Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn (Laurier Poetry)

Desire Never Leaves The Poetry of Tim Lilburn Selected

with an introduction by Alison Calder and an afterword by Tim Lilburn

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Lilburn, Tim, 1950– Desire never leaves : the poetry of Tim Lilburn / selected, with an introduction, by Alison Calder ; and an afterword by Tim Lilburn. (Laurier poetry series) Includes bibliographical references. isbn-13: 978-0-88920-514-7 isbn-10: 0-88920-514-0 i. Calder, Alison C. (Alison Claire), 1969– ii. Title. iii. Series. ps8573.i427a6 2007

c811'.54

c2006-906448-2

© 2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada n2l 3c5 www.wlupress.wlu.ca Cover image: Pamela Woodland, Untitled, © 2004. Colour photograph. Cover and text design by P. J. Woodland. Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

' This book is printed on 100% post-consumer recycled paper. Printed in Canada No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 -8935777.

Table of Contents

Foreword, Neil Besner / v Biographical Note / vi Introduction, Alison Calder / vii Names Of God / 1 1 Love At The Center Of Objects / 1 2 Allah Of The Green Circuitry / 1 3 Light’s Gobbling Eye / 2 Theophany And Argument / 3 Pumpkins / 5 Fervourino To A Barn Of Milking Doe Goats Early Easter Morning / 7 Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World / 9 Elohim Mocks His Images For The Life Of The World / 11 I Bow To It / 13 Spirit Of Agriculture, 1986 / 14 In The Hills, Watching / 18 Contemplation Is Mourning / 19 How To Be Here? / 20 Restoration / 23 Pitch / 24 There Is No Presence / 25 A Book Of Exhaustion / 29 Kill-Site / 32 There / 39 Afterword: Walking Out of Silence, Tim Lilburn / 41 Acknowledgements / 49

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Foreword

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed. But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available. The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home. Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirtyfive pages of poetry from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work. It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners: “but they had their being once /and left a place to stand on.” Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so. —Neil Besner General Editor

v

Biographical Note

Tim Lilburn was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, on June 27, 1950. He was trained as a Jesuit and spent many years teaching philosophy and creative writing at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and St. Peter’s College in Muenster, Saskatchewan. He has taught in West Africa and herded goats in Ontario. He currently lives in Victoria, BC, where he teaches Creative Writing at the University of Victoria. Lilburn has written six poetry collections, among them Tourist to Ecstasy (1989), which was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Award for poetry, and Moosewood Sandhills (1994), which won the Canadian Authors Association Award. From the Great Above She Opened Her Ear to the Great Below (1988) is a collaboration with visual artist Susan Shantz. In 1999, he won two Saskatchewan Book Awards: the Nonfiction Award for his collection of essays, Living in the World As If It Were Home, and the Book of the Year Award for the poetry book To the River. He has also edited, and contributed to, two anthologies of essays about poetry and philosophy: Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy and Poetry and Knowing. His latest poetry collection, Kill-Site, won the Governor General’s Award in 2003. His work is widely anthologized.

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Introduction

Tim Lilburn’s poetry should come with two instructions to the reader: have courage, and relax. Have courage because the poetry, on first glance, can appear daunting; relax because, well, it’s beautiful words on a page. So you don’t know all about these characters “Nicholas of Cusa” or “Paul Celan”? Relax and listen to the music. An expert on classical music will have a different experience of a Beethoven symphony than a non-expert will, but they’ll both enjoy the concert. Lilburn’s poetry is no different. His well-crafted lyrics, both thoughtful and artful, treat the basic objects of the world around us at the same time as they gesture towards something that words themselves cannot express. The resulting verse mixes the profane and the sacred, ultimately insisting on the necessary coexistence of both. Lilburn writes about place very intensively, but his poetry may not provide what readers of “prairie poetry” expect. One strand of prairie poetry, heavily influenced by the writings of Robert Kroetsch, Dennis Cooley, and Andy Suknaski, uses vernacular speech to provide a record of prairie experience. This kind of poetry is narrative, conversational, and often, though not always, accessible. It may also rely on the convention of the lyric narrator, a voice confessing its thoughts. Another strand of prairie poetry, to which I think Lilburn is much more closely aligned, comes down through writers like Anne Szumigalski and shows up in poetry like that of Jan Zwicky, whose lyrics draw on a wide range of subject matter and philosophical and literary influences to produce an eclectic mix of voices. The distinction between these two strands—John Deere vs. John Donne, let us say—is in some ways artificial, as vernacular poetry also draws on a wide range of influences, and more formal poetry often speaks directly to immediate prairie experience. Nonetheless, Lilburn’s poetry uses different conventions than those usually called “prairie,” and thus requires a different kind of readerly approach. He doesn’t give us a solid narrator for us to ground our readings in. He mixes the wordplay of Gerard Manley Hopkins with the whimsy of Dylan Thomas, pinning it all to philosophical questions raised by early Christian mystics and Classical Greek thinkers. His work starts with the prairie, but it does not end there; the place with which he is concerned is the larger world viewed through close attention to environmental detail. Lilburn is a thinking poet; he’s working through

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various tough questions about the relation of the human to the environment and the artist to the Divine, and none of these elements can be separated from the others. He’s working hard, and it behooves readers to put a little effort into their readings too. He’s not running counter to “prairie writing”; he’s expanding the category. Though Lilburn’s poetry draws on religious and philosophical languages born far from the prairie, his poems continually insist on their here-ness. They are about somewhere in particular, and where they are located needs to be looked at carefully. Living in the World As If It Were Home, the title of his essay collection, points to this connection with the immediate environment. But what does it really mean to live in the world? And what is lying in wait in that tricky phrase “as if,” waiting to trip us up? Central to Lilburn’s poetics are the concepts of eros and sorrow. Eros, or erotic love, is the desire that one has for the beloved. For Lilburn it is also the desire that one has to connect with the divine presence immanent in the natural world, the desire to get at the essence of the world, its soul. Sorrow results from the recognition that this connection is impossible—how can we possibly know the essential natures of other things? What makes the deer a deer will always surpass our understanding. This desire to express the inexpressible is part of a long poetic tradition; in fact, one might argue that it is from this desire that poetry sprang in the first place. Think of metaphor and simile. If a poet writes “my luve’s like a red, red rose,” as Robbie Burns does, that saying is not strictly true, yet we know what the poet means. The words have pointed to something beyond themselves, while at the same time keeping a measure of themselves hidden: neither the love nor the rose is captured fully on the page. Lilburn’s metaphors are often erotic and sensual, perhaps unexpected in writing about landscape. But in his use of erotic language, he follows a well-established tradition of Christian mysticism, taking his cue from eleventh- and twelfth-century writers like Bernard of Clairvaux and Margery Kemp (see Barratt and Dalrymple). Like these early writers, Lilburn’s yearning for connection with the divine is expressed in solidly physical terms. His poems bounce with physical and sensual imagery—sights, sounds, smells, sometimes blending into an ecstatic synaesthetic experience. What does Lilburn’s poetry desire? Nothing less than the recovery of a lost unity with the world and with the divine forces immanent in it. Another prairie artist, Joni Mitchell, suggested that we’ve got to get back to the garden, and Lilburn’s complex and intricate poetry tries to work through a way of doing that. But in Lilburn’s thinking, we will never come to know the world as we want to. The resulting sorrow is what motivates us to keep trying to connect with the world. If we don’t feel sorrow, if we think that this time

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we’ve made the connection, then we’ve gone wrong. Lilburn’s poetry is like tossing stones towards a target you know you’re never going to hit. It may seem silly to keep throwing, but gradually, if you look at where the stones fall, you may discern a pattern, a vague shape outlining your target. You’re never going to be able to strike it; but in your different throws you may discover different ways of approaching it, maybe even getting a little closer. To think that one can encompass the world with language is inherently conceited. The key to overcoming this conceit, according to Lilburn, is to know that writing a poem is like carrying water in a sieve. Because language is so faulty, you’re never going to be able to say what you mean, just as you can never see the true essence of things. “The grass is a mirror that clouds as the bright look goes in,” he writes in the poem “In The Hills, Watching.” You can look, but your vision will always be obscured. Seeing the true face of the natural world is like seeing the true face of God —impossible. To believe that you can do either, and that you can then express this vision in language, is an act of arrogance that leads to the attempt to “command” the natural world (Living 60). Instead, argues Lilburn, “everything exceeds its name…. The mysterium of the world is a theophany of what is not there” (Living 61). The word deer, the human idea of the deer, is not the deer itself. As one Buddhist precept goes, the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Confusing the artist’s words with the world is the arrogant act. To avoid arrogance, know your limits. The world itself will always exceed them. This excessive nature of the world is one reason, I think, for the deluge of metaphors present in Lilburn’s poetry. A deer’s body is “a border crossing, a wall, and a perfume” in “Contemplation Is Mourning,” pumpkins are “earth hogs,” “blimpish Prussian generals,” “garden sausages,” and “golden zeppelins” in “Pumpkins.” Over and over he tosses the stone, the metaphor, and each time comes up a little short. Sorrow: but then he tries again. In Living in the World As If It Were Home, Lilburn argues against the projection of the human ego into the world, against an anthropocentric worldview that sees the world only as the background to human activity. Instead, he calls for a kind of “poetic attention” that seeks not to appropriate the world, but to stand alongside it. So, how to do this? Lilburn turns to ascetic and contemplative practices. Stripping away the external trappings of the world, the poet separates himself from distractions and tries to empty himself out so that he can receive what the world has to give him. For Lilburn, contemplating the prairie landscape is crucial. The prairie has been described as a minimalist landscape, already scraped down to the bare essentials. In a sense, it serves as a model for the contemplative poet: without the overblown greenness of the West Coast or the busy highways of Southern Ontario, the prairie shows its Introduction / ix

