Cast from Bells 9780773582293

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Cast from Bells
Acknowledgments

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Cast from Bells

t h e h ug h m a c l e n n a n p oe t r y s e r i e s Editors: Tracy Ware and Allan Hepburn Selection Committee: Mark Abley, Donald H. Akenson, Philip Cercone, and Joan Harcourt

titles in the ser ies Waterglass

Jeffery Donaldson

All the God-Sized Fruit Chess Pieces

Shawna Lemay

David Solway

Giving My Body to Science The Asparagus Feast

Rachel Rose S.P. Zitner

The Thin Smoke of the Heart What Really Matters

Tim Bowling

Thomas O’Grady

A Dream of Sulphur

Aurian Haller

Credo Carmine Starnino Her Festival Clothes Mavis Jones The Afterlife of Trees

Brian Bartlett

Before We Had Words Bamboo Church

Ricardo Sternberg

Franklin’s Passage The Ishtar Gate

S.P. Zitner

David Solway Diana Brebner

Hurt Thyself Andrew Steinmetz The Silver Palace Restaurant Mark Abley Wet Apples, White Blood

Naomi Guttman

Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson Mosaic Orpheus Cast from Bells

Peter Dale Scott Suzanne Hancock

Cast from Bells Suz a n ne H a ncock

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston . London . Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2010 isbn 978-0-7735-3720-0 Legal deposit first quarter 2010 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

l i br a r y a n d a rc h i v e s c a n a da c ata l o gu i ng i n pu bl ic at ion Hancock, Suzanne, 1971– Cast from bells / Suzanne Hancock. (Hugh MacLennan poetry series ; 21) Poems. isbn 978-0-7735-3720-0 I. Title. II. Series: Hugh MacLennan poetry series ; 21

ps 8565. a572c 38 2010 c 811’.54 c 2009-907022-7

Typeset in 10/13 Adobe Garamond Pro by Garet Markvoort

For Colin

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Cast from Bells

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A tongue strikes the inside of a metal mouth: the sky splits into skies.

Beneath the gape-lip, someone grasps a braided rope, swings his whole body, then, momentum gathers, taut shoulders and arms, and voice –

birds scatter, unfold as seed tossed in fresh furrows. Every creature points to an idea of something, none reveals.

•

3

It’s a small porch, and rickety, but the sky is wild and dark silver and it woke me from a nap. Stuff in the yard is colliding with other stuff, plastic bottles from the garbage picked up and knocked against the shed, the neighbour’s ashtray and Kokanee tower lifted and dropped onto her kids’ bikes. The wind is up and everything wants to come alive. An erratic heartbeat and my cheek against the chest. When I eventually leave this house in my car too full of boxes, I’ll see my neighbour sitting on her front stairs and she’ll lift her watery beer in my direction and yell Good Luck as if every disaster can be rolled into one, and a heart wet with carbonation and cheer can make them all reasonable. Her voice will strike me hour after hour as I drive further east, past industrial parks and trees, one edge of the many-edged world up against the windshield, the many changing rooms of want leaving me mute. But before that, the wind is up and everything wants to speak. I want to undo my jacket and jeans. I want to soften into the dark silver light. Instead, I pull the hood of my sweater over my ears (for courage).

•

4

The bell-ringer walks from the tower, nods in time, counts his steps. Blistered palms. One, two, three, four, repeated, in quick succession, means fire. Many joyful peals of different pitches: a wedding. Six, with breathing space between, the call to prayer. Three: a death. Father Son Clangs so close together they blend into one long cry: war.

•

5

200 feet above the ground my mouth still minds the world. A body that clangs with absence, I’m a corroded shell with a voice. I will say whatever you want me to say. Pointy heads of spruce and pine listen. I’ve heard calls of disbelief from the scattered. They carry easily across fields and sea. From here the world is the world: ditch grass, slight yellow dogs, ash, clotheslines, factories, people hiding from wind. I will announce it all. To the bald. The planner’s graph. Unabashed.

