Earthly Pages
The Poetry of Don Domanski
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Earthly Pages
The Poetry of Don Domanski
Selected
with an
introduction by
Brian Bartlett
and an
afterword by
Don Domanski
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing pro-
gram. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the
Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Domanski, Don, 1950–
Earthly pages : the poetry of Don Domanski / selected with an
introduction by Brian Bartlett ; and an afterword by Don Domanski.
(Laurier poetry series)
isbn 978-1-55458-008-8
i. Bartlett, Brian, 1953–
ii. Title. iii. Series.
PS8557.O43E27 2007
C811’.54
C2007-903603-1
© 2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
www.wlupress.wlu.ca
Cover image: “Earthrise,” drawing by Don Domanski. Cover and text design by P.J.
Woodland.
Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material
used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and
omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.
●
'
This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).
Printed in Canada
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or trans-
mitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher
or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an
Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800 -893-
5777.
v
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Trees Are Full of Rings, Brian Bartlett / ix
Summer Job: Hospital Morgue / 3
At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue / 14
Epiphany Under Thunderclouds / 33
Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers / 35
Taking the Train to Fredericton / 43
Afterword: Flying Over Language, by Don Domanski / 53
vi / Contents
vii
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and
publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely con-
flicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new
work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry
is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.
But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our
poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in class-
rooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and
more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contem-
porary poetry more widely available.
The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University
Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-
ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction
writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly
be better known at home.
Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-
five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduc-
tion; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual
practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology
will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have
more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work.
Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections
among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.
It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the
epigraph for The Diviners: “but they had their being once / and left a place
to stand on.” Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on.
We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so.
—Neil Besner
General Editor
viii
Don Domanski was born on Cape Breton Island in 1950 and raised in Sydney,
and has lived in Halifax for many years. Beginning with The Cape Breton Book
of the Dead in 1975, he has written eight collections of poetry. Two of them,
Wolf-Ladder (1991) and Stations of the Left Hand (1994), were short-listed for
the Governor General’s Award. At Malaspina University-College on Vancouver
Island in 2005 he delivered a Ralph Gustafson Lecture, “Poetry and the Sacred,”
which was later published by the Institute for Coastal Research as a chapbook
designed and typeset by Robert Bringhurst. In 2006 Jack Pine Press published
a chapbook of Domanski’s poetry and artwork, All Our Wonder Unavenged.
His full-length collection with the same title was published by Brick Books
in 2007; this book includes poems that won cbc’s Canadian Literary Award
for Poetry in 1999. His poems have been anthologized in Storm Warning ii,
The Poets of Canada, The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse, The Atlantic
Anthology: Poetry, Canadian Poetry Now, Easterly, The New Canadian Poetry,
Inside the Poem, Fiddlehead Gold, We All Begin in a Little Magazine, Coastlines,
and To Find Us. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been
translated into Czech, Portuguese, and Spanish. He has been on the faculty of
the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio, and contributed to the
mentorship program of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia.
His interests include the natural sciences, religion, mythology, and the
visual arts. Some of his artwork has appeared in galleries in Halifax and Seoul,
South Korea. He collected fossils for fourteen years. During this time he found
a neural arch of a 350-million-year-old (Carboniferous) amphibian previously
thought to have gone extinct in the Devonian period. His interest in religion
has included visits to churches and cathedrals in France, Ireland, and Argen-
tina, mosques in Istanbul, Rumi’s tomb in Konya, and Buddhist temples
and monasteries in China. One of his interests in the last few years has been
meteorites, his collection including a meteorite from Nantan, China, that
fell in 1516. Another of his pastimes is collecting Stone Age tools, such as an
80,000-year-old Neanderthal digging tool made from the jawbone of a cave
bear found in Germany. All of these pursuits help to ground his work and
fuel his imagination.
ix
The cosmology of Don Domanski’s poetry is both fresh and ancient. Much
of it is absorbed in the living fecundity of nature, in what one of his poems
calls “the stupendous pit / of beatitudes opening / wider and wider.” Rather
than forget all but Domanski’s metaphorical shape-changings, atavistic
moments, and unfoldings of the unconscious, we should recall that as an
epigraph for his second book he chose these lines from Hopkins: “And for
all this, nature is never spent; / There lives the dearest freshness deep down
things.” Hopkins’s words are significant for all of Domanski’s seven collections
published between 1975 and 1998. In various poems, his own words refer to
“all these letters / lying unopened in every field,” “the small kingdoms of
eternity and desire,” “the good and tumbling earth.” Domanski’s titles like
War in an Empty House, Stations of the Left Hand, and Parish of the Physic
Moon are all unique and spacious, but none of these titles represent his work
as directly as the one he’s chosen for his first volume of selected poems,
Earthly Pages.
