IV
Birthmark
This morning as I woke,
the summer sun, the deep day, the brown earthâ
all began with my memory of the mole
you carried on the inside of your thigh.
You are gone; I am lightly riding to my own death.
Once you asked if you should have it removed,
but a mole such as that one, I said, you should let stay.
Now it is my birthmark.
Two Houses
The house I ran from is gone. A new house stands where it stood.
I will never be able to go to that first house
as I have imagined I would one day
and ask the owners if I might intrude
and walk around the front room
and go down the staircase to stand in my old room.
The rock wall at the end of the backyard is not gone,
though it is held together only by crumbling mortar and vines.
Once I saw a rat run up the rockery
into a small dark gap, and disappearâ
I stood watching with a hole in my forehead
made by a boy who hurled a stone at me from down the lane.
A house a block away is not gone. It was older,
much older than our house. This is the house I ran to.
The street I ran along was vast, the darkness vastâ
it narrowed to an enclosed front porch,
where I knocked as I had at every house.
I could go to this house again,
but the mild couple who brought me inside and made a call
would be gone. They would be long dead.
The house, so well-kept, immaculate and fine an old house,
will likely still be here when I am dead
and not here to remember what only I can
of the book-lined den, the sweet smell of the baking. I am alive.
A Dove
A wild dove that has chosen the tree
outside our apartment for a home
flashes past with its lightning-white wings,
parts the vast curtain of green needles
in front of our window two floors up
and disappears. There is no olive
leaf in its mouth. Still, the apartment
shelters us like an ark, our quarters
inside its listing hull. There is rain
that comes sweeping against the glass, air
that turns purple-dark and storms that come
along with my dreams of my loved ones
lost forever. The dove reappears.
My two small children climb up to see it.
It as soon departs againâaround
the side of the building, up above,
beyond our sight. There is the window
of our ark that lets in the sunlight.
The dove returns again, nothing
in its mouth but sunlight. All our eyes
must follow it, all our ears must fill
with its cooing. Its wings are the wings
we flap and flutter. The grey deluge
held in the world will rise around us,
and the wild dove arrive out of it
carrying our lives apart from us,
father, mother and child will be sent
to and from us by what is in us,
wing the way from the tree to the tree.
O God, Beast, Mystery, Come!
They will come edged in early running light,
brimming with blood, to see their arrows pierce
a stag, a muskox or horse, then let out their cry.
They will create paste from red clay ochre
and with it fill in the rhythmic outline of the animal
on secret torch-lit cave walls and ceilings.
I leave my life behind when a watercolour
of a palomino painted by my father leaves my hands.
On my schoolâs gravel field I pin the boy
whose boot has trampled my picture, I lift
myself over him and bring my lunch kit
down like a machete across his face.
I take the throat of a boy who has taunted me
because I can run fast, run farther than the rest
without tiring; I seem to watch as I throw him
against the metal of a gym locker door
and clamp his throat there with my hands
to stop his breathing, until they pull me away.
I wait in the dark, I jump someone who jumped me
and hit him, fling him into a ditch, kick him
until he goes quiet, is unable to move; before
I hear the yelp of a siren around a corner
and veer off, I gaze at the palette of oils
in the moonlit muck splattered over him.
They will shriek, they will dance around a pit
where they have trapped a mammoth, never closer
to the life beneath the hide as when they spear it,
never closer to the energies of their fires
as when they ...