Vol 1 No 1 2007

A Perishable Art

Ravines

Takayama: A Dream in Japanese

Ultrasound

Ravines

Summers the ragweed empty lots
and the schoolfields in green fever
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?
                                                             I’ve seen her,
a daughter,
hair soft as the silk of milkweed 

who was absent years until the eye
tired, bleared with finding then losing her
over and over in the face of a stranger's child
A woman felt this
in a bus-shelter winter rain veined, postered
with dated grade-school snaps, each caption
a love poem of stats, inconsolable
particulars
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHILD?
                                                             I have,   
I still remember—

Remember a dream where you watch the bereft ones 
filing down into a basement flat, in cinder-
block projects along the Humber,
to petition the shrugging collector, mayor
of the underground, while in the docklands 
or ravines slashed green by the Don, others
are calling out Kore         
Kore
   
             there is no loss unless you are gone
             there is no love until this one

Only Kore's face  
through summer, when the fields in green fever
flourish and burn, a daughter, born and found,
with her eyes twinned tarns,
hair soft as the silk of milkweed—

____________________

Note: Kore is Greek for “daughter” and is pronounced KOree in modern Greek.  In some versions of the myth, Demeter, in search of Persephone, wanders the world calling out this name.

Reproduced with permission from The Address Book, House of Anansi, 2004

Steven Heighton