•

6

From this vantage point:

In the river, a shivering moon reflected. Silent streets. A piano pushed up against a white wall. It is winter and the desiccated garden resembles the undressed ribs of animals. Snow on the empty tower.

•

7

First, take copper ingots, 7,500-weight tin. Put it all to flame until it melts yellow-white, 1,120 degrees. Bell bronze. While the mixture works up to the boil, dig pits in the ground where bells might be born. Pack the ground tight, smooth it as you would a pillow. Call for silence before the cast, then ask the holiest to say: Grant us thy blessing, Lord, that the bells cast here today be free of any flaw. Listen for birth sounds.

8

As metal enters the earthen mould from feeder tubes, all the air escapes the ground in one long sigh. Like something uncovered. Like the earth can be beaten and melted, poured, made to sing. It is the beginning of the first word. It is a crane testing its wide white wings.

•

9

Tongue whipped around a toothless mouth, child’s earsplitting wail for food, or low tolling moans of my grandmother, high on dementia, naked behind her door at the home, purse in hand, wanting her uppers. Clang of empty beer glass on skull when the new guy started talking shit about his brother. Cartooned death-beat. Clank of whole continents, rain pinging a grey, grey day. Reverberations of a blue whale’s heart-beat five times a minute, that organ, that elephant, echoes, rings with life in the middle of that astounding depth.

•

10

1940

Bells are cut from the sky, loaded onto trucks. Muscular peals transformed into the stuff of assault, sounds of a one-sided salvation. Bells into bullets, tanks. No longer the unified cadence ringing above Austrian monks who hear God’s voice, exalted, in each chime, above Dutch villagers who escape flood again and again because of the insistent peals, quicker than anyone can run, louder than anyone can yell, above those who cover their ears, and want wind through branches instead of faith’s loud bullies, above sons and daughters watching with glassy eyes the burial of a parent, for those with no bodies left to bury.

•

11

And everything outside also ticks away inside. Our small wars, and big; mercy and reason, flight and the animal dirt between our reaching hands.

•

12

Six hours when everything was ours. The entrance to the woods is a small sign at the end of a cul-de-sac and we are two girls who should be in a grade-five classroom. By the end of the day we’ll be grounded, but before that, we see limbs of sky above the trees, river water polishing rock after rock. The whole place glowed in that Tuesday silence. It seemed natural to be alive then, a tiny sunlit blade opening the thought: this is what the world will be. Something to escape into, to be awed and comforted by, a forgiving place of mild winter, a place to be shared and lost within, something to trust, and be trusted with.

•

13

Before being broken apart and mended, and broken again, the unripe mind can’t imagine a crack that remains impossible to heal.

•

14

1940

Brass = grenade cartridges, machine gun casing Copper = axle bearings for heavy engines Tin = countless parts for the air-craft industry

If there were no bells in the steeples, there would be enough metal for bullets

Goering wanted 10 bells to remain in the whole of Germany. But there is never enough – Poland, Czechoslovakia, Holland, Belgium, France, Austria, Italy, Hungary.

Mrs. Lactitia Dytrychova, the last one of those who can cast bells, could lay her hands in her lap.

•

15

80,000 round copper bellies taken from the sky and torched.

The tiny bellies of children also burned. Those graves across which soldiers stiffly march.

All of Europe has turned its ear inward to its heartbeat.

•

16

Say it again: this country, bereft of bell-sound. Hold a light to the far house and repeat sustain, repeat repeat so the danger of forgetting diminishes. To hear the churn of what is missing you must drop your ear to the earth or break open its foundation with a stick. News reports lie in the same way a wounded mind depends on delusional recall. What remains in the mind of the one remembering. Why that particular day; that particular scent. Which facts haunt the stories. This happened here. He did this because. We watch, or we don’t. We listen, and sometimes we hear.

•

17

Throw open the windows and you’re sure to hear the city, silver side up, shaking and ringing. Like he did years ago, chilly thoughts of his wife pushed aside by his Bavarian lover, whom he sat with on the hotel-room floor covered in the unexpected warmth of new sunlight, while Zurich swung and gathered. How to spread the sorrow and elation, the terror and guilt, onto a pale sheet and come clean. We can be moved by the music of made things, of metals liberated from silence, of want freed from rule.

