Steven Heighton
Steven Heighton is publishing two books this spring: a novel, Every Lost Country, and a poetry collection, Patient Frame, from which the poems in this issue of NPR are excerpted. His last novel, Afterlands, appeared in six countries; was a New York Times Book Review editors’ choice; was a best of year choice in ten publications in Canada, the USA, and the UK, and was recently optioned for film. His poems and stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies -- London Review of Books, Poetry, Tin House, Europe, The Walrus, and Best English Stories, among others -- and have received three National Magazine Award golds. He has also been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, the Trillium Award, a Pushcart Prize, and Britain’s W.H. Smith Award.
THE LAST READER
The woman whose eyesight is fading tries to read
her son’s first book. It’s long, 300 pages,
of which she can take in a page a night, at best.
When the doctor says she has less than a year
it’s not her eyesight he means. As she reads, death
gets on with its own determined work -- studying,
mastering the subtle codes, transcribing her
cell by syllable into the dense, vast anthology
of the dead. Death never doubts itself, as her son,
she knows, must do. Death gets it right each time.
She reads till all sense stops rising from the page,
this plot no lamp can brighten. A week’s worth left
to be unveiled. In the still-encrypted world
she and her son the last reader and writer.
HERSELF, REVISED
There’s a final bedtime when the father reads
to his daughter under the half-moon lamp.
The wolf-eyed dog sits guard on the snowy
quilt at their feet -- ears pricked, head upright
like a dragon on its hoard -- while the daughter’s
new clock ticks on the dresser. When the father
shuts the book, neither feels in the cool sigh
cast from its pages a breath of the end --
and how can it be that this ritual
will not recur? True, this latest story
is over, Treasure Island, which held them
a dozen nights, but “the end” has arrived
this way often before. Maybe she’s tired
of the rite, or waking to a sense of herself
revised? Maybe he’s temporarily bored,
or unmoored, reading by duty or rote,
turning deeper inside his own concerns.
How does the end enter? There’s a hinging
like a book’s sewn spine in the raw matter
of time -- that coded text, illegible --
and stretched too far, it goes. An innocent
break, the father off one weekend or the child
sleeping at a friend’s, followed by a night
or two she wants to read alone, or write,
for a change, in her new padlock journal.
She has no idea what has changed. She
can’t know that the enlargement of her life
demands small death after death, and this one,
the latest, is far from last. She will not
notice this death, being so intent on life --
so implied in its stretching crewelwork
of seconds.
Some nights later, suddenly,
writing cheques or checking email, he might
notice and wonder at the change. In a sense
such minor passings pre-enact his own.
For a moment he might lay down his pen,
forget the figures, peer over the roofline
and find she was right -- Orion, rising,
is more blueprint of butterfly, or bird,
than hunter. How does it enter, through what rift
or flaw? Maybe it doesn’t enter at all.
It was there in every sentence: the end.
OUTRAM LAKE
Lake buried under the Hope Slide, Hope, BC, January 1965
The rhyme of your death revives the couplet.
No one’s with you on the porch the bitter night
you submit yourself to winter, to wed,
with ice, your absence
to a buried wife’s, dying toward her
in a way that’s anaesthetic
and yet, in its simple dignity, aesthetic too --
that would matter to you --
while in the vital, summerlike hum
of sodium streetlamps, a cold confetti of snowflakes
settles homeward, marking this reunion, till it’s time
and timeless, the lush numbness of freezing
stills you, and your lips and fingers
are done versing.
A cold spring
and we drive from the coast into the Cascades
to witness how a body of water can vanish:
this prior loss
could hardly have rhymed less -- deafening,
fast -- massed panzers of boulders and snow
loosing downvalley over a doomed throughway
to plough traffic under, then bombarding
onward to bury Outram Lake, ages
deep, under a jumbled slag
like dense, enigmatic wording.
(wait for me in that winter room—)
Different, yet here too a beauty
interred, flow stalled (we thought at first),
until, miles downvalley, reading in the car,
we came to ourselves along a glacial stream
braiding green with subconscious silts
from under time’s not quite decisive slide --
Richard Outram, poet, died Port Hope, 21 January 2005.
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So, I'd like to start with a comment made near the end of your Late Nights with Wild Cowboys, in the poem "Jawbone." You express real fear and anxiety over the prospect of having your life and love be objectified, turned into summary, a bowdlerized rendering that "[leaves] nearly everything out." More than that, though, you are worried about how we ourselves are complicit in this sort of exclusionary act. I guess what I'd like to ask first, then, is: do you imagine poetry as a means of letting things in rather than keeping everything out? And what are you aiming to let in, exactly?
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