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Touch To My Tongue
- GenresPoetry
53 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1984
15 people want to read
About the author
Daphne Marlatt
53 books13 followers"Nationality: Canadian (originally Maylasian, immigrated to Canada in 1951). Born: Daphne Shirley Buckle, Melbourne, Australia, 1942.
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
*
The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
Education: University of British Columbia, Vancouver, 1960-64, B.A.; University of Indiana, Bloomington, 1964-67, M.A. 1968. Career: Has taught at University of British Columbia, University of Victoria, University of Saskatchewan, University of Western Ontario, Simon Fraser University, University of Calgary, Mount Royal College, University of Alberta, McMaster University, University of Manitoba; second vice chair of the Writers' Union of Canada, 1987-88.
Awards: MacMillan and Brissenden award for creative writing; Canada Council award. Member: Founding member of West Coast Women and Words Society.
Other Work:
Plays
Radio Plays:
Steveston, 1976.
Other
Zócalo. Toronto, Coach House, 1977.
Readings from the Labyrinth. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1998.
Editor, Lost Language: Selected Poems of Maxine Gadd. Toronto, Coach House Press, 1982.
Editor, Telling It: Women and Language Across Cultures. Vancouver, Press Gang, 1990.
Editor, Mothertalk: Life Stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka. Edmonton, Alberta, NeWest Press, 1997.
Translator, Mauve, by Nicole Brossard. Montreal, Nouvelle Barre du Jour/Writing, 1985.
*
The National Library of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.
Critical Studies:
Translation A to Z: Notes on Daphne Marlatt's "Ana Historic" by Pamela Banting, Edmonton, NeWest Press, 1991; "I Quote Myself"; or, A Map of Mrs. Reading: Re-siting "Women's Place" in "Anna Historic" by Manina Jones, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993; The Country of Her Own Body: Ana Historic, by Frank Davey, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1993.
"Although I think of myself as a poet first, I began writing both fiction and lyric poems in the early 1960s. My collections of poetry have usually had a loose narrative shape as I tend to write in sequences, or "books." As an immigrant, I'd long held the ambition to write an historical novel about Vancouver, but Ana Historic actually critiqued and broke open the genre, as it also increased my fascination with the potential for openness in the novel form. Influenced by the development of "fiction/theory" in Quebec by feminist writers there, I see open structures combined with a folding or echoing of women's experiences in different time periods as a way to convey more of the unwritten or culturally overwritten aspects of what it means to be alive as a woman today.'"
* * *
Read more: "Daphne Marlatt Biography - Daphne Marlatt comments:" - http://biography.jrank.org/pages/4556...
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January 23, 2022
Waters of Wisdom
Fantasmata and Mythemes
Touch to My Tongue
The brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important.
- H.D., Thought and Vision
Une femme inscrite en exterritorialité du langage. Elle expose le sujet comme on s'expose à la mort. Car il est question qu'elle vive.
- Louise Cotnoir, S'ecrire avec,
clans et contre le langage
for Betsy
this place full of contradiction
a confusion of times if not of place, though you understood when i said no not the Danish Tearoom - the Indonesian or Indian, was in fact that place of warm walls, a comfortable tarot deck even the lamps pick up your glow, a cabin of going, fjords in there, a clear and pristine look the winds eave through your eyes i'm watching you talk of a different birth, blonde hair on my tongue, of numbers, nine flush with cappuccino and brandy and rain outside on that street we flash down, laughing with no umbrella, i see your face because i don't see mine equally flush with being, co-incidence being together we meet in these far places we find in each other, it's Sappho i said, on the radio, always we meet original, blind of direction, astonished your hand covers mine walking lowtide strands of Colaba, the lighthouse, Mumbai meaning great mother, you wearing your irish drover's cap and waiting alive in the glow while i come up worrying danish and curry, this place full of contradiction - you know, you knew, it was the one place i meant.
houseless
i'm afraid, you say, are you? out in the wintry air, the watery sun welling close behind your shoulders i am following, the already known symmetry of your body, its radiant, bow-woman arched over me, integrity straight as an arrow. blind with joy i say oh no, thinking, how could i fear with you?