18

Some bells are named when they’re cast. Stamped with a designation, they become whole and wordless declarations of solidity. The Harvest Bell will summon labourers. The Gleaning Bell will give everyone an equal chance. Gate, Sermon and Market. Curfew and Storm. And after, a silence that is not silence. The high-pitched sound of responsibility, of schedule and deadline, moves deeper into the chest cavity and sparks something vital. Something like before now and one day soon; something as big as that in our chests. He divorced his wife after that Swiss hotel-room filled and altered the light of the next day. The desire for that music. We are struck and struck again. We are spoken to while we wait.

19

The city swims below as we spend whole days listening for home. The Holy Ghost Bell in Strassburg was only heard when two fires were seen in the town at once.

For P.L.B.

•

20

How you are like me: We are both skins for void. Your echo is subtler. Heart as a clapper. It sings your songs. Rings out. Sounds your calls. Radiance found and lost in both our bodies. A calm sting of silence.

•

21

A girl is made of many wheels, the faithful whir of motion, pushed by surging spokes, tiny, cranky rings in frequent pursuit, sleepy, wobbly, drunken ones that want even more. You’ll know when she arrives, and when she holds you you’ll hear the hum of lungs and hair and hips, bone feathering bone, something spinning, until it rings out, whole.

•

22

For that’s what happened. We let the pealing scatter something, yielding as sadness, fierce as blame. The world became tender. Resounding, undisguised: earth turned into sound so we could recall the world, clanging history. We didn’t know it would happen. Looking back, I guess, the light almost appeared certain. That evening in your blue songless car, the way the windshield refracted dusk. I should have said perhaps the way through grief is by way of sound. We drove to the cathedral and when we reached the gate the bell began to peal. We rolled our windows down to hear that particular wind. We closed our eyes.

For Brian

•

23

Apples seem to appear in poems almost as often as horses – wild, rebellious souvenirs, pawing and snorting at regulations and desire, they point fingers and run, are caught and tamed, picked and exported. A horse I once rode loved apples. His owner said they made him crazy with excitement. Seeing a small red globe in my hand he’d whinny and stomp, his penis would grow, his teeth flash through a riotous grin. Saliva on my hand, I’d pat his flank and wish I had a whole bushel at my feet. I never thought much of apples as a kid – we weren’t a religious family and, diet-wise, certainly not as wholesome as the Brunelles down the street. Sure, I ate them occasionally, and once, my mom, who loathed the kitchen, made a delicious crumble with granola and sugar, the white flesh of the Red Delicious, warm and sweet. By the time Colin and I drove to Rougemont, the season was almost over. Most of the fruit had been collected and boxed, or pressed, sliced, fermented, baked. But, god, what a day! We pulled off the road into an orchard and popped the cider’s cork and sat eating a picnic on the warm hood of the car. Of course we all dream of being touched. And even as we are, we dream of that touch continuing, that light thing that spreads and warms. Didn’t you want to make vows? And now, don’t you want to say I’m sorry? Or, why bother? But it’s a stupid question. We know why we bother, even as our homemade cities shake and give way.

24

It was a calm day in Rougemont, although we half expected the farmer (and everyone else we knew) to come and scold us with declarations of propriété privée, but no one came, so we kissed and ate and drank and watched the sky through perfectly gnarled branches of the field’s trees. Once, the anger over judgment reared up, and the sadness of fall, as we imagined cooler days and a flight that would, again, take you half-way across the world. But the air was still bright and, that day, the orchard was not a place of punishment.

•

25

It takes a number of men to cut a bell from the sky and load it onto the bare metal bed of a truck. A long ladder of men, an order for more munitions, the continual call and response, awkward slip and pull, a full day’s work. Then only a hard, lifeless thing, grounded, and the awful clatter of the drive out of town. After I said I was leaving, that I loved him differently, silence, eventually, too. The work of undoing that high, pure sound of possibility, dismantling the lip and tongue, the body and its curl of sound, clumsy hand on familiar spine, each bone a small open mouth of disbelief.

