COUNTERPOINT
TO
SLEEP
by
Anne
Wilkinson
Anne Wilkinson began writing verse about six years ago, when she was in her late twenties. Her work soon came to the attention of Canadian editors, and poems of hers began to appear in Reading, Contemporary Verse, Here and Now and other magazines. Among the first to recognize her promise was E. J. Pratt, who gave her valuable encouragement and assistance.
Her name is by now familiar to readers of poetry in Canada, and she is generally regarded as one of the most interesting of our contemporary poets. Recently, her work has been introduced to English readers, through publication in Outposts and in Poetry Commonwealth. It is hoped that the appearance of this, her first published volume, will add to her growing reputation both in Canada and abroad. [front cover]
Counterpoint
to Sleep
Poems
ANNE WILKINSON
NEW WRITERS’ SERIES NUMBER 8, FIRST STATEMENT PRESS
[unnumbered page]
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of the poems in this book first appeared in
Contemporary Verse, Northern Review,
Poetry Commonwealth, Outposts,
Reading and Here and Now.
Copyright, 1951, by Anne Wilkinson
[unnumbered page]
CONTENTS
Summer Acres |
5 |
Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa |
7 |
A Folk Tale |
9 |
A Poem of Anxiety |
12 |
The Up and Down of It |
13 |
A Poet’s-Eye View |
14 |
Still Life |
15 |
Orchids |
16 |
Black and White |
17 |
Theme and Variation |
18 |
Lake Song |
19 |
I Know Not What to Do, Love |
20 |
La Belle Dame Sans Dormi |
21 |
Tower Lullaby |
22 |
After Reading Kafka |
23 |
The Puritan |
26 |
The Great Winds |
28 |
Time is Tiger |
30 |
Dissection |
31 |
To a Psych-Neurotic |
32 |
After the Ballad, Lord Randall, My Son |
34 |
Lullaby |
35 |
Climate of the Brain |
36 |
[unnumbered page] |
[blank page]
SUMMER ACRES
I
These acres breathe my family, Holiday with seventy summers’ history. My blood lives here, Sunned and veined three generations red Before my bones were formed. My eyes are wired to the willow That wept for my father, My heart is boughed by the cedar That covers with green limbs the bones of my children, My hands are white with a daisy, sired By the self same flower my grandfather loved; My ears are tied to the tattle of water That echoes the vows of ancestral lovers, My skin is washed by a lather of waves That bathed the blond bodies of uncles and aunts And curled on the long flaxen hair of my mother; My feet step soft on descendants of grass That was barely brushed By the wary boots of a hummingbird woman, The Great Great Grandmother Of my mid-century children.
II
September born, reared in the sunset hour, I was the child of old men heavy with honour; I mourned the half mast time of their death and sorrowed A season for leaves, shaking their scarlet flags From green virility of trees. [page 5] And the whine of autumn in the family tree. How tired, how tall grow the trees Where the trees and the family are temples Whose columns will tumble, leaf over root to their ruin. Here, in my body’s home my heart dyes red The last hard maple in their acres. Where birch and elm and willow turn, Gently bred, to gold against the conifers, I hail my fathers, sing their blood to the leaf. [page 6]
WINTER SKETCH, ROCKCLIFFE, OTTAWA
Down domestic roads the snow plough, snorting Stacks a crop of winter, spills it high To hedgerows alped with lilies; in the valley White is wag, is daisy till The sun aloft and hot with husbandry Beheads the flowers. Behind the plough the cold air flies a spume As soft and adamant as swans Where snow’s vacation is to etherize The wood and choke the town’s Hard arteries with drifts of chloroform. And all the long excessive day the ploughman Steers his dreaming over the hill To the faraway hour that carries his frostbite home. Such storm of white Bound by the black extravagance of night Makes winding sheet our myth-told-many-a-bed-time tale Till April babble swells the shroud to breast So milky full the whole north swills, licking A world of sugar from encrusted nipples Springful and swollen with love. And tusked with icicles, the houses here Bog stuporous in slow white sand, guard Their docile lawns with walls that boast Immaculate conception in a cloud Made big by polar ghost. In suburb of the forest, men walk shy, Dismembered by two worlds; Only the uncurled ears of children hear The coyotes mating in a neighbour’s acre, Theirs the only hands whose thumbs work free To sculpt a tower leaning tipsy with unPisan laughter; And being young, flexible pink tongues [page 7] Rename a carrot, nose; Nose on hump of snow they crystal christen Christ, the stillborn man; Then herd their feet to kick the undefiled When eyes still whey with vision see That chastity, though white, is wormed with sleep. O watch the child lie down and lusty swing His arms to angel in his image, sing “I dare the snow my wings to keep.” [page 8]
