Early Winter Light
Anatomy Lesson
Night Rain in Summer
Nymphalidae
First Snow of Silence
Tablecloth
A Bird of Three Syllables
To Quench Our Thirst for Stories
Cigar Box
On Reading Submissions to a Poetry Magazine
Crackle-Glaze
The Space Between Two Words
Listening
Old Bones Juggles Three Skulls
When You Will Be a Mountain
Skull
Lombardy Poplars
Old Bones
Once a Great Ruler, This Spider
No One Will Be Counting
Albert
Wilderness
Creation Myths
Nine Haiku
Reinventing the World
Wall
Wilderness
Some of the poems in this book were previously published (in several cases in slightly altered form) in the following anthologies and publications:
Descant: “Prisoner,” “First Snow of Silence,” “Crackle-Glaze” The Fiddlehead: “Wall” The Free Verse Anthology: “Report on the End of Time” Indian Literature (India): “Early Winter Light” Intervox: “Deep Ecology Haiku” Poetry Canada Review: “Baudelaire’s Letter to Ancelle,” “Double,” “Degas in New Orleans,” “Creation Myths” Prism international: “Villa-Lobos Lugs His Cello Through the Amazon Jungle” Revista Española de Estudios Canadienses: “Thunder” Sealed in Struggle (anthology edited by N. Vulpe and M. Albari): “Death of a Poet” Six Ottawa Poets (anthology edited by S. Mayne): “Chinese Exhibition,” “Cigar Box,” “Lombardy Poplars,” “Old Bones,” “On Reading Submissions to a Poetry Magazine,” “Reinventing the World” White Wall Review: “Tintoretto” The Windhorse Review: “Fragments of Heaven and Earth,” “Euclid,” “Blue Sky,” “Horses in the Fetal Heart Rate,” “Once a Great Ruler, This Spider,” “Heart of Rust”
Within the size of a fist can be assembled the beauty of a thousand cliffs…. The Sage (Confucius) once said, “the humane man loves mountains.” … Thus longevity through quietude is achieved through this love.
—Kong Chuan,
preface to Hermit of Cloudy Forest by Du Wan, 1133
The Journey to Shu —A Chinese Landscape
The artist paints with a brush of horsehair
drawn from the horse he is painting.
Mountains and forests, ambiguous,
their folds spontaneous and immeasurable.
Ambiguous too the path
threading through them
like smoke
rising from a mountain hut.
At first it holds steady,
a solid stream,
then splays and shreds
in a thousand branches.
Why are we going to Shu? Remind me, the Emperor on his majestic horse questions his lieutenant.
To see the goddess, the lieutenant replies. The Emperor turns his head, shakes the reins, and the single-file procession stutters on through birch forests.
One day the weather is clear, the next, cloudy.
As the painting unfolds, so do the mountains,
so does the path through the mountains,
and so does the line of men and horses
on the path through the mountains.
Not even the painter knows
why they are going to Shu.
2. The Emperor Comes to the Wall
Deep in the chaos of mountains
the Emperor and his procession
come to a wall.
Like a snake
or a flickering tail
of lightning,
the wall twists along
mountain ridges
until it disappears to the east
until it disappears to the west.
The peasants they ask do not know
how far the wall goes
but believe it must end
two mountain chains beyond.
But they have never walked that far,
east or west.
The Emperor and his procession
follow the wall toward the setting sun
until they can ride no farther
and turn about.
On arriving at their starting point
they rest, then ride again
toward the rising sun
until they can ride no farther
and turn about.
When they have returned once again
to their starting point,
the Emperor is haunted
by the belief that
if he had kept on one day more
in either direction
he would have come to the wall’s end.
His lieutenant watches him rise
in his stirrups to gaze eastward,
then turn to the west.
His horse twists in a circle
unsure which way to go.
The Emperor sighs and waits
and does nothing.
The long procession of riders and horses
waits too, in silence.
He