The Broken Face

Russell Thornton

• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781550178449
• eBook ISBN: 9781550178456
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familiar relationships he ushers in a connection with something transcendent: "A man has come floundering late in the night / to stand alone at the shore of a sleeping infant's face."

The poems capture life at the periphery, whether describing homelessness or incarceration, or even the universal experiences of aging and mortality, love and fear of love, all of which bring the speaker into a detached yet energized state of watching and waiting: "the door that was my grandfather into our passing lives / will arrive at a house where each of us is his own door / that opens on our first selves, fundamental together."

With intense lyricism, Thornton displays a mastery of craft so complete as to be nearly invisible. While stunningly beautiful, his imagery is also in such complete service to the deeper emotional resonance of each poem that it feels inevitable, and contributes to making the collection deeply moving.

IV

Birthmark

This morning as I woke,

the summer sun, the deep day, the brown earth—

all began with my memory of the mole

you carried on the inside of your thigh.

You are gone; I am lightly riding to my own death.

Once you asked if you should have it removed,

but a mole such as that one, I said, you should let stay.

Now it is my birthmark.

Two Houses

The house I ran from is gone. A new house stands where it stood.

I will never be able to go to that first house

as I have imagined I would one day

and ask the owners if I might intrude

and walk around the front room

and go down the staircase to stand in my old room.

The rock wall at the end of the backyard is not gone,

though it is held together only by crumbling mortar and vines.

Once I saw a rat run up the rockery

into a small dark gap, and disappear—

I stood watching with a hole in my forehead

made by a boy who hurled a stone at me from down the lane.

A house a block away is not gone. It was older,

much older than our house. This is the house I ran to.

The street I ran along was vast, the darkness vast—

it narrowed to an enclosed front porch,

where I knocked as I had at every house.

I could go to this house again,

but the mild couple who brought me inside and made a call

would be gone. They would be long dead.

The house, so well-kept, immaculate and fine an old house,

will likely still be here when I am dead

and not here to remember what only I can

of the book-lined den, the sweet smell of the baking. I am alive.

A Dove

A wild dove that has chosen the tree

outside our apartment for a home

flashes past with its lightning-white wings,

parts the vast curtain of green needles

in front of our window two floors up

and disappears. There is no olive

leaf in its mouth. Still, the apartment

shelters us like an ark, our quarters

inside its listing hull. There is rain

that comes sweeping against the glass, air

that turns purple-dark and storms that come

along with my dreams of my loved ones

lost forever. The dove reappears.

My two small children climb up to see it.

It as soon departs again—around

the side of the building, up above,

beyond our sight. There is the window

of our ark that lets in the sunlight.

The dove returns again, nothing

in its mouth but sunlight. All our eyes

must follow it, all our ears must fill

with its cooing. Its wings are the wings

we flap and flutter. The grey deluge

held in the world will rise around us,

and the wild dove arrive out of it

carrying our lives apart from us,

father, mother and child will be sent

to and from us by what is in us,

wing the way from the tree to the tree.

O God, Beast, Mystery, Come!

They will come edged in early running light,

brimming with blood, to see their arrows pierce

a stag, a muskox or horse, then let out their cry.

They will create paste from red clay ochre

and with it fill in the rhythmic outline of the animal

on secret torch-lit cave walls and ceilings.

I leave my life behind when a watercolour

of a palomino painted by my father leaves my hands.

On my school’s gravel field I pin the boy

whose boot has trampled my picture, I lift

myself over him and bring my lunch kit

down like a machete across his face.

I take the throat of a boy who has taunted me

because I can run fast, run farther than the rest

without tiring; I seem to watch as I throw him

against the metal of a gym locker door

and clamp his throat there with my hands

to stop his breathing, until they pull me away.

I wait in the dark, I jump someone who jumped me

and hit him, fling him into a ditch, kick him

until he goes quiet, is unable to move; before

I hear the yelp of a siren around a corner

and veer off, I gaze at the palette of oils

in the moonlit muck splattered over him.

They will shriek, they will dance around a pit

where they have trapped a mammoth, never closer

to the life beneath the hide as when they spear it,

never closer to the energies of their fires

as when they ...

Table of contents

• I
• II
• III
• IV
• Notes & Acknowledgements
• About the Author