Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain. Russell Thornton

      and explain to me in Spanish that you don’t speak

      Spanish anymore. Or Portuguese. Or the Quebec French

      that jumps out of you. Explain to me that North Vancouver

      has the most beautiful cemetery you’ve ever slept in.

      No landlords, no need to pull a knife. With the different

      parts of your brain in the right places, explain it.

      With your jumble of words, lay down your head.

      With your jumble of words. With your single joint

      per day and the pain gone out of your skull. Let

      the sections of your head click into a proper machined fit.

      Yes, killed so many times, scattered in so many places,

      you can’t say—say a loud Fuck you! in the direction

      of your every past boss. Say it at your every Refugee Board

      hearing, at your every income assistance interview.

      Consult the cemetery’s visiting bear, coyote and deer.

      Consult the community of the dead flowing in unison

      beneath your head. Then make your many decisions

      and rule the parts of your head. My friend, my co-worker,

      here’s a coffee, a set of garden tools and plastic yard-bag.

      Come do your expert work. Whistle all day the songs

      that came to you in the night through the cold clean dirt.

      Greenness

      What am I now that I was then

       —Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

      I turn to grass tufts and see unsullied

      clear greenness displaying its steel. I see

      what I should see, simple close-mown spring grass

      like that of any suburban house lawn.

      I turn again and decades disappear

      and I see the dark grass all down the block—

      I wake, run out of a basement and go

      reeling across yard after wide yard. Here,

      I unlock a gate. Swing it open. Go

      to a neighbour’s front door. I knock, and ask

      for help. But I am still half in the house

      where I crouch, and we gaze at each other,

      my mother and I, while my father holds

      her so she will burn in the fireplace flames—

      it is only a pretend me who asks.

      Here, a woman blankets me and leaves me

      in a den. The simple grass I turn to

      is of the same greenness that pierces me

      where I sit in a deep plush chair and hear

      a man on a phone, sink and right away

      begin to dream of grass. Lawns touch my bare

      feet with cold dew and make me swift, shoot me

      full of starlight the grass stores in its maze

      of roots and make me shine bright. Here, I slip

      out of the blanket, the den, and go back

      outside and down the rows of blades all

      waiting to take me in. What I bring,

      I bring to grass to help it find its way

      beyond every house. I turn to grass

      that is close-mown, sunlit in the morning,

      and turn to the grass that rinses my eyes

      wide for the dark. When the soft spring rain flows

      busy through grass, the always houseless night

      helps continue this beginning. When grass

      lengthens and men come to cut it, I laugh

      with the laughing greenness. Unknown heaven

      in its depth in the grass, once here cannot

      be unmade. What I am now that I was

      then can only be what is in grass—here

      in what reaches breathing, reaching nowhere

      but from blade to blade. It breathes and is iron

      that is not cast by anyone but grows.

      The Rain Bush

      ...and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush

      was not consumed. And Moses said, I will now turn aside,

      and see this great sight...

       —Exodus 3: 2–3

      I heard kindlings, full flames, a furnace fire

      and singing ore. I turned aside and saw

      rain blowing into the branches of a bush—

      the molten metal cooling, magnetic,

      its memory of directions, its brilliant