A FOLK TALE
With a Warning to Lovers
I wish to tell In words of one syllable The plight of two lovers, But like a war of roses Love is never At this or any Season, a simple tale. Yet these were lovers Scaled to commonplace dimensions, wrecked On nothing stranger than a reef Of love’s unreason; And they were wide aware Of scarlet, brighter on the heart When fusion follows the homing swing of flesh From cerebral skies apart; They’d watched the waning moon’s Face fade from the earth and the earth Still pale from the moon, embrace the dark. O they determined on a bliss Above the common sweetness of two moths And all the dear etceteras of a kiss. But why their greed was greater, why They ventured farther Than the garden love allows I don’t pretend to know, I only know the tide of their desire Swung miles beyond The ebb and flow that love demands; Each one a rocket in a space Too rare to nourish roots or green The tree of grace. They seemed to think the farther off they ran [page 9] The greater the combustion When they doubled back and crashed, mad For Adam and Evening and the apple, red And waiting for the hollow of a hand. One lack a day alas, The muscle of the heart cried ‘Hold !Enough !’ And though the lovers turned They did not move to take an outward step But stood there, stiff and still And gazing, each at Eden on a different hill. It was a sullen Monday afternoon It happened. Say a quarrel Enacted in the teeth of an ill wind Caught them cold—and spine to spine. In half the time it takes to sneeze Their backs were joined, locked, laced, inseparable. They were not One, All warm as lovers are at dawn But One as are sad Siamese, Irreparably linked twins. No going away now knowing winters March or April of surrender, An end to turning When the milky way to eyes is blocked By pools of pupils, slippery with lies. And in the streets and fields and on the beaches, Like orators they fought The polar pull of blood, the needle Pointing North to recognition, Twisting and yearning to trick the pulse To the South position of love. They bruised the beaches of their hearts With breakers from endemic, UnPacific storms, they slept, Their torn roots bleeding, under eiderdowns [page 10] Theatrical with snow. And each one dreamed at night the other cried “O foe is me.” But morning watched them waken Closer cleaved than lovers lie, close Enough to pick the years away with scraping, Each at the other’s scabless, yelping scar Until one wholly Sunday afternoon A second wind Filled and lifted their lungs In gusts that blew the bricks off chimney pots, A supersonic rage above the wails Of babes, new born’ Their voices violated doors, clouding The weather in the street That runs from their house of storm. They called the law and doctors and quacks, pled For a severing of joined, ill-mated backs. But the wise men shook their heads, “Whichever road you choose”, the sage fools said, Stacked high to heaven with hearts— There is a hitch— To set one free, we’re bound to cut The other’s cord to life.” And all the jesters in the weeping town Were dumb to tell them which. When last I’d news of them One lover looked to morning, one looked west. When one lay down to sleep, the other fell. For all I know they lie there yet, On the home sweet hearth of hell. [page 11]
POEM OF ANXIETY
All morning I go walking in the jungle, Loving and sweet with snakes, a wag With winged malarial hosts, With each insidious and daylight trap I’m gay to tangle. My whole and body being sings In dapple of day jungle, laughs To meet a death, unviolent, say From an adder or a fretted insect’s sting. In acres spoked with noon I ride the rim of danger, hoard The pearl and swine of sweat For one bright foe, The striped, discerning tiger. Though he stretches with the shadows All the aftermath of the hay-high morning, Yawning yet, nor turns His golden menace from its lair, The octave of his pads plays huge and soft On my mouse timorous ear. When night’s at large in the jungle I go fearful Lest I kiss or claw his eye. Too whoo, too whit, who’s who When all the jungle reeks? Exposed by five white columns of the moon Our tracks bear witness, prove The mating of our spoor. Clear as criss-cross lies our love On the forest floor. [page 12]
