Lorna Crozier - The Blue Hour of the Day: Selected Poems

Multiplied by anything it remains nothing. When I ask my friend the mathematician who studies rhetoric if zero is a number, he says yes and I feel great relief. If it were a landscape it would be a desert. If it had anything to do with anatomy, it would be a mouth, a missing limb, a lost organ. Zero worms its way between one and one and changes everything. It slips inside the alphabet.

It is the vowel on a mute tongue, the pupil in a blind mans eye, the image of the face he holds on his fingertips. When you look up from the bottom of a dry well zero is what you see, the terrible blue of it. It is the rope you knot around your throat when your heels itch for wings. Icarus understood zero as he caught the smell of burning feathers and fell into the sea. If you roll zero down a hill it will grow, swallow the towns, the farms, the people at their tables playing tic-tac-toe. When the Cree chiefs signed the treaties on the plains they wrote X beside their names.

In English, X equals zero. I ask my friend the rhetorician who studies mathematics What does zero mean and keep it simple. He says Zip. Zero is the pornographers number. He orders it through the mail under a false name. It is the number of the last man on death row, the number of the girl who jumps three storeys to abort. Zero starts and ends at the same place.

Some compare it to driving across the Prairies all day and feeling youve gone nowhere. In the beginning God made zero. FORMS OF INNOCENCE The girl can tell you exactly where and when her innocence took flight, how it soared from the window beating its wings high above the stubble field. A strange shape for innocence when you think of Leda but this girl insists it was a swan, black not white as you might expect. From its head no bigger than her fist a beak blossomed red as if wings pumped blood up the long neck to where the bird split the sky. She watched this through the windshield, lying on her back, the boys breath breaking above her in waves, the swans dark flight across the snow so beautiful she groaned and the boy groaned with her, not understanding the sound she made.

When she tells this story now, she says though it was winter, she knows the swan made it all the way to Stanley Park, a place shes never been, just seen in the room where no one ever touches anything in the book her mother keeps open on the coffee table, one black swan swimming endless circles among the white. THE PHOTOGRAPH I KEEP OF THEM He on a big Indian motorcycle and she in the sidecar. It is before my brother and long before I demanded my own space in her belly. Behind them the prairie tells its spare story of drought. They tell no stories. Not how they feel about each other or the strange landscape that makes them small.

I can write down only this for sure: they have left the farm, they are going somewhere. WILD GEESE The wild geese fly the same pathways they have followed for centuries. There is comfort in this though they are not the same geese my mother listened to when she was young. Perhaps I first heard them inside her as she watched their wings eclipse the moon, their call the first soundseparate from the soft, aquatic whispers of the womb. And my sadness is her sadness passed through generations like distance and direction and the longing for the nesting ground. THE CHILD WHO WALKS BACKWARDS My next-door neighbour tells me her child runs into things.

Cupboard corners and doorknobs have pounded their shapes into his face. She says he is bothered by dreams, rises in sleep from his bed to steal through the halls and plummet like a wounded bird down the flight of stairs. This child who climbed my maple with the sureness of a cat, trips in his room, cracks his skull on the bedpost, smacks his cheeks on the floor. When I ask about the burns on the back of his knee, his mother tells me he walks backwards into fireplace grates or sits and stares at flames while sparks burn stars in his skin. Other children write their names on the casts that hold his small bones. fromT HE S EX L IVES OF V EGETABLESCARROTS Carrots are fucking the earth. fromT HE S EX L IVES OF V EGETABLESCARROTS Carrots are fucking the earth.

A permanent erection, they push deeper into the damp and dark. All summer long they try so hard to please. Was it good for you,was it good? Perhaps because the earth wont answer they keep on trying. While you stroll through the garden thinking carrot cake,carrots and onions in beef stew,carrot pudding with caramel sauce, they are fucking their brains out in the hottest part of the afternoon. CABBAGES Long-living and slow, content to dream in the sun, heads tucked in, cabbages ignore the caress of the cabbage butterfly, the soft sliding belly of the worm. LETTUCE Raised for one thing and one thing only, lettuce is a courtesan in her salad days. LETTUCE Raised for one thing and one thing only, lettuce is a courtesan in her salad days.

Under her fancy crinolines her narrow feet are bound. CAULIFLOWER The gardens pale brain, it knows the secret lives of all the vegetables, holds their fantasies, their green libidos, in its fleshy lobes. ONIONS The onion loves the onion. It hugs its many layers, saying O, O, O, each vowel smaller than the last. Some say it has no heart. It doesnt need one.

It surrounds itself, feels whole. Primordial. First among vegetables. If Eve had bitten it instead of the apple, how different Paradise. POTATOES No one knows what potatoes do. Quiet and secretive they stick together.

So many under one roof there is talk of incest. The pale, dumb faces, the blank expressions. Potato dumplings. Potato pancakes. Potato head. CUCUMBERS Cucumbers hide in a leafy camouflage, popping out when you least expect like flashers in the park.