bones and encourages the poet to do the same. The early Desert Fathers went out into the desert to seek God. Contemplation of the prairie landscape allows Lilburn a similar gathering in of the self, an accumulation of what he calls “a density of attention.” This dense attention, unmarked by superficial distraction, is what the poet needs. Contemplation, the act of looking, marks most of Lilburn’s writing. One can look at the world in many ways. A writer can look at the prairie and see it only in terms of utility, what it is “good for” in economic terms, how it can be used by humans. In a related way, the writer can look at it and see only herself reflected. Here, the prairie exists to provide her an opportunity to wax rhapsodic, show off her own cleverness, and so increase her standing as poet. This kind of appropriative gaze, which Lilburn links with much romantic writing, never truly understands the world because it sees only itself; it’s as if the land serves only as a mirror to reflect human achievement and power. And a powerful argument can be made that this way of seeing the world has been intrinsic to our understanding of the Canadian prairies since the moment of European arrival. Instead of this dominating, human-centred look, Lilburn proposes another way of seeing, based on humility instead of ego. He writes, “The gaze is best, most authentic, when rooted in a posture of deference and attention. This stance must be cultivated. Such cultivation is asceticism and it is one with knowing. It involves submitting to be disarmed and taking on the silence of things, the marginality and anonymity of grass, sage, lichen, things never properly seen” (Living 22). Seeing the prairie properly is one of Lilburn’s main concerns. The opening of “Pitch,” the first poem in Lilburn’s collection To the River, reads, “Lay it down, the shimmering glass” (3), where the glass is both an evocation of the river’s reflection, and a mirror that the reader must try to put aside in order to see not his or her own reflection, but the true face of the natural world. The poet has to try to put aside this concern with the self as well. Words can attempt to transcend the physical world and approach the numinous, but poetic language is a clunky code that can only seek to approach the divine without actually grasping it. “I live in a hole, I can’t help it” (17), says the speaker in the third section of the poem “There Is No Presence,” reminding readers that we are mortals made of earth, not air. Metaphors may make all sorts of lovely leaps, but they will always, finally, crash to the ground. Close analysis of a short piece of Lilburn’s poetry illuminates several helpful ideas. Here is a section of the poem “There Is No Presence”: You are good but no blond disc in the grass for you, none, no bone of light, no little palate or gland of stupid but shining intelligibility, the pure bride, none, none for you, in the grass prong.

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A glacier of night shoved through the centre of things. Juniper hard with absence. You are alone in the world: the flab of the river is anarchic, the water is feathered with ignorance, a dangerous mirror that makes your face darkness throwing its hair. (To the River 16)

No matter how “good” the contemplative poet is, s/he gets no reward. The world remains unintelligible, anarchic and without order, any pattern the result of the “dangerous mirror” in which the viewer sees his or her own face. There may be an order here, but the poet, being human, cannot grasp it. Again, we have the idea here also of radical otherness. There is no comfortable oneness with the world; the poet is not at home in the land. Instead, nature seems to be withholding itself from him, as the juniper remains “hard with absence.” The “centre of things,” instead of revealing itself, remains dark and cold, a “glacier of night.” Lilburn is knocking, but no one is answering the door. The erotic nature of Lilburn’s imagined connection to the land, seen here in his description of “the pure bride,” is phrased in language drawn from the traditions of Christian mysticism. We see emerging in Lilburn’s writing a poetics of place that is based on negative theology: the poet cannot see what the Divine is, only what it is not. Contemplation and ascetic practices are thus not the means to an end. Rather, they are important as the processes through which the viewers humble themselves, coming to understand the extent of their inability to comprehend the divine. Attempts to grasp a divine presence will always result in failure, and the viewers will always remain “alone in the world,” conscious of the gap still remaining between themselves and the object of their desire. Lilburn’s writings stress the impossibility of ever holding the natural world, but for him the result of this yearning is not alienation. Kathleen Norris, another contemplative poet from South Dakota, writes that “the willingly embraced desert fosters realism, not despair” (11). The contemplative poet’s gaze, driven by a profound love of the world, does not become alienated, and the poet does not turn his or her back on the world but instead continues to seek it out with renewed desire. This desire remains constant throughout Lilburn’s writings. His love is both unrequited and continually refreshed. Norris writes that “a person could stand and watch this changing land and sky forever…. As when I was a child, I want to remain in the open, becoming something other than human under the sky” (178). The desire to connect with “something other than human” marks Lilburn’s poetry. He links yearning and consolation in his poem “There Is No Presence”: Introduction / xi

There are geese over the water, flickering in bad light, something pushing through from the other side; here is desire, a light round the tongue, world next to the world, a garden that would appear if the word were found. What glitters in things is a mountain, it can’t be held in the mouth. (To the River 11)

But what is that “something”? What “glitters” and “flickers,” glimpsed only in fragments, just enough to tell you that something is there? The contemplative poet’s task here turns on the important word “if,” a word that contains simultaneously the exultation of possibility and the recognition of failure. Lilburn’s poetry is profoundly political. I will go so far as to suggest that he presents a radical challenge to accepted views of the prairie, which see it as something to be used. After all, before European-based agricultural practices arrived in the place, “the prairies” as a concept did not exist. The very way in which we think about the place is inextricably tied to agricultural practice. Thus this way of imagining the place, what Rob Shields calls “social spatialization,” is profoundly linked to economics, colonization, the idea that the prairie exists so that people can make money from making things grow. The most enduring symbol of the prairie, the grain elevator, is a monument to a particular economic system. Land that is not farmed or ranched is wasted land. There is nothing inherently bad about Alberta’s Badlands, for example; that we still call them that shows the extent to which prairie culture has internalized a particular ideology so that it seems natural. The kind of contemplative attention that Lilburn proposes challenges this appropriative view. “You cannot truly see the stone if you believe the world is yours to do with as you will,” he writes (Living 35). There is nothing intrinsically wrong with agriculture; but there is something wrong if an agricultural perspective becomes the only way to see the landscape. Lilburn’s writing offers an implicit critique of consumer culture’s narcissistic world-view by focusing closely on poetic process rather than poetic achievement. This is not to say that the poetry itself is not an achievement—of course it is —but rather that it doesn’t record a moment of enlightened privilege. “Contemplative knowing is not a feeling, a rest, a peace that sweeps over one, reward for the ferocity of one’s romantic yearnings, one’s energetic Wordsworthian peerings. Contemplative knowing of the deer and the hill must gather about the conviction that neither can be known,” he writes (Living 18). Where Romantic striving (in Lilburn’s view) results in a feeling of comfort with the world, Lilburn’s writing never seizes the world to itself in this way. Thus the two important words “As

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If ” in the title of his essay collection, Living in the World As If It Were Home. The poetry produced by such uncertainty is process-oriented, a record of poetic attention, of stones being repeatedly thrown at an unhittable target, rather than an attempt to define an experience. Lilburn’s collection To the River is an example of such a record: the poet-narrator continually seeks the river, but never gets there. He is continually humbled by his clumsy attempts to reach it, and can only wait for it to reveal itself, which it may do in flashes. The act of writing is thus always humbling, reminding the poet of his or her inability to express “what glitters in things” (11). The paradox is that within this muteness lies revelation. —Alison Calder

Bibliography Barratt, Alexandra, ed. Women’s Writing in Middle English. London: Longman, 1992. Dalrymple, Roger. Middle English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Kroetsch, Robert. The Lovely Treachery of Words. Toronto: Oxford UP, 1989. ——— . Seed Catalogue. Winnipeg: Turnstone, 1986. Lilburn, Tim. Living in the World As If It Were Home. Dunvegan, ON: Cormorant, 1999. ——— . Names of God. Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1986. ——— . To the River. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1999. Norris, Kathleen. Dakota: A Spiritual Geography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Shields, Rob. Places on the Margin: Alternative Geographies of Modernity. London: Routledge, 1991. Szumigalski, Anne. On Glassy Wings: Poems New and Selected. Regina: Coteau, 1997. Zwicky, Jan. Robinson’s Crossing. London, ON: Brick Books, 2004.

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Names Of God for William Clarke, s.j. i.

Love At The Center Of Objects

At the pentecostal core of matter, a fire wind whirligig, centrifuge of joy, is You, Love, a lung pumping light, auric squalls inflating eyes in my skull’s raw coal. Ssssssst. My bloodstream and the midpoints of my bone hear fire gouging the inner face of flame. Which speaks. “Dress, bride, in your blood’s maroon gas, oxygen feathers tipping each bone blue; on the red knuckle thread desire’s compound carat; moth skip, heart-kamikaze, and explode vaster, vaster in the inhaling charismatic glow.” 2.

Allah Of The Green Circuitry

Salamu, my Lord. Salamu alaikum. You are here for my synapses whip and sparkle like lightninged willows, are in tumoured air storm’s throbbing, are wind’s ululation to my steel-shod nerves dancing them as dust-spooked stallions. Runners of rain trellis fire to earth. You ride the hissing flame, Allah of the Green Circuitry, to jazz with love juice the chlorophyll current to flash sunflower, crimson, orange. You live, ah, You live to unflex in the crux of a woman’s dark ear, coloured cloud pressing into mind’s white storm. The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 1

3.

Light’s Gobbling Eye

O nourishing dark, O blank cloud, You haul in my debris, compress it in the stupendous clench of Your Heart to nothing. Light whorls toward You, a vanishing point where perfection absents You; whorls toward You, screwing itself into its shadow core, letting its socket eat it. O dark gravity, we decry this cannibalism, though the shimmering particles stampede with greased monomania. I, now, feel the suck, tide of light raking over bones, unsnarling from joints of thought and feeling, until I whistle into what-I-know-not, ears imploding, riding the bright shaft of self into Your infolding, gold-splintered eye.

2 / Desire Never Leaves

Theophany And Argument

Oh Blessed be all dapper goats natty in Kentucky colonel string tie tufts, growing party hats of horn in absolute bewilderment, who ricochet, look! from barn walls. Blessed. Blessed be the jubilate of jump. Blessed. Blessed. Blessed be the red, banker’s eye of pigs, and raccoons, at nights, in cities, kissing their faces in the ripe gleam of three, four Italian tomatoes. Blessed be fire and dirt smell and root wonder and the nectar-witted, blabbermouthed nonsense of negro-lipped tulips that can be heard with one ear. Blessed, blessed. Blessed be the lunge-hearted, epiphanous urge of trout, at night-break, to silver heavily from the pond’s upward eye. Blessed be the eye. Blessed be the sacred act of all looking. And blessed be the cataracted stones, who do not look, never. Blessed be the stones, sightless, inward, monasteried in pasture corner piles, elders, ancient ones, celibate, blue, dreaming of good gold, who chant one magical Om mouth to mouth with my choirboy ovalled cells. Blessed be being, big-bellied being, bird song jointed, grace-legged being, goat leap pulsed, holy dancer, with its holy metabolism of storm, holy dancer, jitterbugging on the erect vowel, the I of stem, spine, seam, the phallic vowel of its triumphant self-announcement. Blessed. Blessed be being and its hieratic law of more, its muscling out, phlox’s purple desire muscling out, and blessed be the eye-meet, crammed into sight look

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 3

of squirrels connoisseuring threat. Blessed be. Blessed be. Blessed be the eureka and the hick hurrah And, necessarily, the discrimination. Not star or fisheye, or fire, but consubstantial with each glittering instance my agape imagination is the intelligent tip of cosmopolitan light, the pan-flicker; is the astonished point, light’s sublimity, burning in my head, aquiver, an awe that leaps ear to ear, the slow, interior, Mona Lisa smile the universe ends in. With sammadied molecules, with personed light, with the spirit spurted muscles of heart pounding life that bolts, I am Siamese-unioned, well, at mind, consanguine, a complementary fiction. Let King Entropy stroke suburban temples with fingertips of weary. Let the best in business suits walk blank from horror’s sermons mink-eager to knock up emotion and husband it again as decision until the body winces with a moral astigmatism before S.O.S.’s cue-carded in the given. I hear the vow-psalm of gravity intoned by fraternal stones in the motherhouse of mud, beneath stopped feet at intersections and beneath streets of distraction, and am te deumed real, hallowed in the hesed of my heft, loved into hereness by the nuclear hug, bodied proud in the hilarious spin.

4 / Desire Never Leaves

Pumpkins

Oompah Oompah Oompah, fattening on the stem, tuba girthed, puffing like perorating parliamentarians, Boompa Boompah Booompah, earth hogs slurping swill from the sun, jowls burp fat with photons, bigger, bigger, garden elephants, mirthed like St. Francis, dancing (thud), dancing (thud, brümpht, thud, brümpht) with the Buddha-bellied sun, dolphin sweet, theatrical as suburban children, yahooing a yellow which wallops air. Pure. They are Socratically ugly, God’s jokes. O jongleurs, O belly laughs quaking the matted patch, O my blimpish Prussian generals, O garden sausages, golden zeppelins. How do? How do? How do? Doo dee doo dee doooo. What a rabble, some explode, or sing, in the panic of September sun, idiot praise for the sun that burns like a grand hotel, for the sun, monstrous pulp in a groaning rind, flame seeded. Popeyes, my dears, muscular fruit, apoplexies of grunted energy flexed from the forearm vine, self-hefted on the hill and shot putted in the half-acre. Carro-carroo. Are you well, my sweets, pleasure things, my baubles, my Poohs, well? I, weeding farmer, I, Caruso them at dawn crow in the sun cymballing mornings and they Brunhilde back, foghorns, bloated alto notes baroquely happy. Not hoe teeth, not Rhotenone, but love, bruited, busied, blessed these being-ward, barn-big, bibulous on light, rampantly stolid The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 5

as Plato’s Ideas, Easter Island flesh lumps of meaning, rolling heads in my 6-year-old nightmares, vegetables on a ball and chain, sun anvils booming with blows of temperature. Come, phenomena, gourds of light, teach your joy esperanto, your intense Archimedean aha of yellow to me, dung-booted serf, whose unhoed brain, the garden’s brightest fruit, ones communion with the cowfaced cauliflowers, cucumbers twinkling like toes, and you, clown prince, sun dauphin of the rioting plot.

6 / Desire Never Leaves

1. Fervourino To A Barn of Milking Doe Goats Early Easter Morning Maa¯pe, maa¯pe, maa¯pe, hust, hust, boobies, dears, I want to speak to you. I will turkey Gospel to you as John Diefenbaker spoke French. Glitter unto me on your pert, bone-seamed, Rockette legs, Blue udders whopping knee scoops, snappy at the starlet canter of Flesh in a breathless, wartime dress. Our text: Ubi caritas et amor. Which is that today the Lord High Being of Milk squirted Life-like from the squeeze of his will. Pseudo-reindeer, attend. And I say to you Look at the light on the blond wheat straw. Energeiai of the Godhead, first seen by Simeon the New Theologian, 1000 ad, Mt. Athos, now here, cherub bum bright, curves warm from bedding. To what shall the Kingdom of Heaven be compared? I say it shall be like the femininity of long grass Where the New Idea spreader Arced greenly yesterday’s scrapings of the barn floor, vague, Nevertheless, as the violet of the buck’s penis. And still it shall be like the goat that’s stolen the poem From under the herdsman’s pencil, up, suddenly, on the jokes Of its Pan legs, poem in its pink teeth, then, ears back, off like a Mozart flute. Think of the bucks. Koranic dogmatists, mystically dense as fashion models, Who clench their bodies in memory always, blinking at the flesh exclamatory donging their knees, naming God. They neither labour nor spin Yet the Yahweh of Armies jolts them tall with fresh male dreams While inches of assent bud yearly to their taffied, yellow horns. The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 7

Petites, consider not the world. There the lust-a-rama of the shopping malls humiliates eros, then naps apodictically, Amen. Listen, I go now to the kid barn To preach there to the applause of their lips Five streams of milk From the black nippled lamb bar. And there wads of their coats shall stand up as Dostoevsky at insight And their ears fall back as a long woman fainting into love, And they shall know me there, I Who tickle hail to their beating skunk tails, As mother, Which, Isaiah 62: 4–5, I am, God’s wife.

