Shining Like An Apple On Fire

Three Poems by Cathy Stonehouse

Our Father, the Cartographer

After you had left us, had moved on from this world –

your spirit quiet as a knife in its sheath, blunt enough

to be drawn across the hand – after you had left us

only gargoyles grinning from roofs, pitchfork-wielding 

gods, the fallen angel, had lured us sheer

to the rim of this cratered earth,

had eaten of our sorrow, spat its bones out,

even redrawn our very map of the world – networks of shadow 

across the bed, your hand before the nightlight’s light  –

had warped our continents and distances, shrunken our ice caps,

swollen our oceans, leveled forests, washed out deserts,

diverted rivers, poisoned lakes and renamed countries

only to lay them back again to waste –

after you had truly come and gone,

had left us only shadows of your finery

deep in the dressing-up box of our skin, only then

could we know you as you really were, could we see

in your corpse the grandeur of the body,

broken now, and bloodied, shriveled down at last:

a tiny thing.

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Epistle

Welcome Jesus,

You talk just like my dad,

i.e. you’re a Geordie.

Out in the world I carry a bird

Who warns me about noxious gases

Emitted by adjectives adverbs

and other ghosts.

Jesus, are you still in there?

At night my dad wraps vowels round his fingers

And goes on mining for northern working-class

Poetry 

Despite the fact that no one else

Thinks it exists.

_________________________________________________________________

The Snowman

He had the coldest of hands.

I look down a shrinking tunnel

At the dazzling sight of him, breath smoke

Livid as he patiently moves

The sticks of my small body around.

I did not expect him to wake like this.

He has taken out the coals of his eyes

Ripped out his carrot stick nose

Removed the red scarf that separates head from neck

And become all snow: his voice, his teeth

Still glittering. Ticklish at first, then anxious,

Hoary fingers holding me down as he peels off

My cold weather clothes.

It’s as if he’s trying to press me

To his own fat shape. As he enters

There’s a ripping 

And I try to remember the field’s surface

Compacted by my own hands into ice,

Each rolled ball collected in a long bandage:

Now his face breaks off in pieces,

Clearer and clearer becoming not my own.

The world pressed flat

Into a framed picture, my limbs elongate,

Distant and overexposed. 

When I reach for my lips

I cannot find them—

I need to find some stones

For eyes, a row of small pebbles

For my mouth: I know I’ll have to lie,

Later on.

http://cathystonehouse.com/

My Father’s House

-by Diane Tucker

My mother died in my father’s house

and her death went wall to wall

like the rusty carpet, swung itself round

the central staircase like a cord sliding

behind a roaring vacuum cleaner.

The dust bunnies under the bed 

are stuck together with death now.

The motes in the cold sunbeams

are each an iota of her body,

sloughed off, that will not leave the room.

He retreats to the basement, leaves 

the main floor for Death to roam in

freely; that is a mistake.

Painting himself into a corner, 

he confines himself to sleeping

and sitting.

Death’s made itself at home upstairs.

Death has long, loud parties.

My father retreats into the house

of his head and Death has the whole place

to itself. It squeezes him out.

We ensconce him in a new place:

dustless rooms, and higher, we hoped,

than skulking Death could reach.

But Dad has brought his tenant with him

in his empty pockets. He will not see

the light in the fresh new rooms.

His eyes full of dust, his joints clogged with it,

no home can be any longer home.

Sleeping and sitting, the house of his body

sags and sways. He looks warily

out of the small windows of himself.

My mother died in my father’s house

and a rot began in the foundation;

a black mould grew. Tyrannous Death, 

freed from four old walls, supplanted the wind

and brought the whole house down.

Joe

-by Chris Pannell

one life was enough 

but the blue world opened and allowed him, 

like an astronaut, back into orbit

We thought our neighbour Joe

was dead, but there he was 

one July morning. 

In his wheelchair, on the porch 

in pure white running shoes with velcro tabs.

His clasped hands, 

his narrow lips said 

he felt fine for ninety. 

He could no longer walk, 

but where would he go?

