Embersift

Nights without dawns
Save the rake of cold ash
For dusty red pearls
To coax toward suns

Starlessly dark
A moon out of sight
Weaves word of itself
On a hard loom of black

Alone—but a thought
Without light, without feel
Pressing on silence
Essence shifts

Turning is building
In soil’s rank give
In blindness so utter
Pale filaments shine

Furrows

Found circa 1962, by my grandfather, in a furrow on his wheat farm outside Boharm, Saskatchewan. He mailed it to me in a small cardboard box, swaddled in layers of cotton batting. No writer usually (no time!), he took the time, the year before he died, to pen a story to his seven-year-old grandson, conjecturing about the Indian who might have shot a buffalo on the open plain, who knew how many hundreds or thousands of years before.

It was the treasure of my childhood, never more than an arm’s length from my bed, where I could retrieve and study it. A perfect arrowhead, with a gracile point, and a notched base so cleanly made it was impossible not to imagine it secured (by hide strips soaked and shrunk, I’d read somewhere) to the shaft. Strangely two-toned in colour: whitish as though frosted on top, but an almost translucent amber underneath.

Lost one day, it must be forty years ago. No warning or clue. Just gone. Both the arrowhead in its box and the note with the story under it. Missing it bitterly, I sensed the actions of the perfect thief, as perfect in his or her way as the arrowhead. The thief that, knowing what you value most, goes straight past your wallet or your passport to a faded cardboard box with yellowing cotton. An intimate thief. The secret thief.

Found the other day, as I was cleaning out my parents’ house prior to putting it up for sale. The tiny box, its cotton nest now beige, at the bottom of a bigger box at the rear of the lowest shelf in storage—the remotest corner of the house. Intact, the arrowhead, but with its tip snapped off along with one side of its base. Still no note.

Postrscript to the Girl with Long Black Hair

To live outside the law you must be honest. —Dylan

And that, too, might help to answer your objection that an ogre can’t be reasonable. For perhaps the smaller ogres can’t, the regular random hustlers after flesh, obeying the usual and well-known laws of predation.

But for the largest ogres, the true monarchs of the dark: these have need of codes for their feeding. These will not, cannot, deprive without rightful ceremony and strict adherence to a rule.

The Reasonable Ogre

www.reasonableogre.com

“How can an ogre be reasonable?” asked the girl with long black hair. “They’re not like that. It’s simply impossible.”

I tried to explain my point of view on ogres, but couldn’t come up with the right words at the moment. Not anything that would let her see things as I saw them, anyway.

“It just depends on what kinds of ogres you mean, or maybe which ones you’ve met,” I said finally. “Obviously, we haven’t met the same ogres.”

www.reasonableogre.com

Ogre Sequence

shard





















counterclock

The Reasonable Ogre

The Reasonable Ogre

The reasonable ogre
Shelters in the cave
Of a warm, hollow hand:
Smash, celebrate, remember him.

31 December 2011

Apparition

(Seen looking northwest from Eglinton Avenue, Toronto, 25 December 2011, 12:53 p.m. Not PhotoShopped.)