8 / Desire Never Leaves

Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World

Come you with desire and you without desire and you royal-sleek with the aplomb of the doctor-loved mad. Come you who violently wait. Come you brow bejeweled with the cranial ache to eat —bright, mental food—the world. You sowing in tears, come. Come you sleepless ones who hear in the clank-tappa-clang of unstable titanium heads banging walls of silos in wind-boisterous Dakota spirit-rappings of your own garrulous deaths, come; come now. Come all who are infatuated. Come you who are Hamlet-spooked. Let the jails empty And let come diddlers, two-years-less-a-day sniffers with drooling sleeves. Come fathers whose shame hands have burnt on breasts of Oh-eyed daughters in houses mortgaged at twenty per cent. Come. Let the electric locks release. Come you dangerous ones who have seen all that is solid melt into air Into the hearing of these extravagant promises. Come from the doughnut stands, the Trail’s End Taverns. Come you Vespuccis of the Americas of the eye. Come, come now here to the peacelands and their white peninsulas which are hands raised, pax. You seldom Nathaniels with leaping tongues, come. The night eats towards us, its boot full of blood. Dead Alden, poet, come, come from the night, the dead cough of your laugh gruffing as the large-animal-feeding sound of sea gnawing rock, your face of smoke, your head blurred with Player’s Fine Cut’s broken gold rings, come.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 9

Brother William, painter, ex-crazy Ukrainian, come, arrive shy, robed, with birds. Come women with scars. Come mumblers after quarters, with your newspaper shoe shuffles from the high-heeled, well-healed, Dior-cheekboned streets. Come from the Thrift Villa, Mister Donuts, sanatoria, buckets. Come children from the video parlour, your hands agog with the miracle of deke and thrust that outwhizzed the machine. Come you who believe the golden M of the blood meat bar is all that remains of metaphysics, gold standing ruin of M, and that what lies behind the gold slag is nothing, night-nothing, alive simply in its anarchically pure impulse of its hate of you, just night, glued one by the gore of insects exploded on the flashing windshields of the traffic. Come, turn and come; bolt from the loveless cars idling in the street, doggying wearying tails of smoke. Come you with child and you without child And you whose children are your own nursed selves. Come into the held breath of the mute God, who, seeing you, covers his face in awe.

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Elohim Mocks His Images For The Life Of The World

Do not cling to me. I hate your sacrifices, despise your festivals. I turn embarrassed from your Helen Steiner Rice looks fattening upon the ice cream scoop curves of holy art. Pull down the Mediterranean pietas erotic to the sweet toothed sense. Do not “like” me. I will not take your pain away. Upwrap the beautiful mind bound white and young for the arousal of the power fathers as it grows slender to the bone. Unwrap the beautiful mind. Retrieve all amputations. Repent with erotic shouts thought of me, cloudland’s geriatric, his cranky beard and the body of a farm boy or narcissist that ripples to the tip of a nixing fascist digit, more musclebound than a mushroom cloud. Forget, too, the lamb-y, metaphor-male, the groinless, bourgeois Jesus, with his Easter-egg, candy-store-window eyes ogling the cruciform crosspiece of his eyebrows. If you meet such a Christ on the way, kill him. Do you wish to love? Do you wish to love? Leave love. Love nothing. Life is dark; life is dark at the no-place of the shocked heart cut two by the bone-handled, thrice-bladed Word. Life at the breakpoint between spirit and soul is dark. It is the unseen continent, past the Europe-edge of like that announces itself a hundred leagues out with the smell of cedars and with giant floating beds of trillium and ragweed. It is the vast green fragrance of nothing, meek darkness, that maps itself in mind by the cry of imaginary animals mating inland.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 11

Unloop the crucifix from the neck; let the neck be a naked neck. Eschew the new Plato-man tucking his shirt in with a stick. Forget the ear-to-ear mmmmmm hmmmm, the dream of total health, the dream of permanence. Lover, meet me between the joint and the marrow.

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I Bow To It

Earth, earth, earth, stone lobed, blue, earnest, blundering Godward with lummoxing barn fever, the dead’s reliquary, the dead bunched as flowers in its arms, the stone-sung-to dead, the lovely, horse-sensed, devout earth, jewelleried with the dead, earth, earth, dog-adored, wise and ambitious sleep, anti-fire, intelligenced with diva-fat, cadenced purpley as the long Book of Isaiah, the slow exhalation of itself, earth, wasp-pasture, dragging a shadow of water, singing trampoline of winds, moving, bee-brocaded bosom first, bright in the dark ray of its tonnage, bright in the dark ray of its tonnage, potato-ganglioned, bright-dark, unfolding.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 13

Spirit Of Agriculture, 1986 for Louisa

1 Barn light great as gold room-sky at the Council of Trent at the definition of papal infallibility, joy’s fist-like body, then, raised over the elegant periti like a stadium shout at a touchdown, light pleased as a rich man’s belly, gold heat summery and wavy over the mirage lines of argument, tongue’s bright shadow, what of the cardinal’s eminence the muddy eye cannot hold, morning light in the towering barn, now, when the forearms of the farm are sleeping, this light the goats wear as the more public part of their bodies, as we wear fierce manes of feeling, monstrances of what might be fanatically bright hair when moved.

2 And the barn suddenly like a circus family climbs up unto itself, web to twine-loop, beam to web, hay hook Everested to nail, loin chandelier of the one lonesome buck waving like one hand free, weightless Leibnitzean worlds of self-hurrah, architectures of it-couldn’t-be-any-other-way, apt as a high ear of violins, as gulls mount the cross valley hill like a god’s thought climbing a girl’s thigh.

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3 You who are about to be hysterical, look at the stone that looks back at you like your father.

4 The farms are dying. The farms scuff in their nervous straw, throwing links of their machinery, laneways fluting, meaty, vegetable ears fanning with terrified stupidity, half men, one and half men, shocked by the dark ray of their deaths. Pale land of sleep. There is a rumour among the farms there is a place in the West they must go to die, where all the Indians have gone, land of dreaming, the bone gone dreaming in a grease swamp, go lie down, laneway love-holding lane end in going, the grave-hair-faced farmers asleep in the howdahs of tractors on their backs, and in the mornings before milking, I have seen them moving to that place like hills moving.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 15

5 Light like a gold ear, like the plaque angels hold over the right shoulders of the dead in old prints, light, the pectoral of a Mediterranean boy stretched in the pull-back of bow arm, the point in Music for the Royal Fireworks where the expert kettle drummer starts to sway in an electrocuted wave, striking the skin over and over crossed wrists, weeping, animus roaring, maybe tapping the rim with his forehead like a sped-up ether bird, propellering his mallets, and the violinist walks back and forth on his instrument like a man who’s lost car keys, the king confused and about to rise, light like that or the mouth-shape of someone saying “yes,” light that is where the word goes that slips the tongue and waits, the light.

6 Now the land turns in its chemical sleep, corn floating on lakes of nitrogen, and the almost-awake banker dreams in town of a sistine, jet-fuel-bright sky, money’s salmon run up the head office cloud shaft of a Toronto ziggurat, an Islamic heaven where women flicker like trout in the dark pool of the chief executive’s eye. He sharks out in the gliding skin of his sleep skin sidepanelled with 30,000 feet’s victory-bright aluminium, his eye jumping ahead of him like an ecstatic’s unconsciousness red red red. He cleans the highway of farms hit crossing in the night. Ingenious hunger making him everywhere, kill-thing, his will-to-power mouth loosewide in the meathead leer of a Wagner opera.

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7 You who are about to be giddy, Spiritus Vertiginous, look at your hand, the palm, its wise face, the place in you the sun rests, breathing soft hub the hawk feels as the center hold of its wheel turn. Raise it. It is the tablet of writing powers and thrones hold over the right shoulders of the dead. Look: the one you hold is gathering words. Filling with light.

8 Dawn. One goat leaps to a place in the air near the manure pile as if an angel rushed through the room of her brain and flung on a light and the goat flew up, fleshless, into it, the light the colour of its corn-tan eye, instantly gone seconds until the spirit-line earth wills into the goat, into the eye of the goat from the shadowed love eye of the stone grew taut and sprung her back. She looks back with all the forsythia, Handel trumpet goldness of her queer eye out of her Kilroy-was-here face at the air her non-body was. Huh.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 17

In The Hills, Watching

Among the nerved grass, thrones, dominions of grass, in chokecherry dewlapped hills, hills buffalo-shouldered with shag of pulsed heat, meek hills, sandhills of rose-hip and aster, in the philanthropic silence fluxed by the grass, hounded, nervous with its own unaccountability, grass the frail piston of all, in hill heat, lying down in the nearness of deer. All knowing darkens as it builds. The grass is a mirror that clouds as the bright look goes in. You stay in the night, you squat in the hills in the cave of night. Wait. Above, luminous rubble, torn webs of radio signals. Below, stone scrapers, neck bone of a deer, salt beds. The world is ending.

