Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. Russell Thornton

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      OTHER BOOKS BY RUSSELL THORNTON

      The Fifth Window (2000)

      A Tunisian Notebook (2002)

      House Built of Rain (2003)

      The Human Shore (2006)

      Russell Thornton

      Copyright © 2013 Russell Thornton

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca, 1-800-893-5777, [email protected].

      Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.

      P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC, V0N 2H0

       www.harbourpublishing.com

      Edited by Silas White

      Cover art by Golya Mirderikvand

      Cover design by Angela Caravan

      Print edition text design by Mary White

      Printed and bound in Canada

      Harbour Publishing acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Thornton, Russell

       Birds, metals, stones and rain / Russell Thornton.

      Poems.

      ISBN 978-1-55017-601-8 (paper)

      ISBN 978-1-55017-657-5 (ebook)

       I. Title.

      PS8589.H565B57 2013 C811'.54 C2013-900212-X

      Birds, metals, stones and rainare mother, father, daughter, son,birth, death, heaven, hell, prison, rescue, blindness, sight, the only time, the only place,birds, metals, stones and rain.

      I

      Squall

      The clinking becomes a ringing,

      solid and clean. The spikes go straight

      into the wide earth, the four poles

      into the sky. The canvas bells

      and flaps, and stays taut in the wind.

      That is the tent in a lost camp.

      The drumming deepens and quickens.

      Wild and intricate, it allows

      a melody to break from it,

      a mist to lift off it and through.

      That is the wet ghost that will ride

      along the edges of the flesh.

      The plane surface stands brilliant

      within the vastness of metal,

      and a winged drop of a small bird

      flies chirping out of a keyhole.

      That is the newborn that unlocks

      the clear mirror door of the rain.

      The Oldest Rock in the World

      A news item: Oldest rocks in the world found on barren Quebec shore

      And brought my hand down on the butterfly

      And felt the rock move beneath my hand.

       —Irving Layton, “Butterfly on Rock”

      In memory of Irving Layton

      They look as if they are in mid-tumble

      out of the bare and windswept swathe

      of outcropping bedrock on Hudson Bay’s

      eastern shore a one-hour canoe trip

      south of Inukjuak. These boulders

      of the Nuvvuagittuq greenstone belt—

      four and a third billion years old,

      dating back to a mere three hundred

      million years after the globe formed

      out of a cloud of cosmic debris and dust.

      When the planet was being pummelled

      by meteors, comets and asteroids,

      microbes interacted with iron

      in the primordial seas and emerged

      as Earth’s very earliest life,

      and nestled in sediment and wrote

      their bio signature in the rust that fills

      these boulders’ creases. Now beyond

      the treeline, beyond houses, the boulders

      have sat longer than the combined lifespans

      of countless generations of animals—

      far longer than human history

      and any dreaming of the way within rock

      or of a dying back to when only rock

      framed what would be wind for human breath.

      Now the microbe might bless us. Allow

      us to stand trembling in bright, bright light.

      Witness our core, the one annunciation.

      Hear us: from out of the depths have we

      called thee, from out of our will and wonder—

      the doors in us so closed, we think the door

      to rock is shut. We cannot die or love enough—

      and love, though it brings us to its door

      and unlocks it for us, will not follow—

      and our signatures nestle in time and we

      forget them. Wind is in a hand of force

      that wraps around wind, and the rock has moved

      and taken our hand, our hand made of nothing

      other than what the rock is made of—

      in death we lose nothing that is not

      of the death and life of this rock. The wind

      moves endlessly, and the rock moves around

      the wind, and the planet moves around

      the wind and around the sun, and around

      everlasting cosmic debris and dust.

      Wind