Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (Laurier Poetry)

Earthly Pages The Poetry of Don Domanski

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Earthly Pages The Poetry of Don Domanski Selected with an introduction by Brian Bartlett and an afterword by Don Domanski

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 Domanski, Don, 1950– Earthly pages : the poetry of Don Domanski / selected with an introduction by Brian Bartlett ; and an afterword by Don Domanski. (Laurier poetry series) isbn 978-1-55458-008-8 i. Bartlett, Brian, 1953– PS8557.O43E27 2007

ii. Title. iii. Series. C811’.54

C2007-903603-1

© 2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press Waterloo, Ontario, Canada www.wlupress.wlu.ca Cover image: “Earthrise,” drawing by Don Domanski. 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.

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Table of Contents

Foreword, Neil Besner / vii Biographical Note / viii Introduction: The Trees Are Full of Rings, Brian Bartlett / ix Beldam / 1 Angels / 2 Summer Job: Hospital Morgue / 3 Summer-Piece / 4 The Sacrifice / 5 Sunrise at Sea Level / 6 One for an Apparition / 7 A Netherpoem / 8 Sub Rosa / 9 Snowbound Letter / 11 Visiting the Grandmother / 13 At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue / 14 Hammerstroke / 16 Hammerstroke ii / 17 Dangerous Words / 18 Looking for a Destination / 20 The Sleepers / 21 Love Poem on the Sabbath / 23 A Perfect Forehead / 25 The Ape of God / 26 The God of Folding / 28 Excathedra / 30 Fata Morgana / 31 v

Epiphany Under Thunderclouds / 33 Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers / 35 Lethean Lock

Mnemonic Key / 37

He Leans Homeward / 39 House / 41 Taking the Train to Fredericton / 43 The Passageway / 44 Walking Away / 46 What the Bestiary Said / 48 Sentient Beings / 49 Sleep’s Ova / 50 Banns / 52 Afterword: Flying Over Language, by Don Domanski / 53 Acknowledgements / 59

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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 poems 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

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Biographical Note

Don Domanski was born on Cape Breton Island in 1950 and raised in Sydney, and has lived in Halifax for many years. Beginning with The Cape Breton Book of the Dead in 1975, he has written eight collections of poetry. Two of them, Wolf-Ladder (1991) and Stations of the Left Hand (1994), were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award. At Malaspina University-College on Vancouver Island in 2005 he delivered a Ralph Gustafson Lecture, “Poetry and the Sacred,” which was later published by the Institute for Coastal Research as a chapbook designed and typeset by Robert Bringhurst. In 2006 Jack Pine Press published a chapbook of Domanski’s poetry and artwork, All Our Wonder Unavenged. His full-length collection with the same title was published by Brick Books in 2007; this book includes poems that won cbc’s Canadian Literary Award for Poetry in 1999. His poems have been anthologized in Storm Warning ii, The Poets of Canada, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, The Atlantic Anthology: Poetry, Canadian Poetry Now, Easterly, The New Canadian Poetry, Inside the Poem, Fiddlehead Gold, We All Begin in a Little Magazine, Coastlines, and To Find Us. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czech, Portuguese, and Spanish. He has been on the faculty of the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio, and contributed to the mentorship program of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. His interests include the natural sciences, religion, mythology, and the visual arts. Some of his artwork has appeared in galleries in Halifax and Seoul, South Korea. He collected fossils for fourteen years. During this time he found a neural arch of a 350-million-year-old (Carboniferous) amphibian previously thought to have gone extinct in the Devonian period. His interest in religion has included visits to churches and cathedrals in France, Ireland, and Argentina, mosques in Istanbul, Rumi’s tomb in Konya, and Buddhist temples and monasteries in China. One of his interests in the last few years has been meteorites, his collection including a meteorite from Nantan, China, that fell in 1516. Another of his pastimes is collecting Stone Age tools, such as an 80,000-year-old Neanderthal digging tool made from the jawbone of a cave bear found in Germany. All of these pursuits help to ground his work and fuel his imagination.

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Introduction The Trees Are Full of Rings The cosmology of Don Domanski’s poetry is both fresh and ancient. Much of it is absorbed in the living fecundity of nature, in what one of his poems calls “the stupendous pit / of beatitudes opening / wider and wider.” Rather than forget all but Domanski’s metaphorical shape-changings, atavistic moments, and unfoldings of the unconscious, we should recall that as an epigraph for his second book he chose these lines from Hopkins: “And for all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.” Hopkins’s words are significant for all of Domanski’s seven collections published between 1975 and 1998. In various poems, his own words refer to “all these letters / lying unopened in every field,” “the small kingdoms of eternity and desire,” “the good and tumbling earth.” Domanski’s titles like War in an Empty House, Stations of the Left Hand, and Parish of the Physic Moon are all unique and spacious, but none of these titles represent his work as directly as the one he’s chosen for his first volume of selected poems, Earthly Pages. “Earthly” reminds us that Domanski has deep respect for phenomena and processes that sustain our lives as they did those of our ancestors going back millennia, and those of prehistoric life forms. It’s apt that Domanski has literally been a fossil collector, and has sometimes given his findings as gifts to friends. As he said in an interview conducted by S.D. Johnson, “The wonder is that anything at all exists…. All the birth through billions of years of incalculable plants and animals got you here.” Or to quote from his poem “Sleep’s Ova”: “I was born because millions of years ago communities / grew out of ponds.” (Here Whitman isn’t too far off: “Immense have been the preparations for me / … / Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me.”) The second word in Domanski’s title, Pages, can remind us that poetry is a product of work within a human medium, part of the earth more than a mirroring of it. Domanski is acutely aware of the silences surrounding poetry, of the infinite expanses of existence poetry cannot hope to enter. He may have recalled in talking to Johnson—and years earlier to John Oughton— the Chinese saying “A blank page contains the infinite,” but he confronts how any poem is bounded by our limits, as by the four edges of a page.

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Over two decades before Domanski published a group of poems called “What the Bestiary Said,” he was well on the way to creating a bestiary. In his first two collections, The Cape Breton Book of the Dead and Heaven, he introduced a few of the creatures—fly, beetle, moth, spider, toad, frog, salamander, rat, shrew, cat, wolf—that would populate his poetry. References to Buddha, Lucifer, God, and angels also foreshadowed emphases in Domanski’s later books. Just as crucially, while still a poet in his twenties he established the centrality of birth and death and regeneration to his vision. “Sleep’s Ova,” a later poem I quoted above, speaks of “the sleight-of-hand motion / of being born and dying and being born.” No early poem of his suggests cycles of life more movingly than “Summer-Piece,” which contemplates the endless recirculation and transformation of matter, how through eons earthly things generate other earthly things. “Summer-Piece” imagines how “someone’s torso… / was ousted for this slew of flies.” This poem can also direct us to Domanski’s sense of time. As drenched as his poems are in the everyday burgeoning of lives, they’re also grounded in an intense consciousness of the past. Domanski’s past isn’t so much one of social, economic, or nationalistic struggles as one of geological and biological change (one of his poem speaks of “Neolithic patter” and “Triassic cables”), mythic resonances, and religious, philosophical, and scientific thought. Domanski’s imagination is drawn not merely to the past in general but specifically to the primeval, to the origins and early manifestations of things, now known only fragmentarily. It’s no coincidence that his first three collections include the phrases “old phoenix,” “old weight,” and “old beast,” but also “ancient fable,” “ancient mind,” and “ancient pose.” Mythological names in his poems include Bran, Cerberus, Charon, Cupid, Daedalus, Dionysus, Elysium, Erebus, Icarus, Israfel, Jove, Lazarus, Lethe, Leviathan, Molpe, Morpheus, Narcissus, Odysseus, Orpheus, Pallas Athena, the Phoenix, Proteus, Siegfried, Tartarus, the Virgin, and the Werewolf. Some day an ambitious study should be written of the role such names play in Domanski’s poems. For now, let’s note that two of the most suggestive figures are the Phoenix, with all the rebirths it represents, and Proteus, symbol of constant transformation. Historical names in Domanski’s poems, though fewer, include Apuleius, Aquinas, Caesar, Copernicus, Dante, Diogenes, Eckhart, Hildegard, Lao-Tzu, Nostradamus, Novalis, Ptolemy, and Seneca. One striking aspect of these names is that none are of figures from recent centuries; while Wallace Stevens, a major inspiration for Domanski, names within his poems figures such as Bach, Constable, Corot, Lenin, Mather, Racine, and Whitman, Domanski’s almost exclusive concentration on figures of earlier eras creates a greater sense of distance from recent history. Listing

