castle stone
where brave men died in previous years
meeting firepower at dawn or from damp
man speaking Polish
sneezes, brings me back to
not earth but its high-flying
flight attendantâs steely smile
Dutch woman chiding
my lack of savvy: to travel
without a pen
for customs form
ballpoint she disdains to take back
when I exit â such a stance
after all my successful
ignoring of thirty thousand feet
weight of luggage and imaginings
so earth passes below more serenely
than ever felt when dropped in on
5. return: over snow
flying home from far away
jets seem to stall
Iâm thankful to find
at last
my country below
features we otherwise call
white, grey and black
not one sign of humankind
there lies snow upon snow, soft
from this height
or a peak protrudes
white slashes its face
what might live there
long swept away: home
somehow, space without provenance
its relief lets me relinquish
cities with fables
and five more airborne hours
traversing tundra and taiga
before gaining my bed
that still point found on no map
but mine, its welcome
now absurdly foreign, alien
as once was last nightâs European bolster
weeds grew while I was away
I expected what?
an unchanged patch
of pure stasis, stems
unaltered, exactly as
the morning I glanced back
from the cab, my face sunny
not this yellow of greeters
trumpeting on my lawn
crowding the walk where birds
splatter white words
around the grey face
of the garden stone
that has not altered, cool
under my hand, a spot more
lichen-wrinkle persisting
â that this filigree lives
so little, unlike the rise
and fall we are made of
we hardly care, so pleased
we alone measure how slow
rock crumbles, as we touch it
we rub against time and find
we triumph: listen
to our watery laughter
when sun lights up skin
we have animal pleasure
knowing and loving
even ragweeds with their vigour
and niche so like our own
in urgencies coming and going
a moment of missing bells
on a construction site, a crowbar falls on a pail
at such an angle that metal on metal rings out
to the plaza where I sit near mumbling fountains
half in shadow, half in sun, in view of distant water
and I twist my head to catch the sound again
as if a bell
has
rung, and in that instant I walk again
in Wien amidst the pealing, air-filling, calling chimes
resounding out from corner churches, sending their
iron-made messages of attention and intent
through pedestrians hurrying to destinations of
torte trysts, formal assignations or sitting alone
with tiny porcelain cups in hand, which tremble
in sympathetic vibration, and so the big and
little are joined as the hourly resonance
floats over the city, causes its denizens to
gaze upward at spires and to imagine themselves
ascending, asking how it feels to have ascension
inside them, a tintinnabulation growing, climbing out
of oneâs chest since first burst of the clapper striking
told how a small tick has been carved out of time
Notes
The first quotation in âIn Duinoâ is taken from the first of Rilkeâs elegies in
The Essential Rilke
, selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. The second quotation is also from Rilkeâs first elegy and is taken from
Selected Poems, Rilke
, translated by J.B. Leishman.
The quotation in âI knock on Thomas Bernhardâs doorâ is from
Wittgensteinâs Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock.
âVindobonaâ was the name of the Roman settlement where Vienna now stands, and where Marcus Aurelius died at the age of fifty-eight on March 17, 180 of an infectious disease. His last words were âWeep not for me, think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others.â
Acknowledgements
Some poems, some in earlier versions, appeared in
Event, The Malahat Review, The Windsor Review
and in the anthologies
Poet to Poet
(Guernica, 2012) and
Best Canadian Poetry in English