RECITE THESE DOORS 

       "MY God, if you had been a man, today 
         you would know how to be God..." 
                              Cesar Vallejo 

  You find yourself 
  a promontory, a stone 

  spur, somewhere on 
  the cold, deserted rim 
  of your windswept room, 

  somewhere where 
  night's naked ocean can 
  loom lewdly dark 
  above, where it can plunge 
  immensely, mute, cocksure 
  as death, 

  between the sleek 
  silk stockinged thighs 
  of all your shimmering days, 

  You want this. This 
  brute bruise is what 
  you seek, 
  what you've been shopping for, 

  what's always missed 
  beneath the crimson bows, 
  the ribbons and 

  the twisted tissue. Take 
  your place. Recite 
  these doors, these half 
  forgotten, savage doors, 

  aloud, 
  there on the rim 
  of your wracked room, 

  again and yet again, 
  until the blank, uncornered wall 
  gives way for you. 

  It's not enough, you'll say, 
  this interlude, this liquid pause, 
  this dazzled hesitation in 
  the court of night's motel. 

  It's not enough 

  that, on the tessellate patio 
  by the pool 
  the young girls gambol, on 

  their elegant stilts 
  and succulent secrecies, 
  their holy ice cubes on display 
  for boys to dazed to care 
  caught somehow in their heaving clay 
  and coin and cordite dreams. 

  Not nearly enough this skin 
  of storms laced with hot, quicksilver tongues, 
  the murky, mortal roil 

  that, even now, despite 
  the shallow mercies of 
  the sweating glass, 
  the cocoa rimes and shy, 
  well-meaninged parasols, 
  unshapes itself. It's not 
  enough, and too much as well; 
  the line, the lamp, 

  the rolodex of commercial wants 
  all cobbed and crooked from 
  the streamlined seasons 
  of the patented thumb, 

  can never hold 
  against the great diurnal feast 
  of mourning glories, 

  the sad sweet a capela round 
  that, after all these years, 
  still sounds the empty cathedral, 
  the ring stoned hill, 

  the shaggy, shade filled grove, 
  wherever day's bleached bones are ground 
  among earth's somber reliquia, to dust.
 

 NO WAY OUT 
 "You are only a troubled guest on this dark earth" 
                                           Goethe 

All night long we'd hugged 
the sullen Buckley stream 

west from Prince George. 
In Hazleton we switched off to 

the Skenna's course and saw 
 it grow with foggy light 

till dawn. There, in their tall 
totemic gravity, old 

Kitwanga's poles saw us across, 
and the soggy, cold gray air 

hung out across the hills 
to dry, began to fall. 

It's raining still, in that 
perpetual coastal way, 

when, just past Kitwancool, 
we top a gentle rise, and drop 

down to a hidden valley, long 
and narrow, wooded dense 

as fur as far as mist 
and sight. We stop the truck.

Get out. The silence is 
outweighed only by the smell 

of rot, and wet, and green. 
Our eyes, when they meet, say 

that we agree, that over this 
the Thunderbird keeps, still, his watch. 

A distant woodpecker raps, 
the urgent, signal burst, that sounds 

the silence like the dead 
do time, like dreams do life, 

and echoes in our startled hearts, 
as though they were cathedrals, 

but there is no way out. No, no 
way out, nor any in.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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