Munro - Grief Notes - Animal Dreams

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Jane Southwell Munro

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Munro, Jane, 1943

Grief notes & animal dreams

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-82-3

I. Title. II. Title: Grief notes and animal dreams.

PS8576.U574G75 1995 c811'.54 C95-932305-8

PR9199.3.M85G75 1995

Copyright Jane Southwell Munro, 1995.

The support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation is also gratefully acknowledged.

Cover is after a character, Li (The Clinging, Fire), from the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching.

Brick Books
www.brickbooks.ca
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada

for Bob

and in memory of my parents

Evelyn Elizabeth Southwell
&
Charles Raymond Southwell

Contents

Tis not the swaying frame we miss,
It is the steadfast Heart

Emily Dickinson, #1597 c.1884

The fire the packrat started
destroyed the house my father built
and killed my mother.
Its aftermath sits in me like a drought.

And I, a forest creature, grown
among mists, between creek beds,
where, if water evaporates
it's only for a few hours
of rest in another state
as if to catch a little sleep,
before falling again
I keep expecting the drought to end.

It's as if grief
sucked the green world inside out,
down through its roots
into a closed and cryptic seed,
ran gratitude backwards
like a movie rewinding.

Now, in my dream, the treeless hills are arid
and below the cellar
under the house
the earth is tunneled, as if a mine started there,
and out of the passage
parched animals emerge.
First a deer, terribly close to death.

Upstairs, a little water spills
through the cracks, floor to floor
when the family washes dishes
and I see a silver rivulet
bead and twist as it slips between the planks,
but the air in the cellar vacuums it up.

The animals from underground come
with tongues white and crystallized
like pieces of Turkish delight.

Despite the drought
I find a working garden hose, the alligator kind
mother went after
when she, safely outside,
remembering water in the greenhouse off father's bedroom,
ran back inside.
The kind of hose clearly in her mind when the inferno
filled the hall
and she crawled along the floor beneath ten feet of flame
that tore the skin from her back
devoured the flesh off her feet,
a fire so hot it crumbled slabs of granite six inches thick,
melted brass, left her with third degree burns
to more than fifty percent of her body.
I hold a running garden hose
in the cellar
and a silvery-eyed doe
leaning against the hard-packed dirt tunnel
lets me fill her mouth
but she can't swallow.

In my dream I taste the brine
dissolving round her tongue,
so absolutely stiff with salt
the first water that hits it turns caustic.

And it takes a minute
because the drought and the dream slow my mind
before I realize she need not swallow it:
I have in my hands a running hose
though outside the hillside is brown and treeless,
and I don't know where the water comes from.
I am able to rinse her mouth again
and again, if need be, until it softens
and she can swallow.

Talking to the ghost of desire
I asked him
why he'd moved his rehearsal hall,
his stirring of the air before his orchestra,
his exuberant timing, his encouragements,
far, far away.
Talking to him as I walked was like praying
or attending
to static behind music on the radio.

Though partly I was yelling at myself: numbskull!
Trudging across campus through the snow,
furious with myself for wanting,
spitting damn mad at that trap,
kicking my loneliness so it remembered
what hurt felt like,
marking the past in a neat diagonal
of feet pointing towards maturity .

I dreamt of an aunt who died five years ago:
she was upstairs holding court
over breakfast in an English hotel.
Her body, respirited, recognized me.
She crumpled, saying my name Jane

and I heard anguish, surprise, welcome, exhaustion
voiced in that chord of longing.
As if she'd counted on my presence for days,
perhaps years, but I hadn't arrived.
As if my opening the door on her audience
were gauche, as if it destroyed thought, destroyed her
but restored hope.

The way she called my name! I flooded into that word
even though she was dead and in a wheelchair.
Her hotel was full
and many meals and conversations had taken place
without me. What was I doing

stamping through a glittering winter,
hankering after desire?
I didn't need to want like this.
I didn't want to want so much
- only, to swim into perfection freely.

Falling in love with him pulled me
out of myself like pulling a wet hand

out of a leaking rubber glove.
I would say it had nothing to do with him

the glove fell away from my grasp, inside out.
He seized upon a woman I hadn't allowed myself to be.

A snake drops its former cover, crumpled skin.
I'd say it wasn't him I needed, but me.

A snake splits when it's ready, naturally.
Falling in love with him did what seeing mystic lights,

listening to good advice, reading novels
hadn't accomplished. That wildness.

Of course it had to do with him. We flew
out of wet gloves, bare hands gesturing.

Do you know D'Sonoqua's mask, Old Woman of the Woods?
Falling in love, I paid tribute to a cannibal spirit.

Little piles of gloves: marigold, pink, yellow
in the woods below her white face, her mouth like an O.

Its blades turn invisible,
but their chop
has destroyed the membrane
in which she'd closed his voice.
His drumming in her thoughts
is gone, though little pulses of his intonations
still peak and fall through her skin.
The air oscillates
between her and the metal dragonfly.
Pentecostal, a wordless conversational uproar
transports her attention.
The lake's batiked crinkle
crumples with waves.

Waves from the rotor, waves from the wind,
waves from the moon and sun and passing boats
subside. Still, there's no silence.
Not that she's listening for silence.
She's trying to hear the future, and thinks silence
might help, but what she keeps listening to is him.
His eyes close; hers stay open.
A man's purr as he almost snores,
her ear on his clavicle.

He never finished his story
- it disintegrated in the event
suggesting accident, perhaps a precedent.
A glinting little worry she lets wing away
as the helicopter darts across the lake.
No whirlwind lifted her from the grassy shore
- chances are, she won't fly over the rainbow
and indeed, she can no longer sense the engine's roar.

If time is a local muscle
bound to the bone it moves .
If time bears itself, as a zygote does a baby .
If time curls round us like the jet stream, circulating
atoms of oxygen in and out of bodies .

I wouldn't ask
except I dreamt of fire dreamt twice
not on the flat screen of my darkened mind,
I dreamt of fire in virtual reality dreamt
then woke, and still the dream went on.

Fire drifted,
fingered things, claimed this and that.
Ran along beams, scrambled up logs.