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Coteau Books
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Contents
I. Seven Bridges Road
3
5
7
8
9
10
14
16
20
21
22
Glossary of Hills
along some rivers
Deer Dream
Rodeo Rain
On the road watched by horses
Poem for Looking Up
No Spook No Buck
Bicycle Notes
Seventh Bridge
Animal of Hay
Community Cemetery
II. The Light Observatory
27
28
29
30
33
34
36
38
40
Saskatchewan
The Light Observatory
Last Man
The Trouble with Beauty
Dialogue 1:
Professor Robert Adams Talks With a
Student as They Sit by Wascana Creek
and the Student Takes Pictures
We have landed on the continent of
night and left our flag
Eastend Municipal Campground
En Plein Air
The Mitchell Place
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III. Walking to Beauty
45
47
52
53
55
56
57
58
62
65
67
My Mother By a Bridge
Into the Wind
Noah, Little Sun Bear
Walking
Winnipeg Couch
With You
Advice
Valeport Marsh
Found
Blindly
The Dog
IV. Questions for an
Overcast Sky
71
72
73
74
75
Mobile Homes
Castle Bravo
Interview
Nina
The wind that uproots the trees
makes the grasses shine
77
78
81
82
Easter Sunday
Dialogue 2:
Regina Prairie Dog Interviews
Photographer Robert Adams
Askew
Grasslands
V. Latitudes
85
87
90
93
96
98
101
104
106
109
111
Origins
Latitude 66
Bone Houses
qimmiq
Born in the North
Lesson About Indians
Six Windows
Creek Music
Self-portrait as Landscape
Ovide
Untitled (talk to the hills)
Endnotes 113
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There are no unsacred places;
only sacred places
and desecrated places.
– Wendell Berry
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I.
Seven Bridges Road
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Glossary of Hills
There should be a glossary of hills
if only to say golden afternoon light on a butte
weathered down to the clay is not old,
though these hills are old. There should be a sign for the breath
taken in the space between one hill and another,
a notation for a voice on a ridge.
We need a name for one slope disappearing
into the mist of the next and the faint green hyphen
joining ourselves to distance, to the deep memory
of how once we studied hollows for life,
knapped blades from a flint core, learned
and remembered it all as if our lives depended on it – and they did.
Then we would know how ancient we’ve become
watching the shallow brown river
that seems not to move, all the while cutting away the time we have left.
3
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There would be no apostrophes
in the Book of Hills, no possessive form.
To open the cover would be like looking
into the mirror
of our own faith, all the lost translations,
the songs at the end of the wind.
4
The Trouble with beauty
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along some rivers
– the heart goes dry
ferns disappear into their roots
a brief drink of snowmelt then the wait for the promise
of light June rain that never comes
some rivers are shallow
and their warm streams feed a plain
where timorous lives scurry to ground as song dogs
criss-cross their precarious freedom
along some rivers love walks
in places it has not been in years
a girl lies naked on a blanket
her skin illuminated like paper in the silvery night
as she leads you into the water
the ripples she makes lick the air and the darkness
you try to embrace her but she just wants to swim
so she escapes you again and again
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along some rivers the galaxy sheds itself of light –
an overgrown circle of stones under the tree
where your brother watched the fire all night
before he left home and was gone forever
all that remains is an invisible mass that pulls you toward it
the need for solace so deep you mistake it for beauty
some rivers are forty paces wide and cross half a continent
we plough right up to the edge but something in us knows
all life wants is a little water and we remember clearly abundance
remains of the roses the wind took apart
the path we walked over and over again as if that could save us
the river goes on with its winding
the line of the day is long
you come across machinery left for rust
at the end of the scar it made in the ground
and how they grow into one another and sure
memory is deeper than that but it matters
the smallest change matters
6
The Trouble with beauty
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Deer Dream
The deer steps from brush
into a dream on the crest of a knoll that the sun
has gone under
and the grass
and the hill turn the same colour as the deer.
The memory of light drains slowly
branches click as if they were talking to horses
the crown of the bluff facing west dusted with cinnamon.
The field in the bottom land makes a loom of the air’s long journey and ends
like a river gone into the ground.
The deer has grown darker, almost black
spirals of light in the sea of its back –
by the half-buried wall, a breath warm as blood
and the heart
that beats even now.
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Rodeo Rain
There’s the question of Red's hooves
throwing mud over two rows of bleachers.
Grey sky comes down on fierce fields, horse trailers
scattered like pieces of jigsaw puzzle
that just won't fit. There’s the skill,
work my father turned his back on
because it could kill him.
The sunshower passes. Big Red
slides round the last barrel as I blow
on my coffee and the heat
comes back to my face. An old love affair flickers
hopeful and slightly ridiculous – sure thing, my kid and hers
could be out between the trailers with their jeans half off. Why not?