“Earthly” reminds us that Domanski has deep respect for phenomena and
processes that sustain our lives as they did those of our ancestors going back
millennia, and those of prehistoric life forms. It’s apt that Domanski has
literally been a fossil collector, and has sometimes given his findings as gifts
to friends. As he said in an interview conducted by S.D. Johnson, “The wonder
is that anything at all exists…. All the birth through billions of years of incal-
culable plants and animals got you here.” Or to quote from his poem “Sleep’s
Ova”: “I was born because millions of years ago communities / grew out of
ponds.” (Here Whitman isn’t too far off: “Immense have been the preparations
for me / … / Before I was born out of my mother generations guided me.”)
The second word in Domanski’s title, Pages, can remind us that poetry is a
product of work within a human medium, part of the earth more than a
mirroring of it. Domanski is acutely aware of the silences surrounding poetry,
of the infinite expanses of existence poetry cannot hope to enter. He may
have recalled in talking to Johnson—and years earlier to John Oughton—
the Chinese saying “A blank page contains the infinite,” but he confronts how
any poem is bounded by our limits, as by the four edges of a page.
Over two decades before Domanski published a group of poems called
“What the Bestiary Said,” he was well on the way to creating a bestiary. In
his first two collections, The Cape Breton Book of the Dead and Heaven, he
introduced a few of the creatures—fly, beetle, moth, spider, toad, frog, sala-
mander, rat, shrew, cat, wolf—that would populate his poetry. References to
Buddha, Lucifer, God, and angels also foreshadowed emphases in Domanski’s
later books. Just as crucially, while still a poet in his twenties he established
the centrality of birth and death and regeneration to his vision. “Sleep’s Ova,”
a later poem I quoted above, speaks of “the sleight-of-hand motion / of being
born and dying and being born.” No early poem of his suggests cycles of life
more movingly than “Summer-Piece,” which contemplates the endless re-
circulation and transformation of matter, how through eons earthly things
generate other earthly things. “Summer-Piece” imagines how “someone’s
torso … / was ousted for this slew of flies.” This poem can also direct us to
Domanski’s sense of time. As drenched as his poems are in the everyday
burgeoning of lives, they’re also grounded in an intense consciousness of
the past.
Domanski’s past isn’t so much one of social, economic, or nationalistic
struggles as one of geological and biological change (one of his poem speaks
of “Neolithic patter” and “Triassic cables”), mythic resonances, and religious,
philosophical, and scientific thought. Domanski’s imagination is drawn not
merely to the past in general but specifically to the primeval, to the origins
and early manifestations of things, now known only fragmentarily. It’s no
coincidence that his first three collections include the phrases “old phoenix,”
“old weight,” and “old beast,” but also “ancient fable,” “ancient mind,” and
“ancient pose.” Mythological names in his poems include Bran, Cerberus,
Charon, Cupid, Daedalus, Dionysus, Elysium, Erebus, Icarus, Israfel, Jove,
Lazarus, Lethe, Leviathan, Molpe, Morpheus, Narcissus, Odysseus, Orpheus,
Pallas Athena, the Phoenix, Proteus, Siegfried, Tartarus, the Virgin, and the
Werewolf. Some day an ambitious study should be written of the role such
names play in Domanski’s poems. For now, let’s note that two of the most
suggestive figures are the Phoenix, with all the rebirths it represents, and
Proteus, symbol of constant transformation. Historical names in Domanski’s
poems, though fewer, include Apuleius, Aquinas, Caesar, Copernicus, Dante,
Diogenes, Eckhart, Hildegard, Lao-Tzu, Nostradamus, Novalis, Ptolemy, and
Seneca. One striking aspect of these names is that none are of figures from
recent centuries; while Wallace Stevens, a major inspiration for Domanski,
names within his poems figures such as Bach, Constable, Corot, Lenin, Mather,
Racine, and Whitman, Domanski’s almost exclusive concentration on figures
of earlier eras creates a greater sense of distance from recent history. Listing
x / Introduction
the names may misrepresent them as comprising an intimidating catalogue;
actually, in Domanski’s books such names interact with things of the present,
and they’re scattered throughout imagery of forests and ponds, kitchens and
basements, mice and worms, hawks and dogs. They’re usually bright sparks
of association rather than cool cases of allusion. In Domanski’s poetry, two
thousand years is sometimes like a second.
