No Ordinary Place Read online

  OTHER BOOKS

  BY PAMELA PORTER

  I’ll Be Watching,

  Groundwood Books, 2011

  This Awakening to Light,

  Leaf Press, 2010

  Cathedral,

  Ronsdale Press, 2010

  The Intelligence of Animals,

  The Backwaters Press, 2008

  Yellow Moon, Apple Moon,

  Groundwood Books, 2008

  Stones Call Out,

  Coteau Books, 2006

  The Crazy Man,

  Groundwood Books, 2005

  Sky, Groundwood Books, 2004

  Poems for the Luminous World,

  Frog Hollow Press, 2002

  NO ORDINARY PLACE

  Copyright © 2012 Pamela Porter

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency).

  RONSDALE PRESS

  3350 West 21st Avenue

  Vancouver, B. C., Canada V6S 1G7

  www.ronsdalepress.com

  Cover Design: Julie Cochrane

  Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the following for their support of its publishing program: the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Province of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Porter, Pamela, 1956–

  No ordinary place: poems/Pamela Porter.

  Issued also in print format.

  ISBN EPUB 978-1-55380-152-8

  I. Title.

  PS8581. O7573N6 2012 C811'.6 C2011-906411-1

  for Rob, Cecilia

  and Drew

  from no ordinary place

  do we come, and there

  will we find each other again

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Acknowledgment is gratefully extended to the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Arc, Cirque, CV2, FreeFall, Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, Room, Tiferet, Vallum.

  The poem “My Father’s Grief” won the 2010 Vallum Poetry Prize.

  “A Table in the Wilderness” and “Like I Told You” first appeared in chapbooks published by Leaf Press, edited by Patrick Lane.

  “Tenebrae” is the Latin word for “shadows.” The twelve anthems of the Tenebrae service are sung on Maundy Thursday in the Orthodox tradition as the congregation keeps vigil throughout the night, waiting for the light to return.

  “The Night of My Conception” was inspired by Lorna Crozier’s two poems, “The Night of My Conception 1” and “The Night of My Conception 2,” from her volume of poems, What the Living Won’t Let Go. “The Restive Angel” was inspired by “What I Gave You, Truly” from The Apocrypha of Light.

  “The Heart Is an Argument with Darkness” was inspired by Lorna Crozier’s series of poems taken from lines in Patrick Lane’s volume of poetry A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie. The lines used in this series are taken from A Linen Crow, A Caftan Magpie, and from Too Spare, Too Fierce.

  I would like to thank Russell Thorburn for his help with the manuscript that became this book. His vision and intuitive logic are invaluable. Also, I wish to thank my fellow writers in the WayWords writing group, in the Ocean Wilderness and Honeymoon Bay retreats and at Planet Earth Poetry for their support and encouragement. Finally, with deepest gratitude I want to thank Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane, my best and most beloved teachers and mentors.

  AN OFFERING

  Many bring food. Some carry flowers.

  I’ve brought poems —

  bouquets in profusion, armfuls,

  a cacophonous disarray

  the wind, magnanimous as a father,

  sweeps into his arms,

  petals strewn underfoot,

  imprinted into mud, cleaved

  to the soles of our shoes.

  Many bring food. Others,

  flowers. I’ve brought poems

  for every season — of dreams born,

  burning, broken, and the one

  when, after protracted grief,

  a scrap of melody begins

  like a perilous grace —

  dishevelled,

  discordant as my frangible

  offering, mud-smeared,

  naked and tender and wanting.

  Some bring food. It is

  what they do at such times.

  Others carry flowers.

  I’ve brought you poems.

  Branches, Early Spring

  They had begun to whisper among themselves,

  hesitant at first, but it was cold you see,

  and had been months cold. They had begun

  to whisper as the ice loosened and thinned

  on the trough, as the moon’s startled face

  rose above the blackened hills. I heard them

  whisper, but did not know the moment

  they began, or the precise dawn

  in which they wakened from their stiff

  and dreamless sleep. I know only

  the horses bowed their heads to thatch,

  I pushed the wheelbarrow toward the fence

  where thin shoots blushed with colour, and higher,

  the trees’ red sap set the sky on fire.