THE UP AND DOWN OF IT
As I came down I met a man Going up a narrow stair. He wore a beard and hairy Had the gall To swear his name was God. “Well met”, I answered, modest, Lowering my catholic Appetite of eyes, “Alone, without a witness I’ll confess: I’m Mrs. Bloom, The loitering Moon Goddess.” He blushed, beard, gall and all A heavenly red And squeezed against the wall, afraid, And I a simple witch With only the silky power To stroke the bat That flaps the shutters in his belfry. I mumboed a humble spell I’d learned on earth from men On burning terms with hell Then let God pass. Ascending on the right He reached his tower. I, two steps at a time, Jumped my way to grass. [page 13]
A POET’S-EYE VIEW
You are earth, loam, actual fields And we are the green reed growing from your body; You are solid, we are porous, ringed with chatter, Stalks that echo water Running in your under-worldly springs; Your ribs crack in the sun, ridge with rain, We lie boneless when our tissues fade; You are stiff against the wind, we Bend, arc’d with ague, by the storm Are properly bowed down a day Then up a daisy, green stalk straight, unbroken; You, the earth, are bound to earth’s own axis, We, who grown our down roots deep in you Are multi-headed, spray out seed like dandipuff To tickle the fabulous thin highborn skin of air Before we fall, point every potent feather Back into its spawning bed, your tethered body; You are warped with rock, the woof of you Is ore; in soul’s rough weather Rock splits open at the giant tremor of the soil; We, the green ones, laugh and add an inch For each storm’s death, our knowing nonsense blowing On and off the lode of your morality. [page 14]
STILL LIFE
I’d love this body more If graved in rigid wood It could not move; I’d cut it fresh in pine; The little knots Would show where muscles grew, The hollows shadow ovals Into eyes, The grain be quick to point The vein, be tendon’s clue; I’d whittle hair A solid armoured hood And nothing here profane, Nor rend the wood But bind my fluid form To forest tree, Be still and let its green blood Enter me. [page 15]
ORCHIDS
I watch and mark the orchid; I have lamped It carefully as a graded egg and stamped The petal painted mauve as sick, not ill; It vomits love-life from a dollar bill; And for the White, red-centred White, red light Is closer to the white of purity Than this unhaloed flower. It boasts of snow Although its tongue has licked the blood of swans. The third, exclusive bronze, the fourth, a lake, Wet, green with thunder, date since God last met A tiger in the Plaza, lost His faith, To paint with elegance the orchid for Arts sake. Absolve the orchid butterfly! Blue, swift And delicate! Ignore, forget the tuft Of yellow fungus growing on the tree— The wing in flight transcends the seed’s morbidity! [page 16]
BLACK AND WHITE
On still black water, water lilies Are less lily than the swan; Here, in still black water, two White horses drinking, three white swans. Two white horses turn and shake The foaming from their mouths, three Swans lift and spread snow-weighted wings, Raise their breasts to drift on air, Aloft, but lazy till the thud – Ding stallions’ hoofs sound bass on the hill; Earth echoes their pleasure, waked from languor; Wind is waiting for Assault of white birds’ wings. Here On still black sky, three white swans Above two horses galloping. One swan breaks the air with smothered Strength of feathers, and they’re off! Look! Suddenly the stallions rise! The chase is on! Two white horses, Three swans flying on a still black sky. [page 17]
THEME AND VARIATION
This is the noisy silence of a tree The rustle in the fern is the noise of fear A twig is a nerve; it snaps the heart to pounding. This is the swollen silence under the sea; The hush and push of pressure soundless, sounding, Drowning the human splash, the man-made tear. This is the spiral’d silence in a cave Where silence echoes itself; it echoes a jest As a shell forever uncoils the thread of a wave. This is the silence of love, and though the ear part It cannot hear, it will not hear the rest, The pause between compulsions of the heart. [page 18]
LAKE SONG
