Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Jane Southwell Munro

Brick Books

CANADIAN CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Munro, Jane, 1943–

Grief notes & animal dreams

Poems.

ISBN 0-919626-82-3

I. Title. II. Title: Grief notes and animal dreams.

PS8576.U574G75 1995 c811'.54 C95-932305-8

PR9199.3.M85G75 1995

Copyright © Jane Southwell Munro, 1995.

The support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council is gratefully acknowledged. The support of the Government of Ontario through the Ministry of Culture, Tourism and Recreation is also gratefully acknowledged.

Cover is after a character, Li (The Clinging, Fire), from the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching.

Brick Books

www.brickbooks.ca

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

for Bob

and in memory of my parents

Evelyn Elizabeth Southwell

&

Charles Raymond Southwell

Contents

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

Wanting

Romance

Helicopter By The Lake

Wood Box

Extended Care

Terminal

Animal Lives

Dream: Housing The Seam

Even With All Our Windows

Cottontail

Nursery Rhyme

Queen Anne's Lace

Night Tiger

Festina Lente

Moving Too Fast

Rolling Over The World At Night

What I've Left

Not Sterling

Thinking #1

Thinking #2

Dream: Emptying The Premises

Li – The Clinging, Fire

Candy

Towards A Researchable Question: It Must Be Testable

Towards A Researchable Question: It Must Be Significant: Fanny Bay Bill

Towards A Researchable Question: It Must Be Parsimonious

Towards A Researchable Question: It Must Be Manageable

Remembrance Day

Ashen Flakes

The Earth Beneath

Grandmother Spider Said To Set Aside The Ego Roles

Maxie's Wake

Salt Woman

Shelburne Farms

When We Lived On West Tenth

Anon

The Fine Minutiae Of Moments

23, 20, 19

Hyacinth

Fishing Sonnet

It's In The Kitchen

In The Time Of The Dying Of Mothers

Tis not the swaying frame we miss,

It is the steadfast Heart

Emily Dickinson, #1597 c.1884

Grief Notes & Animal Dreams

The fire the packrat started

destroyed the house my father built

and killed my mother.

Its aftermath sits in me like a drought.

And I, a forest creature, grown

among mists, between creek beds,

where, if water evaporates

it's only for a few hours

of rest in another state

as if to catch a little sleep,

before falling again –

I keep expecting the drought to end.

It's as if grief

sucked the green world inside out,

down through its roots

into a closed and cryptic seed,

ran gratitude backwards

like a movie rewinding.

Now, in my dream, the treeless hills are arid

and below the cellar

under the house

the earth is tunneled, as if a mine started there,

and out of the passage

parched animals emerge.

First a deer, terribly close to death.

Upstairs, a little water spills

through the cracks,