W H I T E O N W H I T E


Contents


Freeze
Snowfall: Four Variations
Seasonal
From a Journal
December 31st
White on White
Landscape with Snow
Solstice
Before, and After
Seeing Her
The Eclipse
Blame
Apple Wine
A Patch of Light
The Ice Thing
Hearth
Zen and the Art of Cross Country Skiing


FREEZE


Across the sky, ragged and swift,
an exodus of dream-stuff:
shadows, white peaks, blossoms, wisps
and rare islands of blue
where the stranded early morning moon
will flare before it dissolves
into smoke.

I stand in the blowing dawn
breathless, cold
unable to turn away.
It comes on like a spell
of misery. Mist
swarming the houses and bare trees.

By noon, branches rattle
their glass antlers at the sun.
There's a glittering skin
on the statues, the streets
are varnished, the government
buildings locked in a bright daze.

Before this, I was lazy.
Now I walk for miles, thinking
to whom do we owe the favor of such armor?
Even the churches wear stiff coats and glare.


SNOWFALL: FOUR VARIATIONS


Basic White

Angels
might fall that way
out of their myth-
ical, bloodless war
into the dark
street's electric light.

Stilled syllables
flakes
locked in the dead heat
of that debate
steer a dazed, formal dance
through cold halos.


The Shadows

Driving straight roads
at night, I flinch
inside as the blurred arrows
die into the windshield:
white poisonous thoughts:
tracer bullets from the last war.

No. This is a delicate
invasion. Drops
that have grown so cold
they flower cling
to the blind shapes of this world.


Station Break

In the dark bedroom
a girl shrugs off
her mohair sweater.

What is this shocked
blue crackling
if not some abstract god
who cares, desperately
for the shape
of her human shoulders?


Static.
A cold fact.


News of the World

The snow is cold, factual, a mind
battering static that proliferates
at windows and litters my T. V. screen
with dandruff, heroin
flaked ash from the ovens of the Third Reich...

Angels.
Pale Barbarians.
This is the white plague.
Sugary insect faces
continue to fall
into the eyes of lit cities
out of the dark ages of the sky.


SEASONAL


All afternoon the snowflakes whirl and fall.
In the park, skaters glide on the scraped mirror
of the duck pond. They are entranced by winter
like figurines trapped in a glass ball.

It’s a Christmas card, an iconography
of good cheer that returns each year from a past
we’d like to believe still has the power to cast
a breathless charm against catastrophe.

Those who watch from the road are reassured
by the calm skill, the clean redundancy
of scarves in the wind, blades that carve and coast
always in circles, closed as the stone outpost
where dead men dreamed, in the nation’s infancy,
that every ill we suffer had been cured.


FROM A JOURNAL


I'd been off by myself trying to evolve.
It had to be done
in the dark
under tight security.

I chose this northern lake
the auroras turning at night like lucid scarves
the afternoons of lime-green snow.

I remember the taste of fish eggs
on rice in sub-zero weather
the smell of cold fur
firelight and slow frost
given the run of the cabin
and the wolves
who were starving in their deep twilights.

Once I saw
(or was it merely hunger)
the blooming of nebulae
radiant colours
the sudden coherence like a sun
haze burning off
then a star cluster
and a pinwheel of dust
six billion miles from rim to rim.

And that was all.
Though the mind was willing
the body thinned
out like breath in a blizzard.
By the time they found me I was a changed man.


DECEMBER THIRTY-FIRST


Sign of the Goat. The closed Male will.
Once

again it’s time to make ourselves important
promises

before we begin to celebrate the end
of a year

that was nothing like the year we predicted the year
before

lurching from terror to criminal war to natural
disaster.

I stand at the window and watch
the light

of another wasted day fade from the clouds,
from the streets.

Along the perimeter highway, traffic
backs up,

a necklace of plastic rubies and zircon brights.
For hours

it ties up the city
in a choke-hold of starts and blinks.


White on White


Snow blowing and drifting
beyond the double-glazed patio doors,
the starched carnation, leaning
from a ceramic eggshell
vase over creased linen, the thin
skin of a cigarette and the chains
of foam in a drained beer glass echo
the shock of my beard, my shirt, the hair
on my wrist, and I remember Summer,
a rush of angel wings from the outboard,
the swerve and flash of a fish,
little puffs like phosphate meringue
on the lake top near shore.

In Asia it's the colour of death.
Here it announces purity
in a bridal veil, a hospital gown
or celebrates the belief
that everything begins again
every day, false
dawn a clean page or a blank
check, open to forecasts
and signatures which are valid
only till sunset
burns down to a flurry of moths.


LANDSCAPE WITH SNOW


It fell again last night, just when we thought
we couldn't live any more with the view--the shack
and its broken dock, the bleached driftwood caught
like snapped bone in the rocks--and it softens the shock
of day, this immaculate poultice of cold scum
shed from an overcast infected with chem-smoke
where the sea digests thousands of steel drums
(time capsules preserving the same dark joke)

and we're free again to clothe ourselves in slogans.
We remember why we are here. We rummage for bargains
like tireless mice in fifty acre malls
where the young lounge and wander, safely adrift,
dreaming of power and stealth, believing in Kraft
food stuffs, video rock and lottery windfalls.


SOLSTICE


Stalactites of ribbed ice hang from the eaves.
A whisky jack sits on a branch, cowlicked
by the shrill wind. He is not dreaming of leaves
or the tall grass that’s been cut, bundled and hayricked.

Out on the frozen river, fishermen stare
at their rigs: a line, a bell, a black hole.
The sound that bristles along each wind flare
is loose change dropped into a bowl.

Snow falls like scratched light from an old
film or a shattered mirror. It flashes, drives
them deeper inside, where they clench against the cold.
But their stillness masks an aggressive patience, a desire
to stay awake until the dark arrives,
the darkest night of the year, the dead of winter.


BEFORE, AND AFTER


1

On the airport bus,
ice-light makes me think

we=re crossing the badlands
of an abandoned planet,

sun-dogs
like matched trumpet notes,

low dunes, white
and sleek as quicklime, smoking

where the wind sharpens
their curved lips, and now,

out of nowhere, this
graveyard without a fence,

this extinct outpost
of stones, weathered


inscriptions half silted up
with alkali snow, glides

by, behind glass,
like some display in a museum.


2

The travellers have returned,
their clothes only slightly soiled,
their gear intact. Their eyes are still
bright with what they have seen:
mountains clean as flint chips,
blown curtains of snow.

There is a lightness, an absence
in the way they move
through the strange rooms of the house,
picking up and replacing things
they are not really sure belong there,
their glances, their fingers
lingering distractedly over surfaces, textures...


The close air is faintly scented
with memory, and the shifting light recalls
a web of associations
they never thought about before,
but lived
in, a habitude, a style
that has become remote, and they
demur, bemused, enclosed by shadowy moods
they recognize but cannot re-enter.

They are happy to be back, they say
this to each other
in subtle ways though their words
are thin, reaching like intangible probes
into all that was once careless
and familiar,
until their voices are more secure,
exploring fresh timbres, surprising
in their unaccustomed
spaciousness,
and as a comfortable silence opens
between, then around them, they turn


from each other,
and lose themselves in the view.

Late winter light
fades from the brushed chrome and smoky glass
of an office tower across the river. It seems
to have always dominated the landscape
though none of them can swear they have seen it before.


SEEING HER


1

Out in the dark at forty below
the gale sweeps gritty snow

up from the fields, down from the sky
choking my head lights. I try

to imagine the highway between one break
in that white turbulence and the next, toe on the brake

heel on the accelerator. The heater fan
blows up a storm of crystals and

my face, my ears, ache in the chill.
I stop on the shoulder, stuff a blanket between the grill

and the radiator. Back on the road, it's not much better.
I should have written her a letter.

If this old wreck breaks down, I'll die out here.
Think of her smile. Think about pretzels and beer by a cheer-


ful fire. Miles. And miles. They feel like years.
Then, for no reason at all, the air clears.

Nothing ahead but hills, a blizzard of stars
and off to the left, a tight roll of smoke, bars

of light behind it. A train. Bright
and safe, inching across the white

horizon. That's where I'd like to be, tucked up
with buttered rum and a book. Tough luck

mate

. The road curves to the right.
Something I can't quite

locate makes me blink, and stare.
Then I see it. That train is going nowhere.

It grows, and squirms out of shape, and I recognize
the slant roof of Simplot Fertilizer's

Brandon plant, big stack smoking, shed lights ablaze.
ALL RIGHT! I pound the wheel. But suddenly this craze

for long distance romance makes me feel faint.
Did I really drive my sad excuse for a car

this far
through killer cold with the blind faith of a saint?


2

City lights. No one left on the streets.
I cruise to a stop beside a Self Serve pump.

Gasoline jumps
in the hose. My nose burns. My feet

are so damn cold they're numb, though body heat
steams from the collar of my sheepskin.

I can already see her, half asleep in a thin
blouse at the door, houselight spilling over the drifted river

and the lovely way her mouth will slip
into that between-the-sheets grin

when she asks, "How long can you stay?"
Maybe I'll say

"Forever!"
(Maybe I'd better start back right away).


3

Morning. She's gone
downhill
and over the slate
green river
to work. I sit in the cold
kitchen, watching her things, the remains
of breakfast, a sheer blouse draped over a chair,
light through a blue bottle, burning
a lucid stain into the Irish wool
of my sweater.
In the window
a crystal turns on a string
and its blurred rainbow
drifts like a lost feather across the floor.
I feel her absence. It=s the room
closing around me, a pressure against my chest.
I force the stuck door to the roof
with my shoulder, clearing
a quarter circle in the snow.

A jet climbs over the city.
Its vapour trail fades into blue
distance. The air
sparkles with minute flakes
and sunlight is a faint astringent,
rinsing my fingers as they pull apart
stale toast for the sparrows.

How quickly they arrive
fluffed by the wind, cheerful
and quarrelsome. They pick the white
silence clean and leave
confused
tracks, a barbed-wire script in the snow.


THE ECLIPSE

An evening with friends. Snow
is floating down through shadowy elms
into the lit street in the silence
beyond Anderson's chair – his face
vital with stories
of wheat barges, lumber camps, the wild,
slow years coming of age,
and though I’m close enough
to touch his arm
a wish to be alone and apart
enters my mind like the iced edge of the moon.

* * *

Somewhere a clock is chiming. Twelve
cold strokes clear my head. Flakes
continue to fall. I stand
breathing their chilled awe till my face
grows numb and the snow begins
to fall, too, through the warm gloom
of my body. Suddenly
the whole flickering sift
stalls, and I'm rising, weightless
through a sea of sparkling facets
adrift, but drawn toward the clean, hard
core of the streetlight's diamond.

* * *

I'm there, walking
through chambers and echos of ice
but a voice, far off, breathing
belief into Blake's Everything
that lives is holy thaws
my flawless vision of light
and cold, so that brilliance
like a glass house under rain
runs together and spills when I blink
warm, emotionless tears.

Perfected flakes melt on my lips.
My ears ache. I watch
the keen air cloud my breath.
As it dies away, I move
toward gifts, ghosts, things that live
at the tips of tongues and fingers.

* * *

Collapsed in the arms of a stuffed chair
I wait for comfortable darkness to drain the chill
from my clothes... eyelids close, latch
the rickety gate of my grandfather's lettuce garden.
I comb the loose crisp leaves
for bugs to burn in the pointed light
of a magnifying glass
under cold sun, in slums by the sea.

But something knocks, knocks
against the walls of the world
and a patch of scrambled fencewire
burns through to a stand of elms at the window.