x / Introduction

the names may misrepresent them as comprising an intimidating catalogue; actually, in Domanski’s books such names interact with things of the present, and they’re scattered throughout imagery of forests and ponds, kitchens and basements, mice and worms, hawks and dogs. They’re usually bright sparks of association rather than cool cases of allusion. In Domanski’s poetry, two thousand years is sometimes like a second. That such references are more common in Domanski’s poetry than twentieth-century cultural references means that when the latter do appear, they do so surprisingly, with a pleasing jolt of the unexpected. When we read of Claude Rains and “B-movies from Hollywood,” or of “the footprints of Neil Armstrong,” we may feel we’re stepping outside Domanski’s usual world. But the references are never there inertly as tags of picturesque, historically local detail; Domanski’s transformative imagination plays with them. When Aspirin appears in Domanski’s poetry, it’s Aspirin with a difference: “you feel a sudden hurt / in your left side / so you place an aspirin / in a vase of white roses.” Just as the famous pill is fed to flowers, the passages cited above make the references new: Claude Rains is crying out “among the mosquitoes” at a tv-watching woman’s windows, and Neil Armstrong’s footprints are found in a child’s moon-like backyard (or is it a backyard-like moon?). Not as rare as his twentieth-century cultural references, Domanski’s mentions of particular Nova Scotian sites—Sydney, Bras d’Or, Blomidon, Horton Bluff, Burntcoat Head, Blue Beach, North Mountain, New Edinburgh, Halifax Public Gardens—are infrequent reminders of the physical territory in which most of his poems are written. Not that there’s anything conventionally regional about his poems. In this he differs from Atlantic Canadian predecessors like Pratt, Nowlan, or Acorn; he moves more quickly than they to the metaphorical and the mythic, or begins there, and doesn’t offer details of provincial social dynamics or economic conditions, though the fact of poverty is alluded to in a few poems. (Someone, however, might draw comparisons and contrasts between Pratt’s satirical, dinosaur-populated fantasy “The Great Feud” and Domanski’s long poem “Firedrake.”) Other locations such as Vancouver, Berlin, and Zaire appear in Domanski’s lines, but fleetingly, since he’s most likely to find named locations as primarily sites where the archetypal occurs. In any case, locations are named in the poems, and I would argue that they— especially the Nova Scotian names—add one kind of specificity to Domanski’s cosmology, just as London and Middlesex do to Blake’s poetic universe of Beulah and Jerusalem. The most dramatic moments in Domanski’s poems are often spoken by an “I.” Now and then he identifies his personae as one of the dead, or a prophet, or some animal—dragonfly, owl, blue whale. One common sort of Introduction / xi

Domanskian speaker is an alert, mentally agile, playful or surprised “I,” unemphatic in his presentation of marvellous moments, likely to start with a quotidian thing, then veer into the wondrous: I was coming up over the mountain where someone had built the moon the stone-built moon and the bleached shade .... .... in the valley I walked under chestnut trees watching black ants as long as pencil stubs the ants Nostradamus predicted would swallow the world .... .... after Sunday dinner they were talking about politics in the next room and I was sewing dust into my hair painting my legs to match the swaying grass beside the road The last poem quoted from, “A Perfect Forehead,” places the speaker in what initially appears a common situation of post-dinner conversation, but he stands apart from others with a desire to “keep the day sacred / to keep it invisible,” and to do that partly by distancing himself from others as they debate politics and, later, religion. The poem doesn’t so much dismiss the dialogue as hear it in a greatly widened context: it’s “really about the river that runs / through their conversations / carrying each word into nocturnal fields / where it becomes a shadow hunched over a stone.” Often Domanski’s personae don’t so much transport us to alien, surreal landscapes as find the extraordinary nearby. (In the Johnson interview, Domanski denies that the word “ordinary” has much weight: “There is no ‘everyday,’ no ‘normal day.’”) It is in “vacant office buildings across town” that his poetry finds “stables where horses and hay / are lowered slowly to the Underworld”; in “a bar on Hollis St.” that it finds a geranium “dreaming of her maker’s heart”; and in a poem called “Household Gods,” gods are in the bookcase, the walls, and the ceiling. To cite the Johnson interview again, Domanski has said on the question of tradition and influences: “each of us stands on the shoulders of thousands of men and women who have gone on before us…. This sense of connectiveness

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has gone a long way in appreciating the poetry of others, of realizing that the poem written has only a bit of myself in it, and far more of the world, of other poets, both dead and alive.” This seems a remarkably modest view for such an original poet, yet it chimes with Eliot’s view that a poet is most original when most readable in light of predecessors. It also encourages us to take Domanski on his own terms and speculate about what links can be discovered to form a “sense of connectiveness.” Domanski tells Johnson of the inspiration provided by writers from religions as diverse as Taoism, Gnosticism, and Sufism, and by many twentieth-century European poets. In a newspaper piece a decade ago, Domanski cited as major influences “a lot of European and Oriental poetry— those Chinese poets such as Li Po—Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens.” Among Canadians, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Tim Lilburn have been singled out for praise by Domanski. An American review of Wolf-Ladder referred to Domanski as “a cross between Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, and the Brothers Grimm.” For those of us who find more profound associations between Domanski and poets such as Stevens and Rumi, that Bloomsbury Review passage may be understandable but unsatisfactory. In the case of Whitman and Domanski, whom I’ve never heard mentioned together, there are a few fascinating parallels, likely not matters of direct influence. There are enormous differences between the two poets, such as the absence in Domanski’s poems of anything like the striding, exclamatory, America-proud “I.” Yet the title Earthly Pages overlaps with Leaves of Grass, and Domanski shares with Whitman an omnivorous sympathy with many spiritual traditions, attention to microcosms and macrocosms, a desire to see time in terms of millennia rather than only years, an ongoing engagement with death, and a prosodic fondness for parallelism and repetition, devices found in many religious texts. Compare Whitman’s “I find letters from God dropt in the street” to Domanski’s “last night I heard God in the street / breaking bottles rebel-yells.” Compare Domanski’s giving space to many species in his poetry, and his faithfulness to both the seen and the unseen, to Whitman’s “The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place / … / The palpable is in its place and the impalpable is in its place.” Domanski’s “Summer-Piece” could be glossed by Whitman’s “The Compost,” a troubled, frightened poem about the endless recycling of matter. In “Assurances,” Whitman claims “the majesty and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world,” and “the eyesight has another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another voice.” It wouldn’t take long to find parallels in Domanski’s poetry to these and other passages from Whitman. Stevens, writing partly under the shadow of Whitman, can be more extensively connected to Domanski. Just look at their titles. Stevens has “The Planet on the Table” and Domanski “The Planet Asleep on Your Heart,” Introduction / xiii

