By Al Purdy
Underfoot rotten boards, forest rubble, bones....
Animals were here after the plague,
after smallpox to make another ending;
for the tutelary gods of decay
acknowledge aid from any quarter...
Here the charging cotyledons of spring
press green forefingers
on femurs, vertebrae, and delicate
bellied skulls of children;
the moon's waylaid light does not shrink
from bone relics and other beauties of nature...
Death is certainly absent now,
at least in the overwhelming sense
that it once walked at night in the village
and howled thru the mouths of dogs
But everything fades
and wavers into something else,
the seasonal cycle and the planet's rhythm
vary imperceptibly into the other;
spirits of the dead have vanished,
only great trees remain,
and the birth certificate of cedars
specifies no memory of a village...
(And I have seen myself fade
from a woman's eyes
while I was standing there,
and the earth was aware of me no longer_)
But I come here as part of the process
In the pale morning light,
thinking what has been thought by no one
for years of their absence,
in some way continuing them
And I observe the children's shadows
running in this green light from a
distant star
into the near forest_
wood violets and trilliums of
a hundred years ago
blooming and vanishing_
the villages of the brown people
toppling and returning_
What moves and lives
occupying the same space,
what touches what touched them
owes them...
Standing knee-deep in the joined earth
of their weightless bones,
in the archaeological sunlight,
the trembling voltage of summer,
in the sunken reservoirs of rain,
standing waist-deep in the criss-cross
rivers of shadows,
in the village of nightfall,
the hunters silent and women
bending over dark fires,
I hear their broken consonants...