and now it's dark in here, deep, my cave a house, you on the other side of the country, our country of sea with the wind blowing, our country of reeds and grassed under unfathomed sky. i huddle small, i call you up, a tiny point of light, memory small like a far-off hole - are you there? in all this smoke, fear, images torn from the wall requiring life for a life / that she take it all, mother of giving turned terrible mother, blood-sipper, sorrow Durga. turning her back, she takes back what she gives, as you might, or i might. giving myself up to fear. turning away (for "safety's" sake).
there are no walls. fear/love, this light that flashes over the idea surrounding us. signals danger, yes, my house no house. i can only be, no vessel but a movement running, out in the open, out in the dark and rising tide, in risk, knowing who i am with you -
creatures of ecstasy, we have risen drenched from our own wet grasses, reeds, sea. turned out, turned inside out, beside ourselves, we are the tide swelling, we are the continent draining, deep and forever into each other.
yes
JADE a sign on the road announces, jade, piedra de, stone of that space between the last rib and the hipbone, that place i couldn't bear the weight of his sleeping hand upon - and my fingers flutter to my ring, gone. only a white band the skin of years hidden under its reminder to myself of the self i was marrying - "worthless woman, wilful girl." standing athwart, objecting, "so as to thwart or obstruct," "perversely." no, so as to retain this small open space that was mine.
perverse in that, having to defend myself from attack, encroachment on that soft abyss, that tidal place i knew as mine, know now is the place i find with you. not perverse but turned the right way round, redefined, it signals us beyond limits in a new tongue our connection runs along.
you call me on the phone, have you lost something? and i startle yes. held of it is here, you say. not lost, not lost. broken open on my finger, broken open by your touch, and i didn't even feel a loss, leaving the need for limits at your place, leaving the urge to stand apart i sink into our mouths' hot estuary, tidal yes we are, leaking love and saying it deep within.
coming to you
through traffic, honking and off-course, direction veering, presently up your street, car slam, soon enough on my feet, eager and hesitant, peering with the rush of coming to you, late, through hydrangeas nodding out with season's age, and roses open outline still the edge of summer gone in grounding rain. elsewhere, or from it, i brush by, impatient, bending to your window to surprise you in that place i never know, you alone with yourself there, one left on your knee, you with boots, with headphones on, grave, rapt with inaudible music. the day surrounds you: you point where everything listens. and i slow down, learning how to enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
kore
no one wears yellow like you excessive and radiant storehouse of sun, skin smooth as fruit but thin, leaking light. (i am climbing toward you out of the hidden.) no one shines like you, so that even your lashes flicker light, amber over blue (amba, amorous Demeter, you with the fire in your hand, i am coming to you). no one my tongue burrows in, whose wild flesh opens wet, tongue seeks its nest, amative and nurturing (here i am you) lips work toward undoing (dhei, female, sucking and suckling, fecund) spurt/spirit opening in the dark of earth, yu! cry jubilant excess, your fruiting body bloom we issue into the light of, sweet, successive flesh . . .
eating
a kiwi at four a.m. among the sheets green slice of cool going down easy on the tongue extended with desire for you and you in me it isn't us we suck those other lips tongue flesh wet wall that gives and gives whole fountains inner mountains moving out resistances you said ladders at the canyon leap desire is its way through walls swerve fingers instinct in you insist further persist in me too wave on wave to that deep pool we find ourselves/it dawning on us we have reached the same place "timeless" you recognize as "yes" giving yourself up not in we come suddenly round the bend to it descending with the yellow canyon flow the mouth everything drops away from time its sheets two spoons two caved-in shells of kiwi fruit
climbing the canyon even as
the Fraser rushes out to sea and you, where you are i am, muddy with heartland silt beside the river's outward push my car climbs steadily away from and toward - where we were - each step we took, what you said, what i saw (sun in your hair on the rim of your look), smell of love on our skin as we rushed with the river's push out, out to the mouth taking everything with us / and away, as i leave you there (where i am still) to make this climb i don't want to, feel how it hurts, our pull, womb to womb, spun thin reaching Sailor's Bar, Boston Bar, reaching Lytton where the Thompson River joins, alone nosing my way into the unnamed female folds of hill, soft sage since we came down twelve days ago begun to bloom, gold and the grass gold, and your hair not gold but like as light shivers through these hills. i am waiting for the dark waiting with us at Ashcroft, behind glass, by the river's edge: then going down to it, that bank of uncertain footing as the freight roars by, across, that black river in its rush, noisy, enveloping us was we envelop each other - and the wind took your hair and flunk it around your look exultant, wild, i felt the river pushing through, all that weight of heartlocked years let loose and pouring with us out where known ground drops away and i am going, beyond the mountains, past the Great Divide where rivers run in opposite direction i am carrying you with me.
