Nunc Dimittis

These Elegies - DC Reid

My eighth book of poems, These Elegies, 2018-2019.

Send me a comment if you would like to receive a copy.

How Does A Warm Animal Come To Her Death?

I have punctured my finger nails / to fill one thimble / with blood
                                                            - Phyllis Webb

The elk lies in its body of ribs, fallen
together as hands in prayer. I see
xylophone bones and meat's white growth

of fly. The skull has no one to look at me, but
a pink toe looks a blood eye left to find my own.
Half an ungulate jaw, the other not found

in second-growth bush, or century of sweat
down my black hair shirt. Could she,
if she she be, have mewed her own

small ending? A jaw of long white fids
unspliced her arteries: adventitia, media,
intima, to snuff the life of eyes.

I consider teeth-shortened bones,
not lungs around which they
breathed and returned. Hamstrings

on my calves, I finger hide too
worthless to be eaten. Where are mouths
that ripped warm life to feed their own?

I might stagger among alder haze pursued
by green fly. But I know no fear. No wolf,
no cougar. I am short-sighted bear

and shamble wilderness as though  I own it,
the chocolate lily on the grading that bore
a railroad a 100 years ago, taking

skeletons of cedar to men. All the men
with sweat from their mouths. Plank holes
chopped in trunks, and double-ended

blades with teeth many inches deep.
Now, the bones of elk starve perfectly
fed on by mosses taking them to calcium.

The white hair, the white bone, the white owl

become a winter. What else is there to know?
Ah, the maple tree, grown from shore,

topples a century into river. So many
questions. Such indifferent curiosity.
No one eats a carnivore.

 *****


'The blood eye left to find my own.'

Several images of: 'The maple tree, grown from shore / topples a century into river.'

And, if you can believe it, I found a rock that looks just like a cougar head, stumbling around in a North Van Isle river on a warm summer day. Isn't the resemblance uncanny, almost eerie? It is six to eight feet across.

 

 

A Poem About the Water, Land and Animals of BC

I could simply give in                      

It is morning and I am kneeling

in the river that trembles my hand.

There is flesh in this morning,

the fragile of sockeye, living on

in winter where they should not live.

There is the beat of a hidden heart,

and the river gives and takes a life.

My hands grow ghostly

at the ends of my arms.

The flesh in them will not end today.

The blue-green knowledge

of nothing is: Sitka, cedar and sedge.

As though a coastline makes a difference.

A ragged place of feet in boots and laces

come free. Only the legs keep moving,

scattering salmon that should not be.

Their purpose is as ours: to make

an acquaintance and break

in water the colour of thought.

I could simply give in to making life.

My feet, trembled into nothing,

run red rocks from the basement

of time. They know no other

purpose than striding the Taylor,

the Elk, the San Juan,

any source of knowledge

that is passed to the tree

after it is passed through me.

Fort Garry Hotel - Watermark Image

Glosas from: The Spirit of the Thing and the Thing Itself

Like the circles that you find

Nothing could now disturb

the white infinity

of his radically altered syntax

the total absence of verbs.

In Memoriam                          - PK Page

Nothing could now disturb

the sweet of fallen snow. A proverb

perhaps. Could it be so to a tongue  

or an angel dipping low, to serve

or slip a pin? For snowflakes

are perfect too, as an angel from

a perfect illusory god. How I miss

it so: belief’s rotund head

of satisfaction. Link me up, USB

my dreams, my god spot if you like or                      

the white infinity

with its loss of deep. Can you see

in a white mind in a white world on

a white cloud where all is irretrievably,

resolutely, inescapably, invisible

to the atheist, but populated with

non-existent ancestors of those

who do believe? I shouldn’t be a scold,

and accept anyone’s belief in anything

that does not incinerate the believer              

of his radically altered syntax.

Somewhere most anything must be, an axe

precise as the neck of a guitar, the logic

of picks and fingernails that attacks

music, cracks callouses on finger tips.

