Dark Wild Realm Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  A Prologue

  BIRDS APPEARING IN A DREAM

  HOW SNOW ARRIVES

  THE WATCH

  ABOUT THE MOTH

  CONFESSIONAL

  SUMMER ANNIVERSARY

  BIRD CRASHING INTO WINDOW

  HOW DID IT GET INSIDE?

  TO THE MORTICIAN'S SON

  BOUGAINVILLEA

  SNOW DAY

  TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  THE MISSING MOUNTAIN

  SINGING, 5 A.M.

  OUT OF WHOLE CLOTH

  THEIR WEIGHT

  MINE OWN JOHN CLARE

  ELEGY FOR A LONG-DEAD FRIEND

  A WINTER FEEDING

  SPELUNKER

  THE MESSENGER

  A LINE FROM ROBERT DESNOS USED TO COMMEMORATE GEORGE "SONNY" TOOK-THE-SHIELD, FORT BELKNAP, MONTANA

  BIGGAR, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1976

  MEDEA'S OLDEST SON

  LOST HORIZON

  AUBADE

  BOAT RENTAL

  COMMON FLICKER

  INVOCATION TO THE HEART

  A NIGHT AT THE WINDOW

  THE LIFT

  TO A CHAMELEON

  NIGHT STORY

  TURKEY VULTURES

  IN MAY

  SHELLEY'S GUITAR

  BARDO

  THE NEXT NIGHT

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  Copyright © 2006 by Michael Collier

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  Visit our Web site: www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Collier, Michael, date.

  Dark wild realm / Michael Collier.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-618-58222-8

  ISBN-10: 0-618-58222-3

  1. Birds—Poetry. 2. Human-animal

  relationships—Poetry. I.Title.

  PS3553.0474645D37 2006

  811'.54—dc22 2005024759

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Robert Overholtzer

  WOZ 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Katherine

  A Prologue

  The mind shapes bodies

  that take on other shapes,

  changes no one but gods should make.

  And so I ask the gods

  to let this song lead deftly,

  back and forth through time,

  until it finds the shape

  of the world's beginning.

  BIRDS APPEARING IN A DREAM

  One had feathers like a blood-streaked koi,

  another a tail of color-coded wires.

  One was a blackbird stretching orchid wings,

  another a flicker with a wounded head.

  All flew like leaves fluttering to escape,

  bright, circulating in burning air,

  and all returned when the air cleared.

  One was a kingfisher trapped in its bower,

  deep in the ground, miles from water.

  Everything is real and everything isn't.

  Some had names and some didn't.

  Named and nameless shapes of birds,

  at night my hand can touch your feathers

  and then I wipe the vernix from your wings,

  you who have made bright things from shadows,

  you who have crossed the distances to roost in me.

  HOW SNOW ARRIVES

  The pine trees stood without snow,

  though snow was in the air,

  a day or two away, forming in the place

  where singing forms the air.

  "Mother?" is what I heard my mother say,

  said in such a way she knew her mother

  didn't know her, as if they stood

  beneath the trees and breathed the singing air.

  How frail the weather when its face

  is blank or, startled, turns to find

  its startled self in a child's voice,

  flake by flake of the arriving snow.

  "Mother?" is what I say, as if

  I didn't know her, standing blank

  and startled where she stands beneath

  the trees amid the singing air.

  THE WATCH

  Three days after our friend died,

  having dropped to his knees

  at the feet of his teammates,

  we are sitting in a long,

  narrow, windowless chapel,

  staring at his casket

  that runs parallel to the pews.

  It's like a balance beam

  or a bench you could sit on—

  floral sprays around it,

  a wooden lectern behind,

  and a priest nobody knew,

  a man I'd seen in the parking lot,

  pulling on a beret and stamping out

  a cigarette, all in one move,

  as he emerged from his car,

  holding a black book.

  And now he is reassuring us

  that our friend is in

  a better place, that God,

  too soon, has called him home,

  a mystery faith endures.

  Occasionally he looks down

  to check his watch, the habit

  of a man who always has

  a next place to be, which must be why

  he barely stays to finish the job.