That such references are more common in Domanski’s poetry than
twentieth-century cultural references means that when the latter do appear,
they do so surprisingly, with a pleasing jolt of the unexpected. When we read
of Claude Rains and “B-movies from Hollywood,” or of “the footprints of
Neil Armstrong,” we may feel we’re stepping outside Domanski’s usual world.
But the references are never there inertly as tags of picturesque, historically
local detail; Domanski’s transformative imagination plays with them. When
Aspirin appears in Domanski’s poetry, it’s Aspirin with a difference: “you feel
a sudden hurt / in your left side / so you place an aspirin / in a vase of white
roses.” Just as the famous pill is fed to flowers, the passages cited above make
the references new: Claude Rains is crying out “among the mosquitoes” at a
tv-watching woman’s windows, and Neil Armstrong’s footprints are found
in a child’s moon-like backyard (or is it a backyard-like moon?).
Not as rare as his twentieth-century cultural references, Domanski’s men-
tions of particular Nova Scotian sites—Sydney, Bras d’Or, Blomidon, Horton
Bluff, Burntcoat Head, Blue Beach, North Mountain, New Edinburgh, Halifax
Public Gardens—are infrequent reminders of the physical territory in which
most of his poems are written. Not that there’s anything conventionally re-
gional about his poems. In this he differs from Atlantic Canadian predecessors
like Pratt, Nowlan, or Acorn; he moves more quickly than they to the meta-
phorical and the mythic, or begins there, and doesn’t offer details of provincial
social dynamics or economic conditions, though the fact of poverty is alluded
to in a few poems. (Someone, however, might draw comparisons and con-
trasts between Pratt’s satirical, dinosaur-populated fantasy “The Great Feud”
and Domanski’s long poem “Firedrake.”) Other locations such as Vancouver,
Berlin, and Zaire appear in Domanski’s lines, but fleetingly, since he’s most
likely to find named locations as primarily sites where the archetypal occurs.
In any case, locations are named in the poems, and I would argue that they—
especially the Nova Scotian names—add one kind of specificity to Domanski’s
cosmology, just as London and Middlesex do to Blake’s poetic universe of
Beulah and Jerusalem.
The most dramatic moments in Domanski’s poems are often spoken
by an “I.” Now and then he identifies his personae as one of the dead, or a
prophet, or some animal—dragonfly, owl, blue whale. One common sort of
Introduction /
xi
Domanskian speaker is an alert, mentally agile, playful or surprised “I,” unem-
phatic in his presentation of marvellous moments, likely to start with a quoti-
dian thing, then veer into the wondrous:
I was coming up over the mountain
where someone had built the moon
the stone-built moon and the bleached shade
. . . . . . . .
in the valley I walked
under chestnut trees
watching black ants
as long as pencil stubs
the ants Nostradamus
predicted would swallow
the world
. . . . . . . .
after Sunday dinner
they were talking about politics in the next room
and I was sewing dust into my hair
painting my legs
to match the swaying grass beside the road
The last poem quoted from, “A Perfect Forehead,” places the speaker in what
initially appears a common situation of post-dinner conversation, but he
stands apart from others with a desire to “keep the day sacred / to keep it in-
visible,” and to do that partly by distancing himself from others as they debate
politics and, later, religion. The poem doesn’t so much dismiss the dialogue
as hear it in a greatly widened context: it’s “really about the river that runs /
through their conversations / carrying each word into nocturnal fields / where
it becomes a shadow hunched over a stone.” Often Domanski’s personae don’t
so much transport us to alien, surreal landscapes as find the extraordinary
nearby. (In the Johnson interview, Domanski denies that the word “ordinary”
has much weight: “There is no ‘everyday,’ no ‘normal day.’”) It is in “vacant
office buildings across town” that his poetry finds “stables where horses and
hay / are lowered slowly to the Underworld”; in “a bar on Hollis St.” that it
finds a geranium “dreaming of her maker’s heart”; and in a poem called
“Household Gods,” gods are in the bookcase, the walls, and the ceiling.
