
the clear mirror door of the rain.
The Oldest Rock in the World
A news item: Oldest rocks in the world found on barren Quebec shore
And brought my hand down on the butterfly
And felt the rock move beneath my hand.
—Irving Layton, “Butterfly on Rock”
In memory of Irving Layton
They look as if they are in mid-tumble
out of the bare and windswept swathe
of outcropping bedrock on Hudson Bay’s
eastern shore a one-hour canoe trip
south of Inukjuak. These boulders
of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt—
four and a third billion years old,
dating back to a mere three hundred
million years after the globe formed
out of a cloud of cosmic debris and dust.
When the planet was being pummelled
by meteors, comets and asteroids,
microbes interacted with iron
in the primordial seas and emerged
as Earth’s very earliest life,
and nestled in sediment and wrote
their bio signature in the rust that fills
these boulders’ creases. Now beyond
the treeline, beyond houses, the boulders
have sat longer than the combined lifespans
of countless generations of animals—
far longer than human history
and any dreaming of the way within rock
or of a dying back to when only rock
framed what would be wind for human breath.
Now the microbe might bless us. Allow
us to stand trembling in bright, bright light.
Witness our core, the one annunciation.
Hear us: from out of the depths have we
called thee, from out of our will and wonder—
the doors in us so closed, we think the door
to rock is shut. We cannot die or love enough—
and love, though it brings us to its door
and unlocks it for us, will not follow—
and our signatures nestle in time and we
forget them. Wind is in a hand of force
that wraps around wind, and the rock has moved
and taken our hand, our hand made of nothing
other than what the rock is made of—
in death we lose nothing that is not
of the death and life of this rock. The wind
moves endlessly, and the rock moves around
the wind, and the planet moves around
the wind and around the sun, and around
everlasting cosmic debris and dust.
Wind