PaulHoy

I keep discovering you're gone,
the trees in the sun
still without leaves.

Not a sacred vision, or beauty in the premonition of a name,
but a day that starts in grass, yellow curves which charge
in viridescent wind.

Because already I see these first birds, sheets of music spilled across
the fields’ meltwater glass; they go to them,

Like true selves, long before they turn to land.

Feels like these long brush strokes
are gripped with vision. Muscles spray light,
skin opens bright as a poem’s wordlessness.
So let glimmer and clamour sing
to the flood ahead, of savage angels who drink
the river there, the taste of everything
that’s dark and clear.

A second rain today
When you opened the door to your car
and I got in, we were
strangers again, except—except
for your green scent. As if you had
driven by a third time, your
directionss cut
by second thoughts.
As if the earth had come
somewhere from the sky,
shining newly wet with grass

So quickly I forget the speed of light.

Darkness says my name as it shuts its eyes—

The colour of blood
had been my sight, I bled revelation.
Awake, dreaming, not this life.

I see how your low fox trails travel,
pale veins fraying from the pauses of birch creeks,
in them, perhaps, the heart,
its velvet coat shedding tree-and-snow country,
down stripped away, flakes clinging
to the seat next to me, or like never-born birds,
always in flight.

They say nature out there is in here

The mouth to the forest of creeks

You at the edge of the ridge

The sun crow tearing your sight

Shadows diving in your eyes

I turned over my life for you

The heart is not what we believed

An island breathing at the bottom of the continent

A man who called himself a farmer blazing its fields

The trains consuming the Buffalo

The Indians trading their skins

I told everyone this was love

Stripping the world to live in it

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

The crow drank from the creek

The creek flew away

The anger between us
at this moment is gone.
I see the easiness of change
as we drive to the arena.
Light from traffic through the dash
redoing your face.
Skates, pressed together,
opening cuts of light.
Our possible lives.

Simeon Lake, my boys’
laughter wrestling wind.
We rise upriver, we, creek-like,
strands, a plane humming
war, the river, lost.
We won’t be found again,
we fly-out, we fly in.

How it appears, your small
  hand on my shoulder
under my shirt
  as if I drive as if
all at once
    I see it -
    the ocean,
there, right there.

Ten miles offshore it’s legal to gamble,
wander with driftwood, marry. Ten miles away,
you're lying in the sand letting yourself forget
you’re sinking, while I stare the wrong way
at the Rio Grande coast, the blurred line
painted with Mexicans, 35,000 dead or gone.
So where does this find us, dark edged skies
offshore, murmuring, and tossing bets endlessly
against the constellations of the Queens
and Kings of Hearts? Almost fish, almost
yellow-footed egrets flipped backwards
amid flooded castles, burnt backs, and
wounded light half-buried in tracks we left.

The evenings have become cooler,
but I don’t mind. It’s the darkness
I fear. It comes sooner.
But I don’t want to drive away; I see love,
and when I turn the lights off over Wellesley Pond
and your voice on the phone begins to come in clear,
there are the stars.
As if you’ve travelled with them to be here.
So that’s not it.
It’s that I don’t want to trip over
what I cut away,
those places where I failed love,
the stars that became holes.
This darkness makes me shiver.

Strange, that my feet shiver
but no longer feel the cold.
How spare the river is.
How thirsty I’ve become.

I see how your low fox trails travel,
pale veins fraying from the pauses of birch creeks,
in them, perhaps, the heart,
its velvet coat shedding tree-and-snow country,
down stripped away, flakes clinging
to the seat next to me, or like never-born birds,
always in flight.

The weight of a man
In the sack of flour I carry on my shoulder
To you.
You
Blinking in the no-parking zone
On Wyndham.
Things begin
To rise and fill time - birds
Which swirl in and out of crowds, notes from horns and radios
That whirl back.
Your small hand’s sunlight-gloves on the wheel, unprepared
To take us into traffic, it takes
Its time. The delicate china
Of your medieval language - aşkım, aşkım, aşkım -
Sounds ridiculous in my mouth,

Miraculous in yours
So
Laughter strips certainty
Down to mystic emptiness.
In the eye of a single flower there are a million bees.
All that remains is love.

I still think there’s something to be said
for life on a star.

Did you watch LA graze the sun,
its cloudy bees that burned the eyes,
as if this is what it takes to see?

