Variations

I

The wind outside rattled the glass in the window panes,

While the little silver cat sat, quiet in the potter quite unlike a flower,

Letting drips of water fall on his nose,

While my thoughts collected like those drops & rolled away in the cavalcade of a year:

I had stood now at the mouth of the great Pacific—

At the edge of the West, in the swirl of its mist—where the wind

Pushed and caught us, pummeling rock & shore & I & you,

And we--deaf in the howling moan of revolution,

As feet felt for holds in the wet rock

And waves, in sets, came apart against our perch

In a spray stinging deep in the nostrils--

Watched Orion, askew, and Betelgeuse, flickering orangey, shone in the sky

& Again weathered the rush of wind and braced for more.

I thought then of my magnitude, of myself

Against the will of the sea & that sprawl of sky,

Of those doe-eyed, honeydew and neon years–

Those ones I look back on fondly now–

When we were young, talking-shit-drunk out-on-the-night,

Parading our invulnerability out in discussions and song

And insane ramblings in the kitchen, while rice cooked

And steam collected outside the breeze of the open-door-stairwell-view

Of the adjacent buildings & parking lots shelling us in.

There, I sweet-talked a dream of you & you sat with me on the stairs,

Contemplating the stars and talking books or god or self,

As if time was static, or broken and waiting to go on,

As if we were a dream always meant to be dreamt

And this was the moment.

When the storm broke, the soaked pavement spoke in torrents,

& I too teem—like rain falling in The Big Sleep,

Like November on Vancouver Island,

Like the puppy on her leash,

Like watersheds in Spring,

Like rain collecting on the window frame—

Singing to satisfaction, staring out the bottom of some glass vision,

A tunnel shooting straight back to that him,

Who looms so large at the edge of these late night and early morning ruminations

On the shape of the universe and the relative relation of bodies acting on bodies,

Their masses bending space-time, willowy, into arcs, folded, and passages, intersecting Where the long-since-past is persisting-still.

& Here, ill, I feel only this damage—its metal, steaming,

Twisted on metal, plastic, broken glass and bones—

Where, other than these spinning wheels, the scene is still,

It’s nausea terminal, this is and was always irreparable & irrevocable, I know,

Yes, after so many miserable hours wasted inward.

I am outside myself

& the sky is russet, dirty with autumn and flashes of fire.

A shape is standing at the edge of the wreck, sanguine and leaking flames,

Sending smoke signals into the vacuum of space,

‘Man is the bane of the world,’ they say,

‘Grasping always in the murky nexus of the soul.’

& here I am: picking at festering words

Until fresh scars weep salvos of seraphim dreams—

The exalted and the lowly in holy communion, Searching until the de-symmetry’s distilled

Into a poem that probes the infinite

Like a rooster in a cage, pecking in shit and straw

At flickers of light breaking through,

Again and again, compelling nothing to be

Through nothing more the dumb repetition of will,

Like the mindless mechanisms of all nature

Enclosed in the endless acrid steam of churning machinery

Processing disjointed time reassembling in cubist nightmares

of private Guernicas—cut-up, pasted on & bursting out--

Playing in looped reels repeating, at once, barely perceptible

And exploding, vibrating between violet & deep red,

Like a centrifuge swirling every living colour into an indistinct mush,

Like a pink processed meat paste for the deep fryer.

The cavalcade of these images repeats

Until the visible warps and dissolves into drunken heaves,

Or this chest becomes a super-conductor

Catching the beats of twitching fingers

Tapping out melodies in key strokes

That resolve, embodied, as an ode

Composed in the divine minutia of resonating human matter:

I am the syncopation & you are the harmony,

We vibrate out of phase (along atomic strings in nucleic soup)

Until the disjunction shifts the pitch and we hum together,

& a voice repeats like a mantra,

‘We are no beginning or end, We are no beginning and end, ….’

Only infinite threads cast into the wind,

Weaving together against the random will of energy acting on mass.

Then always, the ebb tide comes

To pull this mollusk shell back into the wash,

And time, random, moves along rhizome routes,

Spreading its palm, unfolding like a lotus leaf,

Or inching, like a glacier,

Chewing mountains into moraines

(Then boulders and dirt).

