Tuesday poem #181 : Christine Stewart and Ted Byrne : Stone Rimes 1

from Dante

Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra

1.

In the brief day of masks

When the color leaves

And the grass is white

In the day that comes

To the white bleached hills

My desire is lost.

In the scalded hills lost

In the stone woman masked

In the white hills

Fixed in the dying leaves

Left but how hard is stone when the soft shade comes

To her that is masked, how white?

When the shade softens the white

And covers in green the desire lost

In the flowers coming

In the orchards unmasking

In the fields and leaves

Releasing the white hills

Turning green the new hills

Taking breached the will of bleached white

Finding the stone self in leaves

Shielding the stone not lost

For its beauty unmasked

Made clear in a verdant coming

As a person comes clear in leaving

As the stars of grass come

Calm to the plains not lost

Come finding green hills

Where the person is not white

And the unlight of I is unmasked

As leaves from the grass of hills  

Come green come unbleached   

As desire comes, found, and unmasked 

As I come between

2.

In the brief bereft of eyes

of what ambition imparts with time

In her eyes periodic departures and the cold

brought back from places she’s not known

the address that’s not a home

the country where desire persists

In hillocks mountains persist

In the bleached sand snow and ice

call the hunted home

Ecology announces the death of time

erases the burden of being Unknown

the fear of coming in from the cold

When May comes back from the cold

the rattling of the harrow persists

as shoulders bump against the known

A satyr he should fear Demeter’s eyes

to be unmanned before his time

in the place he once called home

Not Love but Love’s mother draws us home

all lifted to her lips but the cold

of stone white in this green time

Leafing then blooming the selves persist

in her eyes in her eyes in her eyes

light unlike the light we know

By persistence will she be known

with knowledge driven home

splendour condensed in her eyes

There is a winter’s distant cold

unremembered nights persist

against the odds of perfect time

But certain clocks take back time

or would if the truth were known

Certain ideas fail to persist

once they’re away from home

while others give heat to the cold

as surely as trousers attract eyes

The odour of time clouds our eyes

but vision persists in what we know

coming home to the fondling cold

3.

In underpants, the lost can see

what will gives from hours

In her vision – small and interrupted leavings and the cold—the fucking cold

returned from anonymity

those numbers aren’t on her gate

in this place where want lasts

In the small hills height remains

in the white sediment and snow, some ice.

It calls to the chased

the way systems shout ‘hey, time’s up’

and wipe out the weight of being one

and the fear of being welcomed

The way spring returns from a thaw

as noisy as hell, never ceasing

shoulders jostling against its certainty

That old goat should fear Spring

She’ll unman him soon enough

in that place he once called home

At first, it’s as if Love’s mother sketches the houses

and lifts the pencil (to her mouth)

And it is, everything lifted to her mouth, except winter,

not Love but Love’s mother that holds us

leafing, blooming, selfing

undone in her eyes, light’s mechanical misfortune

She will be known, by all the science of the schools

standing in the hollow of a spoon

dancing a concave of warming

There is a winter we forget

its night dissolved in this solution

as if time were not a problem

and the little smile in the corner of her mouth

her turning back, were of the essence

Ideas are well enough, but hell

they never wander far from home

because it’s cold in the marches

even as exile quickens the attention

Let’s not talk about time or the insubstantial

qualities of what it moves around in

Let’s just close the door behind us when we leave

Dante’s Rime Petrose are the underbelly of his beatified distortion of desire. Starting from Ted's literal translation of Dante's quartet of petrified rimes, we have tried to pull this desire slant, into repetition, into shifting patterns of diffusion and accumulation where dejection can flourish, where the gendered subject (masked) and the green hill can regather. This sestina is the first of the four canzoni.

Christine Stewart works in the English and Film Studies Department at the University of Alberta. She studies poetics, and is a founding member of the Writing Revolution in Place Research Collective. Recent publications: “Propositions from Under Mill Creek Bridge,” in Sustaining the West. Wilfred Laurier, “On Treaty Six from Under Mill Creek Bridge” in Toward. Some. Air. Banff Centre Press, “This—from Treaty Six” in Dusie and The Odes, Nomados Press.

Ted Byrne was born in Hamilton Ontario and has lived in Vancouver since the late sixties. He was a member of the Kootenay School of Writing collective, and is presently a member of the Lacan Salon. He periodically teaches poetry and poetics in the HUM 101 program at UBC. Current projects include historical fictions about Hamilton, and a book constructed from sonnets by Louise Labé and Guido Cavalcanti. His books include Aporia, Beautiful Lies, and Sonnets : Louise Labé.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan