{ Jan Zwicky: Rain Shadow. }

[delga]

Rain Shadow
by Jan Zwicky

And in the late afternoon, after so much,
to come off the high plateau.
Who doesn't secretly love the Sahara?
The desert is a promise — that clean sweep
leaning out of the future,
one table and a single chair.
To abandon the heart, too,
with the other useless machines
and make the body empty as sky.
Which is always leaving
— and the hills, drifting in with sage
year after year, bearing it somehow.
It's this we'd like to be free of, this being
always on the brink:
the spring on the porch door creaks,
someone, you're sure,
about to speak to you, you're turning.

If we knew why we had come.
If we knew why we loved it anyway.

--

Have I posted this before? I can't remember.

Comments

[raucousraven.livejournal.com]

The desert is a promise — that clean sweep
leaning out of the future

Ohhhhh she is my favourite

Thanks for posting this.

[delgaserasca.livejournal.com]

Those are my favourite lines!

I love this poem, but I haven't read much else of hers. Any recs?

[raucousraven.livejournal.com]

I know she's got other, more recent work, but the ones that captured my imagination are from Songs for Relinquishing the Earth, which is still one of the most evocative titles I have ever read. I highly recommend that collection; favourites include "Musicians," the one about the cat, the one with the lovely description of "G", the one about the poppies, the one about the Brubeck piece, one of the dialogues between the philosophers... It's possible that I like them all.

I met her once. I could barely speak. She was lovely, though, and so was her husband, Don McKay -- also a poet, and a darn good one. His Luna Moth Meditation is particularly fine, I thought.