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The Crisp Day Closing on My Hand: The Poetry of M. Travis Lane
The Crisp Day Closing on My The Poetry of M. Travis Lane is a collection of thirty-five of her best poems, selected with an introduction by Jeanette Lynes. An environmentalist, feminist, and peace activist, M. Travis Lane is known for witty and meticulously crafted poems that explore the elusive nature of “home” in both historical and present contexts and reflect on the identity of the woman poet and what it means to be a writer. Lane’s poems exhibit impressive range and variety―long poems, short lyrics, serial poems, poems inspired by visual art―and are richly attentive to the landscapes, both urban and wild, of her New Brunswick home. They voice a sense of urgency with respect to ecological crises and war; her poetic attention fixes unwaveringly on the smallest pebble on the coast of Fundy but is equally attuned to global patterns of destructive domination. In her introduction “As Opportunity for Grace, This Life May Serve”, editor Jeanette Lynes discusses how Lane’s poetry integrates an ecopoetic vision with explorations of the artist’s task of mapping her world. Lane’s afterword reinforces her sense of the poet’s project as a form of mystical play, a search for patterns in the “unified disunities” of all things.
- GenresPoetry
102 pages, Paperback
First published November 26, 2007
About the author
M. Travis Lane
19 books3 followersM. Travis Lane is Honorary President of the Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick and a Life Member of the League of Canadian Poets. She has published eleven books of poetry (including the forthcoming The Safety Net) and received numerous awards, including the Bliss Carman Poetry Prize, the Atlantic Poetry Prize, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Alden Nowlan Award for Excellence in English Language Literary Arts.
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January 24, 2022
I carry for my safety
an unimportant stone,
not smooth to touch, not lovely,
but quite my own.
It's not sharp or heavy,
but useless in my hand -
significant of nothing,
a stone I understand.
Until this nothing fails me
I'm safe, as safe as stone,
but once I give it meaning, art
will give the meaningless a heart,
and heart is nothing safe in hand,
and nothing I can understand.
* * *
It looks like house-tidying,
housewife's art:
arrangement of mass, shifted
against an endurance.
Like spreading a clean white lawn
outdoors, with candles and spruce drift,
salting the meal
with the window. Or,
indoors, two pots
are earth buds, ear breasts,
cue to the ghosts -
if you see it.
Sweetheart,
sitting within the work,
move gracefully.
Don't jar.
Move as the cat moves, he
composes it round him.
This is the visible flame of my hearth.
The furnace, a deep conch,
summons the lares.
* * *
The plane takes off. A seagull scuds
the far end of the runway.
Beyond, a tiny smoke curls up
from the dusky tatters of the woods.
And we go home, non-travellers,
who leave the long departures til the end.
Where could we go? to read the world
from some air-seated atlas, trail our hands
across the surfaces of seas,
of fondle ponds and rivulets
like beads in some old bureau drawer
among the pins and photographs -
(a child's face on a browning card,
tender, distrustful, petulant - )
Open the window. The mirror shakes.
All that good dust flies out of doors.
In this small attic of lost time
we stand and watch the distances
expand. This place is travelling
too, has left us,
now, is different.
Where were we standing when you left?
The trees have turned to ash.
I see a jet's white spiral in the west.
* * *
The wind's too rough for the sailboats.
A cormorant, starting to hand out its wings,
has had second thoughts. ale mustard flowers
shake in the rocks and styrofoam
of the riverbank. A runner in red mittens
pounds on past.
At the armoury
boys play at soldiers. My small dog
noses the thawing ground. Her thick
coat flares like thistle seed.
* * *
This man runs into the forest
breaking its red-tipped branches, flails
among the ice-encrusted leaves,
is,
he says,
the poet himself.
He sees himself, his vividness
of shoulder, his strong arms,
as one with what he fractures. He
contains, he says,
what he has run inside.
Says 'Woods.'
Better he should go mousely; creep
flat as a dry leaf; write
on snow calligraphy
of his own diary doings; claim
only a single errand run;
report: one nut.