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Contemplation Is Mourning

You lie down in the deer’s bed. It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums because the body’s touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses after a run. There are snowberries, fescue. This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy. Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert and winter of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and sounds felt through the gigantic walls. Choose. Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body. The hills are the bones of hills. The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed. Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this. You lie down in the deer’s bed, in the green martyrion, the place where language buries itself, waiting place, weem. You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool, nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost smell of last year’s melted snow.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 19

How To Be Here?

i Desire never leaves. Looking at wolf willow bloom, streaming through plushlands of scent toward the feeling of its yellow, self breaks up, flaring in stratosphere. Looking undermines us. The world and its shining can’t hold our evaporating weight. The world or what is there goes away as we enter it, goes into halls of grass where torches of darkness burn at noon. Goes into light’s lowest mind. Leaving us, woo-floated from planet-like names and not quite in things’ shimmering gravity, alone in wide June air. All-thumbs intensity that feels like virtue or music. The Form quivers in the deer. She doesn’t see me; I’m lying barely above grass on a plank between fallen poplars. Hot day, slow wind; I lift on the cam of rhizomes. The light behind her light is a shell she’s just now born out of. The Form is the doe’s ease within herself. I came from there. If you dug with small tools into radiant belts round her shoulders you’d come to a first settlement of the soul, stroke pottery bits, put your tongue on old cinders and remember. Tears will take you part of the way back but no further.

20 / Desire Never Leaves

ii You wake, say, inside a large mosquito net, you’re away from yourself, older, near a desert perhaps, air cool, dry, cloud of small sand, everything seems far away, North African, night ancient, hard to read, you look through the flap and see something bent toward a fire, sparks low round it, stocky, sitting on its man-calves, force, tiptoed. It is desire. Yes, adding stick after stick, it seems, managing in its naked hands the reins of occurrence, charioteering the will-horses of night. You want to walk in the dark garden of the eye of the deer looking at you. Want a male goldfinch to gallop you into the heart of the distance which is the oddness of other things. All would be well. Desire never leaves. Mercury’s flower, a ghost-hurtling. A mirror held before the spiritual wind that blows from behind things, bodying them out, filling them with the shapes and loves of themselves. You want that and all else that shows in the bright surface polished by the lunge and prowling of your desire. You don’t know what you are doing.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 21

iii Desire tells me to sit in a tree. I live alone, mentally clothed in the skins of wild things. Desire sways ascent into me. I look, I look: bull-necked hill, blue sweetgrass in hollows. Knowing is a bowing, a covering of your face, before the world. The tree’s white tallness praises through me. What receives the bow? I am seduced by the shapeliness of the failure of knowledge. My name in religion is the anonymity of grass. I practise dying. Each day, the tutor, old man, eros, repeats the lesson, I wrinkle my brow, my tongue protrudes. Outside the window one chokecherry in the bush, in a thicket of gooseberries, adds a weight and compression of darkness under the sun that is perfect.

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Restoration

I want to be the knowledge that is one sleep in the sunward shoulder muscle of the two-year-old doe coming out of hills and down to Moon Lake. I will get there by seeing. The whole body and virtue will rise up and form the look. Seeing is the extreme courtesy that comes when desire is broken. Desire will be broken and will continue with a bright limp. We will move toward high bush cranberry and the smell of water. I will be attentive, an oblique crescent near her spine, touched by the light of her liquids. We will be going to Moon Lake, the diamond willows, old oxbow lake, reeds round it, the true river a ruin of water in dust further on, the red century ending. I will see my way into that place and into that body. This will come only after I’ve been sitting in the long grass eating loaves of shadow pressed up through the ground. I will have been dreaming there of one day opening milky eyes and finding myself sick, inside her body, high up, near the spine, poor, relieved. Sometimes it happens: you lose everything and wake in the strange room of what you want. Except I won’t be awake but asleep and full of gnosis. In my ears, gold pulse of her footsteps. We will go down the hill and enter the shadows of frost-burnt roses and the shade of the smell of water in which reeds and elms are rotting, October sunlight the shore of a country a small boat is just now pulling away from. I will smell her, light of one locked room in the mansion. I will be in the muscle, a painting on the cave wall of her flesh. I crane into the deer. I am in the bright-dark cloud of knowing her and could walk for days. She is at the top of the hill and starting down in early evening. The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 23

Pitch

Lay it down, the shimmering glass. The hooded flickering of the flat is for you, the hooded flame of the hole. Way out there, don’t tell. You can see winter’s limp and unshavedness moving on the hills; it doesn’t know where to put its body. Dark shifts of cranes in the valley. Be quiet. Move up along the coyote edge, come up along the left-hand bank to the best geese place near the Métis winter camp graves. Experienced light cruises the clay banks. You must be this without knowing you are. The river gleaming with falling down, gold scar of current on its back. Sandhill cranes on the dock scruffed islands. A bigger dark comes in from a farther place.

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There Is No Presence ✱ There are geese over the water, flickering in bad light, something pushing through from the other side; here is desire, a light around the tongue, world next to the world, a garden that would appear if the word were found. What glitters in things is a mountain, it can’t be held in the mouth. The heavy grasses; night bends from the waist and goes down into them. The last light is the intelligence, the smallness of birds in wild berries. The stars clank up, black-wet weight running on the oil of anticipation. The geese participate in the boiling dark and they are a speech of it. ✱ The water is a thicket and a strangeness, the smoke of the river, the scabbed back. The ray of the river doesn’t bend into your face, it’s full of the meat of its smell and heaviness. Tree—a crackling huff of old light. The water is a thicket of motion and soon the wheat will be wounded in the fields, it goes straight to compunction. Sleep is everywhere, early spring, things slumped in holes, calm, thinned, snow becomes dust. A seed of light is building fat and intense in the ground. Something not yet here will speak for us.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 25

✱ Geese on the ice, walking; this is breathing and thinking. This first lies down in the fields of eternity. And comes here, hot in its throat, lost, empty. I live in a hole, I can’t help it. Late afternoon, old grain in wet fields, winter-dusty stubble, geese hulking down into it. You could read by the light of their floating down and understand what you read. The sun goes into cold pools out there and the rotting smell of water hushes in from the stiff fields while there is still some light, way up and uninterested, in the southwest. In my high ear, the quaver of the world. It is the colour of barley water, it rises and dips in a small way that is exhausted. ✱ Everything is fallen, everything a soul, dry stick fire, green water shouldering up among absent-minded, heavy poplar. I’ve seen the river; the river is one sleep; the forehead, tin-coloured, flexes with guessing. Everything is lonely. In stones, fox, water, violet light, the jounce, floing at the end of memory, the climb back up the black fall from thinking, up the waterfall of rotting into bone, stink, hair, thigh wooing sunlight in the streaming plummet through air that cooled as mass blistered in it. Slow river, coyote-coloured, blue with melting snow. Dirt river slumping through sugary ice. The dark lid of the mauve river is falling: how little we have. There is a female light in the branches.

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✱ The river is a hiddenness, mud-green tree smoking from first darkness you could spread out the camp of your life in. No limit: hold it in your mind and you are weeping. A grip, a posture of bells. Coyotes move in the stopped valley, fox through snow, one lit judder of prints a plume lifted in the middle of the animal’s life. Later a husky moon, loose bone of a moon. The world became the world when the light of adoration fell in it and it could not stay aloft in invisibility. Now the river is here, a hand the spirits move. ✱ You are good but no blond disc for you in the grass, none, no bone of light, no little palate or gland of stupid but shining intelligibility, the pure bride, none, none for you, in the grass prong. A glacier of night shoved through the centre of things. Juniper hard with absence. You are alone in the world: the flab of the river is anarchic, the water is feathered with ignorance, a dangerous mirror that makes your face darkness throwing its hair. ✱ Almost black light heaves from buffalo leg bones, lichen, a ring of stones. There are geese on the river, walking the ice shelf: the erotic world wants more room. In the night season of winter, dark church with wind outside it, a limp of water. Twilight comes from the ground, unwrapped from a rag, all this dominion has. The river’s breath is a bright elm. Further in the water, a deeper bark, the lack of light so strong you cannot look at it.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 27

The river, head of grass in the chest, wand-stalk, and the bumble of the horned, chimneying head, flicking, half sickness, part relief.