Stevens “A Weak Mind in the Mountains” and Domanski “A Mind in the Top of the Trees.” Echoes can also be heard between the titles “Stars at Tallapoosa” (WS) and “The Stars in Ireland” (DD), “A Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” and “A Man Betrayed by Incorporeality,” “The Course of a Particular” and “The Particulars of Pointed Things,” “The Dance of Macabre Mice” and “The Pyramid of Mice.” Faithful readers of both Stevens and Domanski might also daydream about one poet writing poems given the other’s titles: it’s fun to imagine Domanski writing poems called “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,” “Primitive Like an Orb,” and “Ghosts as Cocoons,” and Stevens writing “Narcissus in a Random Universe,” “Coat of Arms for an Afternoon,” and “At the Height of Names.” The connections between the two poets are far more complex than overlappings between their titles, but I’d like to mention one important difference: while both are pervasively metaphorical, Domanski doesn’t seem to share with Stevens a hunger for “[t]he poem of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word, / Straight to the transfixing object.” One of the defining struggles in Stevens’s poetry is between the embrace of metaphor and the desire for transparency, but Domanski grounds himself so much in the necessity of metaphor that he may not want otherwise, recognizing that human language will never truly capture—to adopt one of Stevens’s phrases—“the thing itself.” In Domanski’s poetry and prose, silence and intuition beyond language—rather than language without metaphor— is where a fuller understanding resides. Rereading Domanski recently, I’ve thought less of Stevens and Whitman, or of Baudelaire and Rilke and Tranströmer, than of a poet from another language and a much earlier time: Jelaluddin Rumi (1207–73). Rumi emerges as one of the giants on whose shoulders Domanski speaks of standing, just as Rumi stood on the shoulders of others. His advice “Try and be a sheet of paper with nothing on it” is reminiscent of Domanski’s citing of the Chinese saying about a blank page. Rumi’s line “Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little ship” jibes with Domanski’s sense of the smallness of anyone’s poetic endeavours amid the oceanic confluences of beings interacting with beings. Rumi’s technique of using multiple metaphors consecutively presented—“you’re the wind. You’re the diver’s clothes / lying empty on the beach. You’re the fish”— is a technique much favoured by Domanski. The two poets also combine the miniature and the cosmic: “A tiny gnat’s outward form flies around and around / in pain and wanting, while the gnat’s inward nature / includes the entire galactic whirling of the universe!” (Rumi); “[a fox’s] paunch… so full of heaven / stuffed so full of vista / and testament / he can barely move” (Domanski). As an epigraph for Parish of the Physic Moon, Domanski chose a passage from Rumi: “Invisible, visible, the world / does not work without both.” These

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lines come from a poem translated by Coleman Barks as “The Cat and the Meat.” The poem begins as a somewhat humorous tale about a husband and wife’s feuding over how to manage their food. By the end, it has moved to an unpredicted place. Elaborating on a metaphor for body and soul, Rumi writes that if “you throw dust at someone’s head, / nothing will happen.” Likewise with throwing water. But if you throw both together, “[t]hat marriage / of water and dirt cracks open the head, / and afterward there are other marriages.” Now and then in their poetry both Rumi and Domanski use marriage as a metaphor. “He lived the marriage of form and spirit,” says another passage in Rumi. In a Domanski poem called “Wedding Rings,” “the trees are full of rings / wedding rings / diamonds and gold.” “Bride and Groom,” set in a postapocalyptic time after the disappearance of the human species, speaks of a “coyote-bride” and her groom calling out to men and women to return from death, because “the wedding night is also lonely” when “there are no other / brides or grooms / on the face of the earth.” The depth of loss in that poem— which begins with “bats in their Dantean circles”—is felt through the diminishment of many marriages to a single surviving bond. “Bride and Groom” can be read as a predecessor to “Banns,” the poem chosen for the conclusion of Earthly Pages. The more recent poem sees birds as wedding dresses, trees as waiting brides, and the walking human as one who would “marry the heartbeats that collect / on birch leaves” as well as marrying “what can’t be seen.” The walker goes into a forest “via homages.” When the poem says “you can begin no journey here without marriage,” Domanski may be suggesting that love, commitment, and homage to the heart-and-mindshaking richness of existence can help make our lives not only bearable but also fulfilling. These human drives are embodied in a book like Earthly Pages, but they’re also needed if we are to read it with attentiveness and understanding. —Brian Bartlett

Note on Sources Full titles of Domanski books quoted in the above introduction are given on the acknowledgements page at the back of this book. Poems quoted, with those in Earthly Pages in semi-bold, appear in this order: “Spider Song” (Heaven), “A Daybreak …,” “Small Kingdoms” (Parish), “The Sickroom” (Station), “Sleep’s Ova,” “Summer-Piece,” “Sisters of the Ungathered Rosary” (Stations), “Beldam,” “Finch” (Cape Breton), “Weed Song” (Heaven), “An Ancient Fable” (Heaven), “Sub Rosa,” “Cactus” (Cape Breton), “Aquarium Music” (Hammerstroke), “The Sickroom” (Stations), “The Madonna Room” (Hammerstroke), “Ghosts” (Hammerstroke), “Before the Plague …,” “A Perfect Forehead,” “Writing” (Parish), “On a Winter’s Night” (Wolf-Ladder), “Household Gods” (Parish), “Love Poem on the Sabbath,” “Fox Song” (Heaven), “Wedding Rings” (Hammerstroke), “Bride and Groom” (Stations), “Banns.” The

Introduction / xv

interview by S.D. Johnson appeared as “The Wisdom of Falling” in Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, edited by Tim Bowling (Roberts Creek, BC : Nightwood, 2002). An earlier interview with Domanski, by John Oughton, appeared as “Blank Paper and the Infinite,” in Poetry Canada Review 12. 2 (1992). In Arc 52 (2004), Domanski published a brief essay on Tim Lilburn’s poem “The House.” Three other books used for this introduction are The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997); Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990); and Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton, 1973). The Whitman poems quoted are “Song of Myself, 44, 48, 16” and “Assurances”; the Stevens poems, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and “Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself.” Detailed discussions of the Whitman–Stevens link are found in Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977). The Rumi poems quoted other than “The Cat and the Meat” are “The Fragile Vial,” “Buoyancy,” “The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty,”and “The Three Brothers and the Chinese Princess.” The newspaper article cited is “Rewards scant for Canada’s poets,” by Val Ross, The Globe and Mail, November 15, 1994, and John Bradley’s review of Wolf-Ladder appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, December 1992. Published discussion of Domanski’s poetry so far has been largely—and regrettably—limited to brief book reviews. A few exceptions include “Domanski, Don,” an entry I wrote for The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (New York: Continuum, 2005), and a few longer reviews: Dennis Cooley on Hammerstroke in Journal of Canadian Poetry 3 (1986), B. Bartlett on Wolf-Ladder in The Fiddlehead 175 (1993), and Louis MacKendrick on Stations of the Left Hand in Journal of Canadian Poetry 11 (1996).

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Beldam

old phoenix you rise out of morning tea out of a single cup left by itself on the kitchen table old gal, old wart, your celtic pounds simply balance the house when it teeters your remedies never cure your advice is always wrong your kindness drowns cats and overwaters the geranium old grandmother, old sister, old wife, old sweetheart, old heart in pre-War condition what carries your soft body to breakfast? what sly tongue has chatted your head awake?

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 1

Angels

balanced like gulls above the relapse of sea and rock their heads slowly turn a complete twist toward land they carry burning swords and pen-names like Michael and Israfel but know themselves as larvae twirling in a man’s ear or a rat gnawing away at a wall dead Heaven’s moil they now drift spore-like toward anyone’s mind their silence thumping loudly on the boulders drowning the water’s edge the Big Dipper rising to bare its incisors over the sea.

2 / Earthly Pages

Summer Job: Hospital Morgue

smug and exhausted each lay like a satisfied craftsman each a heroism looming in front of me still some only heads in bags some about to spring to their feet bursting with laughter at the joke by midsummer their shattered bodies and bad timing were commonplace almost forgettable now years later I remember detail a half painted nail a half opened eye a clenched fist a brief heart to heart with an irredeemable face.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 3

Summer-Piece

whose heart or bowel was looted for this cool arena of trees? for this footage of bracken ajar at my feet? who paid for that sparrow’s nervous direction through the thicket? for his song roofing these goldenrods and lupines? there is someone’s vigour wasting away under all this blood and greenery there is someone’s familiar face sagging over every bloom permeating each athletic gesture of the land someone’s torso that I knew so well was ousted for this slew of flies in the afternoon air for this pond’s peculiar look.