So, a hole for the whole,

To let me leak out or it to creep in,

To itch and throb and make it mean

Or expire quietly in shame.

II

Cars tear along the rain-slicked asphalt as glaring headlights & doopler vrooms,

Passing beneath streetlamps below the limbs of trees,

Triangular Victorian roofs, clouds and a dome of orange tinged sky.

The night here is sonorous, and electric with the regalia of early morning pursuits—

The passing’s-by, going’s-on, wailing sirens & so on,

& the rain, bouncing into the puddles beyond the window our bed used to lay below,

Holding a head harbouring thoughts of a similar kind:

I wonder if the microbes in the ooze knew,

When they woke and rose from the sea,

That they would breed so definite an end—

To spit out the children of men,

Lost in time and condemned to its lines,

The apocalypse dreams of our lips

When they spoke god as an absolute—

Quantified and thus contained,

Compartmentalized and divided against itself,

Dueling, like chicken or piss and the wind, soon in triplicate—

As an limit, like sin—born when it’s named—

As some goddamned categorical incantation

To the divine remains of the holy ghost

Still howling in the tempest wombs of the universe,

Settling in the fertile black as birthing solar systems,

Swirling dust while forming, clawing through the ether,

Tracing elliptical cracks in the crystalline shell of heaven

On a millennial crawl towards our prescribed visions

Of divided bodies set in motion

& their dissolution into Starry Messengers.

& we, in synecdoche, still look at million-year-old light

As shapes of stories we told ourselves:

Of when the world was smaller and myth projected ego

Past the bounds of space to break the bonds of time;

When man was the heart of god’s love,

Pumping lifeblood into the starving tissues of the universe

And signifying only His towering goodness;

When Ganesha, Gautama, Christ, Krishna and Mohammad, amongst countless others,

Saw it for all it was and tried to close it off or tear it open;

Before god’s hand pierced the sun and stole its heat;

Before Adam’s hand seized the Father’s and the ceiling cracked

To reveal the infinite void beyond the artifice of the edifice;

Before the universe returned to the naked singularity of its birth

To wail until it bursts and splits apart again

(Pouring galaxies like paint back onto the blank canvass of night);

Before the steam propelling motor function dissolved back into water

And fell, sinking the body down (into the seams of the couch);

Before I was you and on the other side of God, the Father, holy, holy,

Who is still in that noise that hums in my gut,

But quieter now and less persistent, brushed aside more easily

Through rituals—incantations, repetitions and touching you.

So: until I trace your hips back into the vacancy of night,

As a series of rites to ineffable existence expressed as experience;

Until I’m back on the rocks with you, drinking beers

And watching the sun set into the silhouetted trees above the shoreline,

Tracing lines along the water’s edge into the protrusion of a harbour

& The naked masts of pleasure crafts like cocks

Reaching into the pink petals of a sky closing,

Slowly descending back into the nothing of black;

Until we are standing at the Edge of the World,

Again clinging to the solid and rooted,

Watching rain swirl through the valley and the sun burst somewhere behind;

Somewhere back on the floodplains at the mouth of the St. Lawrence,

Watching the tide creep towards the moon, and the sun rise, rosy-fingered;

Until I feel the steady pulse of your heat, like mist from the Athabasca

Spilling over rock eroding in millimeters and millennia—

The residues of a feeling raging inwards and onwards—

From somewhere behind my nose, down in my gut, out of this throat

(Humming delta blues through the heat of the night),

From somewhere back in the muck and mess of it all,

I will build your body,

From the sinews of myth, along tendons of memory, bone by bone,

Into the shape of a makeshift shell

Stolen from the stories that bred Isis, Esther, Dido Alyssa and Antigone,

That, like Eurydice’s, fades at the first touch of sight,

That, like all myth, is written over until the source is shot through

With the dreams and inventions of the maker—holding pen tight—

Making marks on the blight of blank bark and tracing

The divergent curves of history into straight lines and finite form,

As if structure could undo time and start over;

As if, with eyes held tight, I could hold onto you again,

Where, curled up at your feet or curling around you as we sleep,

This supple coil could unwind & time, at last, finds release.