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A Book Of Exhaustion ✱ Early June; behind the ears, rubble. Now the wheat comes up to you on its shaking legs. Now you move in the blurred fur of blue light in the large ear which is the darkness of the garden. Small ache of the new moon over ungerminated peas uncovered in their trench. Stars now over the garden, a glow like thinking smudging it, onions first inches, thinking with a head-ducking, coppery thunder cat-slow sewn into it over the beginning wheat. You are in someone else’s clothes walking at a slant to the gold momentum. Thinness lets you walk through the trees. A small purple strip has been hauled out and hit with ropes, something has been lifted out. The garden looks at you. Both you and it washed in the blood of not being seen. ✱ Don’t say you’ve heard this. I’m in a limping house that’s breaking up, floating on the star river. Mineral light over the big-armed, turned-away ground. The place just stands under the fat quaver of northern lights. Pigweed closed in, wattle of morning bird song—ask it to lead the country and it’d tie a stone round its middle and jump into deep water. In my hand, the clean and glittering weapon of doing what the light eventually tells me. Sunflowers, peas, wheat, spinach, carrots are up.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 29

They are the dragon again, promising obedience, eddying muscle of the other side; they will live with us and living with us means letting themselves be fleeced by the beam thrown by the tightness of our hearts, means their eyes on the hollow just below our throats, the blood-jump. ✱ The long striding dirt kicks into big, important felt boots and is gone in a grainy, moth’s-back dusk out past the waxy light of petunias, war light, light with no mind the river forgets up over the rise. It goes into the mountains, it tends sheep; what it eats is what it breathes of the clotted dark of extreme distance. Last summer I lived in the grove of her skin. A bear’s ear of new potato appears on the ground. The eyes of everything sharp and young on my hands in the morning, I walk in the garden and am admired. ✱ Heavy fall of three-week male wheat, a matinée forelock. It did this by itself. It looks up because it thinks this is beautiful, but can’t see over the anvil forehead. It can’t sing. Its body is an olive-gold cloth it doesn’t know what to do with laid across its arms. The flavour of the indifference of the bend of the iris stem, the meal of its carelessness —the small penis of light in me stands on end and stays that way all day.

30 / Desire Never Leaves

Everything thick-faced with green, first stars a few crazy people round scrawny fires in the hills. Late now, just a little light in a thicket where no one comes, high, poisonous—the grass flattens its mirrors and in the fresh dark in the tall stalks there’s a room where everything can slowly open its eyes.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 31

Kill-Site ________________ The animal dreamed of me, a brown gust separating above its head; this was below snowhumps on the creek, ice fog up the towers along the valley sides, blood on the snow, estrus marks, the water frozen a yard down. ❖ When Henry Kelsey died or left Hudson Bay, there’s a rumour he continued walking under the ground in the highest part of his voice, down the west hip of the Porcupine Hills, a pythagorean veer in his eyes. Because all this was a new music, uncooked ratio, a machine of smoke. And he thought Let the will sleep here 400 years. Let the will sleep here 400 years. Only some song would turn the lock. He was looking for the deeper Crees, the Poets, south people sleeping along the rock ledges behind their eyes, someone to put something in his mouth. And because he was under the ground, everything came to him—he saw a face of wheat, a face of mineral beam, nipples of stones, a face of winter in things, face of what is at the back, the watery, the alto part of the mind, showing through skin. (It rose to the skin for its hump to be seen, then moved back into the trees.) Only a song would turn the lock. He kept walking, wanting and fearing the freezing of rivers.

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________________ Sandhills in a light, likely daylong rain, looking off to the left, grass that’s not going anywhere, September— everything walks toward you; it undresses and comes toward you with its small bright hands and the downwind smell of your father’s mind and his shoulders in the early summer of 1964; he’s working two jobs, post office, moving company, right now he’s not wearing a shirt, a hundred and forty-five pounds, but still less under the name of his lower-in-the-throat citizenship, where he’s not saying a thing, living in a cave twothirds up a cliff line, how did he get there, swallows heaving in front of his face, the hole trench-shovelled into clay sides lifting over the Milk River, north of the Sweetgrass Hills, cattle clouding off infinitely to the east, feathers and bones hung from string at the mouth of the cave, pale green feathers smooth out long and speechless from his tailbone. Things climb out of the elms of their names and themselves and they come forward, moving their tattooed, Fulani hands. They smell of your father’s voice, his one black suit.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 33

________________ Winter now; heavy twist and giving up of snow; it slump-hulks in from west of the river out of a greenish, balls-kicked cloud, then sleepwalks down the valley through the muscle of four thousand cranes, the light of their red foreheads; if it knew anything, it would be the deepest human voice, or a little more, three or four throat-singings hanging from fishing wire 104 storeys down the invisible centre of it. Its sweep and wound are the complete lack of choice. Now the rilled flank: set this beside the corpus dionysiacum. Gather me into your forgetting, cloud the colour of the watch-face my father carried through Italy, Holland, forty-three, forty-five. Gather me home into the attention, the float and the visitations and the bright room. You’ve seen the mountains beyond their names and been seen by them. ❖ The animal that came to me was big with wounds, songful with wounds’ clatter, with the clatter of wounds. It wore a dark sound. It moved into the back country of winter after it lay near my head. It didn’t leave anything, no sachet, no cupped list of names. Then it went into the bush country of winter. I didn’t know what it wanted, it could hardly breathe. I couldn’t breathe. There was the breath-thunder of snowgeese flyways. There was The Evidential Power of Beauty. Nothing in the animal’s mouth, no neumes, no number chain of sounds, nothing added to the general name of things that are and those that are not. Maybe it meant sleep in some buried clothes in the hobo jungle by the river that went through Spokane, WA, in the early eighties, Reagan just elected, a few of us reading

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Marx in a small room, crawl back into that, maybe not. That river, then. The animal smelled of unmixed space. Sandbars, early November, light-quake on the front of my body. Cranes gone almost completely.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 35

________________ The animal dreamed of me. It held a ball of light. This had been embedded in its burnt-birch, split shoulder but now was just above its head, shifting, gathering its sea legs. November leaf smell in the light. All that I had done had set up camp under the ground, a lame fire, chewed pot, a blanket smouldering. Tonight Henry Kelsey would serve creamed shoe leather and the green backs of stones. Keep going.

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________________ Dogwood leaves amnesiac, religious, turned to the wall; crickets heavy-shouldered in the fall field that is growing inside the candle in the tight, stone-lit church, lifted blue and rose from the ground, where Bernard of Clairvaux is giving his third sermon on the Song of Songs— the rubble-backed soul breaking off smokily from the moon of the Word, the guttural rubble of knees and eyes cruising out from the Kiss, The Kiss, the body tulipping-out, coughing and stumbling — crickets widening and drying the hammered, low field inside the candle beside Bernard’s glasslike, horse-flanked mouth, crickets widening, widening the field and deep day. Bermard mentions the secrecy of the summer of 1964, my father in a sleeveless t-shirt working for movers after the 6:00 to 3:00 shift at the post office, this is the stag on the hill, the beloved, let him kiss me with the kiss of his mouth; he’s looking up now and there are bird shadows slamming across his cheek and throat, then later, in his seeing, a dark sucking appears a little to his left, which is not the grave, but a bunching and rucking of emptiness which he feels mostly under his tongue, where he appears to see it best, like memory. This is the war. Cranes on the river now, their calls small charges in the upper arm. Everything is here, everything is inside speech. All blood is pooling. The flats are voice-old, one crumbling stroke on a sightless, bull violin. Olderwinter soon, older winter. Come quickly if you are coming.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 37

________________ The animal dreamed of me —smoke of looking namelessly lifting— below snowbanks on the creek, ice fog up the towers along the valley sides, blood on the snow, estrus marks along the water frozen a yard down, then the kill-site around the next bend. But the animal moving, breathing, who dreamed, let go on a wind of not-its-own thinking. Henry Kelsey died or left Hudson Bay, but then started walking under the ground in the highest part of his voice, walking under the ground, down the west shoulder of the Porcupine Hills, a pythagorean shake and jump in his eyes. All this was a new music, blindfolded ratio, a milk-bunting machine of smoke, and he was just beginning to see how it bellied out. And he thought Let the will sleep here 400 years. Let it go down in the grass. Let the will sleep here 400 years. Only some song would turn the lock. He was looking for the deeper Crees, the sand-coloured, someone to put something in his mouth. And because he was under the ground, everything entered from the top of his head —a face of wheat, a face of mineral beam, nipples of stones, a face of winter in things, a face of what is at the back, the watery, the alto part of the mind, showing through skin. He could grunt this for a while, bone twisting on bone along his spine-top, the things could crawl forward in the body of a single eye, a little eye. Only a song would turn the lock. He was walking, wanting and fearing the freezing of rivers.

38 / Desire Never Leaves

There

I was in the ground and the animal came to me wearing signs. It came out of the water moaning in stone, and it turned toward me and this was speech. The animal nitrogen-burnt with suns, moons, initial, beribboned equations, loose canvas, scenes painted on it, on its sides, hanging from leather-laced poles along its spine, the animal’s sides jewel-embedded, its sides and neck quick with tongues. The worm of the river was on my arm. Under my tongue, the river tattoo, the thicket tattoo. The animal’s large sides were assemblies rising in canyons to speak two things, one from the cottonwoods, one from the side shade of the canyon wall. The animal came with the world. The animal came with many people inside; inside it was a boat, carrying many people over night water, a kind of creature. Its sides were long walkings out onto the flats. All I had there was grass. I was lying down; the word of the river was under my arm, cupped in my armpit and I was lying down in blue grama grass. The animal came with the self-polished things. It could have worn old Spanish armour, it could have carried flags, say the flag of St. George. It had sides of catanyxis. It carried a plaster mirror with gold letters on it. It had sides of a no-speaking but a musical, half-weeping gravity. It lay down near my head. It uncurled its mind, nothing there, no smell. It had a gold band round its head. The animal came out of the west and you could hear it breaking through trees, a little later, moving east in insistent dark.