4 / Earthly Pages

The Sacrifice

and now her skin coffins these peaks and valleys now her belabouring blood spreads out along the dull skyline and ballast of stars before her nape and breast arrived this shoreline swam with misery these rocks stood for nothing this weather had nowhere to be the magnitude of a woman has been stretched open again and now the entire world can lull back into its dark self once more now heaven can stop its awful ragging and sleep.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 5

Sunrise at Sea Level

out of the eye’s corner comes the red visor of the orchis the torturous reds of war out from behind the injured white steps the magenta of thorns and knives the eye-shaped sun approaching the tide I am always here a bystander applauding the inflammation of the waves the constant flaring of water all winter and all summer I have come to this seawall to numerous fires to the effigy-burning lights of the sea hoping for something to appear something gigantic something to fill a vacancy that does not carry the sweet poor scent of the flesh a ghost would do or a jackal-headed god in a boat or at night the green polar lights could appear like a siren like bird-legged Molpe seated on her rock throwing men casually into the sea. 6 / Earthly Pages

One for an Apparition

I am at midnight now, waiting for the instruments of thought to arrive. Outside the snow is turning away. Outside the dark leads the snow down to the harbour for a second life across the expanse of ice. Out to sea past the farthest point of land comes an elemental song from you. The melody empties light from the eye. The words crowd the throat. Overtaken by night, taken by your voice, the heart drops its mirror, the brain will not do a thought. What is it in your name that leaves itself like a frond in my hand? Outside the wind suddenly moves again saying something to itself, saying something dark into its own ear. I think it is a single word, a word born far out to sea in a place without horizons, in a place where you dry your hair with death, where you comb it out with nightmares of a body falling through space. A woman arrives. She looks like you. She hasn’t been with me for long. She smells of cellar-heat. She smells of an old address. The otherworld drifts out from under her dress. It fills the room with bees and darkness measured out carefully against the light. Her mouth hangs open but no words will come from there. Speech and love gather at her waist falling away from her body. She stays in the corner dancing without a partner, without music. She is the colour of a dog violet. She wears a dahlia with no life in it. She wears a dress with no body in it. She has always been blind. She has always forgotten her name. I call to her from across the room, but that only makes her tremble. That only makes her cry out like a wheel, like an iron bar striking bone. While she puts on her broken shoes, while she puts on her bent ring and torn gloves, while she puts up her dead hair, she cries as you did decades before standing in front of the sea. She cries as if she were a storm over harbour ice, a wind moving out under snow. She is tired of the exactness of stone, of a black moisture spidering her blush away. She wants to stay with me just like this, with her broken head almost making a syllable, almost making a name, a word out of all eternity. The Poetry of Don Domanski / 7

A Netherpoem

in the basement where evening pulls in the huge ropes of morning where the sun fills the furnace red at nighttime in the basement where the gramophone plays the slow sound of the moon against the world I came across an empty house the empty rooms of your dark body not the body you use now but the other one you didn’t know existed the body of a dwarf clothed in handfuls of water the little figure lying on the mineral floor in the basement where the ocean originates where the undersea mountains unfold into rain where all the tides go to sleep without end I heard the voice you never used in the basement where all the fables come from where all the stories smell of bandages and spilled medication where a riderless horse nudges your folded body I head a voice that could have been you the missing words that sound like a waterglass filled with footsteps that are always coming back patiently from the sea.

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Sub Rosa

i In each rose it is deep December. In each rose there is a half-risen evening that never ends. There is also a dark house full of women. Singing women on black beds. We sometimes hear them in the waking night. We sometimes pick up their voices while walking alone in the garden. They sound like a sea of roses, like a harp made out of paper. ii A rose is an unwanted place. It hangs in the garden like a spider. It dreams of the other side. It is our enemy when we knock over the vase, when we slam the door and move out into the night. We begin to believe it has a face or hands making music without desire. iii A rose is a lion in a kingdom of lions. It is a venerable rage finally entering time. Things are not destroyed without chaos. A rose is not a rose but always a war. War in an empty house. A locked door. iv In profile a rose looks like a man. Full-faced it is half the sun. It avoids the quilted sound the mind makes in a thought. It avoids the proximity of the heart. It hungers after the silence between our shoulderblades or at the small of our backs. It hungers after our muteness, the dark hands in our pockets while we listen to the slap of the sea against a wall.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 9

v The rose speaks a dead language. Every word is a coliseum or a shoreline of broken figures. The rose is an ancient mind, the coral movement of a dead thought. It is time coming back to us. It is time churning at the end of the garden. The blue centuries full of roses and the snow falling in some future place. vi Let the solar rose tell its lunar tale. We will keep it secret. Let all the mystery be told like a summer’s day. We will not understand. Let the hidden tide come in from the sea on a rose. The cold waters rising deep in labour.

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Snowbound Letter

it has snowed a lot since you were last here the synagogue and the abattoir are covered in snow the ships docked at the pier are white the rapid pulse of the sailors can be heard at night even this far inland (like the snapping of dry twigs in their arms and legs) I’m not practical enough to live much longer only a dozen more lifetimes or so and then the freedom of insects again the peace of being a fly for a thousand years the window is open and it’s cold in my room but it’s almost daylight and I’m listening for the coal-train through the snow this world separates us with a single ache with a button with a grassblade it takes so little effort to keep us apart the neighbour’s lights have just come on they’re now removing the dry leaves and earwigs from inside their mouths it’s the wind that shapes their lives that fills the morning glass with sugar and water it’s the wind that allows them to live like birds on wires pigeons that startle each other over breakfast

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 11

I can hear the train although it’s still miles away soon I’ll be able to sleep soon I’ll be able to put up my feet to tie up my wrists and ankles and pull the small black hood down over my heart.

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Visiting the Grandmother

it’s always the same there white arms fading into the table fireflies perched on all the chairs evil dogs living in the forest I sit down at her table to hear the kettles sing softly in the trees “Just a little music,” she says peeling away the rabbit’s beautiful dress and we eat the rabbit throwing the dress into the fire soon it rains as it always does the skyworks turning the clouds in heavy circles above her house she looks up as she always does and says, “When it rains, I think of your grandfather in the doorway wearing his blue overcoat. Do you remember it? The one with the little bloodstain just above the heart?” I never remember it or the grandfather watching her hand pour the tea again and the tea falling each time like dark corners from a great height into thin yellow cups.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 13

At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue

you almost met her in the railyard in the pigyard in the witch’s house you almost bumped into her on the staircase on the doormat on the windowsill you do want to meet her but not like this not with all these moons growing out of your head not with all these stars pouring out of your side you almost met her at daybreak but at daybreak a hairsbreadth turns to blue the nile blue of a close call of chance sliding down the entire length of your body you almost met her at noon but at noon each second turns to red the cherry red of a fixed grace of delicate hands serving up that last piece of damp air you do want to meet her you do want to take her in your arms but not like this not with all these cats following you through the streets not with all these letters lying unopened in every field

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you do want to meet her but it can only be at midnight it can only be once it can only be forever and when that moment comes your mouth will be another man’s mouth your hands another man’s hands and he will tremble but not you and he will kneel before her he will remove his gloves and tie he will bear the pain and joy that an orchid feels thick and green and luminous but not you.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 15

Hammerstroke

you’ve driven your black sedan just past the lines of rain past the geranium with its red lanterns burning late past the stars and planets without end on the radio you hear the hammerstroke that brought down the world the awful cry that rose up once like Caruso from his polished chair in the backseat lives the fire the slow nuclear night with its tigers burning too bright with its empty chrysalids floating on air outside your one headlight will last for a thousand years or for as long as you last with that beam of light stiff with ghosts that engine making random shifts in the void outside the nothingness will sleep while you drive with both hands on the wheel and the glowing dust settles in your lap the fine blue dust that a god leaves when it is flying towards new worlds to be born.