26

I packed the car with the discovery that a bell without that height becomes a heavy burden, a metal heart on the way to becoming something else. And that none of it can be done tenderly enough.

•

27

The men were indiscriminate. They took them, regardless of flaw or perfection, regardless of song or protest. I wonder if on the night the first tower was stripped, as one man attempted to sleep, a crow perched precisely on a branch outside. A handful of black feathers. That small ringing heart: it comes and goes. There is always sound that reveals something else is gone. And the bell hangs silently. You hang silently. Waiting to be struck, to sing, to sound in a way that echoes the day, instead of wishing it gone. In the silence there is memory and slurred anticipation, the want for a clanging heart. Another hour, you think. Another hour.

•

28

One night, after we’d loved each other a few months, we slept beneath a transport truck, on our way from Vancouver to Toronto, in sleeping bags, the driver agreeing because there wasn’t enough room with him and it looked like rain. We lay close, your sweater under my head. I couldn’t sleep and you were patient, the air was Canadian Shield and surprisingly warm. It did rain and our roof held, but I woke every few minutes fearing that he’d forget we were down there and, at best, drive off without us.

•

29

Ganges River dolphins are blind because, for generations, their eyes haven’t worked in that sediment-rich river – one route the crumbling Himalayas take on the way to the ocean. You can say Red to a blind man and the heat of a berry on a shrub will blush. The dolphins find fish in that dusty cloud of water, hear flowers twirl in the water. In caves blanked by darkness – held together by darkness – bats and swiftlets also understand using the echo under their tongues. The same way we throw out sound to see if someone is home, the way our voices bounce back and we think, no, no, no, yes, maybe. Our mouth-made nests of silver. Sometimes our echo becomes thunder and it scares us into letting everything go. Or it just stops coming back and the veil that could be lifted, is, and we hear ourselves flapping and finning in the dark.

30

A blind dolphin the colour of stone surfaces then tucks back under the watercloud thick with the memory of boulders, collapsing peaks, hooves and chisels, coins of a mountain drifting by.

•

31

The way an idea forms. Something knocks up against something else and the result is a word, or the sound of a word, or the sound of words before they are words. Before they are images or colour, or little bodies that fold and splay and do their best to mean something. Let’s try to be heard, they say. The promise of sound is a tender twitch of the world, the joyful pledge for something to come from something else; creation is a sincere noise.

•

32

On the radio call-in show yesterday, the expert told Lucille to dig a trench around her lilac tree and sever the root wrapping itself around the others. He told Mary to stick a coat hanger into the maple’s oozing hole to kill the invading borer. So many ways to suffocate! Someone practices not minding not getting what they want. Someone takes a deep breath, then turns back. A friend checks herself into rehab because she drinks and drinks, but the real reason is that she can’t talk to her husband. I noticed her leaves falling ages ago. Her stunted growth. The expert tells Ron to pour concrete into the wound the willow sustained because of the beaver. It won’t flourish, but at least you won’t have to use the hacksaw.

•

33

Sometimes I think it happened on that highway at night. The dark, generalized shapes of fields out the window more pleasing than the prospect of arriving home, my life a strange distance ahead or behind, all the feeling gone from my hands as I rolled up the window and wandered into the final gas-station’s awful light. The reassuring familiarity of standing beside the car, holding the pump, those intoxicating, repellent fumes a vague indication that leaving could be brilliant and terrible.

•

34

He once said nothing opens without apology, so I stumble through sorry, hold its flawed body in my mouth, reach it over the edge, but my voice is never right. It doesn’t matter where you are, or what light you sing by, even after the deepest winter, leaves break into warmth, and that subtle ferocity eases the mind. A certain kind of demand – desire that spills into motion (first as an idea, then the hostile boxes wondering why so much useless stuff) can smell of a dusty, ripe world. Wind comes up, lifts regret onto its fickle shoulders, and clears a patch of ground warm and clean enough to open a space for whatever comes next.

