Into the Fire

Toni Onley, Johnstone Strait, B.C., 27 September 1998

English Bay

Again we found ourselves at the shoreline,
among shards of shell and plastic,
scrim of seaweed trapping my feet like a net.
Red freighters and the grey Onley mist of the islands.
The seashell gleam of sun on water, herringbone sky.
I was thinking of a movie where a man was drowning
in the middle of the ocean, huge swells soaring
all around him like dunes in a desert, and how I’d once said,
That’s what it feels like, grief—
years ago, before anyone had even died.
Who knew how wide the ocean would get,
how high those waves would climb.
Then I went into the water, into that marine world
of kelp and plankton. The green that bathed my legs
had travelled for miles to reach this bay.
A noose of cloud hung on the gold horizon.
Spores, sand in the gritty air. No one I loved was there.

His Last Days

You call one Sunday night
to tell me about his last days on earth.
How he made you promise him one more
summer, a garden where the two of you would sit
over a white tablecloth and a pitcher of cool water.
Promise me, he said, while you dipped a swab
in cool water, rubbed it along his gums.
Yes, Daryl, you murmured, because by then
you were saying yes to everything—
water, white tablecloth, the South of France
where he was too ill to travel those final months,
the tickets booked, the oxygen rigged for the flight.
You moved him into the guest bedroom
on the ground floor, and he did not recognize
the house he’d lived in for twenty years.
Where is this place? he’d demand,
fussing in the unfamiliar bed. Are we in a hotel?
The maid service is terrible!
The bed and special linens ordered from New York,
the syringes laid out on the prettiest dishes you could find—
splashes of colour throughout the room, any colour
but white, that no-colour of hospitals,
flowers at a Chinese funeral.
Pyjamas he wore once,
a cashmere robe from Holt Renfrew twice—
he was only himself upright in bed
in a shirt, buttoned and pressed.
The Filipina nurses came and went,
girls with names like jewels—
they poured tea, read poetry to him.
Don’t forget my wife, he’d say,
even in those final days,
don’t forget to bring tea to Anne-Marie.
Friends who had died years ago visited him
in morphine dreams, he woke elated
from the rich meals and much red wine they shared,
from the conversations that went on into the dark.

He went into the fire
wearing the suit he had selected,
but without the raincoat he wanted
in case it got cold in the afterlife.
What do you need a raincoat for? you’d laughed,
then wept as the storms tore the trees from their roots
in Stanley Park the winter he died, snuffing out lights
and televisions across the city grid—
you lay awake, imagined him shivering
in some damp celestial doorway.
His ashes in a plot positioned
to soak up the sun, the sweet silver rain
and the cold fire of stars.

The Burning Desert

The day your obituary ran in the paper,
I lay buried in bed
as if stuck in sand at the edge of the shore
where the tide brings in seaweed
and washed glass and skeleton-white shells—
wave after wave of muscle pain,
the mist of sweat on skin,
the weird bliss of temperature.
It was flu season, the bare branches outside
carrying their burdens of snow, the sky
a scratched and burning silver.
We had seen you just months ago,
swimming in your suit, radiation and pneumonia
shaving you down to college weight—
you looked forward to buying
a new wardrobe, to the twenty more years
the doctor had given you.
I hope more, I said, thinking how brief
twenty years sounded, gone in a shrug,
gone while we looked the other way—
so little more time with us, among the living.

Two months later, you were gone.
The warmth of your embrace
in the lit doorway, the beach we walked with the shadow
of the black dog leaping for the ball you threw,
streaking past the park and the rocky point,
through the summer days we loved and could not
make stay. The fever sloshed me
in its wine-drenched bed,
rocked me into seasickness—
the bitter wrack of hair,
the fishy reek of skin,
the aching pebbles of my eyes
held open to your face on the funeral page.
You had travelled to the border, the purgatory
between day and planetary night,
locked in a coma, wrapped and penetrated
with tubes that brought sustenance
and carried away waste. You lay in this border state
for days, then slowly made your way back to us
like a thirsty traveller with tales of the golden desert,
your face burnt, rasping your name.
If only we had said something,
offered water, begged you to stay.

A Cup of Cobalt Glass

The white star-shaped building is still there.
The waxy plants by the doorway, surviving cigarette butts,
candy wrappers, anything we throw their way.
It’s been months since you’ve been gone—
soon it will be years, and in decades
you will be a handful of photographs
in a fading family album, your great-granddaughter
perhaps saying, Depression runs in our family—
see, this was my great-grandfather,
he killed himself. Nothing left of what you made
but a cup of cobalt glass, blown from your mouth,
the rose one broken long ago.
I think of taking the elevator to the third floor,
finding you again in the amber hallway,
standing in your sneakers like a boy—
the frown lines between your eyes
those final years, like the tracks
of a hunted animal. Instead I stay in the lobby,
stare at my reflection in the speckled mirror,
imagine disappearing, the mirror reflecting back
a lake of mercury light. Turn then
to meet your partner Nadine for lunch,
her green eyes across the table glazed
with what they saw that morning
she found you in the hotel in Halifax.
The entire meal you drift between us,
huge and unspoken.
The mountains beyond the window
frozen blue seas tilting at the sky.
Then without a word
she touches my hand, and in that gesture
of grace you are alive again—
in this new year, this one more day
without you, one more day lost in this world,
where there are still days I see your face
around a corner, across the street, and rush
toward some startled stranger.