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Hammerstroke ii

nothing will change you place roses in the ocean red roses the red oars of Odysseus tired after the long journey to the world’s end to the world’s end you bring the stroke of a hammer and the weight of a single nail you build unnoticed things there the things Odysseus built the purl and darkness of a moth hung upon a web the talons of a bee carrying death moving the water over you like a sheet as if you could sleep or rest or stop coming back into this world as if the war were over or the journey purged of its animal smell.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 17

Dangerous Words

little by little the thistles suffer on the hill bare trees enter the river the wind takes the earth and blows it drop by drop into your ear you are ashes mixed with rain and sleep leaves rustling in a closed hand a mouse dropped out of a cloud dangerous words pass under your window words that no one has ever used before you follow them into the woods your find three words building a fire one word skinning a rabbit and another word far off in the shadows pissing on a violet what do they have for you these five elves these little men this little sentence in the forest? they have but one knife between them one hat one coin one pot and a dark bag full of spoons what good are they to you? what can they give you that you don’t already have? if you touch them you touch a hanging bell and a small tongue wakes in the grass to speak to you to give you a name to call you tulip or pincurl or doll’s breath

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which means you’ll never see your home again not your parents or their love which means you will always whisper but never speak never escape these little men these words burning their supper their rabbit-water in an iron pot.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 19

Looking for a Destination

the frozen road the scalded pines wind in the hills stars balancing everywhere on stilts we are driving this car this greasy bed this sink full of dishes along the coast looking for a destination watching wedding nights and rain between the trees we sing with the fury of a snail who sleeps among the dogs in the yard drinks rain from their bowl and in his dreams barks at passing cars kicking up his one masculine foot high above his head in a salute to wolves we roll down our windows call to dogs snails to anything with blood on its lips to point us in the right direction to hand us a chart a map the secret one made out of skin and shadows the black one humming to itself like a motor like a car waiting on a highway at night for its hitchhiker its teenage girl with her breasts edged in water her teeth pointing backwards in her mouth like a boa her eyes her hair of matches and straw.

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The Sleepers Even sleepers are workers and collaborators in what goes on in the universe. — Heraclitus on the moon it was two a.m. on the earth it was almost noon I stood in a house where it was always midnight or shortly after midnight I had forgotten that everyone was asleep that everyone in that house threaded their eyes with meditations from an earthly wind I had forgotten that I’m always with those who are sleeping with those who are curled around an axis of genitals and stars I remembered that the dreams of the sleepers were the work of countless generations labouring away with a mist and a hammer in the dusty grass that sleep is God’s way of walking on the earth then I went from room to room taken away by a fragrance by the dirty rose of bed and wall by figures whose desire met the shoulder coming in on the sea The Poetry of Don Domanski / 21

the arm on the breeze the chest on the shadow the face on the rock the anatomy of greater flesh on greater bone and the bone said kneel and I knelt and the flesh said pray and pray I did as anyone would among sleepers heaped upon a frozen road or on a cathedral roof or on an ethered stair and there I stayed a walker a beater of clouds a bloodman awake and awake the smell the half-spice of sleeping words the flickering herb on the flickering heart and I’m kneeling there still listening and listening my body covered by that milky moment just before birth when all heads look back one last time into the jaws of nothingness the jaws of sleep the little sound.

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Love Poem on the Sabbath

your face reminds me of an angel’s face because an angel’s face is half-way between a goldfish and a young girl your tongue reminds me because an angel’s tongue is copper-coloured from having spent so much time in a human ear because an angel’s nails are simply dimes at the end of its fingers polished dimes just like yours last night I heard god in the street breaking bottles rebel-yells under my breath I said: “It’s You who stay up all night making noise in the forest, noise in the cities, disturbing everyone. no wonder we are always tired, always yearning for religion.” this morning I tried to rest to float on breakfast listen to the radio to the evangelists do battle with the blades of grass but I kept thinking about you not God I thought about how your breasts remind me of dark cabins in the woods about the rain-scent of your body I thought about wishing you were here curled up in your straw chair wearing those Tibetan slippers The Poetry of Don Domanski / 23

your toes fluttering inside them with such certainty like the wings of an angel no like the wings of a marsh hawk following a mouse deep into the earth.

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A Perfect Forehead

after Sunday dinner they were talking about politics in the next room while I was sewing dust into my hair painting my legs to match the swaying grass beside the road putting on a sweater the colour of heated water poured from a tin kettle into a bath I knew there was no use in hiding from you but I try in my way to keep the day sacred to keep it invisible to conceal just a bit of myself from your eyes from your angel-bitten fingers and besides they were already arguing about religion which is really about the river that runs through their conversations carrying each word into nocturnal fields where it becomes a shadow hunched over a stone a stone that would fill a mouth or a glass a stone you could throw into the wind which wouldn’t come back or land but travel like a perfect forehead into the sky.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 25

The Ape of God

and what if evil was a tint of pink against the bone pink star pink water the pinks of a world turned red by turning what if the devil was a cadaverous paste stuck to your gun-blue shoe and what if this point-blank demon this anti-priest this ape of God was simply and closely you dreaming of a better life a better sun better clouds a greener field bluer sea what if all the evil was in your hand at its tiger-tips at its dusty edge would you suddenly dream of heaven’s casino folded under your skin huddled high in your blood such a bright room on a bright night and the angels bringing such gruff and crumpled pages

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to your lips to be read earthly pages to be explained in the pink light the pink spice of their half-small-desire.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 27

The God of Folding

he is a god living in some origamic paradise where noon is always folded over midnight where the creased waves splash their hems on a dog-eared beach where corners of skin are tucked under corners of blood and the body makes its way bending between flexions of the wind he is the god that folds the lovers the night and the flutter of an owl into a deeper embrace he is the god that gathers the forest into a billion pleats so it can be slipped under the dreamer’s door presses the edge of joy over the edge of melancholy and calls it music he is always loved in that paradise and sometimes in this world

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when you ask for his guidance you must fold your hands in solemn prayer because hell is a grave an abandonment an unfolding.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 29

Excathedra for Anne Michaels the candle in the window waits for its match to be born looks out onto a night of clouds and stars listens to the sound of walking beneath day-old footprints along the river bank watches the cat filled with scissors chase the mouse filled with paper under the awnings of dahlias and roses it is not a religious candle or a romantic candle but one for when the lights of the world go out for when the earth is wrong for the bride who falls headlong into the oil-padded sea for the baby lost in mid-air the husband missing in a room it is a final decision the last white breath against the window pane before the ogre attacks it is a candle for when the maelstrom comes with its many orbits of ciphering heads its ten thousand passions expanding infinitely its black diapason pushing into edgeless space. 30 / Earthly Pages

Fata Morgana

you’re walking alone in the forest the moon is directly overhead eating her supper of astronomy and wedding-gifts there’s a thousand miles of trees in every direction which means there’s just enough blood to go around so you mustn’t spill a drop of course every second tree is the Tree of Death every third one the Tree of Life while all the others are doors to atonement but you mustn’t knock you’re like me and want a straight line through everything but there aren’t any here no path from A to B no A or B you’re not lost this is the earth you’re not human but a fox or a rabbit your life behind a desk was an illusion the shining city a madness brought on by fatigue

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 31

there aren’t any cars or telephones there never were not a single clothesline or shoelace in all the world your heartbeats are so many peapods being cracked open between a finger and a thumb your footprints swallow themselves as you walk along what I said about the moon was a lie there were never any weddings or any gifts not an astronomer to be found the moon is devouring you just you tonight with your long ears pricked up in their sad salute to fear this hour is called Abandonment this night Bottomless I would call you Insignificant if you weren’t already named Essential if you weren’t the very centre of the world.

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Epiphany Under Thunderclouds

each night I spend whatever God made during the day spend it freely on paper and empty air I spend because God is only a resemblance of God only a conjuring built out of nebulas and wheat by a few old men asleep in their escapes I believe in God because those old men sleep among paintings they’ve never seen because they’re part of the paintings little dabs of colour with stern faces and arms akimbo while these men were awake and walked about in the world their bodies were easily corroded by any movement of flesh in the street they were terrified they were as weak as sleeves and God knew He was as many arms that filled them with a total weight

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 33

God doesn’t exist and that was His best idea to keep it simple as every priest knows reality ebbs away by noon so better to have the rolling embrace of being invented like the wheel which carries the silence in baskets up the hill I spend whatever God makes because He doesn’t exist and will never miss it I believe in God because I’m paid so well so often also I believe because I’m saddened by belief saddened by praying hands by the little footsteps that hurry back and forth beneath the storm.