  Our friend

  had the most beautiful voice

  and his guitar was as cool

  and smart, soulful

  in its registers. When he played,

  he gave his body to the music,

  his eyes closed sometimes and his head bent,

  sheltering what he made of himself,

  his fingers knowing the next place

  and the next—his voice, too—

  taking each of us with him.

  ABOUT THE MOTH

  If you think the dead understand silence,

  then why do they light their hems

  and burn in dresses? Why do they fan their wings

  against screens and windows as if they wanted in?

  Why do they show their wiry contraptions

  dusty with age and almost useless?

  They only want to wake us with their light

  unraveled from upper darkness.

  They only want to hear us speak our reassurances.

  Love will conquer, the heart endures.

  And when they've left—flames, dust—

  and frantic—we want them back,

  not the friends and parents they once had been

  but their new presences, sharp, unequivocal,

  buoyant in their crossing back and forth,

  inhabiting the condition they've become.

  CONFESSIONAL

  I was waiting for the frequency of my attention

  to be tuned to an inner station—all mind but trivial matter,

  wavelengths modulated like topiary swans on a topiary sea,

  and not quite knowing where the tide would take me.

  In the darkness where I kneeled, I heard whispering,

  like dry leaves. It had a smell—beeswax, smoke;

  a color—black; and a shape like a thumb.

  That's when the door slid open and the light that years ago

  spoke to me, spoke again, and through the veil,

  an arm, like a hand-headed snake, worked through,

  seven-fingered, each tipped with sin. What the snake c
ouldn't see,

  I saw, even as it felt what I felt or heard what I said.

  Then along my arms boils and welts rose, on my back

  scourge marks burned. I counted nails, thorns.

  In my mind, inside my own death's head, I could hear: "Please,

  forgive me. Do not punish me for what I cannot be."

  SUMMER ANNIVERSARY

  It was the night before the anniversary

  of your death, and the dream I had

  was not of you but of a neighbor

  who the day before had undergone some tests.

  He stood in his yard holding a rake

  the size of a palm frond.

  The grass was brown and the leaves

  on all the trees hung as they do in summer,

  patiently, not concerned they'll fall.

  It was the night before the anniversary

  of your death, and my neighbor with the rake

  had not yet heard the results of his tests

  and so he wanted to be ready for the leaves.

  He wanted to apologize as well for being

  in my dream. He said, "It's not like me

  to die." "You're not dying," I told him,

  "you're only in my dream." Then he disappeared.

  But the rake he'd held stood by itself,

  and the grass, now green, grew quickly

  up the rake and sculpted a creature

  whose wings stretched over me to catch

  the falling leaves, for all at once

  it was autumn and the sky let loose

  its winter fox and then its hound,

  though neither moved, and so the space between them

  grew, slowly at first, until it was at the speed

  of the world, unseen, spinning like time itself,

  pushing apart lover and beloved.

  BIRD CRASHING INTO WINDOW

  In cartoons they do it and then get up,

  a carousel of stars, asterisks, and question marks

  trapped in a caption bubble above a dizzy,

  flattened head that pops back into shape.

  But this one collapsed in its skirt of red feathers

  and now its head hangs like a closed hinge and its beak,

  a yellow dart, is stuck in the gray porch floor

  and seems transformed forever—a broken gadget,

  a heavy shuttlecock—and yet it's not all dead.

  The breast palpitates, the bent legs scrabble,

  and its eye, the one that can't turn away,

  fish-egg black, stares and blinks.

  Behind me, sitting in a chair, his head resting

  on a pillow, a friend recites Lycidas to prove

  it's not the tumor or the treatment that's wasted

  what his memory captured years ago in school.

  Never mind he drops more than a line

  or two. It's not a lean and flashy song he sings,

  though that's what he'd prefer—his hair

  wispy, his head misshapen.

  Beyond the window, the wind shakes down

  the dogwood petals, beetles drown in sap,

  and bees paint themselves with pollen. "Get up! Fly away!"

  my caption urges. "Get up, if you can!"