To cite the Johnson interview again, Domanski has said on the question of
tradition and influences: “each of us stands on the shoulders of thousands of
men and women who have gone on before us…. This sense of connectiveness
xii / Introduction
has gone a long way in appreciating the poetry of others, of realizing that the
poem written has only a bit of myself in it, and far more of the world, of other
poets, both dead and alive.” This seems a remarkably modest view for such an
original poet, yet it chimes with Eliot’s view that a poet is most original when
most readable in light of predecessors. It also encourages us to take Domanski
on his own terms and speculate about what links can be discovered to form a
“sense of connectiveness.” Domanski tells Johnson of the inspiration provided
by writers from religions as diverse as Taoism, Gnosticism, and Sufism, and by
many twentieth-century European poets. In a newspaper piece a decade ago,
Domanski cited as major influences “a lot of European and Oriental poetry—
those Chinese poets such as Li Po—Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens.” Among
Canadians, Gwendolyn MacEwen and Tim Lilburn have been singled out for
praise by Domanski. An American review of Wolf-Ladder referred to Doman-
ski as “a cross between Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, and the Brothers Grimm.”
For those of us who find more profound associations between Domanski and
poets such as Stevens and Rumi, that Bloomsbury Review passage may be
understandable but unsatisfactory.
In the case of Whitman and Domanski, whom I’ve never heard mentioned
together, there are a few fascinating parallels, likely not matters of direct in-
fluence. There are enormous differences between the two poets, such as the
absence in Domanski’s poems of anything like the striding, exclamatory,
America-proud “I.” Yet the title Earthly Pages overlaps with Leaves of Grass,
and Domanski shares with Whitman an omnivorous sympathy with many
spiritual traditions, attention to microcosms and macrocosms, a desire to see
time in terms of millennia rather than only years, an ongoing engagement
with death, and a prosodic fondness for parallelism and repetition, devices
found in many religious texts. Compare Whitman’s “I find letters from God
dropt in the street” to Domanski’s “last night I heard God in the street / break-
ing bottles
rebel-yells.” Compare Domanski’s giving space to many species
in his poetry, and his faithfulness to both the seen and the unseen, to Whit-
man’s “The moth and the fish-eggs are in their place / … / The palpable is in
its place and the impalpable is in its place.” Domanski’s “Summer-Piece” could
be glossed by Whitman’s “The Compost,” a troubled, frightened poem about
the endless recycling of matter. In “Assurances,” Whitman claims “the majesty
and beauty of the world are latent in any iota of the world,” and “the eyesight
has another eyesight, and the hearing another hearing, and the voice another
voice.” It wouldn’t take long to find parallels in Domanski’s poetry to these
and other passages from Whitman.
Stevens, writing partly under the shadow of Whitman, can be more ex-
tensively connected to Domanski. Just look at their titles. Stevens has “The
Planet on the Table” and Domanski “The Planet Asleep on Your Heart,”
Introduction /
xiii
Stevens “A Weak Mind in the Mountains” and Domanski “A Mind in the Top
of the Trees.” Echoes can also be heard between the titles “Stars at Tallapoosa”
(
WS
) and “The Stars in Ireland” (
DD
), “A Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”
and “A Man Betrayed by Incorporeality,” “The Course of a Particular” and
“The Particulars of Pointed Things,” “The Dance of Macabre Mice” and “The
Pyramid of Mice.” Faithful readers of both Stevens and Domanski might also
daydream about one poet writing poems given the other’s titles: it’s fun
to imagine Domanski writing poems called “The Worms at Heaven’s Gate,”
“Primitive Like an Orb,” and “Ghosts as Cocoons,” and Stevens writing
“Narcissus in a Random Universe,” “Coat of Arms for an Afternoon,” and “At
the Height of Names.” The connections between the two poets are far more
complex than overlappings between their titles, but I’d like to mention one
important difference: while both are pervasively metaphorical, Domanski
doesn’t seem to share with Stevens a hunger for “[t]he poem of pure reality,
untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word, / Straight to the trans-
fixing object.” One of the defining struggles in Stevens’s poetry is between the
embrace of metaphor and the desire for transparency, but Domanski grounds
himself so much in the necessity of metaphor that he may not want otherwise,
recognizing that human language will never truly capture—to adopt one of
Stevens’s phrases—“the thing itself.” In Domanski’s poetry and prose, silence
and intuition beyond language—rather than language without metaphor—
is where a fuller understanding resides.