prairie
in this land the rivers carve furrows and canyons as sudden to the eye as if earth opened up its miles and miles of rolling range, highway running to its evercoming horizon, days of it, light picking flowers. your blackness susans are here, my coral weed in brilliant patches, and always that grass frayed feathery by the season, late, and wild canada geese in the last field. i imagine your blue eye gathering these as we do, only you are not here and the parches flat opens up: badlands and hoodoos and that river with dangerous currents you cannot swim, TREACHEROUS BANK, sandstone caving in: and there she goes, Persephone caught in a whirlwind the underside churns up, the otherwise of where we are, causing earth's surface, gazing on it, grazing, like those 70 million year old dinosaurs, the whole herd browsing the shore of Bearpaw Sea which ran all the way in up here, like Florida, she said, came in from the desert region they were hungry for grass (or flowers) when something like a flashflood caught them, their bones, all these years later, laid out in a whirlpool formation i cannot see (that as the metaphor) up there on the farthest hoodoo, those bright colours she keeps stressing, the guy in the red shirt, metal flashing, is not Hades but only the latest technician in a long line of measurers. and earth? i have seen her open up to let love in, let loose a flood, and fold again, so that even my fingers could not find their way through all that bush, all that common day rolling unbroken.
hidden ground
lost without you, though sun accompanies me, though moon and the maps say always i am on the right track, the Trans-Canada heading east - everything in me longs to turn around, go back to you, to (that gap), afraid i'm lost, afraid i've driven out of our territory we found (we inhabit together), not terra firma, not dry land, owned, along the highway, cleared for use, but that other, lowlying, moist and undefined, hidden ground, wild and running everywhere along the outer edges. lost, losti, lust-y one, who calls my untamed answering one to sally forth, finding alternate names, finding the child provoked, invoked, lost daughter, other mother and lover, waxing tree, waist i love, water author sounding the dark edge of the words we come to, augur- ess, issa, lithesome, lilaiesthai, yearning for you, and like a branch some hidden spring pulls toward our ground, i grown unafraid increasing ("lust of the earth or of the plant"), lasati, (she) yearns and plays, letting the yearning play it out, playing it over, every haystack, every passing hill, that tongue our bodies utter, woman tongue, speaking in and of and for each other.
where we went
we went to what houses stars at the sea's edge, brilliant day, where a metal crab jets water catching light, heaven and earth in a tropic embrace joined upright, outside glass doors people and cars and waterglaze. city that houses stares, city that houses eyes, electricity writing the dark of so many heads figuring where we were. we knew so well i didn't even catch your eye as we stepped through and she brought out the rings for us to look at, silver, moon metal engraves in the shape of wild eyes by kwakiutl and haida hands, rave and wolf and whale and unknown birds not seen in the light city. creatures of unorganized territory we become, a physical impulse moving from me to you (the poem is), us dancing in animal skins in the unmapped part of our world. now you wear whale on the finger that enters and traces in whale walrus the horse you thought i was, shy of fences running the edge of the woods where brought up short i feel the warmth of you, double you, wolf. i wear wolf and dream of your lean breast descending, warm and slow the fur that grows between your eyes fifteen hundred miles away in another city under the same moon.
down the season's avenue
sunrise 7:18, sunset 7:23: we are approaching that point when the pivot of dawn and the pivot of night balance the narrowing day. you in it far off on the coast climbing what tree over the sea to gaze east? everywhere i see light lean along a curved plain. no intimate clefts of earth, no hilly rise but plain ("flat, clear") under the eye of horizon, that boundary you are on the other side of, two hours earlier. flat, plano-, plain as the palm of my hand, but i can't see. i try the tree for company, these lives, leaves, sudden against their going, lucid and startled. i ride their coming into view, not knowing, whispering where are you? down the avenue your breath runs up my spine, you shiver through, clear as the fire in turning leaves, clear as your voice that lights i'm here, clear as that point when the plane comes in and you will be standing there. i'm coming home.