  HOW DID IT GET INSIDE?

  Not a message in a bottle

  but the keel and wrongs,

  the lap and brightwork,

  beams and thwarts, and belowdecks,

  in berths, hammocks hung.

  Yardarms unfurled reefed sails.

  Lines zinged through tackle.

  Sizing stiffened the jib.

  Hemp keelhauled pilferers

  of the mess. But now it rides

  at anchor in a dark room

  where dust occludes the mind's eye.

  Even so, you can hear

  the deckhand's wooden leg,

  like a butter churn, thump

  to the memory of his sawed-off limb,

  and the one-eyed crewmen gauge

  the captain's rusted hook.

  Somehow the corked-up wind

  still swirls, the spinnaker bursts.

  Speed moves the clouds

  and the clouds disperse.

  And the first mate's parrot,

  wired to its perch, knows—

  crow's nest to storm anchor—

  once you've survived

  the worst, the log records:

  hope first, then skill.

  TO THE MORTICIAN'S SON

  No choice but to be your father's son

  and yet never to be him, who moved like vapor,

  who stood secure as a pillar,

  and yet if not for you, prodigal,

  stuffed in a dark suit,

  if you had not tried to hand a program

  to the deceased's ex

  and usher her down the aisle like any mourner,

  I would not find you consoling now,

  not that I found you unsettling then,

  or that your slovenly discomfort would be memorable,

  especially the next day

  when we interred my friend,

  and you, positioned above the grave,

  after a while made little steps

  to move our small party down the hill

  toward the black cars. Consoling

  because my friend would have loved

  how unfit you were for the family trade

  and perhaps even enjoyed

  how you peeved his former wife,

  though not from malice,

  and made of his death some melodrama,

  human and absurd.

  BOUGAINVILLEA

  Of its productivity—

  whim of blossoming—

  hope that came

  of its luck, of shade

  struck triumphantly:

  of this, so much worry.

  Of its constant failure,

  travail trailing the tendering

  hand, and its rise by leaf,

  through eave-height and sun-cower,

  the too much and too little,

  of its thirst;

  from that was a life's consideration,

  the planted stave,

  the blessed frond replaced,

  and of the cul-de-sac opening—

  the garden of one concern:

  gaudy mirror for the hummingbird,

  bright reflection of stifled

  migration and the passage out.

  Of this was the perfume

  and suffering,

  the blossom trained

  over all contingencies.

  SNOW DAY

  It's snowing and it won't ever stop!

  In order for this to happen, the eastern tropics

  of the Pacific have had to cool or warm.

  Now the sun's not rising and the children,

  still asleep, dream of weather as a rippling

  curtain of northern lights across the arctic sky.

  Or the children are awake and dressed

  but have turned away from breakfast—

  all the radios and all the televisions are on.

  And even when the snow stops we will say,

  It fell all day! Who cares if the sun rose

  or the wind turned the trees to glass.

  That's how snow is, falling, never stopping,

  promising itself to itself, changing one day

  into the same day, like happiness into happiness.

  Now the sun is setting and the yard is blue.

  And only someone who loves cold

  and isolation could live like this,

  waiting at the window for disturbance,

  someone who wants the world buried,

  who loves the short days, the deep long nights,

  and then waking up to see nothing as it was

  before the snow began to fall.

  TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

  A lion is devouring a man.

  That's how they first appear

&nb
sp; when you come upon them

  in the gallery, beneath the skylight,

  among many other artifacts

  removed from the past.

  But the lion could as well

  be kissing the man. The animal mouth

  engaged with the throat, a leg

  behind the neck, a paw gripping

  biceps, supporting him

  who in his pleasure tilts back

  his head and spreads his legs,

  but only so far as the lion allows,

  for the lover's paw pins

  the human foot, crushes

  the toes and sandal of the man

  who is ravished but not consumed.

  THE MISSING MOUNTAIN

  Cars could reach the mountain's saddle,

  a notch between two peaks, and there

  survey the grid of lighted streets,

  a bursting net of beads and sequins,

  a straining movement cruising for release.