After Wallace Stevens. From Parkway. Published by New Star Books in 2013.
1
He was in Nanaimo writing letters to
Marshall, every now &
then walking down to the playhouse
for a smoke. The heavy leafage
of a wet June absorbed the roar
of the highway so he sat on the damp
carpet he’d slung over the old garden
chair & picked up and put down
the book that had begun to curl
on the dusty table raising more dust.
He trades places with the cat
so that when the gravel trucks gear
down or loudly up the cat can watch it pass
& he can pretend to read.
It was almost time for Rockford
when the news intervened. Outside the last
bees on Planet Earth rubbed sagey
pollen on their undercarriages.
Noting this he raised his eyes from the
newscrawl to a copper Ford drifting
thru the twilit Bel-Air of the Ford
administration. This is the part of the sublime
from which we shrink: Sepulveda, Ventura
& Culver City are to him
an approximate haze as hard as calcium,
unspooling painkillers at every point
of the compass. Something shifts &
then he shifts. He apologises
to the dead space where he had been sleeping.
2
He wakes in the pollarded half-shade of a dying
walnut. The half-audible early birds tweet
ear bones press against each other
a passing satellite pings its archive.
Night had been a tree to him moving through space,
sparing him memorable dreams, something
medication never quite achieved
but if you sit there thinking it goes dim
the golfball grain comes rushing in
like water through a window. All he knows
of the moon—its interlocking t-shapes
of broom yellow fanning
oilslick tailfeather—is that it’s
both outside & above, a bell held in a cup.
The pain is such a little thing to be wandering
abroad like that. He becomes aware of the
heavy air & that he’s awake,
a hiss of decompression through the leaves
hanging heavy in a hoary-hanging sky
sickly after the rain hit, turning west
he hallucinates as it falls each ring of the tree.
3
He hangs hangers in a
cupboard left to right
the wind chime’s
soft memory gonging
across his neck,
Chico Hamilton style—
a handswidth or two
more or less, unstrapping
the braces, snapping brasses a
hinged ruler with oil, rarely looking up,
even at those shivers of bleached
green leaf piercings
where other people move
through the light more or less as he does
but rarely with that quadrant over-the-shoulder-
you-see-what-he-sees angle—no
narrating parrot or hummingbird
or offshore bee would follow so close
knowing neither right nor left
nor above nor below
bouncing around
at the end of a pineal stalk
like the third eye of realism
squinting through the low cloud.