Willow weep, let the lake lap up your green trickled tears Water, love, lip the hot roots, cradle the leaf; Turn a new moon on your tongue, water, lick the deaf rocks, With silk of your pebble-pitched song, water, wimple the beach; Water, wash over the feet of the summer-bowed trees, Wash age from the face of the stone. I am a hearer of water; My ears hold the sound and the feel of the sound of it mortally My skin is in love with lake water, My skin is in love and it sings in the arms of its lover, My skin is the leaf of the willow, My nerves are the roots of the weeping willow tree. My blood is a clot in the stone, The blood of my heart is fused to a pit in the rock; The lips of my lover can wear away stone, My lover can free the blocked heart; The leaf and the root and the red sap will run with lake water, The arms of my lover will carry me home to the sea. [page 19]
I KNOW NOT WHAT TO DO, LOVE
I know not what to do, love I know not what to do. O hand your clothes on the hickory tree And bathe in the shallow dew And open an ear to the earth, love That’s beating under you. I know not where to sleep, love I know not where to sleep. O cradle into the hay, love And curl in close to the sheep And the sheep and the little black lamb, love Will bleat you into sleep. I know not if I be, lobe I know not if I be; I do not know if I touch, love Or if ought touches me. O hang yourself on the weeping birch And very soon you’ll see. [page 20]
LA BELLE DAME SANS DORMI
She did not dress Except to wear A word across her groin She wore no jewels Bu the snake Living on her arm She could not sleep For sleep would watch The flies stroll on her face She did not dare To lose her web In that dark webbèd place. [page 21]
TOWER LULLABY
Climb, as a child easy with circles Spins to the tower Or turn, an old man Shaking out a route With eighty journeys dragging at your back. Swing to the tower High as a child swings, higher and higher, Swing on plenty of rope, Or warily Test the ascent On the thread of your pulse. Wheel, as a child is a swallow Flying to spiral Or plodding, string a necklace out of sweat And stagger step by bead Bead by step. The stair is soft; Little moon-lit lawns Of lichen moss; The stair is bare-faced stone; So creak on curv – Ing rock or leap From turf to the top, to the turret. Then, panting, lean The moment, prop It on the parapet Before it tumbles Over and old again Climb again Young again Sleep. [page 22]
AFTER READING KAFKA
Here at my door I swing between obsessions: Hall by day, corridor by night. I am obsessed with exits, bound To qualify the latitude of light, To mourn the quantity of shadow Beaked and flocked in flight across the meadow, Spreading eagles on the stubble in the hall. The hall is my terrain. I pace Its length from where I am to who I’ll be When the sun falls from the sill; It falls away from the window, Window wedged in the narrowing ends of the wall; I walk it every day, love summer months When air and time and I are white with searching; I name its flora, feed its fawn, My eye is on the storm across the ceiling; Leaking drains spread a cloud, streaks Of hail crack and flake the paint in drifts About the floor. I stare Until an ounce of light and two of space Trace a stain to the bearded face of God. Pity him, a King, dependent now On my erratic eye to right his halo; He begs my eye to stay, Begs my tongue call holy holy holy; I yawn and as I turn he fades away. The down-rays focus on the baseboard, spot The dirt, the crunched and crunching cockroach, in And on the wood in warts. Though I remember in my head This house where I born, my feet forget And pound the alleys, bruise their soles in byways [page 23] Leading nowhere from the hallowed hallway And eyes forget their little blink of time, The wasting of the worn thin planes of day Flying lower, closer to the ground. And yet, in June when time is light and big I’ve come so near the end of it, if I’d a stick I could have held the blind; Before my last lid fell I saw beyond the heel of Caliban to Ariel. Light is my Love! I dallied, lost The white years in a wink. Do flora deera fawn breathe on? Can they outwit the dark? I shield a traitor Am betrayed by the off-beat of a tock-sick heart. Reassemble, join the scattered stems, Fumble for an ankle in the black, Put back the flesh; send broken feelers Out to spy along the wall—Signal If you touch an opening in the line to home! Delicate as ears, fingers fest (Walls are seeping) Weeping blisters cry out from their tips, Cry up upup the arm to the sky in my head; I scold but