Two Bowls of Milk (3 page)

and the girl with the turban, who is always turning.

There’s not long left. She already misses

who she’s witnessing lose her. Because in keeping her still

for several days Vermeer saw the changes and broke

in trying to retain them, the crooked hairs of her brow

and the brush of scarf against shoulder.

He lit mostly the far side of her face, it would be gone

first. Soon he’d have only the nape, and her back

receding. Soon the map would dim and crumple.

I have folded it myself, often, bringing this place near

to where I’m from, but there is still the shadow between

and a difference of time. Here the streetlamps stutter on.

There it’s still light on my mother’s turned face.

My mother said they saw the droves of fish uncoil,

she and my father far out over the water at White Rock

where I used to follow them into the wind.

The fish passed beneath the pier, a quick stream

until they gathered close, whirled around each other

to elongate again and go. The whole school moved

as one creature but the human crowd dispersed,

most watching instead the taut lines, gulls

raiding the bait. Had I been there, we would have been three

bent over the rail, trying for that depth and that

fluidity, the three of us seen from behind recognizably

of the same source and unspeaking, worshipping.

Inept in everything except perception – and even there

subjective – I’m only partially my chemist father: I never

threatened to explode my childhood with experiments

but watched my mother release a blot of half-and-half

into the glass cup that held her coffee and a hurricane

ensued before her spoon dipped in to smooth things out.

When photographed with utmost care – the care my father,

demonstrating for his students, gave to filling his pipette

and counting tears of danger as they mixed with mildness –

a drop of water falling forty centimetres

into a bowl of shallow milk will make a rising

circle, widening until a phallus strains upward

from the centre, milk and water bound.

With its tip congealed into a sphere, the column falls back,

the globe drops in and the milk is a little more

watery. This quick gift’s gone unglimpsed as I wash dishes –

my hands dank in gloves – and muse on some dumb

wall of brick. Across the continent my father watches

another sitcom while my mother waits for my next call.

Each time she reaches the ringing first: my words travel four

thousand kilometres to the saucer of her ear.

By the time I speak to him I’ve achieved that even

surface, coveted aftermath of his childhood combinations:

after the bang and froth is that silence we both live beneath,

small water fallen into so much milk.

In my palm a photograph of me, holding

in my palm the huge gold salmonberry –

it’s summer, the bush behind us

only beginning to turn to luxury houses,

and I have a small room with my name

on the door, a brother and parents

who love me. I picked this fruit because

I wanted to own its size and yellow sheen,

because we called it
luggie
for its luminous

bursting. What did we think,

naming it? It makes no sense.

My mother coaxes me to eat it.

My father thinks it worthy

of a photograph; my brother believes

it’s magic. It has nothing to do with me.

That it’s yellow instead of ordinary red,

that I found it, means nothing. It is just

what it is. Its taste would leave me

as I was, as I am, as I was, as I am.

Ten years before your birth, you already live

in her face, in the sharpness of her nose,

the omniscience of her eyes. Your longing for solitude

permeates her, emanates from her like moonlight

to blur the camera’s focus.

Behind her, blossoms quiver, shrink

into their nightly state, leave her alone.

You are not even thought of, and yet she is thinking of you

here with the tendrils of vine at the nape of her neck.

Her eyes sting with salt wind, though the sea

is miles distant, the air draped and still.

She sees, as if through layers of gauze

or water, desires worn to ragged

skin beneath waves. She widens her eyes

against crying, and the shutter blinks

her into permanence. Light spills from her

like ocean water. The mouth

of time gapes wide

and chokes.

You saw the battered fear on the woman’s face

as she witnessed herself in the mirror, parting

her long hair like a raven preening feathers,

expecting someone behind. And then you didn’t see her,

only her reflection, which you’d inherited

when your sleeping eyelids twitched and you slipped

into her skin. Now your hands lift to bruises,

your heart quickens but your feet won’t go.

You don’t know what came before,

only the certainty of fist raised or scissors

held to your hair. That glint the corner of your eye finds,

which turns to plain sunlight when confronted.

You’ve forgotten what dreams are. No words

can fill the open mouth the mirror shows you, these lips

now yours: numb as gutted fish, wide with the knowledge

that this moment cannot be awoken from.

I’ve never been to any of my favourite places

but I saw the film, that north American town

ensconced in snow. A pregnant woman stood

on a blood-flecked plain beside a car wreck,

pronounced a man dead. Now, like all those

grey roads in my sleep, Fargo’s under water.

