Omens in the Year of the Ox Read online

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Price, Steven, 1976-

  Omens in the year of the ox / Steven Price.

  Poems.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-771314-03-9

  I. Title.

  PS8631.R524O64 2012 C811'6 C2011-908120-2

  copyright © Steven Price, 2012

  We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

  Cover design by Michel Vrana.

  The author photo was taken by Esi Edugyan.

  The print edition of the book is set in Bembo.

  Brick Books

  431 Boler Road, Box 20081

  London, Ontario N6K 4G6

  www.brickbooks.ca

  About this Book

  Omens, curses, the reading of entrails: means of grappling with what is out of our hands, beyond our ken.

  Steven Price’s second collection is part of a long-lived struggle to address the mysteries that both surround and inhabit us. The book draws together moments both contemporary and historical, ranging from Herodotus to Augustine of Hippo, from a North American childhood to Greek mythology; indeed, the collection is threaded with interjections from a Greek-style chorus of clever-minded, mischievous beings—half-ghost, half-muse—whose commentaries tormentingly egg the writer on. In poems that range from free verse to prose to formal constructions, Price addresses the moral lack in the human heart and the labour of living with such a heart. Yet the Hopkins-like, sonorous beauty of the language reveals “grace and the idea of grace everywhere, in spite of what we do.” The pleasures of Price’s musicality permeate confrontation with even the darkest of human moments; the poems thus surreptitiously remind us that to confront our own darkness is one of the divine acts of which humans are capable.

  For Jacqueline, old friend

  Contents

  The Crossing

  I

  Field Guide to the Sanctuary

  Odysseus and the Sirens

  Chorus

  Jarred Pears under Dust

  Icarus in the Tower

  The Wrecking

  Chorus

  Danube Relic

  Auto-da-Fé

  Bull Kelp

  Arbutus

  A Gloss on Arbutus

  Raccoon in Ditch

  Chorus

  Reparations

  Bach’s Soprano

  Orpheus Ascending

  II

  The Tunnel

  Midwife’s Curses

  The Tyrant’s Physician

  Medea

  Ghosts

  Gardener’s Curses

  Three Blues

  The Inferno

  Curses of the Blind

  Omens at the Edge

  III

  The Excursion

  Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife

  Omens in the Year of the Ox

  The Persian General

  Chorus

  Dr Johnson’s Table Talk

  Plumb

  Odds Were

  Kid

  The Boy Next Door

  Chorus

  Late Rehearsal: Requiem in D Minor

  The Second Magi Returns to Parthia

  Stations of the Geode

  At the Edge of the Visible

  Transparencies

  Mediterranean Light

  Omens at Dusk in the Year of the Dragon

  Notes & Acknowledgements

  Biographical Note

  We pass these things on,

  probably, because we are what we can imagine.

  Robert Hass

  The Crossing

  I

  So. At the end of the middle of your life

  you wake, rain-shivering, to a white railing

  in a shriven dusk. A strangeness churning

  under the hull, the great blades boiling through

  ferruginous waters. So the ferries sail still

  in this late age, vast holds half-full of souls.

  And so you rise, each day, more than you were.

  Exhausted, maybe, into silence. When Bridges

  wrote, How is the world’s bright shift held

  in such a cluttered line? Hopkins, in a rage,

  had no answer. Or none beyond his poetry.

  Rain in silver ropes overrunning his faith,

  his metre marking long great gulps of night air.

  So the waters gulp at the mournful hull,

  so the rusted bolts bleed. You unfold both

  fists in the charred coastal dusk, watching

  a white chill krill across their skin. Bright shift,

  cluttered line. If the ill of the world issues

  up out of the world, then there is no course

  but to praise it. As Hopkins praised it. In the straits

  a slack foam froths blackly in the scum, and you

  who are water stare at that water, blurred

  by old hurts praise holds no part in, here

  at the edge of a dark crossing that is always

  evening. As if called to account for a life

  lived in the provinces. But there is no

  calling to account. You sway at a railing

  staring west, towards desolation, that is, forgetting.

  II

  In Gaudí’s Palau Güell, with her. How the walls

  wept into form, as you wandered hall to hall

  in that black building, astonished such a shape

  could hold. The built thing made bright shift of.

  Gaudí had given Güell an allegory of the cross,

  both sculpture and story. It was a spatial truth

  he’d sought: an ascension up, up

  seven stories towards the spires of heaven.