Even through chilled glass
I can feel the rough lift of boughs
rising out of the crystalized heart
of light, all that fierce purity
and I think of seeds, pressed
by a voice, a touch
into the body's intimate night
how they spring to life
even before we know
we need them. I sit listening
to the pause and pulse of blood
under these flickering images
that melt like snow as dawn climbs
from gray to pale gold
filling the room
with sunlight
and the shadows of trees.


BLAME


I thought we had learned
how to dissolve
self-importance into the sky
or the calm reach of a lake,
how to leave
some chaos in the shadows
of our lives. Why
stir up that pit
of reptile passion coiled
at the base of the brain?
Can it really matter
so much who
is at fault for the loss
of an address, the missed
appointment, the phone
call that should have been
returned, the broken
plate, the careless edge
of a phrase? Consider
this: when snow collects
in the apple tree
do we believe it will stay
forever? And when that frail
arrangement disintegrates
in a soft buffet of wind,
leaving so many branches
bare, do we try to change
or punish the air? You say
that letting things go
creates distance,
and distance is not love.
Not love, no, but the gap
love jumps to burn
at the heart of a storm.


APPLE WINE


1

Why do I still think of her voice
as an angel trapped in the soft rain of the shower?

I sit at the window, immobilized
by silence that jelled after she left
for work. The furnace clicks
and expires; air vents tick and the clock
in the kitchen whines like a stuck mosquito.

There are always risks. In love
even success can be stifling, like too much
ease. Soon we will drift
close again, get caught up and lost
as if in the pleasures of a magnetic storm
but for now there is this tough stretch
of patience: winter outside, the apple tree
stranded in deep snow, its trunk mottled
like a thousand year egg, its intimate crookedness
knotted against the glare of a stuccoed wall.


2

The wine's not ready to bottle yet.
It stands in a carboy, breathing
while earth draws the haze from its dubious past.

I can see myself in the highest branches, reaching
for half rotten fruit
tossing them into a plastic bucket
or shaking the tree so crabs will rain
down on the beautiful groundling
who yells at me with her tangy voice
because I forgot to announce
the onset of my two fisted storm
in the boughs, and suddenly
I'm surrounded by yellow-jackets.
They buzz my ears and tumble over my fingers
nipping at brown pulp
and rising heavily into the air.

Once, when I was a boy
they attacked and left me blind
for days, but now their bumpy flights
are openly disorganized
and it's clear that these childhood terrors
(helter-skelter war parties
gone astray in my hair
or stumbling over the knap of my flannel shirt)
have imbibed the spirits of wild yeast
and surprise themselves by melting
into fits of laughter I can't hear.


A PATCH OF LIGHT


All morning I’ve felt cold static
creak in my ankle bones,
but it’s my turn to tie skates
at the rink, at the school.

I’m late, but I’ve chosen this road
for the elms that close overhead
with a gesture I accept at once
as my own wish to shelter and protect.

Cloud wrack smothers the sun
but rust light through a wrestle of twigs
soaks into rough bark, a glow,
a patch of remembrance,
not summer, not
a recovered pulse,
or the sweet stain of time,
passing,
but one of those moments
in which we glimpse what we once thought


impossible,
the music of a dying star.

Out on the ice, his puffed buff mittens
batter the air for balance. He turns, cuts
across his own undecipherable trail,
accelerates to the crisp edge
of wipe-out and skids to a stop. He knows
I’m there, in the stands,
unremarkable in my shabby coat,
and he carries this knowledge like a goblet
he will not drink himself, but will not spill.


THE ICE THING


Hung from a branch, thin,
long limbed, angular and slick
as glass, a creature with head spikes,
back spikes, elbow spikes, shines
in the winter sun and stares at the child
who stares back from the picture window
at the stringy fingers, the preying mantis head.

He recognizes The Ice Thing
from the movies he watches at night
in his dreams. A story begins
to unfold, how it hibernates in daylight,
then wakes and comes down to hunt
in the dark, how its bite will melt
small animals to plasma which it drinks
through a tube that sprouts from its chest.

He imagines adventures, crises,
how it stood once, frozen
in the headlights of a police cruiser,


then leapt, five or six times
its height to escape in the oaks along the river.

