Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa / Anne Wilkinson

Winter Sketch, Rockcliffe, Ottawa

Down domestic roads the snow plough, snorting
Stacks a crop of winter, spills it high
To hedgerows alped with lilies; in the valley
White is wag, is daisy till
The sun aloft and hot with husbandry
Beheads the flowers.

Behind the plough the cold air flies a spume
As soft and adamant as swans
Where snow’s vacation is to etherize
The wood and choke the town’s
Hard arteries with drifts of chloroform.
And all the long excessive day the ploughman
Steers his dreaming over the hill
To the faraway hour that carries his frostbite home.

Such storm of white
Bound by the black extravagance of night
Makes winding sheet our myth-told-many-a-bed-time tale
Till April babble swells the shroud to breast
So milky full the whole north swills, licking
A world of sugar from encrusted nipples
Springful and swollen with love.

And tusked with icicles, the houses here
Bog stuporous in slow white sand, guard
Their docile lawns with walls that boast
Immaculate conception in a cloud
Made big by polar ghost.
In suburb of the forest, men walk shy,
Dismembered by two worlds;
Only the uncurled ears of children hear
The coyotes mating in a neighbour’s acre,
Theirs the only hands whose thumbs work free
To sculpt a tower leaning tipsy with unPisan laughter;
And being young, flexible pink tongues

Rename a carrot, nose;
Nose on hump of snow they crystal christen
Christ, the stillborn man;
Then herd their feet to kick the undefiled
When eyes still whey with vision see
That chastity, though white, is wormed with sleep
.
O watch the child lie down and lusty swing
His arms to angel in his image, sing
“I dare the snow my wings to keep.”

~~
Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961)
from Counterpoint to Sleep, 1951

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Anne Wilkinson biography

Earl Andrew, Houses on Rockcliffe Way, Ottawa, 2021. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Summer Acres / Anne Wilkinson

Summer Acres

I

These acres breathe my family,
Holiday with seventy summers’ history.
My blood lives here,
Sunned and veined three generations red
Before my bones were formed.

My eyes are wired to the willow
That wept for my father,
My heart is boughed by the cedar
That covers with green limbs the bones of my children,
My hands are white with a daisy, sired
By the self same flower my grandfather loved;

My ears are tied to the tattle of water
That echoes the vows of ancestral lovers,
My skin is washed by a lather of waves
That bathed the blond bodies of uncles and aunts
And curled on the long flaxen hair of my mother;

My feet step soft on descendants of grass
That was barely brushed
By the wary boots of a hummingbird woman,
The Great Great Grandmother
Of my mid-century children.


II

September born, reared in the sunset hour,
I was the child of old men heavy with honour;
I mourned the half mast time of their death and sorrowed
A season for leaves, shaking their scarlet flags
From green virility of trees.

And the whine of autumn in the family tree.
How tired, how tall grow the trees
Where the trees and the family are temples
Whose columns will tumble, leaf over root to their ruin.

Here, in my body’s home my heart dyes red
The last hard maple in their acres.
Where birch and elm and willow turn,
Gently bred, to gold against the conifers,
I hail my fathers, sing their blood to the leaf.

~~
Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961)
from Counterpoint to Sleep, 1951

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Anne Wilkinson biography

In June and Gentle Oven / Anne Wilkinson

In June and Gentle Oven

In June and gentle oven
Summer kingdoms simmer
As they come
And through flower and leaf and love
Release
Their sweetest juice.

No wind at all
On the wide green world
Where fields go stroll-
ing by
And in and out
An adder of a stream
Parts the daisies
On a small Ontario farm.

And where, in the curve of meadow,
Lovers, touching, lie,
A church of grass stands up
And walls them, holy, in.

Fabulous the insects
Stud the air
Or walk on running water,
Klee-drawn saints
And bright as angels are.

Honeysuckle here
Is more than bees can bear
And time turns pale
And stops to catch the breath
And lovers slip their flesh
And light as pollen
Play on treble water
Till bodies reappear
And a shower of sun
To dry their langour.

Then two in one the lovers lie
And peel the skin of summer
With their teeth
And suck its marrow from a kiss
So charged with grace
The tongue, all knowing
Holds the sap of June
Aloof from seasons, flowing.

~~
Anne Wilkinson (1910-1961)
from The Hangman Ties the Holly, 1955

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada]

Anne Wilkinson biography