•

35

Gently at first

stiff cold cupboard humming heart murmur rosy tremor, early trains shunting. Swallows swallow, flap and glide hushed and electric.

•

36

And just before it is hauled down and put to sleep all sorts of things continue to ring within it: beaches, halfway across the world and copper-white, rhymed conversations of want, clear nights, cloud-clotted days, gulls, flickers, heels and wool. Something fixed and desired, anything nearly finished, all things beginning.

•

37

And just after it is hauled down the earth’s patience is called into question. Thought it would last. Thought creating it would mean forever. Thought the purpose of saying yes would stay the same, that the muscular vow to hang and be struck, to work in unison with want and need would always be. Thought I’d always lift my skirt for him.

•

38

Occasionally, I wish you could see me now. I think you’d notice a difference. The last time was at my parents’ when you made that dramatic cross-country journey in winter, though I told you not to, said it wouldn’t help. But it was another of your symbolic gestures towards change, and when you finally got it, when you finally understood, took your wet socks from beside the fire and allowed my dad to drive you to a motel, I felt relieved. Like I’d sprung a tender trap. I knew you’d never talk to me again because you always thought that response a sensible one, and for the first time, I didn’t care. I pictured you in a simple room, cheap lamp on cheap bedside table, curtains open to more rain, feet bare under the blankets, every breakable part of you blaming me, while I curled up in the bed above the garage and did the same thing. It’s stupid now. There’s nothing fragile about sadness. It stays because we love badly – in ones and twos and crowds no matter the stun or the season.

39

I hope you proved to yourself whatever it was you were trying to prove. That you loved me. That you didn’t. That I failed you and I wasn’t worth holding onto anyway. That you did all you could do. The fictions we tell ourselves in order to stagger away.

•

40

In front of the wide landscape painting, I’m thinking, I’ve been there, or, more appropriately, I don’t remember visiting, but I know this bright, bruised place. Look how the blue folds into the pink and then back into the blue, just as the eye turns in on itself, peering at the known and the unknown at once. The view from a church steeple, how sky meets land with the simple violence of touch, air breaking the ground with light. The land is not ruin; nor is it flawless. A place of burial, a place from which birds take flight. Villagers in Estonia buried their bell before its tolling could be transformed into ammunition and, finally, decades later it was discovered, brushed off, and made to sound again. The horizon only understands itself.

•

41

Near Tremblant, we wondered about the eating habits of deer in winter. We’ve wondered about many things. How can it be winter again? Sometimes we walk along the canal together, repeating, I wonder, I wonder, I wonder, like a song. Near Tremblant, it was dark but the moon on snow and headlights illuminated the doe’s quiet brown neck and her slender feet on the frozen river. Not a blade of green to be seen. We were in search of a picnic at the IGA near the highway. It was silly to think we’d see her on the way back. Still, we slowed down, hoping. In my bathing suit and stupid rubber flip-flops, running through -25 to the guestless outdoor hot-tub, I wondered if the same doe walked lightly – almost too lightly to be heard – past your old friend Jean, 3am, in his blind near the river, while he drowsily held onto his rifle, waiting for her mate or brother. Hearing a tick of snow, a toe, then a delicate knee, bent, as she stopped in alarm to sniff the air (the man’s tired, patient scent leaking from his parka), both hearts alight in their own peculiar wool, and Jean, such a kind man, his eye narrowed and aimed.

42

She remained whole, though, and for hours afterwards, a weird delight in the lonely forest, each tree’s snow-covered branches, now, a perfect outline of the heat beneath. Just like after you held your breath, went under the hot water, and then came back up. The hair around your ears turning into delicate knots of ice.

