Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Glass float / Jane Munro.
Names: Munro, Jane, 1943– author.
Description: Poems.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190237473 |
Canadiana (ebook) 20190237546 | ISBN 9781771315241 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771315258 (HTML) | ISBN 9781771315265 (PDF)
Classification: LCC PS8576.U574 G53 2020 | DDC C811/.54—dc23
Copyright © Jane Munro, 2020
We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.
The author photo was taken by Belle Ancell.
Brick Books
115 Haliburton Road
London, Ontario N6K 2Z2
www.brickbooks.ca
Conscious experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most mysterious.
David J. Chalmers
My grandfather taught me, when he gave me painting lessons, that there’s no such thing as a concavity in nature: when you study the profile of a valley, it’s made up of convexities.
I saw this was true when I made contour drawings, verboten to glance down: my pencil moved as my eye did along a periphery. When I finished and looked at the paper, my drawing would be little hummocks — some longer, some shorter — linked together.
My grandfather also said, Art is suggestion; art is not representation.
A morning glory slipped into the front hall, climbed the door frame, and bloomed — white trumpets — inside the old house. I laughed at its wit and trained it over the top of the door the way one of my aunts trained ivy to frame her kitchen window. Ivy, another invasive species: bindweed and English ivy.
Commonwealth countries coloured pink on the world map Miss Adanac pulled down over the chalkboard in our third-grade classroom. Sprawling Canada, triangular India. England also pink, the mother country.
The first time I went to India I felt as uncultured as a toddler. How to use the toilet, eat, dress myself. Even in a sari, I stood out. A mute boy’s sign for me was to tap his front tooth.
My hair is now whiter than my skin.
Ranjan kept telling me that in Indian mythology, the male is passive while the female is active. My idea of what was manly or womanly, he assured me, was parochial.
His mother worshiped Durga, a more sociable version of Kali (minus the bloodied tongue and necklace of skulls). Kali, he told me, eats her children.
When I asked him what on earth his mother found attractive in Kali-cum-Durga, he paused. I could see him discard the complexities he figured I wouldn’t fathom.
Time, he finally explained, consumes everything, including pain. Kali is time. She promises suffering will end.
Indian sculpture depicts Sanskrit poetry — not life. Poets did not speak of the hollow that follows the bone of the shin, so a leg is round as a tree trunk. Poets did not name the wrist, so a hand joins the arm without wrinkles or a knob. Nor did poets mention crow’s feet or Adam’s apples.
Thump a temple column and it sounds a note. The next column hums a note one tone higher — fa so la ti do — across the portico.
In the stonemason’s shed, the chinking of metal on stone louder than wind chimes — like the clinking of dishes and cutlery in a large and noisy kitchen. Under palm thatch, men and boys trace a goddess with charcoal on granite, take chisel, mallet, awl — carve a poem.
So far, the sea has eaten six temples that once studded this tongue of shore. Over thirteen hundred years wind and sand, scouring the seventh, have erased the faces from its stages of creation.
Combers break along the beach. Foam scoots for a few seconds in the dawn. Surf rolls a swimmer in its fist, scouring knees, turning her head over heels underwater, hurtling her away.
Black birds, cocky as jays, strut around women emptying bags of shells they netted while jumping waves.
I find tiny scallop shells tangled in my pubic hair. The lining of my bathing suit has pocketed a handful of sand.
Our English word horizon derives from a Greek word meaning the bounding circle — our boundary, limit.
A glass float — like a person — has boundaries. It’s fragile. It’s made to ride on the surface of ocean and hold up a fishnet. This one came a long way, from Japan to the coast of BC. Somehow, it landed safely. It’s reflective. You can see through it. But the outside looks different when viewed through or on its curves. There are flaws in the glass. It’s handmade. Actually, mouthmade. Someone’s breath formed it and is inside it.
We can change what we make — within what horizon we place the past.
and a full moon
on the trail uphill
snow softens the hump
of spine behind heart
settles on outstretched bones
in an arctic cave
a sow
nurses twins
swallows too swift to follow
stars — flashlight to the car
spruce needles on the alder floor
tea bowl’s ring on the cover
of Plato’s complete works
we owe a cock to Asclepius
do not forget
swallows too swift to follow
squirrels, don’t forget where you left them
corn popping a basin of exploded white puffs
to sleep on muscles combed
with the small hands of raccoons
of river otters in tidal marshes
salt smarts pickleweed little bridge
little bridge shoulderstand plow
hold
fold self up like a seed
the beautiful bird red-throated, red-crested
yellow bill
black and white stripes tuxedo tail
turning on a bare branch
it was there then it disappeared
towering arbutus in flower
for so many days I could not fill myself