Rereading Domanski recently, I’ve thought less of Stevens and Whitman,
or of Baudelaire and Rilke and Tranströmer, than of a poet from another
language and a much earlier time: Jelaluddin Rumi (1207–73). Rumi emerges
as one of the giants on whose shoulders Domanski speaks of standing, just
as Rumi stood on the shoulders of others. His advice “Try and be a sheet of
paper with nothing on it” is reminiscent of Domanski’s citing of the Chinese
saying about a blank page. Rumi’s line “Praise, the ocean. What we say, a little
ship” jibes with Domanski’s sense of the smallness of anyone’s poetic endeav-
ours amid the oceanic confluences of beings interacting with beings. Rumi’s
technique of using multiple metaphors consecutively presented—“you’re the
wind. You’re the diver’s clothes / lying empty on the beach. You’re the fish”—
is a technique much favoured by Domanski. The two poets also combine
the miniature and the cosmic: “A tiny gnat’s outward form flies around and
around / in pain and wanting, while the gnat’s inward nature / includes the
entire galactic whirling of the universe!” (Rumi); “[a fox’s] paunch … so full
of heaven / stuffed so full of vista / and testament / he can barely move”
(Domanski).
As an epigraph for Parish of the Physic Moon, Domanski chose a passage
from Rumi: “Invisible, visible, the world / does not work without both.” These
xiv / Introduction
Introduction /
xv
lines come from a poem translated by Coleman Barks as “The Cat and the
Meat.” The poem begins as a somewhat humorous tale about a husband and
wife’s feuding over how to manage their food. By the end, it has moved to an
unpredicted place. Elaborating on a metaphor for body and soul, Rumi writes
that if “you throw dust at someone’s head, / nothing will happen.” Likewise
with throwing water. But if you throw both together, “[t]hat marriage / of
water and dirt cracks open the head, / and afterward there are other mar-
riages.” Now and then in their poetry both Rumi and Domanski use marriage
as a metaphor. “He lived the marriage of form and spirit,” says another passage
in Rumi. In a Domanski poem called “Wedding Rings,” “the trees are full of
rings / wedding rings / diamonds and gold.” “Bride and Groom,” set in a post-
apocalyptic time after the disappearance of the human species, speaks of a
“coyote-bride” and her groom calling out to men and women to return from
death, because “the wedding night is also lonely” when “there are no other /
brides or grooms / on the face of the earth.” The depth of loss in that poem—
which begins with “bats in their Dantean circles”—is felt through the dimin-
ishment of many marriages to a single surviving bond.
“Bride and Groom” can be read as a predecessor to “Banns,” the poem
chosen for the conclusion of Earthly Pages. The more recent poem sees birds
as wedding dresses, trees as waiting brides, and the walking human as one who
would “marry the heartbeats that collect / on birch leaves” as well as marrying
“what can’t be seen.” The walker goes into a forest “via homages.” When the
poem says “you can begin no journey here without marriage,” Domanski may
be suggesting that love, commitment, and homage to the heart-and-mind-
shaking richness of existence can help make our lives not only bearable but
also fulfilling. These human drives are embodied in a book like Earthly Pages,
but they’re also needed if we are to read it with attentiveness and under-
standing.
—Brian Bartlett
Note on Sources
Full titles of Domanski books quoted in the above introduction are given on the
acknowledgements page at the back of this book. Poems quoted, with those in Earthly
Pages in semi-bold, appear in this order: “Spider Song” (Heaven), “A Daybreak …,”
“Small Kingdoms” (Parish), “The Sickroom” (Station), “Sleep’s Ova,” “Summer-Piece,”
“Sisters of the Ungathered Rosary” (Stations), “Beldam,” “Finch” (Cape Breton),
“Weed Song” (Heaven), “An Ancient Fable” (Heaven), “Sub Rosa,” “Cactus” (Cape
Breton), “Aquarium Music” (Hammerstroke), “The Sickroom” (Stations), “The
Madonna Room” (Hammerstroke), “Ghosts” (Hammerstroke), “Before the Plague …,”
“A Perfect Forehead,” “Writing” (Parish), “On a Winter’s Night” (Wolf-Ladder),
“Household Gods” (Parish), “Love Poem on the Sabbath,” “Fox Song” (Heaven),
“Wedding Rings” (Hammerstroke), “Bride and Groom” (Stations), “Banns.” The
interview by S.D. Johnson appeared as “The Wisdom of Falling” in Where the Words
Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation, edited by Tim Bowling (Roberts Creek,
BC : Nightwood, 2002). An earlier interview with Domanski, by John Oughton, ap-
peared as “Blank Paper and the Infinite,” in Poetry Canada Review 12. 2 (1992). In Arc
52 (2004), Domanski published a brief essay on Tim Lilburn’s poem “The House.”