  Blessing

  To be blessed

  said the leaf,

  is to lie finished

  in dark earth,

  my edges starry

  with frost.

  To be blessed

  said the branch,

  is to stand naked

  in winter sun,

  my blood rushing gold

  and singing.

  To be blessed

  said the gate,

  is to be rusted open

  so that all may pass:

  deer, leaves, wind,

  mice, God.

  Begin Again

  After lightning, after thunder broke

  the darkness brooding over the sleeping houses,

  after rain, in silence morning bloomed.

  The grasses lay mudded, rose petals

  littered the dirt, and in that quiet, a bird

  tried her tentative song. The cat

  set a paw outside the barn; the horses,

  rumps shining, weary with running, stood steaming

  as the sun, that minor god, peered

  from behind the clouds

  as if to make some proclamation.

  Then the horses lowered their muzzles to the plain,

  and it was the beginning of the world, again.

  Cat

  She’d come home at last

  mewling all night on the porch,

  runt bundle of wild

  fright in her bones

  from the owl

  sweeping the dark,

  and the uncouth cries

  of her owlet young filling

  the trees and the night

  with the black bells

  of their sound.

  She’d come home,

  some furred creature

  swallowed up in her, but now

  she’s had enough of wild,

  the open mouth, needle teeth

  of that life;

  she has brought us

  a strangeness riding

  in her eyes: a sky

  of dark cloud built up,

  and the pelting rain.

  Making a Life

  And wind, always wind rolled over the land,

  pulling the clouds thin and grey.

&nb
sp; We had to go out — in snow, in cold, no matter —

  I lay the baby in her crib to let her sleep

  or cry. Some part of the fence was down;

  a deer, maybe, or one of the horses run into it

  in the blizzarding dark, or the wind

  had sheared it off, the post long rotted

  but holding taut in the tension of barbed wire

  until, like someone exhausted or dying,

  it could no longer keep itself upright.

  Wind watered my eyes, the razored barbs

  cut my hands through gloves, the bleached

  bones of grass bent with the weight

  of snow. First we had to pull the rusted

  staples out, then the wire off the post,

  the hard wooden knot like a face

  etched with pain. Then a new post to go in:

  the pounding of the maul, my hands

  holding the new post straight; I stood

  unseeing but for a smear of colour, the tremble

  in my bones when my husband hit it clean, each time

  missing my hands, my wrists, the skin

  exposed and fiery with frost. The chokecherry

  beside the cattle guard bloomed with birds

  feasting on the final fruit, one hawk

  on the power line, patient and lonely,

  our child in her crib and her dark hunger.

  My prayer for her sleep. Then the wire, coiled

  like a summer rattler, pulled snug with the claw

  of the hammer I held in place, my feet braced

  in snow hard as love, burrs catching on my socks,

  sleet of tears stinging my face,

  my hands just holding on, and my breasts

  sudden with milk. And when we finished,

  the birds scattering from the chokecherry,

  we stepped into the house as her newborn wail

  shattered the air, and I, stunned with cold

  and crying, my breasts burning

  and the milk coming down.

  Window

  Three years after I slipped back

  into the world,

  I lay and studied the morning bones

  of my hands opening,

  closing, my fleshy wings,

  the house sunlit and silent as heaven.

  A sudden bang, and I slid my feet

  to the floor. A cardinal

  had flown into the window, shattering

  the dawn.

  Light curled in sleep on the snow.

  The bones of trees tapped at the frozen

  waters of the sky.

  My bald uncle was out in his ear-flap hat,

  high-stepping in clumsy boots.

  I breathed crystals onto the glass,

  my palms pressing the thin

  separation between us,

  and watched his eyebrows turn to ash,

  his gloved hand lift

  the blood-red bird

  motionless as the angels

  in my Bible story book. Barefoot

  in my flannel nightgown,

  faced with death,

  I never forgot the darkness

  in its eyes, shining

  with the last thing it had seen

  before tumbling through

  to the other side:

  that veil

  I still knew, and knew

  would not let me back,

  my loneliness fresh, the bruising

  air of the world

  stroking my strange new skin.