The Poetry of Tim Lilburn / 39

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Afterword Walking Out of Silence I grew up in Regina in the fifties and sixties, the son of a postal worker and a dress store clerk. My father had returned from the Second World War, where, a sergeant assigned to a mounted gun (a kind of tank without a cover), he’d seen action in Italy and Holland. He and my mother had met at a dance in the summer of 1939, and exchanged letters each day for six years, but once home my father slipped into a tight quiet, saying nothing to his wife, my brother or me about what he’d seen in Europe. That silence, eerie, seductive —it was the war itself —became the fifth member of our family, joining us in the late afternoons between when my father got off work at 3:00 and 5:30 when my mother returned, and at supper, which my father cooked with impatience and a spare skill. His uniform hung in plastic in the basement through my childhood next to my mother’s air force uniform with its corporal stripes. My whole family didn’t have a great deal to say—a clipped Irish Protestant reticence came from my father’s side, a rural taciturnity from my mother’s. I had cousins on the farm who uttered little more than a paragraph a month. Besides, we were working class: elaborate talk was an excess we couldn’t afford: how to pay for rich revelation? We were denizens of a Western Canada where literature had not yet appeared; speech was a simple tool meant to get the potatoes passed. That a writer might come from Regina, or live there, was ludicrous; culture happened elsewhere, further east, if not on the other side of the Atlantic. There was, too, something authorized about our particular muteness: we were quiet, in part, because we —dwellers in the hinterland, labourers —were meant to be. Involved language about ourselves or what we loved would have struck even us as presumptuous. We, the colonists, were colonized, and had no words to express this. It still is strange to think of myself as a poet though there is nothing else I care to be. But perhaps it was just as well we kept quiet: just off the boat from the old country, what could my family have had to say about the new place? (This is more fairly asked of my father’s side; my mother’s people, homesteaders, at least knew where the berries were and what to do with them.)

❖

41

Poems are praise songs or a careful, lonely moan for the world: either way, it is the world itself that lifts them forward. They are the speechlessness of things ripening, pressing, into language. The poet contributes attention, permeability, a courageous leisure in which transfixity may occur; the poet combs out the lines until they come as close to shining as he can bring them. Yet another sort of silence can be a room you inhabit, a room of waiting, a room which is a sort of ear; writing is this availability, listening’s stripped place, in which the hidden lives of things, pumpkins, poplar groves, might be transcribed; writing is mostly this craning quiet. People drawn to mystical prayer eventually come to mistrust word use and discursive reason—neither power draws them close to what they seek. They’re not obscurantists, but greedy, and their hybristic appetite has reduced them to a “naked intent” toward God, as the anonymous author of the fourteenthcentury mystical classic The Cloud of Unknowing puts it, a plain longing relieved of speech, thought, image: in this alacritous, headlong soundlessness, they move asymptotically to a deeper language which ever resists the mouth. Poetry does not want what this prayer wants, though there have been many comtemplatives who have been poets (Gerard Manley Hopkins, John of the Cross, Rumi, Wang Wei), but its emptiness resembles the emptiness of contemplative prayer —erotic, without preconception, ready for anything, slowed by the slight drag of discernment.

❖ Below my father’s uniform, in its fog of plastic, was a blue steamer trunk containing, among other things slowly disintegrating, a large slice of my parents’ wedding cake from the early fall of 1945. The feeling my mother and father had for one another, romantic, grateful—he had survived some of the heaviest fighting the Canadian army saw—was a piety of the home, one of the few, not-particularly-useful things that was allowed to occupy the family noosphere, a kind of luxury and relief from relentless practicality. Their marriage had its upheavals, though. One of the most ferocious of these happened when I was two or so, my brother just born. We were living on Alexandra Street in north west Regina, at the edge of the city, across the road from the CN line that carries freight into southern Saskatchewan and brought grain, cattle and cream back. On both sides of the tracks were the “shelters,” single room, uninsulated shacks where our neighbours lived, mostly veterans and their wives and kids; they drew their water from a communal tap two doors down from us at the end of the block; the “honeyman” emptied the pails in the outdoor toilets once a week. We lived in one of the few permanent houses

42 / Afterword

on the street, a one bedroom frame building, no plumbing, heated with coal; my grandmother slept on the couch in the living room, while my parents, my brother and I occupied the bedroom. Open prairie running down to Wascana Creek lay behind our back lane; a mile west was the “white elephant” of Benson School, a large, handsome brick building, then standing empty; the city, it was thought, would never be big enough to need it. My mother bought a set of encyclopedias for a hundred dollars from a door to door salesman one afternoon. My father was enraged when he returned from work—the expense staggered him; the act struck him as dizzyingly frivolous. My mother protested she’d agreed to pay for the books herself in installments; they were for the future of their children; she’d been able only to go to grade eight —my brother and I would do better. And so on. None of this slowed my father down, so my mother retreated to the outhouse, where she spent the rest of the day, the door bolted, her mother-in-law standing outside trying to console. I still have the books, the whole of the family library, full of the knowledge of the world as it seemed in 1949—teletype, Truk Islands, Harry Truman.

❖ The sort of silence that can crush speech can be benign for a writer if he pushes hard against it: privilege or nature do not put language in him; he must look for it himself, and when he finds it, it will be a new land. Your mouth can be utterly stopped, but that’s only if you let yourself be terrified. If you’re only a little terrified, you’ll settle for mediocrity. There are dangers everywhere, lots can occlude speech, but the homogenic utilitarianism of North American suburban culture is the first among these dark powers: being a poet in the face of this seems comically, elaborately inattentive, fool’s work ; it could get you stroked off the roll. Because of the culture and class in which I was raised, apologetic silence often seems my natural state. Big talk, long talk, incantatory speech always for me edges toward criminality. So I’ve thought if you’re going to speak at all, speak with all the magnificence you can muster—steal big. At some point, I realized I was told only a small amount that had real worth in school and that part of this learning, the transmission of Europe’s Enlightenment riches, was meant to keep me in my place. I grew to mistrust what I was told, and decided to figure things—philosophy, interiority, poetry, religion —out for myself. I’ve subsequently attended a great deal of school, but I’ve always thought of myself as an autodidact. If it doesn’t defeat you, silence opens the door. Pythagoras tested candidates to his school by subjecting them to five years of speechlessness: only after that could they begin the study of the cosmos, its order, its beauty. Afterword / 43

❖ St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, says that what makes something what it is, and not something else, is its formal cause; a chair is a chair because it “participates” in some universal essence of chairness. Form brings a thing identity while distinguishing it from other realities; it is the source of individuation, as well as the cause of sameness among things of a particular sort. John Duns Scotus, following Aquinas, disputed this account of individuation—if formal cause alone marked one specific thing from another, it was indistinguishable from others with an identical formal cause, and so unknowable as an individual even to an infinite Mind. Scotus proposed a quality higher than Aristotelian form by which a thing was set apart from all others, even those most like it—haecceitas or thisness. It is best to think of haecceitas not as a trait which a particular chair or tree possesses, a ghostly antler of me-ness, but the capacity of a thing, likely simply its plumage of variety, to awaken awe in human beings. The look of startled surprise, the beingarrested-by-this-particular-tree, is the tree’s final form, a quality it shares with no other thing. Here is the human contribution to the symbiosis of being, our version of bees’ involvement in pollination and forests’ absorption of carbon dioxide. This looking, this looking hard, enacts thisness and so completes a thing, while wedding the mind to the world. Haecceity: the concern of contemplatives and poets, those on ocular patrol, and their central politics.

❖ I returned to Saskatchewan in the summer of 1990 after a seventeen year absence: I had entered the Jesuits in 1978, after having spent a couple of years in Africa, and, following a two year novitiate in Guelph, studied philosophy for another two years in Spokane, where in addition to completing an M.A. on the neo-Thomist Bernard Lonergan, I’d cleaned rooms on skid row with a couple of luminous women, getting to know a number of the men who lived over the bars and pawnshops. I left the order in the late 1980s, spending the next few years working as a herdsman on a goat dairy near Elora, Ontario, and doing a little teaching. When my partner at the time was offered a job at the University of Saskatchewan, I followed her to Saskatoon; we bought a house and land south west of the city and settled in. I taught a couple of classes at St. Peter’s College, a Benedictine school an hour and a half by car east. I found it surprisingly strange living again in Saskatchewan for the first couple of years: not only did I not feel rooted there, everything that European settlement had erected in that place —churches, museums and so forth—

44 / Afterword

seemed temporary, floating. None of it appeared to live from the heart of the place; none of it seemed to know there was such a thing as a telluric heart. Cree people were autochthonic, no doubt about this, but I certainly wasn’t, nor, I felt, was any of the complex culture my people, with incredible effort, had built as they settled the plains; and I didn’t know how I could develop this trait of coming out of where I was, and so lose my sense of estrangement, nor did I have any idea of who would teach me. I suspected that there might be no healing of this feeling of rootlessness because, as I thought about it, I saw it grew from what people like me, displaced Europeans in North America, loved best: the Cartesian conviction of our superiority to nature; our pact with utilitarianism; our heroic allegiance to analytic reason; our refusal of idleness.