in the dark of the coast
there is fern and frost, a gathering of small birds melting song in the underbrush. close, you talk to one. there is the cedar slant of your hair as it falls gold over your shoulder, over your naked, dearly known skin - its smell, its answering touch to my tongue. fondant, font, found, all that melts, pours. the dark rain of our being together at last. and the cold wind, curled-up fronds of tree fern wanting touch, our fingers separate and stiff. we haven't mourned enough, you say, for our parting, lost to each other the last time through. in the dark of this place, its fire touch, not fern but frost, just one of the houses we pass through in the endless constellation of our being, close, and away from each other, torn and apart. i didn't know your hair, i didn't know your skin when you beckoned to me in that last place. but i knew your eyes, blue, as soon as you came around the small hill, knew your tongue. come, you said, we slid together in the spring, blue, of a place we'd been. terra incognito known, geysa, gush, upwelling in the hidden Norse we found, we feel it thrust as waters part for us, hot through fern, frost, volcanic thrust. it's all there, love, we part each other coming to, geyser, spouting pool, hidden in and under separate skin we make for each other through,
coming up from underground
out of the shadows of your being, so sick and still a shade under it, your eye looks out at me, grave and light at once, smiling recognition. draw close, i am so glad to see you, bleak colour of your iris gone blue, that blue of a clear sky, belo, bright, Beltane, "bright-fire." draw me in, light a new flame after your sudden descent into the dark. draw me close so i see only light your eye a full moon rides, bleikr in the old tongue, shining, white ascent above horizon fringed with black reed, horsetail, primitive flicker on the rim of eons ascending this white channel we wander in, a plain of "wild beestes" felt at the periphery of vision, fear and paranoia ready to spring - beyond the mind or out of it they say, though "defended . . . with apparent logic." in this landscape we are undefended in the white path of our being, lunar and pulled beyond reason. bleikr, shining white, radiant healing in various bright colours, blanda, to mingle and blend: the blaze of light we are, spiralling.
healing
stray white lips, petal kissing middle distance between blue iris you, me, moss there and small starred dandelions. in the drift gathering, days, hours without touch. gauze, waiting for the two lips of your incision to knit, waiting for our mouths to close lip to other lip in the full spring of wet, revived, season plants come alive. this season of your body traumatized, muscles torn where the knife went, a small part of you gone. gall, all that is bitter, melancholy.
each day we climb a small hill, looking. rufous hummingbirds dive before our very eyes kissing space. fawn lilies spring moist lips to wing filled air. i want to open you like a butterfly. over bluffs at the rim of blue distance we might leap, free fall, high above us four bald eagles scream for pure glee. glee, it falls on us, bits of sound shining, rain of rung glass. glisten, glare. (g)listen, all of it goes back shining, even gall does, glass and glazing, every yellow hope a spark, lucid and articulate in the dark i wake to, reaching for you. somewhere a bird calls. it is our bird, the one that wings brightness, springan, scattering through us as your lips open under mine and the new rain comes at last, lust, spring in us beginning all over again.
Oneiric Certainty
Impressa Elementata Eidola
Occulis Imaginationis
Fantasmata and Mythemes
Touch to My Tongue
The brain and the womb are both centres of consciousness, equally important.
- H.D., Thought and Vision
Une femme inscrite en exterritorialité du langage. Elle expose le sujet comme on s'expose à la mort. Car il est question qu'elle vive.
