Dark and Windows

by Luke Sawczak

I see the window! shrieks the toddler.
I see the dark, Mommy! Dark dark dark!
I think: Are dark and windows things you see?

The empty train rolls on in falling light,
and I read Lucy Maud Montgomery
on bridges over valleys she walked through,
“all lovely things beloved in days gone by.”
Here and now we ride “an arrow of light
on a ribbon of shadow,”
our lives and voices breath in iron lungs.
The two-year-old trades tunes for tickles:
each time she sings the fates of bitsy spiders
her mom rewards her with “Want to hear a secret?”
and blows a raspberry in her ear, eliciting
such howls of laughter and the incessant plea:
“T’y ’gain! T’y ’gain, Mommy! Tell me my secret!”
She tries again; the same result, and still “T’y ’gain!”

A voice says, “This train will stop at Georgetown,”
and the mom cries: “I need to go to Kitchener!”
The other passenger assures her more trains will come.
She settles down uneasily. Her toddler remarks on me:
“He innit talking!” — No, she’s told, he’s reading.
Then I am talking, like a healed mute.
Where did you go today?

Evening deepens as the toddler tells me her adventures,
all about the cows that scared her on the farm.
“She didn’t want I to leave her,” says her mom,
“she was crying everything would eat her.”
I laugh. At her size I might cry as well.
“She asked if I was going to clean their poop!”

“Tell me my secret!”
Often seeing children I think of those
whose mothers sit alone in rooms, becoming cold,
whose fathers darken, never to look up again
with the same faces. The ones who die
outnumber those whose hands we hold.
Each peal of laughter, each trying repetition’s
evidence of a miracle we’re told but can’t confirm:
that even one He is not willing should be lost is not.

The mother sighs and gazes out the window.
There was a boy of four obediently quiet
The long drive home from church, whose parents
opened the door to a little body breath had left
dressed for long sleep in his Sunday best.
There are those we buried live in Llullay-Yacu,
la doncella drunk on coca, la niña del rayo
burned by lightning, and el niño, seven, tied,
holding objects showing caravans of llamas.
Vomit, signs of struggle in the youngest only.
I draw in my breath, mind on that
native home where the water treatment men
couldn’t dig the plumbing through the yard
because of all the graves of cousins
who had cut off the universe forever.
“Earth shall be riven, and high heaven.”
In each of them the cosmos-fires burned
and were extinguished. Chesterton says:
In every child the world is once more put upon its trial.

The train sombres into the ravine.
He says, From the valleys, alleluia, we look to the hills.
The farmer doesn’t know where life can enter in.
Don’t tell me that I’ll ever understand.
All I know is à chaque jour suffit sa peine
mais aussi ses miracles. A teacher told me
that in classrooms without windows
trees still bud when spring begins.

The voice comes on from centre coach
to tell us that another train’s behind us
forging through the night to Kitchener,
as though God were listening to prayer.

We brake, snow melting on the rails.
The small girl soils her diaper laughing;
she admits it freely to her mother.
Turning from the windows, we get off.
From inside we’d seen the dark
but not these stars. They are quiet
as we disembark.

hard beads of light

Field so dotted with tiny white flowers
it could be dusted with snow or icing sugar.
Chastening rises out of shame,
correction out of chastening.
Baby blue air backdrop for golden leaves
springing red blood along vein network
like map of traffic out of city:
spilled from pump, droplet vans
muster on long motorway escapes.
After arriving we go canoeing, face inwards
to each other, before the shout to turn around.
Then we’re gliding to the island’s sandy landing,
exploring till chased off by a pup.
Campfires built on private property. No way up.
Circuit of fragmentary lake on face of Earth.

Later I go for a walk by myself,
take photos of licheny shield from waist height.
I’ll call these top-down shots my “Aerial Landscapes”:
lake of moss, forest of tiny shrubs, salt pan of long-dead scars
left by ancient flora. When your hand
finds something to do, you do it mightily.
And then, if you want to get well again, repeat.
Feel a little guilt. Come on, it’s fine.
No need to feel guilty about feeling guilty.
No one does it. Walking back on Fire Route Two-Twenty
see a massive wall, a solid arc of dirt
laced with roots of fallen tree.
Examining its base you perceive its mistake:
it built as Jesus recommended, on the rock.
But trees aren’t houses and the wind has peeled it off.
Now see it from beneath, the mouse’s view.
Awe-inspiring spider of snakes as lithe as taffy,
wood watercourses in a muddy flood.

At the cottage a start on stepping outside
after supper: that there is such a thing as black.
Our light goes only so far out and then recedes
and night hides everything I was to see.
Across the lake light fragments like a carnival
shine into the depth: cottage lanterns, moon,
stars in bunches, deck guides dance on agitated water,
rolling as though turning in and turning out of bed,
then against the shore and fading all away.

For a little time there are two of you:
one reading on the couch inside, nose under spectacles
in a book with crimson jacket, cozy now, if older,
and one sitting in the dark just on the other side
of the window. A chill runs through me.
Why are you in so much pain? What about God?
You’re the last person who could deserve this,
even if on occasion you are short with us.
Why didn’t I talk to you about the stars, too?
The last thing I want is for you to think I love less.
It’s true—you become what you think people think of you.

The stars are beautiful, you know, out here.
The moon, bright as a white flower, the awkward
source of all the light pollution at the dock.
Give me infinitesimal marks in the weave
where the thread is torn but no matter how small
the light your eye picks it up sharp and fine.

I need to stay out here until my soul grows calm.
It needs a wicked chastening. Too absorbed
in its own juices, like the basted turkey.
Funny image for a soul. I head down to the dock
with a cushion and no fewer than two blankets.
Dilemma: without shoes your socks get damp,
but then you can draw your feet into your nest.
Shoes on, I pull the deck chair to the water
and bundle up. The more I write, the more
I need the moon that sponges up the stars
from black canvas with unwanted light.

I put down the pen and my mind expands,
then contracts, like the skillful use of the embouchure
of the oboe: wavering when it is strongest,
then receding with the precision of a jet of ink.
The harder I pray, the more stars flicker on
like prayer candles without blood money.
Soon I can see the hosts of which the Lord is lord.
I’m thinking of you in an early wheelchair,
and imagining with all my force, believing, having faith
against this image, till tears arrive at my eyes.
Unfrozen water, like that lapping against the dock.
In the primitive black water I see drops of ichor,
gods’ blood, which it turns out is burning ivory,
like shining milk, fragments of the eternal snow,
tinsel-thick shards of silver from below the earth,
(no human comparison fully satisfies), anyhow ichor.
Flecks of it stream into the sand on the wave
and I watch my own meteor shower.

Is my mind growing calm?
The world is spinning.

BIO

Luke Sawczak is a teacher and writer in Toronto. His writing has appeared in more than 20 publications, including Sojourners, Acta Victoriana, Queen’s Quarterly, the Humber Literary Review, and the Spadina Literary Review. It has been nominated for Best of the Net and included in Best Canadian Poetry. His influences include Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Kenyon. In his spare time he composes for the piano.