•

43

When I have nothing to say, I defer to the view. It’s day-lit or dark. No matter, it puts a hand on my ribs and squeezes a little. You know the flapping sound cheap flags make? My favorite route home is through a used-car lot for that finite, plastic shimmer. Carnival of empty cars, trucks, triangles strung like defeated balloons. Acres collapse into the eye as I take the spreading inside. I’m on a bridge and it’s a riverbed. Or at a window and it’s a building, tall, with muted views. Still, there’s nothing to say. Sorrow hides in a generalized road. Trembling Aspen. Tower. A man walking swiftly by.

•

44

Marry me. Why? Because silences are often misinterpreted. But the world is a terrible place. Not always. Usually. When you’re older you’ll understand. What? Good outweighs bad. I think you’re wrong. What if you leave me? I won’t. You will. Then we’ll both learn to die a little. Like meat. I’m talking about possibilities.

45

I feel old. You’re like a bear in a bear suit. Sad? Your hands hiding in your pockets. My pockets are too small. Didn’t you say good outweighs bad? What if I change my mind and hate you? Because of something I’ve done? Of course. I wonder about certainty. Of course. The world is big enough for both of us. I’m not thinking about dimensions. How many languages does a bell speak? On and off. And what about everything in between?

46

It’s either right or wrong. That’s foolish. You’re the one to blame.

•

47

The clash of failure is a freighter’s horn punching the dark as I drive the highway that skirts the water, wondering why I waited as long as I did to say fuck it, I’m sick of anger and silence, and the conversations like divers under the surf, not a single word getting through. But failure is not quite what happened. The bang and clank of leaving is not always that. If water could tangle, our talk would have twisted it into absurd knots that even agile fingers could never undo. Difficult to see it as it was, two heads smacking the same wall and each strike eradicating the possibility of connection, the crucial buoyancy of understanding.

•

48

And at the end:

in Vienna, the bell of St. Stephen, cast from cannons. In Krakow, the Sigismund Bell, cast from cannons. In the Cologne Cathedral, the Stout Peter bell, cast from cannons.

Remember: the eyes of the dead. Silent. Stone. And the eyes of the living.

What is gone. And what remains. Stop to listen –

bells swim through the air. Rock themselves back and forth.

•

49

Something bangs against the walls of the heart and quietly starts to sing. Something heavy and dead falls to the ocean floor and becomes more than just itself, no longer whole and ringing. The world aches for the predictable good that comes from a sad morning, like wind tearing a sparrow’s nest so the fox is provided for. Something bangs against the walls of the heart and quietly starts to sing. The head believes it won’t fall out of love, and then without thinking it does. The avalanche of leaving begins slowly, then changes course and becomes more than just itself, no longer whole and ringing. Snow stops, and the ice on a distant lake melts a sudden, startling blue, and only days before, no indication of a fire under the surface, something bangs against the walls of the heart and quietly starts to sing. When warmth strikes there is a way inside, and the thaw brings a cleaning of sorts, as growth comes from loss, the lake’s body explores and becomes more than just itself, no longer whole and ringing.

50

If the falling from love, then surely a new opening, doubt changing and breaking apart with the desire to adore, something bangs against the walls of the heart and quietly starts to sing, and becomes more than just itself, no longer whole and ringing.

•

51

May we fall short of knowing each other. May we only speak words to soothe and permit. May we never be as cruel as to be true. May fear of hurting, fear of distance, outweigh the rest.

•

52

Munitions back into bells. That melting forgiveness. No longer anyone to blame for silence. And each sounds in a new way. Each becomes more or less able to hear the transformation from rock to instrument; from a collection of angry groans to unfilled witness waiting to hold the troubled heart’s understanding in a different way. With a looser grip. A new surrounding landscape.

•

53

Perhaps the pianist knows in which direction hammered-sound flies, hands strung across keys in a rodeo of kinetic possibility, eyes half-closed, every winged creature plucking near him, an array of jays, geese, ravens, spotted owls, a sudden eruption of sky-violence without fear, that great flapping of things seen and heard, the shared knowledge that a string of select notes can dislodge earth’s sadness, floods and disasters, can bring us back from the quiet repose of winter, as fingers remove silence’s claim, and the demands grief makes.