  That cellar with its termitic columns,

  that cellar where partisans were tortured,

  that cellar of sand, dust, stone: that was Hell.

  You rested under the white shards of pottery

  on Gaudí’s rooftop, watching a white cat pour

  past her ankles like blood-threaded milk

  while a red sun drenched the staggered chimneys.

  How she looked at you, suddenly perplexed.

  And when you asked, What is it? she laughed,

  having just forgotten what it was. Nothing,

  she said, meaning everything she already had.

  There is your desire, and her desire, and each

  touches many things. You carried Hopkins

  all through Spain, wanting to get closer

  to something. His stark Jesuit suffering, perhaps.

  Tracing your burned fingers along the cool

  ancient stones in the narrow streets

  of the Gothic Quarter, his music

  in your head. We believe we are living

  one life and learn too late we have been

  living another, she said. If all our pasts

  are possible pasts then we are no kind of gone.

  On Gaudí’s tiled roof she pointed past a line

  of smoky blue spires in the Barcelona haze,

  and you felt your future darken before you.

  Does it matter now if none of that is true?

  You know that you cannot, maybe, bring her

  into that city, where she was not. Still, there

  she waits, as you waited, under the locked

  iron grillwork of the Palau Güell, sick

  with absence, which was the real crossing,

  and was in everything, and is, and has no end.

  III

  The smoky waters are the still sou
r yellow

  of poisoned milk. A brooding sky recedes.

  At the stern a ragged passenger perches,

  collar rolled cold against a windblown dawn,

  almost her. You shade your eyes, look away.

  Frenzied light, sea like crumpled foil—

  the world burns redly up out of the strait,

  silent, and vague, and sinister, like a dream

  interrupted. You had been reading about love

  and evil, how the one would transcend

  death and the other deny it. Death

  being both bright shift and the upwelling.

  So your shadow ducks the deck’s edge

  to shatter in the spray, and so you go

  back, going back. To the monster that stalked her

  through a clattering train carriage in Catalonia,

  who shuffled like an old man, who shouldered

  no luggage, blue eyes half-kind as he stared

  her into meat, trembling with age and what

  already had been done and what he would

  do again. Evil is its own element,

  and real, it pours from itself like a sea, all flux,

  whole and divisionless and without center.

  When next you see her she will not, it’s true,

  be who she was. You watch night bell murkily,

  fathoms down, sinking deeper; at the far rail

  a faint sun flares, its vicious hooks flowing

  round you and in you, clutching for purchase.

  In the swells the grizzled gulls glide and cry.

  She will never, will never, will never die.

  IV

  What is steadfast? Nothing is steadfast. You

  sailed for the desired world, remembering.

  How Gaudí’s friend and patron, Güell, died

  of a burst heart in 1918, and the works fell still.

  Fierce, shabby Gaudí. Shuffling into decay.

  That was the year Bridges dredged up his dead

  friend Hopkins’ forced and gnarled verses,

  in a brief embarrassed print run. Few copies

  survive; the poems go on. What is steadfast?

  Sunlight shivers on the face

  of the imperceptible now, as if in answer.

  V

  In the end all is a river that flows from fog

  to fog, that darkens the selves within us.

  In the end, for the tides, this world is the world

  it was. So the waters recede and recede,

  so you trudge out after them, hopeless.

  Trusting a far shore exists. Absolute

  love, wrote Bridges from the long drift

  of his fame, is measured hour by hour.

  Where I say hours I mean years, mean life,

  wrote Hopkins. All of us arrive, somehow,

  in the here. The black firs loom and pass

  in the cold light of the crossing. Far out,

  gulls drift and disarticulate in the grey,

  their song an ugly, rasping appetite.

  As it is in all of us. The final waters,

  fanged and liquid, open under our feet.

  Who wrote that? A Spanish poet, most likely.

  You remember walking the fragrant lanes

  of Mojácar at dusk, the lemon trees belling

  low over the orchard walls. As you crossed

  a corner into a gulch a huge darkness

  detached itself from the ditch and glided

  growling out, all sinew and razored shadow

  blocking the middle of the end of that road.

  Its black hackles bristling. And you understood:

  you could go no further.

  Field Guide to the Sanctuary

  I

  A grey lagoon searing dark

  with chill winds. Rockstrewn

  strands lashed and scoured.

  What eddies here wants

  no mercy. Is salt and savage.