  A Round, with Descant

  My little soul, fluttering flame,

  flies away when I sleep. She has

  no fear of death, that dark ice

  floating between the stars.

  She holds her infinity close

  and won’t let me see.

  My little child who lives in me

  lies awake each night

  and does not sleep.

  Her ear attends to nomad birds

  crying in their bones,

  the humming dust of heaven,

  a voice behind the blackened moon

  whispering

  This is not your home.

  My loneliness speaks

  in the rivers of my veins, again

  and again asking its name.

  Remember,

  I answer. Your name is remember,

  it is mist in the dawn.

  Your name, I say, is little sparrow

  gleaning winter ground.

  And my mother? My father?

  They live deep in a forest

  I have not yet found.

  My mother sews dawn to the sun,

  my father unrolls the fabric

  of the sky. Together, they shake out

  the light of summer, fold it over

  and over in winter.

  After half a century of walking,

  I will cross a bridge

  of fallen leaves to find them.

  I will carry bread to them, the seeds

  of stars, the worn shoes

  of desire.

  I will stroke their heads and say,

  I am here now, little Mother,

  I heard you call in dream, Father,

  and I will place my tenderness

  in jars ancient and jade.

  When they sit down to the table

  I will feed them from my hands,

  reaching down

  to the ripe fruit,

  scraping each jar clean.

  Another Word for Daughter

  Another word for daughter

  is remember.

  Remember ripples the still waters of childhood.

  Remember walks abandoned roads,

  dust clinging to her shoes.

  Another word for mother

  is silence.

  Silence tucks the sheets around the child’s bed.

  Silence wanders in and out all the rooms of the house.

  Other words for daughter

  are stranger, and shadow —

  the child wakens in the night and knows

  she is a stranger

  to those who sleep in the other rooms,

  as remember and silence meet each other,

  one on the top and one on the bottom stair.

  Not even the geese know her, who pass in the sky

  riding two long wings, their music

  another word for poverty,

  which echoes

  through the shadowed chambers of her heart.

  And another way to say heart

  is to say, little drum beating

  under the moon.

  And another way to say moon

  is to say, blue crayon circle

  caught in night’s branches.

  And another way to say night

  is to say, remember —

  the ruddied face of the moon

  she reaches for,

  a memory

  of those who loved her

  before she became human again,

  snagged in the branches

  of her bones, the radiant hum of heaven

  dying in her ear.

  Testimony

  I knew then there were infinite possibilities.

  The world was catching fire.

  Leaves turned one by one to flame.

  I saw my life clearly, in an instant:

  I had travelled by train, the long scarf

  of its smoke the colour of your hair.

  Once, the conductor turned his head to look at me.

  His eyes told me he knew.

  I travelled by foot the rest of the way.

  Someone else had planned this journey.

  Someone knew what my life was for.

  I am here now. This is my story.

  Lift your head and I will tell it to you.

  The Night of My Conception

  This is the dream that has recurred

  all my life. It is the farm

  I love and long to return to
, and know

  I cannot.

  It is no place I can find in this life.

  They are still young,

  my mother, my father,

  the trunk they carried off the ship

  hunched and weary in a corner

  of the cabin they built together.

  The hearth logs lick the flames

  of their desire,

  her dress rumpled on the floor,

  his hat hanging from a peg. In the loft

  where I will sleep in the bed

  he will make for me,

  I hover, listening,

  the night pregnant with stars,

  the plow horses’ thunderous feet

  quiet in their stalls,

  the milk cow curled in the straw, all

  waiting for the day I will reach out to them

  with my curious hands.

  Tonight there is a moon

  in the window

  of the barn. But I remain

  with the mother and father I will love

  even beyond this life.

  Like the rain

  before it reaches us, like music

  before the first note is struck,

  I am the pearl

  that will gleam inside her,

  I am their song of songs.

  And when the bright egg

  of the sun dawns,

  I waken and rise, wondering

  where in the world they are now,

  certain I would know them

  by the sound their hands make,

  their quickening breath,