* * *
No monument. Let me be ash
thrown out to tide
among the rags and flotsam of the shore
and the severed beads of the bladderwrack.
Or drop from a dory a brown glass jar
weighted with sand for the barnacles
to reach their gritty fingers toward
and tumble in the oil-ooze of the flats.
The inscription: that foamy trace
when tide turns and the osprey from her perch
turns also, or,
where a salmon leaps, or where
the sleek unsaying hides a loon.
No epitaph. Even a stone
returns to the nest of processes.
As for the soul,
nothing will hold or mark it but the same
impermanent elation, heart to heart, a word,
like a live fish in water, sometimes shows.
an unimportant stone,
not smooth to touch, not lovely,
but quite my own.
It's not sharp or heavy,
but useless in my hand -
significant of nothing,
a stone I understand.
Until this nothing fails me
I'm safe, as safe as stone,
but once I give it meaning, art
will give the meaningless a heart,
and heart is nothing safe in hand,
and nothing I can understand.
- The Talisman, pg. 1
* * *
It looks like house-tidying,
housewife's art:
arrangement of mass, shifted
against an endurance.
Like spreading a clean white lawn
outdoors, with candles and spruce drift,
salting the meal
with the window. Or,
indoors, two pots
are earth buds, ear breasts,
cue to the ghosts -
if you see it.
Sweetheart,
sitting within the work,
move gracefully.
Don't jar.
Move as the cat moves, he
composes it round him.
This is the visible flame of my hearth.
The furnace, a deep conch,
summons the lares.
- The House as Sculpture as Chapel as Priest, pg. 16
* * *
The plane takes off. A seagull scuds
the far end of the runway.
Beyond, a tiny smoke curls up
from the dusky tatters of the woods.
And we go home, non-travellers,
who leave the long departures til the end.
Where could we go? to read the world
from some air-seated atlas, trail our hands
across the surfaces of seas,
of fondle ponds and rivulets
like beads in some old bureau drawer
among the pins and photographs -
(a child's face on a browning card,
tender, distrustful, petulant - )
Open the window. The mirror shakes.
All that good dust flies out of doors.
In this small attic of lost time
we stand and watch the distances
expand. This place is travelling
too, has left us,
now, is different.
Where were we standing when you left?
The trees have turned to ash.
I see a jet's white spiral in the west.
- Departures, pg. 24
* * *
The wind's too rough for the sailboats.
A cormorant, starting to hand out its wings,
has had second thoughts. ale mustard flowers
shake in the rocks and styrofoam
of the riverbank. A runner in red mittens
pounds on past.
At the armoury
boys play at soldiers. My small dog
noses the thawing ground. Her thick
coat flares like thistle seed.
- Local Suite, 1. Riverside Drive, pg. 43
* * *
This man runs into the forest
breaking its red-tipped branches, flails
among the ice-encrusted leaves,
is,
he says,
the poet himself.
He sees himself, his vividness
of shoulder, his strong arms,
as one with what he fractures. He
contains, he says,
what he has run inside.
Says 'Woods.'
Better he should go mousely; creep
flat as a dry leaf; write
on snow calligraphy
of his own diary doings; claim
only a single errand run;
report: one nut.
- About the Size of It, pg. 53
* * *
No monument. Let me be ash
thrown out to tide
among the rags and flotsam of the shore
and the severed beads of the bladderwrack.
Or drop from a dory a brown glass jar
weighted with sand for the barnacles
to reach their gritty fingers toward
and tumble in the oil-ooze of the flats.
The inscription: that foamy trace
when tide turns and the osprey from her perch
turns also, or,
where a salmon leaps, or where
the sleek unsaying hides a loon.
No epitaph. Even a stone
returns to the nest of processes.
As for the soul,
nothing will hold or mark it but the same
impermanent elation, heart to heart, a word,
like a live fish in water, sometimes shows.
- Codicil, pg. 62
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