The Sunrise Liturgy. Mia Anderson
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of species.
Does the Head of the Body have a choice? Or does he,
did he, give it to us?
Is it something we said? We apologize.
Where do we sit at ease — if ease is allowed — in the present; where
is the still small voice, the true north of this turning, this
world, your cell that teaches you everything?
How put the rest back into the rest of it? Bared of limbs
whose amputation from Love’s body bares our souls’ grievance, how
best comport the limbs left us?
How bear it
unbearing them?
What you don’t know does hurt you.
Imagine knowing.
Imagine denominations of trees, confessions of mammals
covenants of birds and
sects of lost insects, vestigial limbs of Church
withering joyfully away
that they may be One.
The scientific writing’s on the wall ready for dream analysis :
this is not forever. Ashes to ashes.
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages;
Golden lads and lasses must
As chimney sweepers come to dust.
When God shall be all in all, it is home that we’ll be — ash and all.
Imagine knowing that.
‘I repeat myself’
‘I repeat myself’
says the sun
boring his audience with yet another
rise, another up, another
new, fresh, another
chance, another certain sure.
Tautology, redundancy :
there are things
not smiled upon
in business or
grammar or poetry.
Or poetry?
We don’t say
the same thing
over and over?
You don’t say.
Tell me another.
The wallpaper
of our lives is just one darn
novelty after another.
Shall we agree
to accept
pattern for pattern, up for up for up,
salute the drop drop drop this
endless wearing of us
down to down to
down to nothing is?
Poetry
sun
repeating.
In the gloaming
If you’re on the north shore
you face south.
You’re a sunrise people.
Others will have to hymn the sunset; the best we can do is
our Phos hilaron as light’s shadows crumple, falling from
the hump-backed frozen waves before our sunrise eyes, definition lost
to the brush of twilight from this shore to far shore
to those southerners who face north.
Nightfall and the snow is clean erased, tabula
almost rasa before the… uh, onset of the
fearful green
of the neighbour’s sick glare, his
garage lamp! — joyless carnaval against the bogey dark
to chase away… what? Mutinous deer?
Piratizing porcupine?
A skunk à l’école buissonnière?
Our woods’ creatures,
his green glare.
We go to bed at eight now of a night :
Nothing of us that doth fade
but doth suffer a fleuve-change
into something rich and strange
into a people that sleep and wake
with spring of day
who once began work when the midnight telephone stopped
and who now drop with the quick dark
apart from
some star-gazing
some moon-gazing
some listening to the intense silence
some glaring of the green, the emerald threat
the evil eye.
Some glaring at it, exchanging hexes.
Snow’s complicit with sun, snow’s sun’s hireling;
the shepherd has a stand-in, he can go off to the banquet
and the snow
will light us woollums with surrogate light all night,
stay us with second-hand sun.
Québec’s gloaming.
Our eyes go roaming in the gloaming, feasting on the inhering light
…even the darkness is no darkness with thee,
but the night is as clear as the day:
the darkness and light to thee are both alike.
Green has its place.
Thumbs, frogs, lily pads, croquet hoops, lawn clippings, tea, old
orange peels on the compost heap, tall lime drinks, banking cooperatives,
jewellers’ visors, zippers, old leather tomes, old study lamps, Copenhagen
copper rooves, carpets in bedrooms, sheets with William Morris willow
pattern, willows, elms, ginkos, gooseberries, leeks, pipsissewa,
unripe apples on the tree, ripe pistachios peeking out of their shells,
rotten mussels not peeking out of theirs, absinthe, beer
in a Québec pub on St-Patrick’s Day,
these have their place in the scheme of green.
But Not Green Glare On Snow
on pristine white unlit or moonlit or shepherd-lit or hireling-lit
black-light-lit snow!
Snow is white.
Chameleonesque blue or mauve, or grey, or gold maybe. Not green.
Under it is green. Over green is white.
Let’s