Did you get our photograph I sent from there?
I wanted you to see the way darkness disguises light,
like the negative of us,

Inside it, we’re flames.

I wish I knew how to slip out
Of here, even the slush has
Its foot at the door.
The ice is bullet proof glass.
The snow tears at the sky.
Its long, lovely, threadbare dress
Is an apparition dancing
To summer’s unsingable lyrics
In the key of wheat.

If I could take back every word
now, to settle back between us our ghostly
silences, our highest branches thinly touching.
No word for 'us' — only the wild guesswork of wind,
the tips of our tongues grasping
for the taste of it, already tasting the end.
Remember that afternoon we left together,
coming off Lake Opeongo, the wind busy
scattering its big islands of white clouds
crossing the dash like Thomson’s 'Summer Day,'
you turning to peer away, drawing me in, then,
to the reflection of you — green and blue
hills of birch, nearly transparent, tamarack,
slender and teetering.

I sit here with this life.
I imagine what the stars would be
if they had not left behind
their trembling light.
Now, I imagine the way I felt
when you leaned against me.
As if it were night that warmed,
and breathed. As if they could drink
what we left in the air-
your eyes, blinking and wet.

I am still limping. So it's complicated
letting go, though this part of me, my swollen ankle,
shovelled into the gravel bar on Snake River,
could be my enduring reminder to hold on.
I can't name the energy that time consumes
to contract and then expand. Is it the only fluid
anchoring me, obliging ache to swim from
my ankle to grab debris in the northern
eddy of my jumbled brain? Days before,
I offered Reptile Creek my ankle, to wrap
its glacial throat round it until I was river blinded
by recent memory. Of a goat we found
3500 metres above sea level on McDonnel Mount,

closely holding, it seemed to me, a leg hold trap.
Is it that oxygen's so thin up there, time ignores it,
while at sea level both eat us alive? Because
I'm still astonished by the daylight
she used up to lick her fractured hoof. Every
animal forgets it’s easier to mistake pain
for a plain and imponderable thirst.

Knife cleaning,
gut jelly
hands. Honey,

I will never see
you again
down to the flesh

in this catch
of lemon - which
quickens,

gives way
as cleave
meets sigh.

Still, a fish hums
downstream,

slick
with something like a scent
replacing air.

The snow is falling
in your hair,

Thread by thread,
a veil dissolving,

You reveal yourself
to me.

I weep–
for how else to explain

Strands of snow, a body
holy as mist.

I eat
the soup
you made
for me
last night

While I
stand before
the street
winter
has prepared.

This spoon's
a mirror.
It reflects

the taste of
silver
flares,

But I did not know,
as you
move away,
that things
could be this
still,

That steam
melts from air,
from a bowl

so small
it exhales
this world’s
empty
sun.

The forest is white,
its floor, blind.

Constellations snow,
crow plays a trick,

Becomes a branch,
your hair a thought

In the black spruce air.

The last thing I said was, are you awake?
You listened on the outskirts of your darkness.
Last week, you painted your bedroom black.
Said it made you feel yourself again.
Brings back storms that scared you as a girl,
made you sneak to your bedroom and sleep.
These days you dye your hair black, stain time.
But you were always something else,
above the ruined nests and the swarms
of grassy lustre, the still and silent stars.
And me, always wading in, whispering,
wild blackbird of the light, wake inside me.
Before the world turns white and grey.

I was happy today.
Until I thought about you.
Your name spelled out
the way I could
barely pronounce,
and when I did, when I tried,
your laughter, how it
spilled out. That way
that seemed to say,
we were happy. Just now,
yes, just a second ago.

I'm not a man at your door. Flight's on my shoulders, and I'm sitting in my car.
The birds are blowing in from the barley fields, the tree reflected in your
window pulling them in. I'm just sitting here, watching them, tender

patterns of stained-glass Autumn makes. I'm thinking what it must be like to,
underneath, lean into the secret red and yellow of things, to untame instinct,
to embrace things we cannot know, so love. I'm sitting here watching
the geese that open above the line's white sheets, suspended from
the corner of your house, above its heavy ground. I'm thinking, bury me.
Bury me there in sheets punched with scents of its invisible colours
that remember me. Bury me, lover, in wings of places I cannot go. I know
it's late. I know I'm pulling away. Autumn's losing hold, each day lessening
itself, greying while four hours north the ground is blindfolded with sheets of snow,
and its stumbling south. And clouds ahead, lassos of geese flanked in leafy waves.
I want to imagine their distances are always the same, just as far to disappear, just to stay, and a tree sometimes: a bird, more or less.