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Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers

I walked along a shoreline and the boards of the sea rose and fell I walked along a ditch and the train came by to skate along its track in the hills I walked among burrs that shook like blind-wishes only partly because of the wind in the valley I walked under chestnut trees watching black ants as long as pencil stubs the ants Nostradamus predicted would swallow the world I’m a lucky man because I’ve seen such things because every dog loves me and crows fly by like shiny raincoats just minutes before it rains I’m a lucky man because the plague hasn’t touched me yet it will tomorrow or the next day or the day after

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 35

when it comes I’ll feel the way a fly does as the spider combs a web through its hilarious hair I’ll be like one of those parcels our postman threw into the river so he could go home early to his new wife I’ll be inside a parcel and Death will break all the fingers of my left hand to loosen the grip to free the tight curl of a memory the singing of a few crickets at night in a burning field which all my life I’ve held firmly and religiously against my palm it was while watching that fire I realized I was in a world that there were spaces between the voices that I heard.

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Lethean Lock

Mnemonic Key

forgetfulness is the weight of a pigeon landing in the park forgetfulness is a slight sobbing just ahead of the wind when I walk I measure out the spaces between forgetting and those spaces line up nicely like mine shafts down into coal deposits which smell of late-night taverns and complete success at sitting alone I remember forgetfulness it was part of the greenery it swallowed addresses it ate the bright fruit it was space when everyone’s back was turned it was the sound of a closing gate soon after going to bed in old paintings it was always represented as the beautiful child with a broad leaf for a mother’s lap in its chubby hands there was always a black key a key that opened the lock of memory

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 37

I’ve never seen that lock but I’m sure it’s made of flesh and bone I know there’s a little darkness waiting there to be manipulated by the key two tumblers waiting to be spun round like two sleeping heads who suddenly wake stare into each other’s eyes and turn away.

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He Leans Homeward

the farmer walks as he thinks with a wind blowing all the facts along the ground he carries both hands in his pockets while the wind blows the centuries back through time till they’re stacked up against the Iron Age there’s no sword to defeat the wind the farmer thinks no good masterpiece to hold up to a mind windblown in an arid field the sand grains are many-sided many-scaled and sing among themselves like infinite choirs while pounding their fists into everything the farmer’s eyelids are drumskins the rhythm is like a quick reading of the phonebook numbers beat against his lids addresses also names and a good deal of emptiness to his left there’s a cow standing like a public building closed for a holiday on his right a huge maple tree filled with handshakes and lost conversations The Poetry of Don Domanski / 39

he walks as if he were wearing snowshoes or had some small death stuck to his feet he looks like he’s moving through bad reception on a TV screen but it’s just the world filled with blowing sand the farmer is at the bottom of an hourglass he’s a new way of measuring time time with its loopholes its footnotes its punctuality all askew this man who became a farmer at a young age is now very old he leans into the wind like a monastery at night filled with praying monks leans into God he’s a meditative man he leans homeward where the radio broadcasts the flights of sparrows when no one is around where his dead wife’s slippers manage the stairs without her like two elderly dogs with a few sad habits still intact two votive mutts making their long slow way to paradise. 40 / Earthly Pages

House

glass huddled in its frames doors knocking on doors everything afraid the phone might ring a voice might speak from far away like bees hurrying through human words she lived there as a child tonight the house thinks of her footsteps on the stairs remembers the margins of her desires folding in immense pleats all around her her heart placed just so like gravity holding flowers in a vase tonight in a city hundreds of miles away she’s being told of a restaurant she has never met where the cockroaches shine like mother-of-pearl on the greasy faucets and walls but the food … the food is like cranes gliding in over marshlands at sunset shimmering she’s lying in bed the man beside her runs his hand down along her thigh there’s enough darkness in the room to fill a forest the clock beside the bed glows white the numbers are radiated teeth from a mouth lying under the bed another spirit no one understands over her dresser there’s a photo of the house the ocean is also there in the upper-right-hand corner the photo has faded just a bit one gull and a few leaves on an oak tree have disappeared as the man kisses her neck she thinks of windows hung like portraits of great invisibilities The Poetry of Don Domanski / 41

the basement flickers in recall like a campsite at night her parents with their mouths drawn tight each day was a blindfold black birds flew in to cover their eyes before they rose a childhood spent breathing under blank waters the house is afraid of her memories they grow each time as immense thickets up through the bare floors even the closets are afraid and they know little fear the attic penetrated by starlings trembles and the sink of dry leaves the spook of a black phone that glides the air would rather be alone with the surface of empty rooms a phone which once listened to everything knew all the emotions all the human words.

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Taking the Train to Fredericton

we’re moving through dark hills forest on either side of us the woman with the Harlequin romance is sound asleep using her thigh as a bookmark the old man next to me makes the noise of a smaller train with each escaping breath beneath us it feels like loose handshakes coming together coming apart giant hands that otherwise would be tearing trees out of the earth or obeying a power greater than the stealth of engineers we lose out strength by just sitting here tire of newspapers and conversations nothing to watch out the windows except a moon where they get the luminous clock face the winding sheet sand for the hourglass but sometimes you see a square of light in the blackness a couple seated at a kitchen table with a child between them or a family gathered around a television screen and it always feels like part of your life part of your past for a split second you feel excitement a reaching back then the forest reappears and you can’t see once again having gone too far back in time where time is untranslatable cells divide in shallow pools one small blindfold growing out of another.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 43

The Passageway

the mind is emptiness or almost so no more than the small space between the horse’s shoe and dry soil no less than the gallop of a horse across clefts of nothingness under birches that lead to the river the salmon in the river are almost so still you hardly notice them holding open doors decorated with venerable black gills doors that breathe that lead down into the earth the passageway has no room for the mind or the body with its needlepoints of sorrow these must be left behind like clothes on a riverbank along with the horse who knows the way so well what’s left of you must travel like the child asleep in its mother’s arms but you’re not sleeping and you’re no longer a child you’re a lamp through which fire passes but you see no light feel no heat which means you’re coming close upon something that’s motioning to you down there in the darkness it could be a swell of teeth it could be a stranger or an enormous storm or the deepest word that knows nothing of pity or your struggles with loss and desire

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whatever it is you’ve been carrying it all your life and must finally meet its gaze eyelids that opened the moment you were born when you rose up into the world eyes that are creatures in themselves that are slayer and slain scream and whisper all the shadows lying down.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 45

Walking Away

what does it mean to walk away from everything reeds so still along the riverbank like the eyes’ motion held back against the heart the water is a binding of one day to another but never the day you live in at the moment I walk and the hills are straining in the stamens of asters held away from the wind walking among spruce trees that fence in a private light around each piece of dust around each dandelion seed shaped like a casket worn down by children inhaling sorrow from inside its plush interior wandering away from everything passing the miles from hand to hand the wings of sparrows hide in the cheekbones of deer when my footsteps are heard in the brush I want to go north to meet a dry leaf a flake of snow to witness a bear’s hibernation the energy that lives on in its paws that gathers up the dark from around antlers on the forest floor the light from the labour of bees passing directly through the sun a bear in winter is like the Virgin after her son’s death it dreams of the heat of the good blood of almsgivers the medicine of walking for a month without stopping then lying down upon brown twigs that held up the ancients their robes stiff as bark their hands hunting in their pockets for stars and the father of stars the slightest thing

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I walk northward cries of loons feed the pine needles a faith curled tightly around rain and the shafts of feathers the pine trees lean inward like sentries guarding things unborn they know the nourishment of drifting through secrecy after secrecy their roots halfway down into bedrock root hairs following the blonde caravans to Elysium the dark processions to Tartarus they know these paths and roads the stones in the road what it means to walk away from everything.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 47

What the Bestiary Said

after many sorrows and thoughts broken body pains and blows to the heart after living in poorer lands with human company in every mirror I remembered what the bestiary said and allowed the deer of the slender sadness to take my voice and my hearing the wolf of the impenetrable eyes to remove my flesh and bone the salmon to take my spirit and I lay on lichens worn clean by whispers close to the ground so that I was the nothingness there with only the beetle’s breath to carry me till morning.

