Only Child
P. K. Page


The early conflict made him pale
and when he woke from those long weeping slumbers
       she was there
and the air about them—hers and his—
sometimes a comfort to him, like a quilt, but more
often than not a fear.

There were times he went away—he knew not where—
over the fields or scuffing to the shore,
suffered her eagerness on his return
for news of him—where had he been, what done?
He hardly knew and didn't wish to know
or think about it vocally or share
his private world with her.

Then they would plan another walk, a long
adventure in the country, for her sake—
in search of birds.    Perhaps they'd find the blue
heron today, for sure the kittiwake.

Birds were familiar to him now, he knew
them by their feathers and a shyness like his own,
soft in the silence.
By the pool she said, "Observe,
the canvas back's a diver," and her words
stuccoed the slatey water of the lake.

He had no wish to separate them in groups
or learn the Latin, 
or, waking early to their song remark, "the thrush,"
or say at evening when the air is streaked
with certain swerving flying,
"Ah, the swifts."

Birds were his element like air and not
her words for them—making them statues
setting them apart,
nor were they lots of little facts and details like a book.
When she said, "Look!"
he let his eyeballs harden
and when two came and nested in the garden
he felt their softness, gentle, near his heart.

She gave him pictures which he avoided, showing 
them flat and coloured on a painted land.
Rather would he lie in the grass, the deep grass of the 
       island
close to the gulls' nests knowing
these things he loved and needed by his hand,
untouched and hardly seen but deeply understood.
Or sailing among them through a wet wind feeling
their wings within his blood.

Like every mother's boy he loved and hated
smudging the future photograph she had
yet struggled within the frames of her eyes and then
froze for her, the noted naturalist—
her very affectionate and famous son.
But when most surely in her grasp, his smiles
darting and enfolding her, his words:
"Without my mother's help..." the dream occurred.

Dozens of flying things surrounded him
on a green terrace in the sun
and one by one
as if he caught caresses in his palm
he caught them all and snapped and wrung their necks
brittle as little sticks.
Then through the bald, unfeathered air
and coldly, as a man would walk
against a metal backdrop, he
bore down on her
and placed them in her wide maternal lap
and accurately said their names aloud:
woodpecker, sparrow, meadowlark, nuthatch.

To A Friend with A Religious Vocation
Elizabeth Jennings

                                    For C.


Thinking of your vocation, I am filled
With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see
Within myself no wish to breed or build
Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.
      And yet I have a sense,
Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,
Or purpose. Is it merely a pretence,

A kind of scaffolding which I erect
half out of fear, half out of laziness?
The fitful poems come but can't protect
The empty areas of loneliness.
      You know what you must do,
So that mere breathing is a way to bless.
Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you.

Your vows enfold you. I must make my own;
Not this, now that, each one empirical.
My poems move from feelings not yet known,
And when the poem is written I can feel
      A flash, a moment's peace.
The curtain will be drawn across your grille.
My silences are always enemies.

Yet with the same convictions that you have
(It is but your vocation that I lack),
I must, like you, believe in perfect love.
It is the dark, the dark, that draws me back
      Into a chaos where
Vocations, visions, fail, the will grows slack
And I an stunned by silence everywhere.

Carwash
Henri Cole


I love the iridescent tricolor slime
that squirts all over my Honda in random
yet purposeful patterns as I sit in the semi-
dark of the "touch-free" carwash with you.
Listening to the undercarriage blast, I think,
"Love changes and will not be commanded."
I smile at the long, flesh-colored tentacles waving
at us like passengers waving good-bye.
Water isn't shaped like a river or ocean;
it mists invisibly against metal and glass.
In the corridor of green unnatural lights
recalling the lunatic asylum, how can I
defend myself against what I want?
Lay your head in my lap. Touch me.

Correctives
Don Paterson


The shudder in my son's left hand
he cures with one touch from his right,
two fingertips laid feather-light
to still his pen. He understands

the whole man must be his own brother
for no man is himself alone;
though some of us have never known
the one hand's kindness to the other.

The Circle
Don Paterson


My boy is painting outer space,
and steadies his brush-tip to trace
the comets, planets, moon and sun
and all the circuitry they run

in one great heavenly design.
But when he tries to close the line
he draws around his upturned cup,
his hand shakes, and he screws it up.

The shake's as old as he his, all
(thank god) his body can recall
of that hour when, one inch from home,
we couldn't get the air to him;

and though today he's all the earth
and sky for breathing-space and breath
the whole damn troposphere can't cure
the flutter in his signature.

But Jamie, nothing's what we meant.
The dream is taxed. We all resent
the quarter bled off by the dark
between the bowstring and the mark

and trust to Krishna or to fate
to keep our arrows halfway straight.
But the target also draws our aim —
our will and nature's are the same;

we are its living word, and not
a book it wrote and then forgot,
its fourteen-billion-year-old song
inscribed in both our right and wrong —

so even when you rage and moan
and bring your fist down like a stone
on your spoiled work and useless kit,
you just can't help but broadcast it:

look at the little avatar
of your muddy water-jar
filling with the perfect ring
singing under everything.

Children and Death
Elizabeth Jennings


Not to be spoken of, they will not let
     Us enter rooms where anyone has died,
And they put candles by our beds, a light
     That keeps us watchful and more terrified

Than any dear familiar darkness where
     Our shadows slip away. We dream of death
Sweet and apparent in the freedom there
     And ape a dying by a withheld breath.

Nor do they know our games have room enough
     For death and sickness. We have stretched them out
Further than childhood or parents' love
     And further even than the breath of doubt.

The Room
Elizabeth Jennings


This room I know so well becomes
A way to keep proportion near.
In other houses, other rooms
Only anomalies appear.

I chose these books, the pictures too,
Thinking that I would often look
Upon a canvas like a view
Or find a world within a book.

They lie or hang, each laden now
With my own past, yet there's no sign
For anyone who does not know
Me, that these attributes are mine.

Strange paradox — that I collect
Objects to liberate myself.
This room so heavy now, so decked
Has put my past upon a shelf.

And this is freedom — not to need
To choose those things again. I thus
Preside upon the present, cede
The ornaments to usefulness.

And yet I know that while I clear
The ground and win back liberty,
Tomorrow's debris settles here
To make my art, to alter me.