欧洲诗歌与艺术奖章

You lie down in the deer’s bed.

It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the

length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums

because the body’s touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses

after a run. There are snowberries, fescue.

This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy.

 

Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says

the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert and winter

of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and sounds

felt through the gigantic walls. Choose.

 

Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body.

The hills are the bones of hills.

 

The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is

the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is

to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed.

 

Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this

she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this.

 

You lie down in the deer’s bed, in the green martyrion, the place where

language buries itself, waiting place, weem.

You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent

body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the

deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool,

nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost

smell of last year’s melted snow.

Earth, earth, earth, stone lobed, blue, earnest,

blundering Godward with lummoxing barn fever, the dead’s reliquary,

the dead

bunched as flowers in its arms, the stone-sung-to

dead, the lovely, horse-sensed,

devout earth, jewelleried with the dead, earth,

earth, dog-adored, wise and ambitious sleep, anti-fire, intelligenced

with diva-fat, cadenced purpley as the long Book of Isaiah, the slow

exhalation of itself, earth, wasp-pasture, dragging a shadow

of water, singing trampoline of winds, moving, bee-brocaded bosom

first, bright in the dark ray of its tonnage, bright in the dark

ray of its tonnage, potato-ganglioned,

bright-dark, unfolding.

Maāpe, maāpe, maāpe, hust, hust, boobies, dears,

I want to speak to you. I will turkey Gospel to you

as John Diefenbaker spoke French.

Glitter unto me on your pert, bone-seamed, Rockette legs,

Blue udders whopping knee scoops, snappy

at the starlet canter of Flesh in a breathless, wartime dress.

Our text: Ubi caritas et amor.

Which is that today the Lord High Being of Milk squirted

Life-like from the squeeze of his will. Pseudo-reindeer, attend.

 

And I say to you

Look at the light on the blond wheat straw.

Energeiai of the Godhead, first seen by Simeon the New Theologian, 1000 AD,

Mt. Athos, now here, cherub bum bright, curves warm from

bedding.

 

To what shall the Kingdom of Heaven be compared?

I say it shall be like the femininity of long grass

Where the New Idea spreader

Arced greenly yesterday’s scrapings of the barn floor, vague,

Nevertheless, as the violet of the buck’s penis.

And still it shall be like the goat that’s stolen the poem

From under the herdsman’s pencil, up, suddenly, on the jokes

Of its Pan legs, poem in its pink teeth, then, ears back, off

Like a Mozart flute.

 

Think of the bucks.

Koranic dogmatists, mystically dense as fashion models,

Who clench their bodies in memory always,

blinking at the flesh exclamatory donging their knees,

naming God.

 

They neither labour nor spin

Yet the Yahweh of Armies jolts them tall with fresh male dreams

While inches of assent bud yearly to their taffied, yellow horns.

Petites, consider not the world.

There the lust-a-rama of the shopping malls humiliates eros,

then naps apodictically, Amen.

Listen, I go now to the kid barn

To preach there to the applause of their lips

Five streams of milk

From the black nippled lamb bar.

 

And there wads of their coats shall stand up as Dostoevsky at insight

And their ears fall back as a long woman fainting into love,

And they shall know me there, I

Who tickle hail to their beating skunk tails,

As mother,

Which, Isaiah 62:4-5,

I am, God’s wife.

Narrator, eroded voice, a valley of coulees, afternoon

 

*

Wolverine Creek de-caves, walks in its underwear, carrying a willow branch,

then sets itself in the wounds

of Last Mountain Lake, where pelicans are, papery breath

swinging from their stomachs’ glide.

And Last Mountain Lake gives what it’s done, rehab notes, endless antibiotic dripfeed of weeds, all its clothes and shoes, to the Qu’ appelle River and the Qu’ appelle

lays its money inside the body of the Assiniboine (into its side), river cranking,

with an avocet’s hitch,

from Ft. Pelly area, Kamsack, town of Enterprise, from the widefaced, testosteroned

stare of the Minnichinnas Hills.

Most of our courage slants wrong.

West, the stone Cabri Man rustles in poked and stirred light on salt plains.

Medicine wheels (quiet, move slowly now), saged-in pits on lunged hills.

Suncor waste ponds rebound bearings of day lost at a supreme height,

near the Athabasca where the river packs its staked ass north.

Wolverine Creek tucks its nose below its tail

and the night can lance in around it.

 

*

Suncor hired the lord who invented the guitar, a turtle-in-a-handbag

kind of daemon, cattle rustler, Man-with-a-Knife.

He slid his put-on-backwards, hoofy, shaman-shoes

on the glass floor.

No one had ever heard of shoes

used like that before he did it, nose in the groin of the wrong way.

Idiot cattle followed.

Religion grew to his lip like salmon lice.

On one knee before air audiences, the yet again big tent, dance show impersonations.

The swollen trident flew by this one’s look into the water’s neck.

A little underage, he carried his own cradle,

tucked in horsey blankets various moustaches, goatees and driver’s licenses.

Hermes (some say), the beloved.

He gores strings heavily every night in trailers in all the camps

chasing chords, blowing hard on coals in Stones’songs, sweetening oil from

the sand.

He’s seen moving in lamp light behind skin

windows in traders’ sunk cabins at Ile a la Crosse, High Level, Ft. Chipewyan,

heaved over, tail risen, yet curving over his head, enpenned, inflamed with attention

tilting the old accounts,

back and forth, lifting them, tilting, his man-falling-from-a-building eye,

smoothing, smoothing the columns’ glowing, swaying flows.

Memory is the sweetest part of his heart.

a curdling in rain

heated by its own stony force

to a coaly roux,

stretch of turbulence in

the downward spearing

winter creek: a hummingbird

gathers flesh behind fuchsia

before the Douglas firs’ frozen wall.

in the bird’s helmeted look

my face is an inner-dimpling tunnel

moving, touched

by the whipped ends of yellow grass.

spiderweb lanks clotted with slanting

daemon attending me, haloed full body

with metabolic fever,

trouble in middle air, the bird, erupts

on air’s skin,

smudge or blear in the black

from the door in the morning trees,

attack-fountaining the bird, stupendously

visioned speed.

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