The Sheiling

The colour seemed arbitrary, the red too bland against the green

and the corrugated cable that lashes the long painted boughs
makes it look like a campfire from a distance but up close
some Dark* battle scene from the Iliad—Man hopelessly bound to war

But is it? The splayed staves, standing like a stook catching the sun’s last rays
has that dark pink of coloured glasses. The only thing missing is the carnage,
though that electrician’s Laocoön points to a painter who showed us:
Jackson Pollock's No. 1, 1948—slaughter on a hanger. Still, beside the lake
in this place it can pass for a symbol for me and you or you and your daughter

and later in the day we drove on a road of silver and gold
loops falling and rising, lashing the poles together
in a kind of truce leading from a point where two lakes meet.

One is flat and the other rises at an angle, like a medieval painting

linking us to the distant island while cabins lie strewn on the grass

at our backs as we sip wine out of plastic bottles

the stars a long yesterday and the good breakfast digested,
the painful call from an angry daughter bursting the bubbles in the bath,
clawing at our two backs 'til nails rub red skeins—that
love-hate bond of mother and child to erase the memory of
lips that sought an understanding that eludes us in words

—a sheiling we seek and sense beyond trouble, like the faces
of our host and hostess. She showed you her family in photographs
nested near the table, asked if our sleep was good, stuffed us
and sent us on our way so bound that we flitter between

the campfire and the war, the spears and the golden meadow
where the farmer’s raked his straw into stooks to dry in the hot sun.

If it weren’t for the cell phone I swear…

there would still be misunderstandings
about our holies of holies and everything inside them.

This is the knitting place then where staves cross, and straw dries
and lips meet, and people, I coming from my lonely undefined days since
and you with no since at all but presence following presence
I all contemplation and you action, estrogen meet testosterone
and let the chips fall. The way leads from this site on the mountain

into mystery and no one knows where it leads except
I'm stubborn and not-having and cursing what is, has—it’s
envy and endless grieving for what cannot be restored

while babies get on buses every day and mothers worry
and hearts go tick... tick... and you cried when I said twenty years
—I don't remember why anymore.

I, stubborn fool, always dancing on the end of  a long bough
tempting it to break, curious to see that one point further ahead
until it does and the wet green through the pants of my knees
tells me that another way to vision is in crawling on the belly
of love and war through its guts for twisting miles and we

have only entered, feeling our way in the dark.

_________
* Shayne Dark’s sculpture at the Oeno Gallery, Picton Ontario, September 2, 2007

© Dan Goorevitch 2007-8, 2019