Albrecht Dürer and me Read Online Free PDF

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 attendant’s 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 – 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
    I’m 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 night’s 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 one’s chest since first burst of the clapper striking
    told how a small tick has been carved out of time

Notes
    The first quotation in ‘In Duino’ is taken from the first of Rilke’s elegies in
The Essential Rilke
, selected and translated by Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann. The second quotation is also from Rilke’s first elegy and is taken from
Selected Poems, Rilke
, translated by J.B. Leishman.
    The quotation in ‘I knock on Thomas Bernhard’s door’ is from
Wittgenstein’s Nephew
by Thomas Bernhard, translated by David McLintock.
    â€˜Vindobona’ 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 ‘Weep not for me, think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others.’
    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