•

54

A collection of elements, a melting and cooling, the vaulted design opening. A patient love that took thirty-five years to take shape. I waited outside his apartment in the square and called his name. His blue t-shirt smelled of bug-spray and Greyhound travel and his neck was the humming sound rocks dream of, lips to stone, water lapping the middle. It was quiet that morning, but everything sounded, everything was unwrapped.

•

55

Starts in the chest like tin or wind through dead wood, a spark, strike and flinch like dropping your bike where the road joined forest in childhood, feet flying along the trail, accepting your snakelike progress around the world and back, a long hike through rock fields and desert, lavender and dust, dressing up and down, falling flat then timid flight, waking hung-over the day after the darkest and it’s still dark. But something sweet has surfaced from inside the skin and out, finally big and light, a marriage of every naked thought and trust, climb onto that branch and look out from this height always and never quite a stranger’s life, as simple and crucial as a promise or a lie.

•

56

Here, in Old Montreal, a freighter signals its departure. Its low and purposeful moan shakes the shoulder of the morning as snow fingers the ground of the alley behind the building. The ship continues to sound, then crawls off in search of new things and the snow turns wetter; warmer, rain-like flakes as if April isn’t ten weeks away. The horn had sounded like something unimpressed by change, not quite fearful, not quite not. We were in bed listening to workmen dismantle a building down the alley where the snow was collecting and melting. Shards of stone and old flooring and metal pipes slamming into the dumpster. A warm bed. Unmoored, the freighter comes away with its declaration. Forgive me, forgive me.

for Colin

•

57

Sound is a secret waiting like the other side of heartache, an idea that can be glanced in certain light – perhaps a few moments some late afternoons, that in-between time, when day begins to soften into evening and the glare of collapse doesn’t feel as inconceivable as it does at noon, or dinner when you would have been together. There is the body and the silence suspended between its walls, then there is sound, and from just the right angle below, that mouth offers up possibility, a surprising sway of the heart that reaches past erosion and reliance.

•

58

It could be anything: footsteps on concrete, the front door opening or closing, water falling into itself, hourly chimes, inquisitive gull. It surprises the worn heart, quietly gaining momentum, offering unsolicited perspective, then hurdling over the way you once talked yourself into staying. And on the other side, the reverberations are unfamiliar, the colours also new. You on your own, untested on one of the kitchen chairs, door open to the small back garden, listening to the same song, only now the room holds it differently, holds you differently with its long-armed promise, its tentative openness.

59

Sound enters with wobbly vibration, discovering holes in our lives of which we know little. Knocking the ear’s tiny bones, it fills the space with light.

•

60

I can want this. I can want this meeting on the hill near the mountain. My heart, which had become bigger and confused, wider and almost trustworthy, wanted to talk, wanted words on a page and a hand between my legs. Sometimes I talk to myself. I say, listen, you’ve done this and you’ve done that. Sometimes you’re slow and you dream of drowning. You fell out of love and that is one of our small human dramas. You fell in love on the hill near the mountain, and that, too, makes the body feel strange. Alive. I say green eyes, dirty blonde hair, freckles, hips, spine, size 8½ in most boots. I can want a city that stands cold in itself and then warms in spring. I can want a city to want me even if a city doesn’t know what want tastes like. Even if I can’t say to the city: Put your hand here.

•

61

Nosing my crotch, the brown and white dog seems to want to be friends. I wish this happened years ago in the small city where you studied. It would have given me enough confidence to talk to you. I wish I’d listened to that weird, roadside cloud that told me you were just there, beyond the next rest-stop. But how far? How much skyline? I like thinking about you in your room at school, standing beside the ironing board, pressing wrinkles from the spine of a proper shirt, smoothing the space between buttons, flattening biceps and wrists. Outside your door, I’d watch your distracted attention to detail and follow you to the sandwich shop. We’d remember the counterman noting our accents, the introductions, the chewing and sipping. You’d ask about the snow and I’d answer I know rain, not snow. Hearing a bell calling, you’d pack up your stuff while finishing the last of your chips, and it would be later, your shirt wrinkled again, that I’d strip down, as eager and open as that spotted dog.

