Winter 2007

A Week Without God: North Shore
Mary Rose O'Reilley

1
The day we met, you played
with a loose thread of my red dress
as though you longed to unravel
a system that spun my life on a reel.

Some like to play
with solar systems that way.

You say you remember a dress
patterned with abstract daisies
on grey-green. We agree
each unraveled the other.
Two days we’ve lived on this shore
and I get older, as if we’ve entered
enchantment: a girl descends rock face,
an old woman can’t make it up,
soft moss under the slick patella, eroded,
grey hair tangled among the roots
of wild parsnip.

Meanwhile, the wind rises.

2
Yeats, at sixty, left breakfast,
flared out the door, thinking of some girl
out of a myth, stretching translucent fingers
to trim her lamp. But that was Dublin.
Here, the wind rises. Gods are demoted
to Freightliners decked with lights,
hauling case after caseload of trash
up to Thunder Bay. They splash rain
on the dogs and me as we walk Highway 1.

3
Each night, I go under the cliff
of your shoulder, a washed bone, stripped
and refined past the point where I think
I have nothing to lose.

Then, Morning, Bright Morning Star!
up with the north, jaywalking over the road;
O Morning, pinwheeling down,
to get me again for the day,
where I have clothes to put on,
pink thong sandals,
and something to do in the world
they give me and take away.

4
When we see the women carry their beehives
out of the shed, I am that quick
stung with longing for some new life.

Fox eyes, in the prairie grass, glow, too,
with a plan for crossing the highway.
When I watch the veiled women enter the lives
of their gold shelves, I am transfixed, as ever,
with wanting to find out.
Maybe too old.
I wasted so many hours, laid out with my sitter,
watching the soaps, thinking time and death
could be pulled like a plug at lunchtime.

Meanwhile, the yellow hearts of the hives
teemed with their having and giving pulse.
Girls, filmy as brides, offered themselves
to science or some husband, worthy or not
of the nectar.

5
Soon I was learning to pray
in languages slick with longing for God:
the Spanish of old men, who cling to the altars,
as if they were gunwales or wives. Latin
made me feel the panic of boys trapped
in the cloister, Augustine’s tense affection,
poured like water on sand: a man who knew
his deserts, the gold eye of the wrong love.
French prayed with a balance of trepidation
and ire, cool, but full of the impulse
to spend itself.

I can no longer find God
with words, music or silence.
One of the old Fathers, at this impasse
counselled his novice to break into flame;

this option eludes me as yet,
like the choke-cherry’s performance
all down its branch.

I have nothing inside to convert to blossom
or fire. Instead, I sit on the edge of a long drop,
as the Irish monastics patrolled their sliver
of ground, watching for God’s plane.

6
Wind up in the night from the east, long combers
shake the foundation of our house.
High in their nest, sparrow hawks scream.
A dog careens into our bed,
wanting to go outside, wanting breakfast,
all that dogs want, all anyone wants: someone
to scratch the tick bite on the belly,
to smell time.

I want to walk on the shore
and feel something infinite pull on my braids.

But there will be time for that after breakfast,
the dog says. I, too, scent the blackberries
of our shore, still hover, feeding the screamers
in some nest.

So God can wait.
I’ve waited enough for Him, as a child sits
in front of the morning cartoons,
lulled into despair for a world
run by rabbits and roadrunners,
Felix the Cat, smashing furniture,
flattening innocent critters,
tracks of a pick-up across each resilient back;

green, two-dimensional grownups,
pointing with sticks at a storm system.

I’ve held God’s hand as a child leads
her drunken father home to the tufts
of his own sofa, turns on the test pattern,
tiptoes away.
I’ll play with the dogs,
make toast, find the place
in our house you have made for me.

7
I want to hold still and make nothing happen:
surely the virgin said this, busy and dumb
as the spindle that swings from her hand.

“Listen,” the angel tells her, “spin
to the motion of His will. Endure the brooding
of men who want sons for themselves.”

Day after day the lake struggles against the bowl
of its life, a child hating the cradle.

Just before dawn I smell bread.
Across the bay, men and women
have driven their pick-ups over Wolf Ridge,
got into their hairnets, and set out the new loaves.

I want to stand in plain space, my eyes
window shades for the moment in someone’s doll,
geared to spring open on strange worlds.

I want thoughts new as minnows.
Suppose she’d refused the hot morning tea of His love?
It’s not that He bothered to know what inwardness
a girl offers, standing there in the light
with her nervous grin.
What if she laughed at Him?