Year Zero

Year Zero

by | Dec 30, 1995 | Books

Brick Books, 1995

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“[Year Zero] explores with extraordinary depth and intimacy the boundary line joining the creation and loss of life, affirming the ‘insistence of things’ in a language that transcends the differences between thought and feeling, word and thing.” -Glenn Wilmot, The Journal of Canadian Poetry

 

 

Sample Poems from Year Zero

Earth Ward

          (for Kyra)

Unfinished, the centre still gathers
to scatter

Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon

and through weaving heat lines
the ear thinks space: worlds
wavering in and out, urth-
ink: hot colours

pushing from inside the seventh month,
August, and I am listening, listening
at the door of your house,
my ear to taut skin

The whirl of the heart, your thinking
beginning now to bud, as I
grow down to wood, to bone

You spill toward your human hearth
with the speed of darkness, a whir
outward, earthward

Already
I can hear you
readying your shining cry

Bulbs

Bulbs of lungs that do not breathe,
huge saurian head, fierce

with Jurassic time, you rehearse
the archaic, invisible, unseeing

or looking inwards, you are
parasitic in the floating world

you’ve created, with enzymes
you’ve dissolved tissues to get bloodfood

The brain glimmers through
translucent skin, the delicate tree of veins

Organs migrate through you
you’re imagining
a different order we have already
placed ourselves within
and are busy being changed by

Tail, ribs unfurl, condense to bone
you raise a big head

Who can recognize you, already
remote, already human, your heart
a balloon on a string
oh little one?

               (For Adrian)

Smoking Mirror

Smoking Mirror

by | Dec 30, 1990 | Books

ECW Press, 1990

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“[Smoking Mirror] is certainly a poetry of a magnitude and import similar to, say, Don Domanski’s or Louise Gluck’s…. Very accomplished… and elegant to read aloud.” ~ Phil Hall, Books in Canada

Sample Poems from Smoking Mirror

Voladores

When you approach this mirror it throws you back to yourself like a refusal. When you approach this mirror reflection and fear gather like armies: banners and dust and blood and arrows. If you can see anything in it, it threatens you by its establishment of distance you cannot overcome, but always, somehow, recognize, as if it had been traversed when you were in some other form, a red-tail or sidewinder, an arrow flying from Mixcoatl’s bow perhaps. You know both more about it, and much, much less than you’ll ever need. You wonder how you could have gotten over there to become who you are, and wonder, in fact, if you’re really standing here, on the edge of the Lake of the Moon, looking west, into the cardinal direction, knowing that behind you Quetzalcoatl is turning to flame. It’s an image which vanishes with a celerity that makes you blink, like the hearts of the teomicqui. Perhaps you waver on the edge of consciousness, cascade over the lip of the temple into the future that speaks another language. You are always joining the wound of the image in your perpendicular fall, and I, now, am your rebound of swallowed, lost light.

Awaited, You Are Always Everywhere

Coyolxuaqui, goddess of silver fire, the night becomes you, and begins here: words of the threshold. The body is a pilgrimage through it, a river that reads us out. Out of the flowing darkness, stars are drawn. Out of the body, blood. And out of the life, the journey. The fume of frangipani marks the fluid air with air’s own invisible movement. The darkness hesitates, and never becomes complete. It welcomes us and despises us because we are not really strong enough to live in its embrace. Your heart is an hibiscus whose shed radiance it absorbs. Often though, I think I myself am the darkness I travel through, a fish in a smoking mirror. And this, this is the moon door, on the other side of which we are in a room, breathing the dark, urgently awaiting our own arrival.

Migration of Light

Migration of Light

by | Dec 30, 1983 | Books

General Publishing, 1983

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Sample Poems from Migration of Light

Third Migration, Second Series II

The difference is spreading, said Gertrude
Stein. But there is nothing but difference
There is you and your love and your lover
and you; there is the eroticism

of her shirt, her skin, against her body
and your mind being on her, always

Being so close to something, like this
the body of language, or time, or her —
her prime opening out in her, more
generous than the red warmth of hibiscus —

opens that gap in me that doesn’t know me
that forgets everything I do

It’s a mouth, which though mute, speaks
the sentence I’m always about to hear

Dream Garment

Kimono, collapsed on a power line
shed skin, or a bat stale with blood
fruit of the night

A hanged woman
dangles the warning of her body
for all the possible critics
of the regime

This kite, whose memory of blue
has been stolen, sleeps
in a nest of wires
nightmares Orpheus
jolted on the electric lines of his lyre

Lost angel, whose wings are the whole unfolded city

O Lucifer, tonight, golden threads
are pulled from my back

The Viridical Book of the Silent Planet

The Viridical Book of the Silent Planet

by | Dec 30, 1978 | Books

from  Aya Press, 1978

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The Viridical Book of the Silent Planet came together in 1977 and was published by Glynn Davies’ small press, Aya, in 1978 in three, (count ’em – 3!) versions. There’s a paper edition, ISBN 0-920-544-05-3; 06-1 is a cloth edition, and 07-X is a very short run “deluxe” edition.

The title page calligraphy is by Ann Housden and the whimsical illustrations by Stephen Wohleber. I was thrilled to have these wonderful additions to the text. The deluxe edition is hard cover and hand illuminated by Stephen and comes in a slipcase box. The book includes the very first calagramic letters that ended up as The Alphamiricon in 1987 from Underwhich Editions.

The book takes us into the outer space of language and into the black hole of love where very strange things occur and we are all space and time travellers. So there’s a kind of sci-fi metanarrative running throughout. Just as an example of the sorts of highjacks that can be expected: there’s no such word as “viridical”; there is “vivid” and “viridian”  which refer to a certain green colour, and then there is “veridical” which refers to the possibility of reaching truth through language, the assertion of truth or it’s saying. But beware, here be dragons.

Here is a link to one of the 26 hand-illumninated copies:

https://www.biblio.com/book/viridical-book-silent-planet-henderson-brian/d/79356369

And to order this book, please click this link.

Paracelsus

Paracelsus

by | Dec 30, 1977 | Books

from Porcupine’s Quill, 1977

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Sample Poems from Paracelsus

The Motor

The motor oiled, it seems,
with hebetude,
rotates its ceiling fans.
          The air hardly
moves for this
historic meeting.

On the rosewood table
between Kepler & Paracelsus
are two bowls:
one of fruit — papaya, limes,
mangoes, and oranges
               from the
New World,
and one of alphabet soup.

Kepler takes the earth to be
a lime. He has an orange sun.
Paracelsus dabbles in the alphabet
soup, listening.
Finally he says
          Ego- replaces geo-
          centricity:
                    no revolution —
                    simply consonantal drift:

Bank

Bank, said the clerk with the seersucker suit.
Bank, said the pilot with leather jacket &
               winged insignia.
Bank, said the fisherman with wading boots &
               flies.
Bank,
     said Paracelsus, with a smile.
How is it possible?
It just isn’t — not in ‘these’ dimensions.