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62

Give me something upturned, something shiny, something to believe in for a while Give me the day I finally remembered this is mine and only mine Give me your ears, and your voice in mine Give me a cupped palm, a warm wind Give me a way inside Give me new words to say new things Give me your humming breath on my neck Give me footfalls on the stairs after absence and the subsequent stir Give me back one of those first days, those perfectly foolish days when everything hard was forgotten Give the stubborn morning its own life; and let it want to know me

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If May is the month to hunt Wood Pigeon, November is the season of the phone call. I don’t eat meat, but I am sustained by the deep flutter of your voice that daily crosses latitudinal markers, Polynesia, the International Date Line, the Coral Sea. Such a long way to travel. Such a long reach from the table on which you spread your morning toast and coffee to the white armchair where I sip beer and think about what to make for dinner. I’m always trying to catch up. Move faster, I tell my weary continent. Such an upside-down, dizzy, electronic dance, but at least you can sit down now. No more swaying in the multiple phone booths you lived in for weeks at a time. At least there is a couch for your tired legs and jet-lagged heart. Remember how tired our legs were after walking drunkenly home from Wendy and Marty’s last year? I thought I might have to carry you. That was in Vancouver, and the night you saw your first skunk. Its pretty little body glided across the silent, middle-of-the-night street and we both sobered up enough to watch its delicate disappearance under a Cedar hedge. We didn’t say much, just marveled at that trip’s firsts: a skunk, two grizzly bears, arctic wolf, beluga whales and their big brains. There was no need to explain the thrill. I love hearing your breath on the phone. It’s like sleeping beside you, and waking beside you, and knowing you at the ages of 6 and 14 and 25. All those breaths I missed. So let the phone companies bleed us dry.

64

Let the sore ear feel like your sore forehead where I pressed too hard with my own trying to fly right inside. Let our voices be carried over the fertile Pacific by the wind, or satellites, fiber-optic line, bytes, whatever. Let us be grateful for hearing that waking ring.

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Announce something Announce something that hasn’t happened yet Something to walk towards Something to collide with and build from He woke hot from a dream last night tolling What the fuck? What the fuck? But it was too dark to come up with an explanation so we pushed back into sleep And later, beside a window lit yellow, the question tugs differently It rests for a moment on the mute edge of acceptance and the unbearable question of how.

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I want to show you another garden I found. Sometimes, for support, bromeliads piggyback other plants. See? And the water never freezes in here. Take off your boots and stay a while. When you come very close, I can hear the ringing of tiny bells in your body. I tap your chest and they croon. Hop on my back. I know which skylights leak.

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Instead of twelve men at the rope trying to pull its music free, the bell is touched by electricity and swings according to that perfectly tempered current. I don’t know what happened to the arms of those men. If they struggled with other weights, other questions of value and mass, or left the church with mooned relief, hands softer, but halfhearted, metallic songs in flawless measures high above and floating.

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A c k no w l e d g m e n t s

Generous support from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec made writing this book possible. To Suzanne Robertson for her numerous close readings of these poems, and for her loving eyes and vast heart, I’m eternally grateful. Some of these poems were written at the Banff Centre for the Arts in 2006. Great thanks to generous readers Don McKay, Tim Bowling, Anne Simpson and Gabe Foreman. Many thanks to the editors of Arc Poetry Magazine where some of these poems first appeared. Thanks also to Allan Hepburn and to Joan McGilvray and colleagues at McGill-Queen’s Press for their dedicated work. Special thanks to Jim Reid and Nathalie Stephens. To my remarkable parents, Ray and Joyce, for their continual support. And to Jeff, Christy and Jonas. I am very lucky. Thanks to Peter Leonhard Braun for his astonishing radio documentary “Bells In Europe,” which changed the way I hear the world and first planted the seed for this collection. The poems that begin “First, take copper ingots …”, “1940” and “And at the end …” were directly inspired by Braun’s documentary. And everything to Colin McAdam, my heart pal and favourite surprise.