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Sentient Beings

in the abattoir after closing hours when the walls and the floors smell sweet as taverns warm as bedrooms where children sleep when the fifty meat cleavers and the two hundred knives hang from wooden pegs shining like ice skates and bloodied aprons are no longer flags hung at all the entryways of death you hear a whisper distant and alone no crying any longer no sobbing no piercing screams obstructing the ceiling fans just this rustling of a tongue between two dry leaves in a corner somewhere a feather between two stones and the whisper is like a salamander descending an immense staircase on such small legs that the fatigue almost makes it stop the whisper is our longing for the inner eyes of the predator teeth of the insectivore a herbivore’s composure all the marine animals we wish we were birds that simply fly away those invertebrates that mate with a flame inside their deepest selves those larvae that need and know of nothing but the earth’s hold on duration it asks “Where is the total weight of being alive?” it asks “Where are all the dark paths that lead our lives astray?” The Poetry of Don Domanski / 49

Sleep’s Ova

the city is empty enough for offices to fill with afterlives which means snow is falling on the streets which means a dog is somewhere which means the heart and liver are wet with darker ages than the surgeons have ever known I came to the city from the grasshopper’s wing from stones struck hard against a beach from roots and frogs and my mother’s hair I was born because millions of years ago communities grew out of ponds because ponds need a way to say goodbye because I’m always saying goodbye and so are you we grew up side by side eye to eye through the rigging of tadpoles out of sluggish heaven out of sleep’s ova like flowers growing from the camera’s hopeless light that next photograph taken on the green the snow comes because of desire because it has to have its place beside the dust because someone is changing horses in 1829 because someone is arguing with his wife in 2078 and this is the storm’s way of listening to them this silence in the streets this wind blowing all the gleams blowing the loose railings that lead your hands down into death what I carry through the storm is what I carry through sleep the shadows of crows across my shoulders tongue and groove of age across my face the small cusps of history in my shoes misspelled memories all along my spine

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I’m walking headlong through the weather the snow is a coastline beyond it a spooled and posthumous forest nothing scary just that sleight-of-hand motion of being born and dying and being born a forest like a bedroom at night when someone opens the door a crack but nobody comes in.

The Poetry of Don Domanski / 51

Banns

these birds are all the wedding dresses of the world these trees all the brides waiting you can begin no journey here without marriage when I arrived I knew the shadow would be long and hard to follow shadow of a matchmaker stretching thinly through the grass but I came to walk here to marry the heartbeats that collect on birch leaves after rain has fallen the minute ones without home or chest in which to beat without blood to send pouring through the silence I love what can’t be seen I marry what can’t be seen and so walk through the forest via homages the invisible knowing of no hand that it hasn’t held no hand without a wedding ring like a quiet storm moving round a finger shy gold that carries every moment darkened on currents studies of one flesh every bird in the air.

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Afterword Flying Over Language And this is why we write poems. Through them, we try to fix in our consciousness—it, too, formed by language—those moments which open to the intuition that all language refuses. —Yves Bonnefoy

Once a Moslem theologian and one of his disciples were walking along a street when they heard the sound of a flute being played. The disciple asked his master what the sound was. His master replied that it was the voice of Satan, weeping over the transitory nature of reality. That Satan was condemned to fall in love with everything, which passed away, to suffer the loss inherent in creation at every moment of his existence. Satan, he said, was bound to the very fabric of grief itself, by his attempt to hold on to what is essentially so fleeting. He was lost in the flutter of blood in every heart, in the long sighs of civilizations being blown out like candles, in all that play of light and shadow. In this instance, my sympathies lie with Satan, because each of us who have given any thought to the fragility of life could just as easily weep, play our flute, or write our poem. Like existence itself, the poem hangs by a thread; its range and depth can easily be misunderstood and absorbed into the banality of the surrounding sociocultural monologue. The impermanency of everything that I attend to in my work, my own attentiveness included, is ever present. Being mindful opens up the phantasmagorias of each word; the seemingly endless possibilities reflect the cosmos at large and our place in it. There is a deep vulnerability in that, because language itself is transient, and the usage we lean so heavily upon is nailed to thin air. To reinvent meaning, to add to the assailability of the word, is the poet’s job. Undermining what is already sabotaged by common use is at the core of poetry. Endangering what is already threatened is the nature of the work. Being in tune with the vulnerable positioning of existence means relying on nothing but the defencelessness of meaning. I can’t write without knowing that each thing I define will be erased in time. There are no safe and secure places for language. The death of meaning is like the extinction of a species. But other meanings come forth to fill each

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ecological niche. The poet routinely wipes out entire taxonomic groups in order to make room for new forms of life. This culling is necessary; the poet who doesn’t do this is in peril. You must join with the fragility of sentience, recognize the elementary or undifferentiated consciousness where language originates. Writing poetry is like playing the piano with your hair. You don’t know exactly why it works, but somehow you’re able to make music. What I’m describing is intuition, the golden hunch behind all the explanations and theories, which allows you to take advantage of the fluidity of meaning. To intuit is to step outside language and view it from the air. What’s seen when you’re flying over language are the ruins of custom and interpretation, mighty edifices meant to last millennia. But in fact they’re made of straw, built on flowing water. No one who is seriously writing poetry can live in them for long. Intuition, that non-linguistic gnosis, places us deeply within nature; we find our roots in a pre-verbal reality and gradually work towards lexical design. Intuition gives us a richer sense of the potential of language, coming back from a nonverbal stance we’re allowed to see the wonder of its intentionality. This is what Emerson meant when he said, “Every word was once a poem.” Of all the things I’ve learnt over the years about the craft of poetry, intuition has by far been the brightest gift. Discovering its use has been an invaluable aid in the understanding of metaphor, which has been central to my work. It has been of more importance to me than my intellect. The intellect evolved, because of its nature and origin, into a worthwhile faculty for practical use. However, I have strong reservations if it was ever meant to answer many of the crucial questions that art poses; if anything, it sometimes hinders the act of creation itself. It can feel a bit like having your grandmother in the room while you’re having sex. The gestural sway of the mind over the ground of being can be an intimate, intense experience, opening us to new textual opportunities. Intuition shamanizes language, bringing back to the cognitive process the abandon of nature itself. The wildness inherent in this new position frees us from the restrictions of habitual thinking, it allows for spontaneous reorderings of intent and meaning. Pushing the linguistic limit, exploring the non-sedentary, nonlogical conceptual realms, creates a larger eye and heart. We may still weep along with Satan, but our field of vision has been expanded, we are allowed to see more fully into things. Seeing is believing, but seeing is also a function of compassion and empathy. Rearranging and increasing the depth of our creative sight become sign-functions in themselves; this sight speaks to us before we think, before we formalize an approach to the work at hand. This is the word behind the word, the poem behind the poem. The kennings of our

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endeavours link us to a connective reality. Unlike Satan’s inertial sorrow, which is his own irreversible insecurity when faced with love, we can share in a fuller realization of being, a fuller sense of the isness of things. What are exemplified are the complex relationships we have with both language and a living universe. Whatever else you can say about intuition it is trans-intellectual, involving direct insight into some portion of reality. Instinct on the other hand is preintellectual. The question is how and why it happens at all. Scholars during the Renaissance thought the rational soul was divided into two main sections: discursive reasoning and intuitive reasoning. The latter of these was considered the higher of the two because it was an inspiration from God, while the former was associated with human will. This makes sense, because intuition works for me only when I let my will fade into the background. When I can manage to do this, a “gut reaction” floods in to take the place of my will. The romantic view of inspiration, of a muse, or divine influence on mind and soul, remains as a popular cliché. I can understand its origins. It makes sense on one level, but my own experience has failed to come to any definition. The enigma of intuition is described well by Marina Tsvetaeva: “A poet is the reverse of a chess-player. Not only does he not see the pieces and the board, he doesn’t even see his own hand—which perhaps is not there.” It feels like that, like an absence that fills an approximation of the self; it seems at times that the “I” disappears, or is reduced to otherness. Perhaps it has something to do with transhuman consciousness as theorized by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, or with Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of a noosphere, a sphere of human thought. Vernadsky’s idea was that the emergence of human cognition transformed the biosphere, in the same way that the emergence of life transformed the geosphere. Both appeal to me. They are after all “poetic” and rather beautiful. I would like to think that intuitive moments could simply be pulled out of the air at will, like the hooked atoms of Epicurus, found moving in every direction, swarming around us like billions of golden bees. Fundamentally, intuition feels to me like a lived experience, and beyond that I quickly reach my omega point, becoming an infinitesimally small speck in the continuum. In poetry, intuition allows us to sharpen our twilight vision where language and meaning fade out beyond conceptualization. There in the vastness of mind are many other expressions and manifestations of lyrical intent. Poets must be able to retain the capacity to access many areas of consciousness and this necessitates a withdrawal from consensus reality. Space-time itself must lose its social and cultural baggage, if we are to see deeply into things. The transformation of consciousness involves a biphasic push; first, we need to Afterword / 55

