Arrow-Leaf Balsamroot
I was lost. A shadow
covered the sky
like a runner. Then more
shadows, a pack
reeling in
a tired animal.
I closed my eyes.
There, the umber eye
of the balsamroot
looked back
its arrow leaves
pointing in all directions.
The tired animal
was not the sky,
but the first shadow,
running. Every part
of the balsamroot
is edible
I told the sagebrush
and the many grasses
gathered around us.
They all knew
about the giant reactor
the balsamroot
modelled its flower on.
My daughter
might have drawn that
I said, meaning
the bright yellow rays
we call petals,
meaning the sun
bleeding out
across the empty sky.
Bitterroot (I)
Work is holy
my teacher said
looking out a window
at the empty expanse
of our poems.
Beyond
where he could see,
in the arid, brush steppe
above the city
of Yakima, Washington,
the bitterroot
turned on
its primus of pink
and white light
a few hundred feet
from the interstate.
I’d worked 40 years
to see a thing
so perfectly tuned
and burning clear
below a sky’s blue flame.
Once a rattlesnake,
the colour of Yakima
earth lifted the ancient,
holy light of her rattle
toward me.
Through the window
in her cage, I watched
the whole desert
undulate
down the hollow,
coiled length
of her body.
Snow Light
The children
are frozen
around the animal
of night. I slit the belly
and out spills
snow
like winter swans
wicking rain,
like cash money
of an empire
emptied of history,
like all the pale babies
and all the pale dead
drifting slowly
to Earth
again. It’s what
you can do with a knife
that big, that sharp
and made
of light. My daughter
receiving the host
of sky on her tongue.
Everything is
sexual. I’m sorry.
I go out into the museum
of darkness
where light performs
as light across the sheets
of snow shrouding
the statuary of homes,
the formless bushes
of shadow and bunch-
grass. I come from
nothing, goes the story
of the night
and the winter,
the riches of the lilac
leaves scattered
like memory,
like conversation.
In the dark,
when I close my eyes
it gets brighter.
I know if the ice crystals
on the blacktop,
the rippling waves
of glass
we call windows, the full
spectrum of light
spilling
from a television set
in a stranger’s eyes.
If all you hear
is I’m sorry.
And rippling waves.
And formless shadows.
The air is self-
healing. That’s what
you can do
with a hand that big,
that tender, that can reach
the sky. The alms
of stars,
the purse of moon-
light. All the pale
fractals
drifting crazily.
I’m unfinished,
bewildered
by how far I can travel
away from myself
inside
myself. The three-legged
dog, its stream
of steaming light
in the corner
of the museum
beneath a streetlamp
in pixels of snow. Snow’s
memory for footprints,
me walking home
and walking away
from home
past the squat black
shape of garbage cans
lined up like pawns
along the street,
past the block
of schoolyard
chain link
quoting the sky
of snowflakes,
in the companionship
of cold, with its thousand
meanings, its luxury
of ice, its thinness
of air, its snow light
that is nothing
hardening
in your hair. I know
if winter swans
in a field of grubs,
if daylight’s
children spilling
onto the bleach green
of snow, the eyes
that are rocks,
that outlast
the body,
the jet plane’s
undulating cape
of sound passing through
me as nothing
but undulating sound,
the chess pieces
of my daughter’s teeth,
her open mouth
collecting
the offerings
of snow,
its poverty, its abundance.
It’s what you can do
with an animal
that hungry, that holy,
and composed
of stars. I turn out
the lights. Through
window shadows
I watch snow
move like thought
across the mutable glass,
signal noise
dissolving the edge
of things,
car hood, road verge,
the halo
of the basketball hoop
hovering
above the driveway,
its locution
of capital
and games. If each
disruption
of the pattern
is a new pattern.
The swans battering
air. The face of chaos
in the helix of snow.
If I’m an animal
picking ice
from your hair.
I’m making myself
a blade
out of everything
I see. I’m closing my eyes.
I’m seeing the light.
Matt Rader lives with his family on unceded, traditional Syilx territory in Kelowna, British Columbia. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. His latest collection is Ghosthawk (Nightwood Editions, 2021).
Header photo by Marina Poushkina, courtesy Shutterstock.
