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It happened
like this.
Darkness claimed her
eyes,
those months when she had bandages
like a tight fist
jammed
into each eyesocket.
The dark
kept pieces of her
eyes, and left
itself behind, little drops of darkness,
scattered
across her retinas
like black stars.
This explains why
she never stops
touching him with her eyes
closed, why she walks around her rooms alone with her eyes
closed, why she wishes she could write it down with her eyes
closed, why she knows there’s darkness
inside her.
Wherever it goes, the darkness takes
her
dark eyes with it,
she moves inside it
to Asia when the sun’s above her roof,
to the bottom of the sea,
swims through hidden caves,
she rides under the feathers
of a drifting raven, slips
along the sidewalk in shadows,
sneaks through your pupils
and into your skull,
dives into an inkwell and comes back up,
darkness dripping from her body
in black script.
You can go so many places, come back
with so many things, if
you keep your closed eyes open in the dark,
twin moons in the sky of your head.
Copyright Melanie Cameron, Holding
the Dark, The Muses' Company, 1999
I love
you
furiously. I love you
like the dancer spinning
in an empty room,
leaping collapsing
on an oak floor,
in a path of sunlight.
I love you
like the sculptor moving her hands
over marble, knowing
of a centre she will never carve, so
cold solid silent.
I love you
like the gardener
with dirt on her knees,
purple flowers in her hair,
creeping-thyme tucked under her tongue,
like the carpenter sanding pine,
fragrance of wood on her skin all day,
like the potter warming clay
with the heat of her palms,
like the musician in a rainstorm.
I love you
in so many layers, in so much space,
in skies of white paper,
I love you
off this land, past these stars,
like the poet who takes you with her.
Copyright Melanie
Cameron, Holding the Dark, The Muses' Company, 1999
Beyond wishing, she wishes
you could feel her, like the poem
she is. If you could
feel her that way, she would
have so many syllables, rhymes,
a beautiful sound on your tongue, a
rhythm, you would always know
where she’s moving next, but
never know just how
she’d take you
there. She would
wrap herself around you,
like the poem she is. You would
rest
inside her, like breath.
Copyright Melanie Cameron, Holding
the Dark, The Muses' Company, 1999
Walking into each other,
and walking
around a frozen lake in spring, fallen
branches like crude brushstrokes, slashed across ice and sky,
over a beaver dam, its stagnating defiance obvious,
its creators’ presence perfectly concealed.
Sleeping on a picnic
table, clouds of bugs, one cloudless August night.
Lazing around in an autumn field,
crickets humming,
smoke obscuring the setting sun.
Wandering through cemeteries along
the roadside,
adding and subtracting years, calculating
relationships between the dead, speculating class, cause,
loss.
Walking
beside the ocean at dusk, the rugged cup of its thrashing body,
dangerous and foreign. The girl, a woman,
almost
stepping over a cliff, its immaculate vertical disguise.
Pulses angry as the tide below, the
woman, the man, lying flat
on a mock-carpet of tough grass at cliff-edge.
The woman thinking, We’ll
remember this. How soon
one will step, quite accidentally,
beyond these days, into memory’s arms, out of the other’s
loving grasp.
Copyright Melanie Cameron, wake,
The Muses' Company, 2003
She can come
sit
in this alcove on this bank,
beside the Assiniboine. She
can imagine
time
before
this concrete city, days
when things moved
in the directions they wanted to, when
you could be
alone
with the water, its slow-moving
medicine. And yet,
as she sits on this bank, traffic racing
four directions around her, and her
pleading only
for one, she knows that
direction
will pour
down, in
the form of things
she might not
immediately recognize. And she knows it
will carry her
toward where
she must go, as the Assiniboine
always carries itself
toward the Red.
And while she waits, a man
in a yellow raincoat will come
from the east, sit
quietly with her, though far
enough away that she can’t
make out his face or smell
the tobacco, the cigarette
he lights. Like her,
he is
sitting alone, in this busy
city, and she
can tell by his raincoat that he’s pleading
too, and that he believes
direction will pour down.
Copyright Melanie Cameron, wake,
The Muses' Company, 2003
Memory needs
you or it
has nothing, is less
than the black
box of night, closed
indefinitely, less
than a never
-stirred
lake, no thing
to press against
its cheek, less than rock
unturned, no one
to witness
its shadow beneath, or its pulse
within, absent or too
slow to be
taken. And you
need memory because you need
yourselves
to stay. That simple. You
don’t
want
to be, can’t
imagine being,
alone
with you.
Copyright Melanie
Cameron, wake, The Muses' Company, 2003
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