Three other books used for this introduction are The Essential Rumi, translated by
Coleman Barks (Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1997); Wallace Stevens, The Palm at the End
of the Mind, edited by Holly Stevens (New York: Vintage, 1990); and Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass, edited by Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett (New York: Norton,
1973). The Whitman poems quoted are “Song of Myself, 44, 48, 16” and “Assurances”;
the Stevens poems, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” and “Not Ideas about the
Thing but the Thing Itself.” Detailed discussions of the Whitman–Stevens link are
found in Harold Bloom, Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca: Cornell
UP, 1977). The Rumi poems quoted other than “The Cat and the Meat” are “The
Fragile Vial,” “Buoyancy,” “The Diver’s Clothes Lying Empty,”and “The Three Brothers
and the Chinese Princess.” The newspaper article cited is “Rewards scant for Canada’s
poets,” by Val Ross, The Globe and Mail, November 15, 1994, and John Bradley’s
review of Wolf-Ladder appeared in The Bloomsbury Review, December 1992.
Published discussion of Domanski’s poetry so far has been largely—and regret-
tably—limited to brief book reviews. A few exceptions include “Domanski, Don,”
an entry I wrote for The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (New York: Continuum,
2005), and a few longer reviews: Dennis Cooley on Hammerstroke in Journal of
Canadian Poetry 3 (1986), B. Bartlett on Wolf-Ladder in The Fiddlehead 175 (1993),
and Louis MacKendrick on Stations of the Left Hand in Journal of Canadian Poetry
11 (1996).
xvi / Introduction
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
1
old phoenix you rise
out of morning tea
out of a single cup
left by itself on the kitchen table
old gal, old wart, your celtic pounds
simply balance the house when it teeters
your remedies never cure
your advice is always wrong
your kindness drowns cats
and overwaters the geranium
old grandmother, old sister, old wife,
old sweetheart, old heart in pre-War condition
what carries your soft body
to breakfast?
what sly tongue has chatted your head awake?
2 / Earthly Pages
balanced like gulls
above the relapse of sea and rock
their heads slowly turn
a complete twist toward land
they carry burning swords and pen-names
like Michael and Israfel
but know themselves as larvae
twirling in a man’s ear
or a rat gnawing away at a wall
dead Heaven’s moil
they now drift spore-like toward anyone’s mind
their silence thumping loudly
on the boulders drowning the water’s edge
the Big Dipper rising
to bare its incisors over the sea.
smug and exhausted
each lay like a satisfied craftsman
each a heroism looming
in front of me still
some only heads in bags
some about to spring to their feet
bursting with laughter at the joke
by midsummer their shattered bodies
and bad timing were commonplace
almost forgettable
now years later I remember detail
a half painted nail
a half opened eye
a clenched fist
a brief heart to heart with an irredeemable face.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
3
whose heart or bowel was looted
for this cool arena of trees?
for this footage of bracken
ajar at my feet?
who paid for that sparrow’s
nervous direction through the thicket?
for his song roofing
these goldenrods and lupines?
there is someone’s vigour
wasting away under
all this blood and greenery
there is someone’s familiar face
sagging over every bloom
permeating each athletic gesture
of the land
someone’s torso that I knew so well
was ousted for this slew of flies
in the afternoon air
for this pond’s peculiar look.
4 / Earthly Pages
and now her skin coffins
these peaks and valleys
now her belabouring blood
spreads out along the dull skyline
and ballast of stars
before her nape and breast arrived
this shoreline swam with misery
these rocks stood for nothing
this weather had nowhere to be
the magnitude of a woman
has been stretched open again
and now the entire world can lull
back into its dark self once more
now heaven can stop
its awful ragging
and sleep.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
5
out of the eye’s corner
comes the red visor of the orchis
the torturous reds of war
out from behind the injured white
steps the magenta of thorns
and knives
the eye-shaped sun
approaching the tide
I am always here
a bystander applauding
the inflammation of the waves
the constant flaring of water
all winter and all summer
I have come to this seawall
to numerous fires
to the effigy-burning lights of the sea
hoping for something to appear
something gigantic
something to fill a vacancy
that does not carry
the sweet poor scent
of the flesh
a ghost would do
or a jackal-headed god
in a boat
or at night the green polar lights
could appear like a siren
like bird-legged Molpe
seated on her rock
throwing men casually into the sea.
6 / Earthly Pages
I am at midnight now, waiting for the instruments of thought to
arrive. Outside the snow is turning away. Outside the dark leads the
snow down to the harbour for a second life across the expanse of ice.
Out to sea past the farthest point of land comes an elemental song
from you. The melody empties light from the eye. The words crowd
the throat. Overtaken by night, taken by your voice, the heart drops
its mirror, the brain will not do a thought. What is it in your name
that leaves itself like a frond in my hand?
Outside the wind suddenly moves again saying something to
itself, saying something dark into its own ear. I think it is a single
word, a word born far out to sea in a place without horizons, in a
place where you dry your hair with death, where you comb it out
with nightmares of a body falling through space.
A woman arrives. She looks like you. She hasn’t been with me
for long. She smells of cellar-heat. She smells of an old address. The
otherworld drifts out from under her dress. It fills the room with
bees and darkness measured out carefully against the light. Her
mouth hangs open but no words will come from there. Speech and
love gather at her waist falling away from her body. She stays in the
corner dancing without a partner, without music. She is the colour
of a dog violet. She wears a dahlia with no life in it. She wears a
dress with no body in it. She has always been blind. She has always
forgotten her name. I call to her from across the room, but that only
makes her tremble. That only makes her cry out like a wheel, like an
iron bar striking bone.
While she puts on her broken shoes, while she puts on her bent
ring and torn gloves, while she puts up her dead hair, she cries as you
did decades before standing in front of the sea. She cries as if she
were a storm over harbour ice, a wind moving out under snow. She
is tired of the exactness of stone, of a black moisture spidering her
blush away. She wants to stay with me just like this, with her broken
head almost making a syllable, almost making a name, a word out of
all eternity.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
7
in the basement where evening pulls in
the huge ropes of morning
where the sun fills the furnace red at nighttime
in the basement where the gramophone plays
the slow sound of the moon against the world
I came across an empty house
the empty rooms of your dark body
not the body you use now
but the other one
you didn’t know existed
the body of a dwarf clothed
in handfuls of water
the little figure lying on the mineral floor
in the basement where the ocean originates
where the undersea mountains unfold into rain
where all the tides go to sleep without end
I heard the voice you never used
in the basement where all the fables come from
where all the stories smell of bandages
and spilled medication
where a riderless horse nudges
your folded body
I head a voice that could
have been you
the missing words that sound like
a waterglass filled with footsteps
that are always coming back patiently
from the sea.
8 / Earthly Pages
i
In each rose it is deep December. In each rose there is a half-risen
evening that never ends. There is also a dark house full of women.
Singing women on black beds. We sometimes hear them in the
waking night. We sometimes pick up their voices while walking
alone in the garden. They sound like a sea of roses, like a harp made
out of paper.
ii
A rose is an unwanted place. It hangs in the garden like a spider. It
dreams of the other side. It is our enemy when we knock over the
vase, when we slam the door and move out into the night. We begin
to believe it has a face or hands making music without desire.
iii
A rose is a lion in a kingdom of lions. It is a venerable rage finally
entering time. Things are not destroyed without chaos. A rose is
not a rose but always a war. War in an empty house. A locked door.
iv
In profile a rose looks like a man. Full-faced it is half the sun. It
avoids the quilted sound the mind makes in a thought. It avoids
the proximity of the heart. It hungers after the silence between our
shoulderblades or at the small of our backs. It hungers after our
muteness, the dark hands in our pockets while we listen to the slap
of the sea against a wall.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
9
v
The rose speaks a dead language. Every word is a coliseum or a
shoreline of broken figures. The rose is an ancient mind, the coral
movement of a dead thought. It is time coming back to us. It is
time churning at the end of the garden. The blue centuries full of
roses and the snow falling in some future place.
vi
Let the solar rose tell its lunar tale. We will keep it secret. Let all the
mystery be told like a summer’s day. We will not understand. Let the
hidden tide come in from the sea on a rose. The cold waters rising
deep in labour.
10 / Earthly Pages
it has snowed a lot since you were last here
the synagogue and the abattoir are covered in snow
the ships docked at the pier are white
the rapid pulse of the sailors can be heard at night
even this far inland
(like the snapping of dry twigs
in their arms and legs)
I’m not practical enough to live much longer
only a dozen more lifetimes or so
and then the freedom of insects again
the peace of being a fly for a thousand years
the window is open and it’s cold in my room
but it’s almost daylight and I’m listening
for the coal-train through the snow
this world separates us
with a single ache
with a button with a grassblade
it takes so little effort
to keep us apart
the neighbour’s lights have just come on
they’re now removing the dry leaves and earwigs
from inside their mouths
it’s the wind that shapes their lives
that fills the morning glass
with sugar and water
it’s the wind that allows them to live
like birds on wires
pigeons that startle each other over breakfast
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
11
I can hear the train
although it’s still miles away
soon I’ll be able to sleep
soon I’ll be able to put up my feet
to tie up my wrists and ankles
and pull the small black hood down over my heart.
