Into the Fire

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Four poems.

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.