Maybe it was not a person that I loved,
but the roll of a canoe and lapping waves,
a hound dog’s tongue. The burst of pink
between teeth, fireweed by the lakeshore.
And there was always something that could
not be found, a paddle or a shoe or wrench.
So the house stayed in a state of construction,
as though taxes would not have to be paid
unless it had a real door, windows.

Rain shook tarpaper; I piled soft cover
novels under my bed and smelled them,
curious and terrified, as if their mustiness
was something that could spread to me,
as though I would become damp
and suffocated like a long day inside,
with the storm washing the windows.
About time, my mother saying, about time.

On one of the cards is written:
“this world is not ours.”
and on another:
“your hands hold a labyrinth
of wind.”

Somewhere in the scratched darkness
the broken voice of an owl
goes out across the river:
shadowed casings of something unanswered
above the eddied currents of light.

But if that man could only
crouch down near the bank
and read the changing reflections,
or know the strains of loss in that voice
that echoes through sparse branches

then he could bring himself to deal
that impossible third card, to read
the total silence of its blank face
like an owl sliding over snowfields
in the luminous frigid sun.

The heat keeps them rooted.
Heat within, heat without.
Flame refracted in the congregation’s eyes,
their own matchheads hidden
in the quiet space behind the pupil.
Raging.

Not eyes, perhaps, but stones.
Until the sun tugs the clouds from its face
and stones are flesh again
blue and green and brown
raised to the sky, watching
solid smoky arms
drag heaven closer to their haloed heads.

Just in time to burn words from the earth.
Just in time to cut the tongue from the head.
Just in time to take faith-hardened hands
and work a nation’s soft spot as a boxer would.

II.

When the first match hit the pile
it was like remembering how home looks
returning after a long run of hard luck.
How it seems to have swung just fine
on its own swing without anyone there to push.

The world rotates filled with other little worlds rotating in it.
Gears in a clock grind time along,
entwined as completely as lovers.

The universe’s heart is a ruined house.
Written on the door is this:
you cannot do a thing that has not already been done.

One day the door will open.
The shadows in the windows will stand still.
A pile of ash in a clenched fist will turn to blood.
Blood which will letter pages of a new book.
And the door will shut again.

the sky reddening in a blush, as though
still stirred with the memory
of the night’s tempest.
The grace of a parrot’s arc in flight, a
piece of fruit precious in its coral beak.
And in my hands, china, warm succor.

How quietly the morning comes
in this city of cacophony, like
a woman without ankle bells,
suddenly standing at the door.

As the bobbins twist together
plait the threads —

elderly ward at the St-Jérôme Hospital.

I imagine Grandmother Mariska,
late into the night —
sewing your mortuary dress:
Tiny silver buttons.
Buttonholes,
lace ruffles as for a child.
Carpathian Mountains,
by the river Mures,

white-washed adobe house.
Greatgrand-father György deserting the family.
Victoria farmed out her daughter.
Kept her three sons.

Four years of grade school.
Servant girl at nine.

ii.
Late into the night —
you sew your burial gown:
tiny silver buttons.
Bobbin lace.
Laurentian foothills ridge:
You died of diabetes
after one year at the St-Jérôme Hospital.

I didn’t go to your funeral.

Didn’t tell you, my husband beats me.

Late into the night.
Tiny silver buttons.

Peasant lace:

and then believe what I would say,
the moon is purposeful and green
on Leap Years and religious holidays,

the eyes of the bear can see through
trees, their brown is the color
of hardwood, the minute you believe

something is gone, it returns to you.
I set the things out in the yard
for your inspection. The jar for bees.

The net made of clothes hangers
and old silk dungerees. The names
of those who have left us never

to return. But then that was it,
the museum of the backyard,
and all other things we cling to

in each other remain. It’s not
impossible to believe anything you
see, nothing stays invisible forever.