still the blisters rise, Hang glutinous in streamers from my eyes. Can the wounded walk the voyage back? Feel their door distinct from a hundred doors? A key is cut for cunning Is not strength to try a hundred locks. (Did Noah save obsessions, two by two Or did the green sea suck At hall and corridor, deposit coral [page 24] Where the drowning drift from hide to seek?) I tear my foot (a nail was detoured in the sun An hour ago) but if it bleeds I do not know, I cannot see in the dark; The stream may be red or white or the old flood Forcing twin obsessions into the sea Or up the traffic’d gangplank to the ark. The storm is gone from the ceiling; God is not there; I cannot comfort him, say “let beards be” Or smile and shave him when I cannot see. Half-way home or where? Fingers burn as brassy knobs rebuke them; The key is grown, is heavy and The python, patient, waits, across the corridor; He does not hurry me; We struggle, never touching skin to scale; The end is at my door My own two hands move docile to my throat I choke, I splutter “Hands!,” I call them off; I chide them, while “You trespass, Hands, take care!” But they are deaf Or death is shouting and they do not hear. [page 25]
THE PURITAN
The earthquake’s shock Has cut a new grey Puritan Whose ear refutes the lily note For clank of cloven. He cleaves to rock And shaded stone, esteems the dark (Excepting fireflies civil light And stars’ old spark). How rough his word— “’Til they have bread I can’t approve The cherry snow, so soft so close Is white to blue.” Cool is his bed And warm, so he must ruffle it With hate; his scorn takes to a stone To ease whose fret? His rutted frown Projects a whip to shrivel those Who over ten admit the sap That rushes them; For blood has mown The fields and laps the wheat in red— “Is mine not crusted yet from seeing Others bled?” (Hot is the loaf that chokes the throat That’s in his head) But still the song Sings straight into his drum And white the cherry floats Though it is wrong [page 26] (Did devils deck it there?) And still his bed Is cool and warm and sap Climbs up his stair And fireflies light him home At night, all unaware. [page 27]
THE GREAT WINDS
I’ll tell you why the great winds trouble us: Once upon a briny while ago The sea was home and land lay sunning, cliff In unproved element of air; A gale ago the ocean granaries Ran low in the sea one harvest season, Foes swam surly through a hedge of friends And Sea Lords fought for each sea-stalk of pasture. One among them, Marco Polo Swimming low in shallow water, slid to shore; He conjured solid land, he raised a flag, A lung, our pledge to plunge from stilla water No more moving of a mother’s womb. Each birth repeats the first howled breath in time, Reversing all the levels of the world Till seas come up on land, Submerged in you and me; in bog and swamp Released, they sing amphibian noel. The great winds trouble when a summer storm Breaks, blowing waves from hiding, drowning Land-baked puff and pride in childish seas Till we’re unbeached, awash, A native-stranger in contrary gardens; Green and liquid shutters dim the sun Where coral builds pink cities on the sand; Little horses chase their tails Among a maze of cockle shells and silver-sides And sea-cows, udderless, Hung, tethered to the herd by tongue-tied bells. Here flotsam is the sloughed-off memory, Delirium or octopus or clue To beat the walls of water in escape, Though tentacles are ours, were always there Growing in the harvest of our hair; Here sharks, all lazy but their teeth [page 28] Come swimming sweet and slow, the easier To you know what, my dear; And tiny barnacles that love too much Stick, clinging till their millions anchor us; Here mouths are raw, are filled with sorrow, washed With salt by shocked sea-silence when we scream. The great winds trouble till a winter storm Breaks, frosting brine to flesh and wrecking With a breath our web to earth; And long before the wind’s cried out We’re bound in six cold feet of arctic ice; No leaway anywhere to move as in A glass-walled room, and nothing here molests But the weight of the dying albatross Whose two white sings lie cooling on our breast. [page 29]
TIME IS TIGER
Time is tiger. NOW is wooly-witted lamb. Time is tiger (Purple shoes with crimson soles And crimson linings deck his ears). NOW is barefoot, black boy, Little lost Sambo. Time is tiger. NOW is Mowgli, hunted, hunting Khan. Time is tiger. NOW is wooly-witted lamb. [page 30]