- Louise Cotnoir, S'ecrire avec,
clans et contre le langage
for Betsy
this place full of contradiction
a confusion of times if not of place, though you understood when i said no not the Danish Tearoom - the Indonesian or Indian, was in fact that place of warm walls, a comfortable tarot deck even the lamps pick up your glow, a cabin of going, fjords in there, a clear and pristine look the winds eave through your eyes i'm watching you talk of a different birth, blonde hair on my tongue, of numbers, nine flush with cappuccino and brandy and rain outside on that street we flash down, laughing with no umbrella, i see your face because i don't see mine equally flush with being, co-incidence being together we meet in these far places we find in each other, it's Sappho i said, on the radio, always we meet original, blind of direction, astonished your hand covers mine walking lowtide strands of Colaba, the lighthouse, Mumbai meaning great mother, you wearing your irish drover's cap and waiting alive in the glow while i come up worrying danish and curry, this place full of contradiction - you know, you knew, it was the one place i meant.
houseless
i'm afraid, you say, are you? out in the wintry air, the watery sun welling close behind your shoulders i am following, the already known symmetry of your body, its radiant, bow-woman arched over me, integrity straight as an arrow. blind with joy i say oh no, thinking, how could i fear with you?
and now it's dark in here, deep, my cave a house, you on the other side of the country, our country of sea with the wind blowing, our country of reeds and grassed under unfathomed sky. i huddle small, i call you up, a tiny point of light, memory small like a far-off hole - are you there? in all this smoke, fear, images torn from the wall requiring life for a life / that she take it all, mother of giving turned terrible mother, blood-sipper, sorrow Durga. turning her back, she takes back what she gives, as you might, or i might. giving myself up to fear. turning away (for "safety's" sake).
there are no walls. fear/love, this light that flashes over the idea surrounding us. signals danger, yes, my house no house. i can only be, no vessel but a movement running, out in the open, out in the dark and rising tide, in risk, knowing who i am with you -
creatures of ecstasy, we have risen drenched from our own wet grasses, reeds, sea. turned out, turned inside out, beside ourselves, we are the tide swelling, we are the continent draining, deep and forever into each other.
yes
JADE a sign on the road announces, jade, piedra de, stone of that space between the last rib and the hipbone, that place i couldn't bear the weight of his sleeping hand upon - and my fingers flutter to my ring, gone. only a white band the skin of years hidden under its reminder to myself of the self i was marrying - "worthless woman, wilful girl." standing athwart, objecting, "so as to thwart or obstruct," "perversely." no, so as to retain this small open space that was mine.
perverse in that, having to defend myself from attack, encroachment on that soft abyss, that tidal place i knew as mine, know now is the place i find with you. not perverse but turned the right way round, redefined, it signals us beyond limits in a new tongue our connection runs along.
you call me on the phone, have you lost something? and i startle yes. held of it is here, you say. not lost, not lost. broken open on my finger, broken open by your touch, and i didn't even feel a loss, leaving the need for limits at your place, leaving the urge to stand apart i sink into our mouths' hot estuary, tidal yes we are, leaking love and saying it deep within.
coming to you
through traffic, honking and off-course, direction veering, presently up your street, car slam, soon enough on my feet, eager and hesitant, peering with the rush of coming to you, late, through hydrangeas nodding out with season's age, and roses open outline still the edge of summer gone in grounding rain. elsewhere, or from it, i brush by, impatient, bending to your window to surprise you in that place i never know, you alone with yourself there, one left on your knee, you with boots, with headphones on, grave, rapt with inaudible music. the day surrounds you: you point where everything listens. and i slow down, learning how to enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
kore
no one wears yellow like you excessive and radiant storehouse of sun, skin smooth as fruit but thin, leaking light. (i am climbing toward you out of the hidden.) no one shines like you, so that even your lashes flicker light, amber over blue (amba, amorous Demeter, you with the fire in your hand, i am coming to you). no one my tongue burrows in, whose wild flesh opens wet, tongue seeks its nest, amative and nurturing (here i am you) lips work toward undoing (dhei, female, sucking and suckling, fecund) spurt/spirit opening in the dark of earth, yu! cry jubilant excess, your fruiting body bloom we issue into the light of, sweet, successive flesh . . .