  Snub-blunt and sculling

  the grey gulls punch

  their weight in the spray, lift,

  hang over humped middens

  shingled to chalk-shell,

  shaled and cold. Watch

  their world wheel under.

  II

  I have seen this, seen

  this. The dart and snaking

  barb of swans at feed.

  A slow child swarmed

  by slithers of char-geese, dragged

  howling into black water.

  The folded plunging incision

  of hawks in the wash;

  feathers scalpelling the air,

  sharpening. Look dead

  in any eye: terror

  clockworks there.

  III

  A mallard’s worm-

  swaying skull swivots, stabs,

  plicks at greased gun-

  feathers underwing. A wind rises:

  the steel waters sheen and chop.

  One gull swells up, is blown

  like a plastic bag out over the drop;

  most wait out the worst

  huddled grim. The world

  here is harsh, guttural, or still.

  Threnody plays no part.

  On an outcrop, now, kneel,

  observe the birds’ ferocious art.

  Odysseus and the Sirens

  Here

  their

  fear

  churned

  him hard;

  that scarred

  smoke-glarred

  strand burned

  like black shell;

  his men held

  their ears well-

  stogged with wax

  and cut, dipped, dragged

  through froth oarblades,

  old shafts gone grey—

  their knuckled backs

  wracked by hard rowing—

  as, lashed fast, flowing

  with rope and roping

  his muscles in knots

  of their own cording, he,

  Odysseus, hung; leaned

  low, gasping at that beam,

  bloodied ears shunted shut—

  when came the breached dream out of the sea.

  Scorched wharves. Slit fish noonspackled with heat.

  Now was this land that he knew; now surging on past could he make out

  white hills, sunhammered, walls hazed in the blur

  and his eyes afire hawked fast, hunted her—

  not this, nothingness, this

  no-song of wind and hiss

  and spray, gulls in tall gusts

  shoaling over shore rocks—

  in that rain-flared chop

  their oars, all surge and scup

  of salt-stripped cedar, stopped;

  he stared back in shock:

  a battered beach,

  kelp-strangled, seethed

  with mysteries

  and wind-amped cries

  damp with want;

  he shook then;

  he, ropes rent,

  shut his eyes—

  that land

  of stunned

  black sand

  was love:

  shore

  our

  horrors

  sing of.

  Chorus

  In they’d drift, almost motes, like echoes

  of the eye, like articles of dust

  stirred in the drapes’ dreary pall.

  “See with the eye,” they admonished,

  “and seeming will be less and less.”

  “He has no ear for longing,”

  sighed one, or was it: “He hears no air

  of longing”? I screeled clear the drapes

  on tarnished rods, seeing neither shape

  nor shroud. “See,” said another,

  “he sees nothing not his own.”

  “We are his own.” “Or were his own.”

  Knuckling shut my eyes to caulk shut

  my skull. “He thinks he can ignore us,”

 
; one hissed; “this singing he signed on for

  never had sense in it.” “Stubborn.”

  For God’s sake, I muttered, I can hear you,

  I’m here, I’m right here—

  At which each silvered into blessed silence.

  I listened to the sweet nothing

  adrift in the drapes. But then:

  “Did he just say he’s right?” “Right here.”

  “Who is he?” “What is right?”

  “Where is here?”

  Jarred Pears under Dust

  A man’s bruised hand glows

  like glass. Unthreads the lid,

  pries back the brass cap

  in a wet suck of icy air.

  Jarred pears drift in flecks

  of what serene fire, drift

  burning with what sweetness.

  In any jar an inner autumn

  rises: calved pears float

  pure, float white; and a boy’s

  bruised hand pours out

  light. We walk a heavy

  orchard all our days

  to watch such white fruit fade.

  Icarus in the Tower

  As if winched in harness

  he works late, his withered desk’s

  worn olive-wood blurred—

  works, all wax and bristling

  quill in the murky wine-dark shine.

  O my strange, sad father.

  How he does not see me.

  Tangled in the bars of our cell

  the lyred tendons

  of dried seabirds

  stretch, or split, or dangle

  over scrolls we sketched for lift.

  I lie like a coal in the dark straw

  seething with light.

  I stare and stare.

  He shuffles forth

  in his frail creaking contraption

  of leather-twined harness,

  rib-crossed strap. In candlefire,

  clips the brass buckles fast,

  the wings soft in the smoky burn.

  Then turns; mutters; widens

  the twiggy light-as-bone

  wingspan of his wattled arms.