Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. Russell Thornton
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and explain to me in Spanish that you don’t speak
Spanish anymore. Or Portuguese. Or the Quebec French
that jumps out of you. Explain to me that North Vancouver
has the most beautiful cemetery you’ve ever slept in.
No landlords, no need to pull a knife. With the different
parts of your brain in the right places, explain it.
With your jumble of words, lay down your head.
With your jumble of words. With your single joint
per day and the pain gone out of your skull. Let
the sections of your head click into a proper machined fit.
Yes, killed so many times, scattered in so many places,
you can’t say—say a loud Fuck you! in the direction
of your every past boss. Say it at your every Refugee Board
hearing, at your every income assistance interview.
Consult the cemetery’s visiting bear, coyote and deer.
Consult the community of the dead flowing in unison
beneath your head. Then make your many decisions
and rule the parts of your head. My friend, my co-worker,
here’s a coffee, a set of garden tools and plastic yard-bag.
Come do your expert work. Whistle all day the songs
that came to you in the night through the cold clean dirt.
Greenness
What am I now that I was then
—Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”
I turn to grass tufts and see unsullied
clear greenness displaying its steel. I see
what I should see, simple close-mown spring grass
like that of any suburban house lawn.
I turn again and decades disappear
and I see the dark grass all down the block—
I wake, run out of a basement and go
reeling across yard after wide yard. Here,
I unlock a gate. Swing it open. Go
to a neighbour’s front door. I knock, and ask
for help. But I am still half in the house
where I crouch, and we gaze at each other,
my mother and I, while my father holds
her so she will burn in the fireplace flames—
it is only a pretend me who asks.
Here, a woman blankets me and leaves me
in a den. The simple grass I turn to
is of the same greenness that pierces me
where I sit in a deep plush chair and hear
a man on a phone, sink and right away
begin to dream of grass. Lawns touch my bare
feet with cold dew and make me swift, shoot me
full of starlight the grass stores in its maze
of roots and make me shine bright. Here, I slip
out of the blanket, the den, and go back
outside and down the rows of blades all
waiting to take me in. What I bring,
I bring to grass to help it find its way
beyond every house. I turn to grass
that is close-mown, sunlit in the morning,
and turn to the grass that rinses my eyes
wide for the dark. When the soft spring rain flows
busy through grass, the always houseless night
helps continue this beginning. When grass
lengthens and men come to cut it, I laugh
with the laughing greenness. Unknown heaven
in its depth in the grass, once here cannot
be unmade. What I am now that I was
then can only be what is in grass—here
in what reaches breathing, reaching nowhere
but from blade to blade. It breathes and is iron
that is not cast by anyone but grows.
The Rain Bush
...and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush
was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside,
and see this great sight...
—Exodus 3: 2–3
I heard kindlings, full flames, a furnace fire
and singing ore. I turned aside and saw
rain blowing into the branches of a bush—
the molten metal cooling, magnetic,
its memory of directions, its brilliant
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