Minnows pass through open windows

of that upturned car, lodge in the dead

man’s pockets. The current sways him as if

he were alive, in love. Somewhere, the actress

from the film stands by a river with her son,

that swelling within her on the movie screen now

actual. On another channel, Manitoba grows heavy,

towel darkening with spill. I dream

of ghostly birch immersed, roots nudging up.

Those women in the wreckage, seeking

photographs of children, will find

life’s become a soggy matter in their hands,

no one’s to blame. I wake to red

on threadbare sheets, another thin blue sky.

Too many hours beside him on the bed are never enough.

Outside is the sun’s old light, inside its dim reaches.

The bleached hills out the window

are not Crete. Heat is an indoor pleasure,

snow heaped in the courtyard over the
balançoire
.

She dreams alien neighbours and wakes to their footsteps.

Easier even than the warmth of his sleep

is her own tunnelling in. Her skin wall-white

as though she’s seen something terrible.

The thousand snow geese lift over the flooded plain

as we drive by, my love, my mother and I remarking on the glint

given by underside of flight, white feather reflecting

water on field reflecting wing. Others shimmer by the hundreds

where water shouldn’t be. That the earth would give this

to thank them for returning is miraculous.

The farmer has his own word to describe it.

That my mother should be here with us for a time, having flown

across this continent of shield and accidental lakes, that I

should live here now, is what the geese pay tribute to.

Yes, I apologize for the struggle of crops. Yes, I recognize

that beauty can violate another wholeness. But that turn of flock

over flood, I can’t say it is not alone enough

to compensate the waist-deep trees. And so I bear witness

and so my burdens lift. We are here.

Till now you’ve picked a self each day:

sharp-tongued cynic, innocent, fool in love

with how his face distorts in polished

bedposts. In a lake my features

shift: there shy girl, there mindless, there

adolescent with a crease between her brows.

Each shadow my profile casts on page

or yours on canvas makes another face

to live within. Until tonight: this mirror’s

frozen you in charcoal grey, you’ve traced

your shades to find despair becomes you.

You should not have turned your brush

upon yourself so soon. My shadow’s grown

still darker, will not lighten. How finally

we’re caught, those roses in the wallpaper

half-open into wings of flightless moths.

On first entering the white

field, I think I’m dead, and this

no heaven. Aftertaste of sacrifice:

I’ve left the coast, crossed Rockies,

plains and shield to sleep beside

my love and learn his tongue.

Born here in winter, you nod

welcome, let me stand beside you

to watch the train pass. We aren’t

going anywhere. I had not known:

that Norway of your idol

Munch no country of the mind,

so dark just after noon he

couldn’t paint in more redeeming

shades.
C’est triste, la neige
–

your words freeze and drop.

When you lie dead in December

in a white bed, you will be no

angel rising, only a slow

sublimation: snow becoming

vapour without ever being

water. Now I’m winter’s daughter.

Here a glimpse of soaring blue: her scarf,

flicker of summer maples against river.

This Madeleine you’ve married, will she

make you remember who you were

before cold weather? With grace her sun-

burned neck bends to the view you paint

her into. This morning she laid aside

her brush to make your lunch

and has not picked it up again.

(Before your death she’ll speak

of sacrifice as though it were a pool,

blood-warm, and I will read her archived

words, furious in winter.) Whose

choice was this? Though you

believed her praising eye alone

kept your canvases alive, you killed

the part of her that could have lit you.

Love bends me in more resistant shapes;

my neck cracks like ice. I would not give you

a shred of blue, my own too few and far.

A few acres of snow
. In a Montréal

December I come upon your few feet

of west, a tawny field grazed on

by some animals. They might be

antelope and this some view of

Africa – or cows and Idaho? What

cowboy hat do you imagine

my umbrella is? You have not gone

far enough, your English Bay a mouth

drawn shut, its trees cowering

under an enormous Québec

sky I cannot write, my words

small glimpses between

this branch of fir and that. How west

must have threatened to open

you. My pages nearly white

these days, I’m shutting up.

That “I” I write no longer me

but you, alone in the midst of what

I call nothing and you home.

Whatever makes you and I believe

ourselves
tout seul
has got her too,

her painted face the unrepentant

grey of moon. I know lead

lines her eyes, each chamber

of her heart. Her eyelashes rubbed out:

this world the same no matter what.

I cried till I had no water left. All was

ice. Those rectangles, a distant

steeple: what home crumbled into

when I left. Parents might be waiting

at a kitchen table for her safe return,

very much alive, as mine are, as yours

were when you turned them into

monuments apart. You hardly left

the city of your birth, never arrived.