All winter it hangs there, in the cold
light. Then, after a night full of rain
it’s gone. The child imagines it has returned
to the universe, galaxy, home world
or dimension from which it came; listens
as it tries to explain, in that language
of hand signs, glottal clicks and sharp
harmonics, how it survived
separation from the collective
as none of its kind ever had, because
of a creature, an alien child
whose eyes glowed like the green moons
above their white planet.


HEARTH


I kneel before ticks and whispers,
the sudden rush of flame,
the roar that puffs a drift of soot
from the flue. Is it really the same
insatiable appetite that raised a storm
of sparks in the dream time
the wind like a huge white bird
beating its wings against the mouth
of the cave, scattering embers
and charred bones, driving us
back into a choked throat
of stone, into darkness
and hunger and broken sleep?

The grey crust cracks, falls
away. The glare
inside releases crimped threads
of smoke that stretch
and vanish
into a black absence
where something very old
howls
and is still.

A back draught floods the room
with harsh scents, with moments
the body almost remembers:
terror and wonder and grief
preserved, but inaccessible
like the unwritten history of fire and snow.

Flecks of nearly invisible shadow
swim over the floor, the furniture, my clothes, my skin,
like the first signs of life in a bleached sea.


ZEN AND THE ART OF CROSS COUNTRY SKIING


Health. A matrix
of jewelled afternoons,

hard shadows on glazed snow,
the sun, splintering, through evergreens.

Such definition. Exhilaration
a quick lick of blue light, and wind

like raw silk in the lungs
on the trails, thighs powdering through drifts

or gliding over the rhythmic slither-hiss and glass
clicks where waxed edges plough the small ice

lace, and bunched, roughed up snow goes by like the white rush
in a speedboat’s wake and the breath is pulled in or measured out

by body heat, stoked and banked in its nest of layered cottons
and polyester skins, until the everyday word chains clear

off and I can see how language is an architecture
of knives scissoring this from that, I from my structured

muscled bone, we from they, and everything else
from the world in which it lives, a habit I learned

when my pulse abandoned childhood, a contract
with factual destinies that hang like snow packs

over the landscapes we cruise through
so easily we forget to ask how we got them

around us, or how we can leave them
out of our dreams.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


George Amabile has published his poetry, fiction and non -fiction in the USA, Canada, Europe, England, Wales, South America, Australia and New Zealand in over a hundred anthologies, magazines, journals and periodicals including The New Yorker, The New Yorker Book of Poems, Harper's, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night,, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, Canadian Literature, and Margin (England).
Born in Jersey City, N. J. he holds an A. B.(Hons) from Amherst College; an M. A. (Univ. of Minnesota) and a Ph. D. in English Literature (Univ. of Connecticut). He was Writer in Residence at University of British Columbia for 1969-70, co-founder and editor of The Far Point, founder and editor of Northern Light, has edited a dozen titles for Nuage Editions, Signature Editions, Penguin and has published eight books. The Presence of Fire (McClelland & Stewart, 1982), won the CAA National Prize for literature; his long poem, Durée, placed third in the CBC Literary Competition for 1991; “Popular Crime” won first prize in the Sidney Booktown International Poetry Contest in February, 2000; “Road to the Sky” received an honorable mention National Magazine Award for 2000, “What We Take with Us, Going Away” was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Prize in 2003 and he is the subject of a special issue of Prairie Fire, (Vol. 21, No. 1, May 2000). From October 2000 to April 2001 he was Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public library. “Dimuendo” was awarded third prize in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition for 2005 and “A Raft of Lilies” won second place in the MAC national poetry contest, “Friends” (2007). He has performed his poems on the CBC, at numerous venues in Canada and the USA, and at the Olympics in Montreal His most recent publications are Rumours of Paradise / Rumours of War (McClelland and Stewart, 1995) and Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems (The Muses Company, an imprint of Gordon J. Shillingford Publishing, 2001).

Impressum

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.12.2009

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Widmung:
for my partner Annette, and our son, Evan