❖

2 / How Can I Write Above The Clouds How can I write my people’s testament above the clouds? They leave time behind the way people leave overcoats at home. They erect a citadal, tear it down to raise a tent on its foundations nostalgic for a glimpse of palm trees. My people betray my people in wars defending salt. But Granada is gold, silken words embroidered with almonds, tears of silvery glitter on lute strings. Granada is a law unto herself, proudly becomes whatever she wishes, yearns for anything past or passing. If a swallow’s wing brushes a woman’s breast in bed, she screams “Granada is my body!” If someone loses a gazelle in green meadows he screams “Granada is my land. That is where I am from!” Sing so goldfinches can build stairways to heaven from my ribs!

Afterword / 45

Sing the chivalry of men meeting death moon by moon in the beloved’s alleyway. Sing garden birds stone by stone! O how I love you, who cut me down sinew by sinew on the road to her hot night. Sing, “No smells of freshly brewed coffee in the morning after you’ve gone.” Sing my migration from the cooing mourning doves on your knee from the spirit’s nest in the letters of your liquid name. Granada belongs to song. So sing! — Mahmoud Darwish, “Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky”

❖ It’s possible to feel homesick for a place where you’ve never lived. It’s also possible to have a memory, a large, shaping one that pulls all desire, of a time that never existed, a time of Andalusian residence. I assume the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has never lived in Andalusia, that region at the southern tip of Spain, Garcia Lorca country, from which Muslims were expelled in the seventeenth century, depriving Europe of the glitter of Islamic intelligence. Darwish’s yearning for that place and Granada, its capital, total, formational, bears resemblance to my yearning for the plains and mountains of Western Canada, insistent, fantastical. What the heart wants, wants back, is a residence it remembers but never had: this remembered, tugging home place lives in philosophy, too, where it has an old cosmological name: apokatastasis, the restoration of all things. But my ache is also quite different than Darwish’s, though it too is for hyperbolic union: it’s the ache of the victor tired of gnawing on the spoils of the land he and his people have subjugated, but that won’t come to any of his names for it, that refuses to fit to his hand or eye. My people will come home to the place they’ve never chthonically lived in, returning from the exile they themselves shaped, but I suspect this return will take some time.

❖

46 / Afterword

There is the knowledge which is a gathering of facts and another which is true subjectivity: if poetry has noetic ambition at all, it rests with the latter. You can read a poem without scrambling after comprehension; to do this, you must first defeat the sweet tooth for sense. You can read with erotic passivity, allowing yourself to be theurgically sculpted by musical force. Here narrative is less a muscle than music, than anaphora. Though I concede the intentions of poetry and contemplation fork, poetry still strikes me as a religious undertaking, whether it is written or read, because it is an attempt to listen inside things, an attempt to “hear” the interiority, the deeps, of crows and mountains of basaltic rock: as a result, it constantly edges toward ekstasis, a bewildering, somewhat destabilizing, yet vivifying exile from oneself. While most poets possess a substantial horde of ego, the act they perform of homesteading in otherness proves altruistic: if one of us travels into the cut off world of stones, rivers, then all of us do through the sort of reading which is anagogy. This means that poetry insofar as it is erotic, insofar as it is religious, following desire into things, listening in things, is political: one enters the sole trustworthy politics through a deepened subjectivity.

❖ Ted Hughes describes the Tree of Life of the Kabbalists as a model of “the nested hierarchies of the universe —in other words a means of organizing the psyche by internalizing the knowable universe as a stairway to God.” Here’s an ontological map that’s potent, aligning, for me. Take highway 219 south of Saskatoon, past the turn offs to Cranberry Flats and Beaver Creek and into the sandhills, then past the White Cap reserve and the Ruby Rosedale community pasture; you’ll leave the trees before the junction with highway 15; turn right toward Lake Diefenbaker; soon the outline of the Vermillion Hills will come into view. In a few miles you’ll be in the berry and deer country around Elbow, good paths, but they’re not for you today; you’re driving on down the Qu’Appelle valley and up out of it, eagle terrain, then on your right you see the cemetery at Central Butte. Just another turn and you will find yourself between the tall green sides of Thunder Creek valley; stop the truck and begin to walk east, along an abandoned rail line, following the flow of the creek. Thunder Creek eventually will merge with the Moose Jaw River, which a little later will empty into the Qu’Appelle, but that doesn’t concern you, because you are going only as far as Kettlehut Marsh, where the creek pauses for a while and pelicans nest. No one comes here, needless to say, though there is

Afterword / 47

a farm on a knoll north east—they’ve pushed their old cars and machinery over the valley lip; a poplar stand has caught much of the trash; the farm house, of course, faces the road and town. In 2002, we found saskatoons south of the marsh that were as big as medium sized grapes, and this struck us as quite odd since there were no berries anywhere else in that drought year. We picked three or four coolers and left on the bushes eight times that much. It might be worth going back there this year to see if the patch is bearing. The branches offered pretty well nothing last year, but who knows what will be there this July. Poems are a fidelity to what they themselves cannot say but that stipples forth as world. Poems can’t take their eyes off the signs. Poems are the homage of an alert leisure enacted before these things; poems are the world as deep singing.

❖ I suspect a conversation will take place at some point in Western Canada between Crees and other tribes who have lifted themselves out of the wreckage of the last two hundred years and a small band of white people who have gone down the steep stairs of their own tradition and brought out what is truly worthy. One group will say these are our stories and the other will say these are our songs, these, the paths our people took up the mountain. Both will be listening, ready to bolt. The Crees and the others are talking among themselves now, building, and we, at the moment, have no one ready; there’s still too much work to be done. I propose this talk take place in the grove of poplars north of Vermillion, Alberta, heading to St. Paul, close to the big, wooded hills where you turn west to St. Bride’s and Saddle Lake reserve. We’ll see. If we could bring the dead—and I imagine they’ll be there somehow— I’d bring George Grant, Simone Weil and my uncle Jack; I’d set a piece of cut log on end for Evagrius to sit and another for Teresa of Avila. We’d settle down and build a fire; Eriugena would turn up and we’d break out some food. Soon there would be a stirring in the grass, the soft scratch of new poplar branches along metal and we’d look up and there would be someone like old Joe Cardinal or one of the Tootoosises sliding out from behind the wheel of his half ton truck and coming toward us, eight or nine people behind him, their faces dark because of the collapsing light. —Tim Lilburn

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Acknowledgements

From Names of God Lantzville, BC: Oolichan, 1986 Names Of God (11–12) Theophany And Argument (20–21) From Tourist to Ecstasy Toronto: Exile Editions, 1989 Fervourino To A Barn Of Milking Doe Goats Early Easter Morning (3–4) Call To Worship In A Mass For The Life Of The World (22–23) Elohim Mocks His Images For The Life Of The World (24) I Bow To It (44) Spirit Of Agriculture, 1986 (50–52) From Moosewood Sandhills Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994 In The Hills, Watching (13) Contemplation Is Mourning (15–16) How To Be Here? (60–64) Restoration (65–66) From To the River Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999 Pitch (3) There Is No Presence (11–17) A Book Of Exhaustion (21–24) From Kill-Site Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2003 Kill-Site (7–15) There (35–36)

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Books in the Laurier Poetry Series Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Di Brandt Speaking of Power : The Poetry of Di Brandt by Di Brandt, edited by Tanis MacDonald, with an afterword by Di Brandt • 2006 • xvi + 56 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-506-x; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-506-2 Lorna Crozier Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier by Lorna Crozier, edited by Catharine Hunter with an afterword by Lorna Crozier • 2005 • xviii + 62 pp. / isbn-10: 0-88920-489-6; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-489-8 Tim Lilburn Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lillburn by Tim Lilburn, edited by Alison Calder with an afterword by Tim Lilburn • 2007 • xiv + 50 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-514-0; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-514-7 Don McKay Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay by Don McKay, edited by Méira Cook with an afterword by Don McKay • 2006 • xxvi + 60 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-494-2; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-494-2 Al Purdy The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy by Al Purdy, edited by Robert Budde, with an afterword by Russell Brown • 2006 • xvi + 82 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-490-x; isbn-13: 978-088920-490-4