DISSECTION
We crawl through craniums, stare Beneath the bone at spasms, redden At the grey twitched ultimatum when We touch the guilty puddle where the nerve roots Launch their tippy boats to shoot the heart. The towering head observes which curled inch Controls the meadow of the hand, which pipe Dictates the course of sewers in our city; It clocks the ragged pulse That hammers out our imagery, unravels Every sleeping snake And travels to the threshold of its sting. And while we squint to focus microscopes, Dissect each bleeding head, Sun bursts in splendour from the attic skull, An angel shedding glory, come to free The puppet dangling from a mildewed coil. [page 31]
TO A PSYCHO-NEUROTIC
You are each man’s plight, distorted; Therefore we cannot bear with you Or the image of our near defeat Written in black and white and pain Across your face. We stuff our ears against the wolf That howls for thee and me. We jolly you and say the sky is blue And flowers are sweet and morning dew A tonic for what ails the world and you. But underneath we breathe Your soul’d predicament; We know the torture-chamber of the will That ‘will not,’ The blanket that wraps ‘do,’ In ‘do not,’ We know the pressure of persisting Will-rot. We love and hate you; being us You’re doubly vulnerable— Once in yourself, once in our lusty bluff. Accept this truth: You are no stranger in this rare assembly Where the gods clutch bleeding heads When the audience sleeps; At worst you house an abdicated king Who tossed away his crown. Before you settle in despair Listen, I pray you listen To our voices; they are weak But audible. (We do not offer you child’s comfort) [page 32] Two conditions of man are fixed: The quick and the dead. Beware the drowsy twilight bait That lures a man from home And traps him, traitor In a strangers’ camp. Throw in your widow’s mite, Defend the quick, Their victory is here and now And will not shrink Though they concede the ultimate defeat. [page 33]
AFTER THE BALLAD, LORD RANDALL, MY SON
“O where have you been, my baby, my son? O who scratched your face, my poor little one?” “The rose tore my cheek; Mother wrap me up warm And hold me and rock me and keep me from harm.” “You’re bruised near to dying, my school-boy, my son, Your nose is all bloody; who bullied my man?” “The girls are so rough; Mother, wash my face clean And stay close beside me and feed me ice-cream.” “What makes you so sad, my young man, my son Who dares to refuse you, my handsome one?” “She laughed at my love; Mother make my bed soon And kiss me good-night for I fain would lie down.” “You’ll not go to war, my only, my son? Your heart has a murmur, you’re barely full grown.” “You cut off my feet, Mother, stumps cannot stand, And look, they still bleed, for you’re licking your hand.” [page 34]
LULLABY
You’d sleep? Then come, I’ll tell you where to go— As angel or as eagle to a cloud; Float, barely bruised, new-born, with lullalulla Rock-a-bye, white is the gull as the star Is white and the snow. But if I smother, Breathe a feather As a shroud? Too soft? I know another place for sleep— Love, shed your skin and throw your bones on sand; The waves rest curled; they break with lullalulla Rock-a-bye, white is the foam as the fleece Is white on the lamb. But sand—the pain From one small grain Has drenched my eye. You cry? A King! Awake to guide the dream! In sleep the crown’s awash, unwound the grief— Come, cradle on your feet, with lullalulla Rock-a-bye, white is the dawn and the spray Is white on the reef. [page 35]
CLIMATE OF THE BRAIN
Climate of the brain, convert your Africas;
In weather white with Christmas stall creation.
Polar days wake black, and as they lock and lash
Their lid against the eyeball of the sun
So brains grow lustful for a snowy bed
Where shroud blizzards flock their flakes, mock lethe
On budding head.
Hot hasty seed, I’d cover every sprouting one of you
With winter! There, go doze awhile
That love may hang its heart with mistletoe
Or wreathe and halo it with holly, green
And thorned and dropping blood red berries.
Season of possum death, swaddle the anxious
Seed with sedative.
Till seed in-buds, digs down below the frost
And sucks at the springs of sleep.
Then, all the underworld achieved, sap
Run free at the big blessing of the sun!
What hubbub in the meadow, cock a doodle dawn
When skull ablaze with golden flowers
Fools the April morning. [page 36]
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