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

then wakes and comes down to hunt
in the dark, how its bite will melt
small animals to plasma which it drinks
through a tube that sprouts from its chest.

He imagines adventures, crises,
how it stood once, frozen
in the headlights of a police cruiser,


then leapt, five or six times
its height to escape in the oaks along the river.

All winter it hangs there, in the cold
light. Then, after a night full of rain
it’s gone. The child imagines it has returned
to the universe, galaxy, home world
or dimension from which it came; listens
as it tries to explain, in that language
of hand signs, glottal clicks and sharp
harmonics, how it survived
separation from the collective
as none of its kind ever had, because
of a creature, an alien child
whose eyes glowed like the green moons
above their white planet.


HEARTH


I kneel before ticks and whispers,
the sudden rush of flame,
the roar that puffs a drift of soot
from the flue. Is it really the same
insatiable appetite that raised a storm
of sparks in the dream time
the wind like a huge white bird
beating its wings against the mouth
of the cave, scattering embers
and charred bones, driving us
back into a choked throat
of stone, into darkness
and hunger and broken sleep?

The grey crust cracks, falls
away. The glare
inside releases crimped threads
of smoke that stretch
and vanish
into a black absence
where something very old
howls
and is still.

A back draught floods the room
with harsh scents, with moments
the body almost remembers:
terror and wonder and grief
preserved, but inaccessible
like the unwritten history of fire and snow.

Flecks of nearly invisible shadow
swim over the floor, the furniture, my clothes, my skin,
like the first signs of life in a bleached sea.


ZEN AND THE ART OF CROSS COUNTRY SKIING


Health. A matrix
of jewelled afternoons,

hard shadows on glazed snow,
the sun, splintering, through evergreens.

Such definition. Exhilaration
a quick lick of blue light, and wind

like raw silk in the lungs
on the trails, thighs powdering through drifts

or gliding over the rhythmic slither-hiss and glass
clicks where waxed edges plough the small ice

lace, and bunched, roughed up snow goes by like the white rush
in a speedboat’s wake and the breath is pulled in or measured out

by body heat, stoked and banked in its nest of layered cottons
and polyester skins, until the everyday word chains clear

off and I can see how language is an architecture
of knives scissoring this from that, I from my structured

muscled bone, we from they, and everything else
from the world in which it lives, a habit I learned

when my pulse abandoned childhood, a contract
with factual destinies that hang like snow packs

over the landscapes we cruise through
so easily we forget to ask how we got them

around us, or how we can leave them
out of our dreams.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR


George Amabile has published his poetry, fiction and non -fiction in the USA, Canada, Europe, England, Wales, South America, Australia and New Zealand in over a hundred anthologies, magazines, journals and periodicals including The New Yorker, The New Yorker Book of Poems, Harper's, Poetry (Chicago), American Poetry Review, Botteghe Oscure, The Globe and Mail, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, Saturday Night,, Poetry Australia, Sur (Buenos Aires), Poetry Canada Review, Canadian Literature, and Margin (England).
Born in Jersey City, N. J. he holds an A. B.(Hons) from Amherst College; an M. A. (Univ. of Minnesota) and a Ph. D. in English Literature (Univ. of Connecticut). He was Writer in Residence at University of British Columbia for 1969-70, co-founder and editor of The Far Point, founder and editor of Northern Light, has edited a dozen titles for Nuage Editions, Signature Editions, Penguin and has published eight books. The Presence of Fire (McClelland & Stewart, 1982), won the CAA National Prize for literature; his long poem, Durée, placed third in the CBC Literary Competition for 1991; “Popular Crime” won first prize in the Sidney Booktown International Poetry Contest in February, 2000; “Road to the Sky” received an honorable mention National Magazine Award for 2000, “What We Take with Us, Going Away” was shortlisted for the CBC Literary Prize in 2003 and he is the subject of a special issue of Prairie Fire, (Vol. 21, No. 1, May 2000). From October 2000 to April 2001 he was Writer in Residence at the Winnipeg Public library. “Dimuendo” was awarded third prize in the Petra Kenney International Poetry Competition for 2005 and “A Raft of Lilies” won second place in the MAC national poetry contest, “Friends” (2007). He has performed his poems on the CBC, at numerous venues in Canada and the USA, and at the Olympics in Montreal His most recent publications are Rumours of Paradise / Rumours of War (McClelland and Stewart, 1995) and Tasting the Dark: New and Selected Poems (The Muses Company, an imprint of Gordon J. Shillingford Publishing, 2001).


Imprint

Publication Date: 12-23-2009

All Rights Reserved

Dedication:
for my partner Annette, and our son, Evan