Читать книгу The Sunrise Liturgy - Mia Anderson - Страница 13

If you’re on the north shore

you face south.

You’re a sunrise people.

Others will have to hymn the sunset; the best we can do is

our Phos hilaron as light’s shadows crumple, falling from

the hump-backed frozen waves before our sunrise eyes, definition lost

to the brush of twilight from this shore to far shore

to those southerners who face north.

Nightfall and the snow is clean erased, tabula

almost rasa before the… uh, onset of the

fearful green

of the neighbour’s sick glare, his

garage lamp! — joyless carnaval against the bogey dark

to chase away… what? Mutinous deer?

Piratizing porcupine?

A skunk à l’école buissonnière?

Our woods’ creatures,

his green glare.

We go to bed at eight now of a night :

Nothing of us that doth fade

but doth suffer a fleuve-change

into something rich and strange

into a people that sleep and wake

with spring of day

who once began work when the midnight telephone stopped

and who now drop with the quick dark

apart from

some star-gazing

some moon-gazing

some listening to the intense silence

some glaring of the green, the emerald threat

the evil eye.

Some glaring at it, exchanging hexes.

Snow’s complicit with sun, snow’s sun’s hireling;

the shepherd has a stand-in, he can go off to the banquet

and the snow

will light us woollums with surrogate light all night,

stay us with second-hand sun.

Québec’s gloaming.

Our eyes go roaming in the gloaming, feasting on the inhering light

…even the darkness is no darkness with thee,

but the night is as clear as the day:

the darkness and light to thee are both alike.

Green has its place.

Thumbs, frogs, lily pads, croquet hoops, lawn clippings, tea, old

orange peels on the compost heap, tall lime drinks, banking cooperatives,

jewellers’ visors, zippers, old leather tomes, old study lamps, Copenhagen

copper rooves, carpets in bedrooms, sheets with William Morris willow

pattern, willows, elms, ginkos, gooseberries, leeks, pipsissewa,

unripe apples on the tree, ripe pistachios peeking out of their shells,

rotten mussels not peeking out of theirs, absinthe, beer

in a Québec pub on St-Patrick’s Day,

these have their place in the scheme of green.

But Not Green Glare On Snow

on pristine white unlit or moonlit or shepherd-lit or hireling-lit

black-light-lit snow!

Snow is white.

Chameleonesque blue or mauve, or grey, or gold maybe. Not green.

Under it is green. Over green is white.

Let’s get this right.