The Quiet in Me

Poems

Patrick Lane

• Publisher: Harbour Publishing
• Year: 2022
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781550179828
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

A posthumous collection of poetry from Patrick Lane, compiled and edited by Lorna Crozier.

In this final collection, Patrick Lane cultivates the quiet of living in a body amongst so many other bodies—the trout in the lake, geese arriving with the wind, a raccoon fishing in a river—ultimately, revealing a tangled web of life and a speaker who sees both beauty and pain brimming around him.

Together, the poems in The Quiet in Me are a clear-eyed and sharp meditation on existing in a world pulsing between life and death, death and life. When the body is "a museum for what's gone" and a heart is "the sound of the wind seething," there is no answer but to learn the language of quiet; the language of an earth unfolding itself perpetually in the dawn: "the song of the falling water and wild birds."

With incredible poetic precision, this collection is an offering—to come back to yourself and to lose yourself in sight, sound and sense. Playing in paradoxes—"empty marrow bones with their strings of red ants"—these poems cultivate dualisms: intimacy and realism, vulnerability and the roughness of youth, a scar that is a father's teaching, a blade that is a sigh.

From one of Canada's most lyric writers, comes a book steeped in the wisdom of the natural world. Told by an eye that never ceases to observe and a heart that is willing to make itself known—to invite others into its warmth and wilderness—this collection transposes leaf to leaf, stone to stone, reminding us that water will always return to water and so will we.

A Christmas Poem

You get asked for a Christmas poem to read on the radio—a poem for a friend, a guy you know, and it gets you thinking about Christmas and wondering why you’ve never written one, a Christmas poem, you mean, something about birth and death, something about stables and animals, the soft smell of cattle in winter, the bloom of steam rising from their horns, and chickens, surely there’d be chickens, roosting, quiet, even the rooster though he’d have an eye on the sun coming, that first light breaking over the hills, and a birth, yes, a baby, sure, and you wonder at that, remembering the time you, only twenty, a first-aid man in a mill town, delivered a baby up north, that slipperiness, that shout the baby gave when he took in the whole world with his breath, that kind of miracle wasn’t the first thing in your mind like the birth in the stable in the story you were told when you were little and which now you rarely think of because you know it’s only a story, a myth really, something made up to keep children happy, and anyway it’s been written a hundred thousand times, all those sentimental poems about Christmas, and you swore long ago you’d never go that way, but still there was a birth and there was a child and even if the stable was a wishfulness with its goats and pigs, its chickens and its horses, the hay laid down and a blanket hung to keep the cold away because it gets cold that time of year even in the Holy Land, and a woman, yes, there had to be a mother who took that child to her breast and fed it, and a father too, a little afraid, a little unsure of what to do, helpless like men are at ordinary miracles, like you were up north, that baby sliding out of the woman and you holding it for a moment, the woman saying so soft you almost didn’t hear, “Give him to me,” and you did and sat beside her, quiet, only watched that small face pressed against her, young as you were, and you were young then, saying nothing, the blood on your hands her blood, not his, a rust-red, drying in the air and then looking at you with something in her face you didn’t understand, not then, not now, her tears without crying, and the quiet in her after such a birth, so poor she wouldn’t go out to a doctor and chose you, and what this has to do with Christmas, you don’t know, but it does somehow because of the look she gave you and the child and the blood on your hands and the night, and everything so quiet in that room, and you give these words to your friend, not knowing if what you’ve written is enough or whether it’s even about Christmas, but it’s as close as you can get to it, her look and the baby lying there, quiet, and the years.

Cobalt Blue

The elephant seals in the Bay of Otters. I sat under the arbutus at dawn and watched the calves at play. Gulls screamed as geese lifted on their cowled wings. There were clicks of beetles on the tree’s bronze flesh. One grandfather raised his trunk, the holes where his tusks were, healed. Two eagles in their mating swung the sky together, talons locked in their gyre. The light from their bodies, glancing, took me back to Chartres, the ancient windows of the cathedral, that blue glass. The mind is without time. Le bleu de l’aube. No one has been able to make that colour again.

The Elder Tree

Today I cleared the earth around the elder tree, moved the dead branches the wind had carried to where I come to pray. And today the turtle rose from the pond’s heavy dark to heal her winter shell. She rises in the spring when the light returns. I leaned against the ancient bark, closed my eyes and saw my father planting trees, his hands caring for the roots. How long ago the fathers, their stories another kind of cure. The sun mends most wounds, each prayer I say beneath the tree the oldest prayer. Her branches in the wind sing to me: I am the tree who rests on the back of the turtle the turtle rests upon.

Thumbprint

Qin Shi Huang walled the potters inside his perfect city of death. Their hands remain in the curved cheekbones of the warriors. Inside the eye socket of the last horse, the thumbprint of its maker. The eye stares sightless upon the potter who stares sightless in return.

* Qin Shi Huang was the emperor responsible for the making and burial of the terracotta army to guard his tomb.

Carefully

The mole in his small room moves a small stone and waits out the rain.

Ellington & Vera Lynn

I was a b...

Table of contents

• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Last Words
• Living in a Phantom Hut
• Hummingbirds
• Bitter
• The Breath
• Chuck Berry and Cherry Blossoms
• A Christmas Poem
• Cobalt Blue
• The Elder Tree
• Thumbprint
• Carefully
• Ellington & Vera Lynn
• Small Elegy
• Enkidu, Waiting
• False Creek
• Fog on the South Shore
• Icebergs off Fogo Island
• Kintsugi
• Little Wolf
• Blueberry Hill
• Lacrimae
• Love, Too
• Morning
• The Mosque of the Drop of Blood
• Moving, Day
• Ötzi
• Periphery
• Poverty Sutra
• The Quiet in Me
• Road Crew, August, 1956
• It’s Finally Friday
• Salt Burner
• Salvation
• Slick
• The Sea Is Our Home
• Snow
• Suicide
• This Way
• Wild Dogs, 1959
• Without Art and Waiting
• Ash
• Om
• Lookout
• How Many Times Have I Taken Out My Death?
• Fragments
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author