White on White by George Amabile (free ebook reader TXT) 📖

the air clears.

Nothing ahead but hills, a blizzard of stars
and off to the left, a tight roll of smoke, bars

of light behind it. A train. Bright
and safe, inching across the white

horizon. That's where I'd like to be, tucked up
with buttered rum and a book. Tough luck

mate

. The road curves to the right.
Something I can't quite

locate makes me blink, and stare.
Then I see it. That train is going nowhere.

It grows, and squirms out of shape, and I recognize
the slant roof of Simplot Fertilizer's

Brandon plant, big stack smoking, shed lights ablaze.
ALL RIGHT! I pound the wheel. But suddenly this craze

for long distance romance makes me feel faint.
Did I really drive my sad excuse for a car

this far
through killer cold with the blind faith of a saint?


2

City lights. No one left on the streets.
I cruise to a stop beside a Self Serve pump.

Gasoline jumps
in the hose. My nose burns. My feet

are so damn cold they're numb, though body heat
steams from the collar of my sheepskin.

I can already see her, half asleep in a thin
blouse at the door, houselight spilling over the drifted river

and the lovely way her mouth will slip
into that between-the-sheets grin

when she asks, "How long can you stay?"
Maybe I'll say

"Forever!"
(Maybe I'd better start back right away).


3

Morning. She's gone
downhill
and over the slate
green river
to work. I sit in the cold
kitchen, watching her things, the remains
of breakfast, a sheer blouse draped over a chair,
light through a blue bottle, burning
a lucid stain into the Irish wool
of my sweater.
In the window
a crystal turns on a string
and its blurred rainbow
drifts like a lost feather across the floor.
I feel her absence. It=s the room
closing around me, a pressure against my chest.
I force the stuck door to the roof
with my shoulder, clearing
a quarter circle in the snow.

A jet climbs over the city.
Its vapour trail fades into blue
distance. The air
sparkles with minute flakes
and sunlight is a faint astringent,
rinsing my fingers as they pull apart
stale toast for the sparrows.

How quickly they arrive
fluffed by the wind, cheerful
and quarrelsome. They pick the white
silence clean and leave
confused
tracks, a barbed-wire script in the snow.


THE ECLIPSE

An evening with friends. Snow
is floating down through shadowy elms
into the lit street in the silence
beyond Anderson's chair – his face
vital with stories
of wheat barges, lumber camps, the wild,
slow years coming of age,
and though I’m close enough
to touch his arm
a wish to be alone and apart
enters my mind like the iced edge of the moon.

* * *

Somewhere a clock is chiming. Twelve
cold strokes clear my head. Flakes
continue to fall. I stand
breathing their chilled awe till my face
grows numb and the snow begins
to fall, too, through the warm gloom
of my body. Suddenly
the whole flickering sift
stalls, and I'm rising, weightless
through a sea of sparkling facets
adrift, but drawn toward the clean, hard
core of the streetlight's diamond.

* * *

I'm there, walking
through chambers and echos of ice
but a voice, far off, breathing
belief into Blake's Everything
that lives is holy thaws
my flawless vision of light
and cold, so that brilliance
like a glass house under rain
runs together and spills when I blink
warm, emotionless tears.

Perfected flakes melt on my lips.
My ears ache. I watch
the keen air cloud my breath.
As it dies away, I move
toward gifts, ghosts, things that live
at the tips of tongues and fingers.

* * *

Collapsed in the arms of a stuffed chair
I wait for comfortable darkness to drain the chill
from my clothes... eyelids close, latch
the rickety gate of my grandfather's lettuce garden.
I comb the loose crisp leaves
for bugs to burn in the pointed light
of a magnifying glass
under cold sun, in slums by the sea.

But something knocks, knocks
against the walls of the world
and a patch of scrambled fencewire
burns through to a stand of elms at the window.

Even through chilled glass
I can feel the rough lift of boughs
rising out of the crystalized heart
of light, all that fierce purity
and I think of seeds, pressed
by a voice, a touch
into the body's intimate night
how they spring to life
even before we know
we need them. I sit listening
to the pause and pulse of blood
under these flickering images
that melt like snow as dawn climbs
from gray to pale gold
filling the room
with sunlight
and the shadows of trees.


BLAME


I thought we had learned
how to dissolve
self-importance into the sky
or the calm reach of a lake,
how to leave
some chaos in the shadows
of our lives. Why
stir up that pit
of reptile passion coiled
at the base of the brain?
Can it really matter
so much who
is at fault for the loss
of an address, the missed
appointment, the phone
call that should have been
returned, the broken
plate, the careless edge
of a phrase? Consider
this: when snow collects
in the apple tree
do we believe it will stay
forever? And when that frail
arrangement disintegrates
in a soft buffet of wind,
leaving so many branches
bare, do we try to change
or punish the air? You say
that letting things go
creates distance,
and distance is not love.
Not love, no, but the gap
love jumps to burn
at the heart of a storm.


APPLE WINE


1

Why do I still think of her voice
as an angel trapped in the soft rain of the shower?

I sit at the window, immobilized
by silence that jelled after she left
for work. The furnace clicks
and expires; air vents tick and the clock
in the kitchen whines like a stuck mosquito.

There are always risks. In love
even success can be stifling, like too much
ease. Soon we will drift
close again, get caught up and lost
as if in the pleasures of a magnetic storm
but for now there is this tough stretch
of patience: winter outside, the apple tree
stranded in deep snow, its trunk mottled
like a thousand year egg, its intimate crookedness
knotted against the glare of a stuccoed wall.


2

The wine's not ready to bottle yet.
It stands in a carboy, breathing
while earth draws the haze from its dubious past.

I can see myself in the highest branches, reaching
for half rotten fruit
tossing them into a plastic bucket
or shaking the tree so crabs will rain
down on the beautiful groundling
who yells at me with her tangy voice
because I forgot to announce
the onset of my two fisted storm
in the boughs, and suddenly
I'm surrounded by yellow-jackets.
They buzz my ears and tumble over my fingers
nipping at brown pulp
and rising heavily into the air.

Once, when I was a boy
they attacked and left me blind
for days, but now their bumpy flights
are openly disorganized
and it's clear that these childhood terrors
(helter-skelter war parties
gone astray in my hair
or stumbling over the knap of my flannel shirt)
have imbibed the spirits of wild yeast
and surprise themselves by melting
into fits of laughter I can't hear.


A PATCH OF LIGHT


All morning I’ve felt cold static
creak in my ankle bones,
but it’s my turn to tie skates
at the rink, at the school.

I’m late, but I’ve chosen this road
for the elms that close overhead
with a gesture I accept at once
as my own wish to shelter and protect.

Cloud wrack smothers the sun
but rust light through a wrestle of twigs
soaks into rough bark, a glow,
a patch of remembrance,
not summer, not
a recovered pulse,
or the sweet stain of time,
passing,
but one of those moments
in which we glimpse what we once thought


impossible,
the music of a dying star.

Out on the ice, his puffed buff mittens
batter the air for balance. He turns, cuts
across his own undecipherable trail,
accelerates to the crisp edge
of wipe-out and skids to a stop. He knows
I’m there, in the stands,
unremarkable in my shabby coat,
and he carries this knowledge like a goblet
he will not drink himself, but will not spill.


THE ICE THING


Hung from a branch, thin,
long limbed, angular and slick
as glass, a creature with head spikes,
back spikes, elbow spikes, shines
in the winter sun and stares at the child
who stares back from the picture window
at the stringy fingers, the preying mantis head.

He recognizes The Ice Thing
from the movies he watches at night
in his dreams. A story begins
to unfold, how it hibernates in daylight,