extend our “knowingness” beyond the simplified viewpoint of the ego, and second, we must embrace new behavioural patterns. In my twenties, I learned to write by letting go of the poem. I found that I could begin by sitting in front of a blank page with no preconceived ideas of what should be written there. I discovered that meaning is like so many matrioshka dolls, one inside the other. Unlike the dolls, there is no final one. When you’re discussing meaning, it’s matrioshka dolls all the way down. So, without any search for meaning, or any goal-directed purpose, I developed a free-floating sense of metaphor. Eventually the old paradigm I’d been working under started to crumble, until even communication fell away. Instead poetry for me became communion, a primal expression of the underlying wonder manifested in the world around me. One can find a spiritual richness in the ascension to new forms of awareness. It opens us up to other lives and states of being. Using language, we can see beyond language. The Lakota people describe a sacred person as “going beyond knowledge”; poetry amounts to the same thing. The turning away from cliché and verbal weariness is in many ways a leap into the unknown. “The mind,” as René Magritte said, “loves the unknown. It loves images whose meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” Perhaps the unknown is also a recollection and joining with precognitive knowledge, the silent partner as it were, receiving sentience without the normal sensory means coming into play. The spiritual dimensionality comes from the openness you must have to all the possibilities of an empty page. This openness can present the poet with the noumena of existence, Kant’s “thing in itself ” becomes a more real experience. The self grows to include described reality; empathic intuition encompasses what it delineates from phenomena, absorbs it into our being. The disinterested, self-conscious, “normal” use of language is replaced by one that penetrates objects and living things. It identifies with them and in the process enlarges itself beyond strict cultural and social definitions of the self. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the Gnostics, who taught that intuition led to the mystery of the larger self, which led further to revelation. That transitory nature of reality, which caused Satan so much pain, can be for the poet a source of awe and sustainability. In some schools of Buddhism, it is believed that paramartha satya or ultimate truth cannot be expressed verbally. Here intuition is used to bypass dualism and empirical phenomena, to see into a richer reality. This is similar to what the poet can achieve when the work forces logic and intellect into the background. The amplification of presence, rather than reason, brings with it manifest signs of deeper concerns. The essences of things are seen as transient and wholly acceptable, because it

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is in their nature to be so. We can choose to love not simply the thing itself, but also its fragility, what the Japanese refer to as “the slender sadness.” This is where Satan fails; his ego does not allow him to accept the impermanence of matter. An intuiting poet, through his or her work, can find a sustainable position there, one of love and compassion, which if viewed correctly can be indistinguishable from the life process itself. Intuition delves beyond appearances, is independent of facts, or mental constructs. Its seemingly magical properties come from its sudden appearance in our mind. But we could be looking at an ongoing process just below consciousness that wells up after a considerable amount of time has passed. When I’m writing and a metaphor arrives spontaneously, it might have been gestating for months. The clutter of mundane reality may have to be reduced to allow what is already present to bleed through to awareness. Emptying myself of preconceived ideas when I face a blank page may be a reduction of that clutter, allowing a fuller sense of deeper possibilities to break through to the surface. Perhaps that is magic of a sort, pulling a nonverbal rabbit out of a precognitive hat, a sleight of hand without the hand. The sorcerous feel of sensing words and phrases that are needed always surprises me, despite decades of writing in this way. That bit of witching hangs in the air for a while afterwards, as sensory warmth just outside of any explanation. I wish I could interpret it, reveal the meaning implicit in some intuited definition, but that would be like Ouroboros swallowing its own tail; it might simply disappear in a fizz and a flash. That might be the unknowing of it, or at least proof of my own superstitions, afraid to place a jinx into the mix. I suppose there is a bit of hoodooism in all of this, a fetishism shining through all my conscious meanderings here on these pages. Perhaps the poem is a fetish offering to that transcendental experience, welcomed each time, after all the periods of frustration, failures, and dead ends in my work. The mediation of language distorts any definition, inhibits any effective explanation of intuition. There is no immutable, irreducible text that could carry the weight of this type of perception. No methodology that adheres to the rules of logic could encompass what is essentially an unpredictable whisper against the skin. Any representation taken from successive rational points of view is bound to fail. Any dialectic has strict limitations when confronted by intuition, which is at best vague and discontinuous. Lacking a cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to intuition we are often left with the idea that intuition is created ex nihilo, which brings with it the notion of the supernatural somehow lending a hand. That divine interpretation can bring traces of old gods back to our psyches, like minute particles of gold collecting along our neural synapses. But each of these approaches falls short Afterword / 57

of the mystery itself. The penumbra remains regardless of all the analysis. You can’t reduce intuition to elements previously known and explained, celestial or otherwise. For the poet, the aesthetics of the experience reaches its fruition on the far side of language. It must be brought back by a quantum leap, from an unarticulated silence to a system of symbols, which in the end can represent only a part of what has happened there. The rest is lost, escaping through the wide net of words. Yet what is lost to consciousness is integrated, finding its home in flesh and bone; it resides in our bodies like the ghosts of supplications continuously falling through our blood. That shimmer in our veins is the residue from long journeys through time and space, our explorations of what lies beyond and between the words themselves. From the infinite spaces between words comes pouring forth into consciousness a non-linear realization beyond the rigidity of names and forms. It comes as a ministering grace that allows us to lessen the grief of definition and separateness. Through intuition, we realize that the entire universe stands where we are standing right now, every stone, cricket, and star occupying the same space and moment with us, sharing the same presence that we identify as the self. Like intuitive meanings themselves, each becomes interchangeable with the other; there’s the rub, there’s the trembling, there’s the wonder. —Don Domanski

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Acknowledgements

Poems from collections now out of print—The Cape Breton Book of the Dead and War in an Empty House, published by Anansi Press; and Wolf-Ladder and Stations of the Left Hand, published by Coach House Press—appear here with permission of the author. Poems from Heaven and Hammerstroke are reprinted with permission of Anansi Press; those from Parish of the Physic Moon, with permission of McClelland and Stewart. The Cape Breton Book of the Dead (1975): Beldam Angels Summer Job: Hospital Morgue Heaven (1978): Summer-Piece The Sacrifice Sunrise at Sea Level War in an Empty House (1982): One for an Apparation A Netherpoem Sub Rosa Hammerstroke (1986): Snowbound Letter Visiting the Grandmother At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue Hammerstroke Hammerstroke ii Wolf-Ladder (1991): Dangerous Words Looking for a Destination The Sleepers Love Poem on the Sabbath A Perfect Forehead The Ape of God

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Stations of the Left Hand (1994): The God of Folding Excathedra Fata Morgana Epiphany Under Thunderclouds Before the Plague and the Breaking of the Fingers Lethean Lock Mneumonic Key He Leans Homeward Parish of the Physic Moon (1998): House Taking the Train to Fredericton The Passageway Walking Away What the Bestiary Said Sentient Beings Sleep’s Ova Banns

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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 Dennis Cooley By Word of Mouth: The Poetry of Dennis Cooley by Dennis Cooley, edited by Nicole Markotic´, with an afterword by Dennis Cooley • 2007 • xxii + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 1-55458-007-2; isbn-13: 978-155458-007-1 Lorna Crozier Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier by Lorna Crozier, edited by Catherine Hunter, with an afterword by Lorna Crozier • 2005 • xviii + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-489-6; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-489-8 Christopher Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney Dewdney by Christopher Dewdney, edited by Karl E. Jirgens, with an afterword by Christopher Dewdney • 2007 • xviii + 60 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-515-9; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-515-4 Don Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski by Don Domanski, Domanski edited by Brian Bartlett, with an afterword by Don Domanski • 2007 • xvi + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 1-55458-008-0; isbn-13: 978-1-55458008-8 Tim Lilburn Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn 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 + 8o pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-490-x; isbn-13: 978-088920-490-4