Today I see the rain floods the street,
sheds the roads of leaves.
For days, I realize sometimes, I have had
no thoughts. I remind myself, breathe.
The furnace in the basement,
behind the space in the walls, reminds me,
we breathe together and so that maybe our throats
are so terribly empty
we ignore our thoughts, the rain
that would like to come in, at first
tapping on the window, finally running
out of air and dashing itself against
the glass. You write something,
you send it, again so, so quiet just
on the verge of saying. Even
the furnace holding

its breath,
each breath, your voice,
no way for me to say
that I can't answer, so much
of its silence that washes over me, fills
my lungs, drowns me out, takes me.

Today I see the rain floods the street,
sheds the roads of leaves.
For days, I realize sometimes, I have had
no thoughts. I remind myself, breathe.
The furnace in the basement,
behind the space in the walls, reminds me,
we breathe together and so that maybe our throats
are so terribly empty
we ignore our thoughts, the rain
that would like to come in, at first
tapping on the window, finally running
out of air and dashing itself against
the glass. You write something,
you send it, again so, so quiet just
on the verge of saying. Even
the furnace holding

its breath,
each breath, your voice,
no way for me to say
that I can't answer, so much
of its silence that washes over me, fills
my lungs, drowns me out, takes me.

At noon
you slept in your car with the heater running.
At noon I wrote something in a coffee shop,
and burned my lips.
Like this, let's say
we're together.

Let's say you drove here, the ice
not so terrible as it looks,
melting.

All I recognize is the sea,
the moon,

Their bodies washing
the dark marrow of trees, eyes
blinded, two

White sails
from inside.
Deep horizons.

You sail.
Salt wades, for a time,

Inside you, blinking tide after tide.
And for a time, I see
the hollow masts of darkness
bent toward light–

To the moon, to the sea,
that have taken you.

At noon
you slept in your car with the heater running.
At noon I wrote something in a coffee shop,
and burned my lips.
Like this, let's say
we're together.

Let's say you drove here, the ice
not so terrible as it looks,
melting.

What I would like to forget is your name,
the way snow does. The manner in which
it gallops across the silvery earth, imitating
the backs of fish that chum in shallow haze.

To strum away the frozen music of the deer
which rests in the ditch, its brain's slippery
pages that sound out across the fields
and coats light with grey.

What I wish is to forget that dying things
do not die. And each living breath of mine
is a vapour, a sea which spawns the name
for winter along the edges of the other trees

These Decembers, they feel like mine,
rinsed in brown slush, coffee silt, glazed
boots, early winter without
the lie of spring, trees that are less
in the VW's bleary-eyed glass,
you and I

You and I,
slipping out on black ice.
Life's brittle, it rattles inside
the glove box. How can any of this
be true? At my feet, brown
spills cold-blooded mud, we drive
it seems, mid-air, through it,
a pointillist empire, luminous and light,
you and I.

How spare, our boot prints
in the white, fallen earth.
The marks we left there, mouths
that drew in the other's
We did not believe in deserts,
only thirst.

The goldenrod hunches, sour ravined, alder breaches
through snow, scent of deer calves that will be born

He shoulders the canoe on windy cedar, red-waved knuckles,
half-holding nails on gunwales, salted dents.

She lugs the pack. Strawberry, liquorice, macintosh, the weight
of trees mixing breath, shivering wingmoss, flour.

Speaking of flowers, white masks, and birch pelts, the need
for beauty to leave its tracks on every crooked stone,

Do seasons retry, doees god hibernate, wrestle with bears,
his muscles sharp as light and love with shattered claws.

I just remembered the red fox
that showed up by the snowbank as we drove
to find a spot that night. It ran ahead in the net of headlights,
drew us out
into the unplowed road
until we listed, a tugboat, you said,
in whitecaps, trying
to push on.
I remembered you too,
that way we were together, your small body
ferrying mine,
and past the window,
empty houses on hills of snow,
a plow
rasping below, salting
streets, and
under your teeth, lament.