eating
a kiwi at four a.m. among the sheets green slice of cool going down easy on the tongue extended with desire for you and you in me it isn't us we suck those other lips tongue flesh wet wall that gives and gives whole fountains inner mountains moving out resistances you said ladders at the canyon leap desire is its way through walls swerve fingers instinct in you insist further persist in me too wave on wave to that deep pool we find ourselves/it dawning on us we have reached the same place "timeless" you recognize as "yes" giving yourself up not in we come suddenly round the bend to it descending with the yellow canyon flow the mouth everything drops away from time its sheets two spoons two caved-in shells of kiwi fruit
climbing the canyon even as
the Fraser rushes out to sea and you, where you are i am, muddy with heartland silt beside the river's outward push my car climbs steadily away from and toward - where we were - each step we took, what you said, what i saw (sun in your hair on the rim of your look), smell of love on our skin as we rushed with the river's push out, out to the mouth taking everything with us / and away, as i leave you there (where i am still) to make this climb i don't want to, feel how it hurts, our pull, womb to womb, spun thin reaching Sailor's Bar, Boston Bar, reaching Lytton where the Thompson River joins, alone nosing my way into the unnamed female folds of hill, soft sage since we came down twelve days ago begun to bloom, gold and the grass gold, and your hair not gold but like as light shivers through these hills. i am waiting for the dark waiting with us at Ashcroft, behind glass, by the river's edge: then going down to it, that bank of uncertain footing as the freight roars by, across, that black river in its rush, noisy, enveloping us was we envelop each other - and the wind took your hair and flunk it around your look exultant, wild, i felt the river pushing through, all that weight of heartlocked years let loose and pouring with us out where known ground drops away and i am going, beyond the mountains, past the Great Divide where rivers run in opposite direction i am carrying you with me.
prairie
in this land the rivers carve furrows and canyons as sudden to the eye as if earth opened up its miles and miles of rolling range, highway running to its evercoming horizon, days of it, light picking flowers. your blackness susans are here, my coral weed in brilliant patches, and always that grass frayed feathery by the season, late, and wild canada geese in the last field. i imagine your blue eye gathering these as we do, only you are not here and the parches flat opens up: badlands and hoodoos and that river with dangerous currents you cannot swim, TREACHEROUS BANK, sandstone caving in: and there she goes, Persephone caught in a whirlwind the underside churns up, the otherwise of where we are, causing earth's surface, gazing on it, grazing, like those 70 million year old dinosaurs, the whole herd browsing the shore of Bearpaw Sea which ran all the way in up here, like Florida, she said, came in from the desert region they were hungry for grass (or flowers) when something like a flashflood caught them, their bones, all these years later, laid out in a whirlpool formation i cannot see (that as the metaphor) up there on the farthest hoodoo, those bright colours she keeps stressing, the guy in the red shirt, metal flashing, is not Hades but only the latest technician in a long line of measurers. and earth? i have seen her open up to let love in, let loose a flood, and fold again, so that even my fingers could not find their way through all that bush, all that common day rolling unbroken.
hidden ground
lost without you, though sun accompanies me, though moon and the maps say always i am on the right track, the Trans-Canada heading east - everything in me longs to turn around, go back to you, to (that gap), afraid i'm lost, afraid i've driven out of our territory we found (we inhabit together), not terra firma, not dry land, owned, along the highway, cleared for use, but that other, lowlying, moist and undefined, hidden ground, wild and running everywhere along the outer edges. lost, losti, lust-y one, who calls my untamed answering one to sally forth, finding alternate names, finding the child provoked, invoked, lost daughter, other mother and lover, waxing tree, waist i love, water author sounding the dark edge of the words we come to, augur- ess, issa, lithesome, lilaiesthai, yearning for you, and like a branch some hidden spring pulls toward our ground, i grown unafraid increasing ("lust of the earth or of the plant"), lasati, (she) yearns and plays, letting the yearning play it out, playing it over, every haystack, every passing hill, that tongue our bodies utter, woman tongue, speaking in and of and for each other.
where we went
we went to what houses stars at the sea's edge, brilliant day, where a metal crab jets water catching light, heaven and earth in a tropic embrace joined upright, outside glass doors people and cars and waterglaze. city that houses stares, city that houses eyes, electricity writing the dark of so many heads figuring where we were. we knew so well i didn't even catch your eye as we stepped through and she brought out the rings for us to look at, silver, moon metal engraves in the shape of wild eyes by kwakiutl and haida hands, rave and wolf and whale and unknown birds not seen in the light city. creatures of unorganized territory we become, a physical impulse moving from me to you (the poem is), us dancing in animal skins in the unmapped part of our world. now you wear whale on the finger that enters and traces in whale walrus the horse you thought i was, shy of fences running the edge of the woods where brought up short i feel the warmth of you, double you, wolf. i wear wolf and dream of your lean breast descending, warm and slow the fur that grows between your eyes fifteen hundred miles away in another city under the same moon.