Find me a melon without a dead

spot, anything in a white room

with muffler ears, say a Buble flake

out-riffs a flat jazz-man drift: meaning

Sinatra should have left his heart

the total absence of verbs.

To be is to be in motion not swerve

through crooning a lullaby, a dirge.

There is no need of un-motive words.

Who needs a tune without a tune,

or the waxy, fuguey Pachelbel?

Alas, my fingers have no memory

and come to black and white without skill.

But I can listen and my teeth are perfect.

All god things come to he who waits.

The happy little elegy

And it’s hard being dead,

and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels

a little eternity. Though the living

all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.

Duino Elegies                                      - Rainer Maria Rilke

                                  And it’s hard being dead.

A worm will spew a little dirt on the garden bed.

The robin in its endless search is a strobe light finding

the oxygen of your lost attention, your tongue at a twisted

lip. Desire is a molten thing, it moves within my thighs.

An ocean is a horse that knows only where it goes

and when it turns in winter aspen conjures

a beauty. You can’t say what kind only less

sentient, sentimental, less squandering.

Instead, I or you have a toe testing the linoleum       

and full of retrieval, before one gradually feels

like the heron, head aside on its beach asleep.

In its vertical world, we are a granite monument

to waiting. The gecko’s on its white washed wall

with sucker toes, the sound of rubber boots.

Hey there in my pants, where the fate of

mankind resides and subsides from time to

time when you are away; that long

interminable rope resists being apparent to

the looking eye, the hungry iris, or                

a little eternity. Though the living

the modernity of the galaxy believing

with intensity the black matter we cannot see, 

the dust. Without eyes there is nothing

other than now as the frowsy heads of

hyacinths break bluely from the snatching hand.

Starry, starry night, without a sound for

striding within your brain, upsetting

the ear’s knack for keeping our feet on the

ground, the sapient, sentient Earth, the sphagnum;

all make the error of drawing too sharp a distinction.

The endless cantor of winter muscle, the stamping

horse feet on their way to spring, under Northern

lights at 3 am, the tingling ionosphere responding

to the squeak of 30 below. The hard hard snow,

the sand, the hourglass. Say you misstep, head down

and sleepy with scent of women. You land

a gibbet in the reins. The horse you never

liked much, walks you over, each hoof making

an accordion of your ribs, a broken boat, a place to go.         

Oh, for love, necessity, reward’s inability

But that was later, after we had made the passage

from the faint light of morning star and pale moon

to unscrupulous noonday with its major chords –

battalions marching across an Escher landscape.

Hologram                                            - PK Page

But that was later, after we had made the passage

to soldiers, the tinklings of war, vintage

melody of bullets from our guns. Across

a vagina-darkened sky, green message

trails from the Earthen garden. No trees left.

It was well into the fire of Marxists and

romantics, with no known colour or form.

But we with hands could discover

what our eyes in their anticipation

saccaded across the sky in jerks.

From the faint light of morning star and pale moon,

cerulean, sucre, sale, some Sze Chuan

spiciness, and fruit flies drunk

on the rim of my midday beer soon

lived my work among shafts of sun.

The dust that rose between my shufflings,

might shout: my work! my work! – to the empty

sun-filled room, its implication of wont

or lack of wont. A firework I did not see,

for I have never seen enough, then blast

to unscrupulous noonday with its major chords.

Poewtry? Oh for love, necessity, reward’s

inability to make a shilling or be one.

(You’re so tiresome for asking of award$.)

There is no corporeal voice that makes

the air pure bread, communal,

the yeast of good conversation.

And that pesky beer. I should not have

drunk so much. I trudge the flags

of a spectator’s belief in

battalions marching across an Escher landscape.

The earthquake of understanding, the escape

to solace or stupidity, for there is no keen

algorithm to match the sszt of citrus drape

the morning. No love of course, for that

is husbandry of foolishness, of June apple

so tart we spit pulp from our lungs. Worm?

Oh, we could and would have eaten that. We felt

harpsichords coming on, the relentless perfection

of our song. Smell the cork and the after cork.