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.