down the season's avenue
sunrise 7:18, sunset 7:23: we are approaching that point when the pivot of dawn and the pivot of night balance the narrowing day. you in it far off on the coast climbing what tree over the sea to gaze east? everywhere i see light lean along a curved plain. no intimate clefts of earth, no hilly rise but plain ("flat, clear") under the eye of horizon, that boundary you are on the other side of, two hours earlier. flat, plano-, plain as the palm of my hand, but i can't see. i try the tree for company, these lives, leaves, sudden against their going, lucid and startled. i ride their coming into view, not knowing, whispering where are you? down the avenue your breath runs up my spine, you shiver through, clear as the fire in turning leaves, clear as your voice that lights i'm here, clear as that point when the plane comes in and you will be standing there. i'm coming home.
in the dark of the coast
there is fern and frost, a gathering of small birds melting song in the underbrush. close, you talk to one. there is the cedar slant of your hair as it falls gold over your shoulder, over your naked, dearly known skin - its smell, its answering touch to my tongue. fondant, font, found, all that melts, pours. the dark rain of our being together at last. and the cold wind, curled-up fronds of tree fern wanting touch, our fingers separate and stiff. we haven't mourned enough, you say, for our parting, lost to each other the last time through. in the dark of this place, its fire touch, not fern but frost, just one of the houses we pass through in the endless constellation of our being, close, and away from each other, torn and apart. i didn't know your hair, i didn't know your skin when you beckoned to me in that last place. but i knew your eyes, blue, as soon as you came around the small hill, knew your tongue. come, you said, we slid together in the spring, blue, of a place we'd been. terra incognito known, geysa, gush, upwelling in the hidden Norse we found, we feel it thrust as waters part for us, hot through fern, frost, volcanic thrust. it's all there, love, we part each other coming to, geyser, spouting pool, hidden in and under separate skin we make for each other through,
coming up from underground
out of the shadows of your being, so sick and still a shade under it, your eye looks out at me, grave and light at once, smiling recognition. draw close, i am so glad to see you, bleak colour of your iris gone blue, that blue of a clear sky, belo, bright, Beltane, "bright-fire." draw me in, light a new flame after your sudden descent into the dark. draw me close so i see only light your eye a full moon rides, bleikr in the old tongue, shining, white ascent above horizon fringed with black reed, horsetail, primitive flicker on the rim of eons ascending this white channel we wander in, a plain of "wild beestes" felt at the periphery of vision, fear and paranoia ready to spring - beyond the mind or out of it they say, though "defended . . . with apparent logic." in this landscape we are undefended in the white path of our being, lunar and pulled beyond reason. bleikr, shining white, radiant healing in various bright colours, blanda, to mingle and blend: the blaze of light we are, spiralling.
healing
stray white lips, petal kissing middle distance between blue iris you, me, moss there and small starred dandelions. in the drift gathering, days, hours without touch. gauze, waiting for the two lips of your incision to knit, waiting for our mouths to close lip to other lip in the full spring of wet, revived, season plants come alive. this season of your body traumatized, muscles torn where the knife went, a small part of you gone. gall, all that is bitter, melancholy.
each day we climb a small hill, looking. rufous hummingbirds dive before our very eyes kissing space. fawn lilies spring moist lips to wing filled air. i want to open you like a butterfly. over bluffs at the rim of blue distance we might leap, free fall, high above us four bald eagles scream for pure glee. glee, it falls on us, bits of sound shining, rain of rung glass. glisten, glare. (g)listen, all of it goes back shining, even gall does, glass and glazing, every yellow hope a spark, lucid and articulate in the dark i wake to, reaching for you. somewhere a bird calls. it is our bird, the one that wings brightness, springan, scattering through us as your lips open under mine and the new rain comes at last, lust, spring in us beginning all over again.
Oneiric Certainty
Impressa Elementata Eidola
Occulis Imaginationis
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