the fishermen
sit all day on old wharves facing
neither sea-
wards nor inland, mending
and untangling their old nets
of thought

and language is the law

we ran west

wanting
a place of absolute
unformed beginning

(the train
an ark
upheld on the brain’s darkness)

but the inner lakes reminded
us too much of ancient oceans
first flood: blood-
enemy and substance
(was our train like
an ark or like a seasnake?

and the prairies were so nearly
empty as prehistory
that each of the
few solid objects took some great
implication, hidden but
more sudden than a signpost

(like an inscribed shard, broken bowl
dug at a desert level
where they thought
no man had been,
or a burned bone)

(every dwarf tree portentous
with twisted wisdom, though
we knew no
apples grew there

and that shape, gazing
at nothing
by a hooftrampled streamside:
it could
have been a centaur)

and even the mountains
at the approach, were
conical, iconic
again:

(tents
in the desert? triangular
ships? towers? breasts?
words)
again
these barriers

ii

Once in the pass, the steep
faulted gorges were at last
real: we
tossed our eastern
suitcases from the caboose
and all our baggage
overboard
left in our wake
along the tracks
and (we saw) our train became
only a train, in real
danger of falling; strained
speechless through those new mountains
we stepped
unbound
into

what a free emerging
on the raw
streets and hills
without meaning
always creeping up behind us
(that cold touch on the shoulder)

our faces scraped as blank
as we could wish them
(but needing new
houses, new
dishes, new
husks)

iii

There are more secondhand
stores here than we expected:
though we brought nothing with us
(we thought)
we have begun to unpack.

A residual brass bedstead
scratched with the initials
of generic brides and grooms;
chipped squat teapots: old totemic
mothers; a boxful
of used hats.

In the forest, even
apart from the trodden
paths, we can tell (from the sawn
firstumps) that many
have passed the same way
some time before
this (hieroglyphics
carved in the bark)

Things here grow from the ground
too insistently
green to seem
spontaneous. (My skeletons, I think,
will be still
in the windows when I look,
as well as the books
and the index-
fingered gloves.)

There is also a sea
that refuses to stay in the harbour:
becomes opaque
air or throws
brown seaweeds like small drowned hands
up on these shores

(the fishermen
are casting their nets here
as well)
and blunted mountains
rolling
(the first whales maybe?)
in the
inescapable mists.

Journey to the interior

There are similarities
I notice: that the hills
which the eyes make flat as a wall, welded
together, open as I move
to let me through ; become
endless as prairies ; that the trees
grow spindly, have their roots
often in swamps; that this is a poor country
that a cliff is not known
as rough except by hand, and is
therefore inaccessible. Mostly
that travel is not the easy going
from point to point, a dotted
line on a map, location
plotted on a square surface
but that I move surrounded by a tangle
of branches, a net of air and alternate
light and dark, at all times;
that there are no destinations
apart from this.