If a guy wanted he could be in the corral right now
slipping around in that sloppy mud and shit, pulling
for all he's worth on a rope with a wild horse on the end.
He could be down there with horses he owns, a tug of whisky
burning its way down, the rope in his teeth. The gate
could be open. A rope swimming through air and a horse
that won’t ease up. But damn.
Damn the rain.
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The Trouble with beauty
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On the road watched by horses
a white one
a black one, their winter coats dull
the corral churned by hooves
you might think the girl with startled green eyes
longs for the town. She knows
these roads, every rock that took out
an oil pan, near misses
and blind turns all the way down from the farms up top.
And the constellations at night
(there are lines up there too)
she makes up her own names
and the Seven Sisters write to her all winter long.
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Poem for Looking Up
I come to this hilltop broken, lie back
in the strife of another year’s grasses.
I’d sink deeper if I could. My body warms the ground
as the ground wraps round me
and the hills roll out in long exhalations.
———
I close my eyes, wait for the image
that never seems to appear, though the masses and rivers,
the corners of light – these are mine.
And never mind what the eyes are windows of –
I believe in looking up and falling into,
the place where the clouds break apart.
The shush of the distant highway tells me how far away
everything is, something human in the folds of air.
———
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The Trouble with beauty
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Three mornings I’ve woken
in a room with clouds.
A ferruginous hawk sails by, looks all the way through me
as she has through a thousand skies.
———
There’s a diction of clouds that comes from lives spent in the open,
scallops and mares’ tales,
cirrus messages to the watched earth.
The sky mostly watches itself.
I sift cobalt and azure – for a word that sits in the ear
but it’s never quite right.
———
There ‘s a dark line inside me.
I know it too well,
my great illusion
and all this chanting into emptiness –
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a vascular song,
the push of a breath on the back of a small clump of grass
and all the inconsequential goings-on that find their way upward.
They rise and they rise
and everything comes to their music,
lives in the windbreak and the yipping of coyotes.
———
Spring settles misty and gray
on tongues of land that used to speak to a river:
Clothing the Naked,
Relieving the Thirsty – which Act of Mercy?
———
What was the land before it was landscape,
before the rumours of ten-foot tall grasses, calving ice
or the salty deltas of the Bear Paw Sea?
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That was before,
before and before.
What should I say or paint when dawn arrives thin
as a drop of blood spreading through water, or winter sun
ruptures the horizon like a white flame –
a clearing storm in the west after an all-day rain, the edges of clouds
glowing like heated wires.
Cumulous and stratus – these are the swollen valleys and saffron fields
that I walk through
when I open my eyes.
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Found
No Spook No Buck
shadow is black with a star on her head she is almost 16
hands and completely quiet nothing phases her. good with
machinery, dogs, and other horses. loves her oats and attention.
she has been ridden through water,
along highways, works on cows when asked. and will go down
any trail you ask her to.
NO SPOOK. NO BUCK.
i have sat double on her and rode her all over
the place like that. and i have [been] out over fourteen miles a day on her in just
a halter riding bareback. she has a awesome walk and trot and a even
nicer lope. she is a beautiful mare and has never spooked at anything.
bunnies and antelope jumping out in front of her doesn’t bother her. she is easy to catch
and trailer. if you push her she will go after cows or turn barrels for you.
i havent swung a rope off her but you can pull a log behind her and she doesn’t
mind. you can kneel or stand on her back. and you can slide off her butt.
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ive ridden her in the dark also. she has only been ridden in a halter or snaffle bit. she would make a
awesome horse for anyone. i have had people who have never ridden before ride her without
a problem. Than when i get on her i can chase down the cows
or other horses if they get out or i can take her to the arena
and run barrels on her. she is not a really really fast horse
for being a thoroughbred. she is a super mare and will only
go to an approved home. make me a offer on her. i would consider a trade
for a barrel horse or rope horse of equal value. this girl
has a lot of life left in her. she has never come up lame or anything like that.
her hooves are good as well.
the picture... is of me on her after i dropped the saddle off her back
while sitting on her. yes thats right ... i had ridden a good ten miles on her
and dropped the saddle off and laid on her. and she didn’t
even move. this ol girl really needs
a good home...
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Bicycle Notes
There must be a reason cows
look at you they way they do, creamy Charolais,
so temperamental. But this is spring,
months from autumn’s reckoning.
Only one raises her head to gaze at the puffing human
balanced on a two-wheeled machine.
She resumes her munching as the trundle
of twenty-year old gears carries you up the road.
See what winter has done
to your favourite place, the stone barn’s roof
become a well of timbers,
shingles draped like chain mail over a body
that has somehow forgotten to fall.
Across the first bridge, a lugubrious magpie
starts in with its questions. It is speaking
Patois today, Ouais. Ouais. Ouais.
Roll up to Griffiths’ Campground and Farm, the parking lot
circus of playschool kids, Missus Griffiths
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The Trouble with beauty