So at ease to be out of the hospital 

once again in his own home 

with his sixty-year old son to mother him. 

They both wore Bermuda shorts and Panama hats, 

easy shade against the bright sun and his son’s concern

for Joe’s gossamer skin. 

And his face, 

where not even the smallest ambition 

rippled his smile —

 man returned to heaven 

in the summer breeze

Queen Elizabeth’s Way (A Road)

- by Chris Pannell

Westbound from Toronto: 

a sign in an empty field says, 

If you worked here you’d be home by now

I have gone five years with snorers 

and unhappy brokers under pale reading lamps 

Last week a nervous woman got up and started to 

yell over the roar of the bus engine:

Jesus is Lord and Repent your sins to God that you might be saved 

We had to shout her down being so tired 

of the day, of the daily bread, of the good news 

that we were working

when we all knew families who had lost their place 

out of money, I regret that Jesus travels only to the lonely 

that his Pope believes things are better with labour 

Who but God can repair bosses, latch-key children, 

leaking evestroughs, empty a blue box filled with wine bottles? 

Too many live in the mind

of an architect, urban planner, bus driver

Tonight the bus charges like a bloodied bull

these sketches for poems are stillborn 

on the floor I touch my face in the dark

to know how I feel 

while rain whips the windows and we roar on 

under halogen spots on this highway

For more about Chris click on the link below:

http://poets.ca/members_data/Chris%20Pannell

Blue Irises (for Audrey)

-by Roger Semmens

i

How it must have been

for her then

when even the closet door of her tiny apartment

confuses her,

seems to imply the distinct possibility

of her opening it and crossing into

another place,

another kind of being

There she might stand knee-deep

in the tall grass of an endless savannah

and the black shapes

dotting the green furze of the horizon,

she knows,

will be antelope

or bison of some kind

grazing in the deathless light

of a broad ripe sun.

She feels certain

if she approaches them

they will not run away

In the green promise

of the savannah 

her forgetfulness will be

forgotten,

easy as breath.

The other possibility 

which has been worrying her

is that one day soon

there will be a knock at her closet door.

There will be something dark on the other side.

She will be too frightened to answer.

ii

How it might have been is this:

Her husband has not had three heart-attacks, has not died.

He has not left her alone.

Instead, they have bought a cottage

on a crystal lake

and loving her more than all time

he spends half of every day

digging in the garden she has planned.

She tells him to lay in a bank

of blue irises by the gate.

He does not drink and will never hurt her.

On the weekends

their children and grandchildren

visit for a day,

the round oh’s of the youngest

stained orange and purple

from popsicles.

They will never run out of popsicles.

They can live like this forever.

When she wakens,

she wanders naked into her kitchen

and opens the freezer door.

Her hand trembles as it searches the icebox.

iii

How it ends is

the hospital one day.

She stops eating.

She must sense the futility of food at this point,

that hunger is the saliva of time

spilling into a ruptured gut

She no longer speaks.

This too seems pointless.

There will be no further messages from her,

no more predicates or nouns

to punctuate

the senseless air about her.

Her brain has guttered over the bedrail

emptied itself into the world,

into her children

Her thoughts have fed their hunger, 

its hunger.

The last of her blood

shimmers on its lips 

fastening like lampreys

about her skull.

Wrists tangled in restraints

her body arches

becomes one long vowel

unraveling

amid the mindless sibilance of bedlinen.

Together they form one last phrase.

They say finally something clear as glass.

The walls of her hospital room

tune their ears to listen.

They understand perfectly what is said.

They accept too

as only walls can

the perfect silence which follows

iv

This is how it begins

It is early December.

She is eight years old, sent

to the barn

to break the ice in the troughs.

It is hard for her to lift the heavy mallet,

hard to bring it down on the right spot

to crack the stubborn rime.

When she does,

she walks across to a stall

and holds out her arm

Her hand feels the soft muzzle,

the heifer’s breath wreathing her fingers in warmth,

a simple benediction.

She does not have the words to name this thought as yet,

yet somehow she knows

that this warmth

rises forever

from all the warm things of the earth