12 / Earthly Pages
it’s always the same there
white arms fading into the table
fireflies perched on all the chairs
evil dogs living in the forest
I sit down at her table
to hear the kettles sing softly in the trees
“Just a little music,” she says
peeling away the rabbit’s
beautiful dress
and we eat the rabbit
throwing the dress
into the fire
soon it rains
as it always does
the skyworks turning the clouds
in heavy circles above her house
she looks up
as she always does
and says, “When it rains, I think
of your grandfather in the doorway
wearing his blue overcoat. Do you
remember it? The one with the little
bloodstain just above the heart?”
I never remember it or the grandfather
watching her hand pour the tea again
and the tea falling each time
like dark corners from a great height
into thin yellow cups.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
13
At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue
you almost met her in the railyard
in the pigyard
in the witch’s house
you almost bumped into her on the staircase
on the doormat
on the windowsill
you do want to meet her
but not like this
not with all these moons
growing out of your head
not with all these stars
pouring out of your side
you almost met her at daybreak
but at daybreak a hairsbreadth turns to blue
the nile blue of a close call
of chance sliding down
the entire length of your body
you almost met her at noon
but at noon each second turns to red
the cherry red of a fixed grace
of delicate hands serving up
that last piece of damp air
you do want to meet her
you do want to take her in your arms
but not like this
not with all these cats
following you through the streets
not with all these letters
lying unopened in every field
14 / Earthly Pages
you do want to meet her
but it can only be at midnight
it can only be once
it can only be forever
and when that moment comes
your mouth will be another man’s mouth
your hands another man’s hands
and he will tremble but not you
and he will kneel before her
he will remove his gloves and tie
he will bear the pain and joy
that an orchid feels
thick and green and luminous
but not you.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
15
you’ve driven your black sedan
just past the lines of rain
past the geranium with its red lanterns
burning late
past the stars and planets
without end
on the radio you hear the hammerstroke
that brought down the world
the awful cry that rose up once
like Caruso from his polished chair
in the backseat lives the fire
the slow nuclear night
with its tigers burning too bright
with its empty chrysalids
floating on air
outside your one headlight will last
for a thousand years
or for as long as you last
with that beam of light stiff with ghosts
that engine making random shifts
in the void
outside the nothingness will sleep
while you drive with both hands on the wheel
and the glowing dust settles in your lap
the fine blue dust that a god leaves
when it is flying towards new worlds
to be born.
16 / Earthly Pages
nothing will change
you place roses in the ocean
red roses
the red oars of Odysseus
tired after the long journey
to the world’s end
to the world’s end you bring
the stroke of a hammer
and the weight of a single nail
you build unnoticed things there
the things Odysseus built
the purl and darkness of a moth
hung upon a web
the talons of a bee carrying death
moving the water over you like a sheet
as if you could sleep or rest
or stop coming back into this world
as if the war were over
or the journey purged of its animal smell.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
17
little by little the thistles suffer on the hill
bare trees enter the river
the wind takes the earth and blows
it drop by drop into your ear
you are ashes mixed with rain and sleep
leaves rustling in a closed hand
a mouse dropped out of a cloud
dangerous words pass under your window
words that no one has ever used before
you follow them into the woods
your find three words building a fire
one word skinning a rabbit
and another word far off in the shadows
pissing on a violet
what do they have for you
these five elves
these little men
this little sentence in the forest?
they have but one knife between them
one hat one coin one pot
and a dark bag full of spoons
what good are they to you?
what can they give you
that you don’t already have?
if you touch them
you touch a hanging bell
and a small tongue wakes in the grass
to speak to you
to give you a name
to call you tulip
or pincurl
or doll’s breath
18 / Earthly Pages
which means you’ll never see
your home again
not your parents
or their love
which means you will always whisper
but never speak
never escape these little men
these words burning their supper
their rabbit-water
in an iron pot.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
19
the frozen road
the scalded pines
wind in the hills
stars balancing everywhere on stilts
we are driving this car
this greasy bed
this sink full of dishes along the coast
looking for a destination
watching wedding nights and rain
between the trees
we sing with the fury of a snail
who sleeps among the dogs in the yard
drinks rain from their bowl
and in his dreams barks at passing cars
kicking up his one masculine foot
high above his head in a salute to wolves
we roll down our windows
call to dogs
snails
to anything with blood on its lips
to point us in the right direction
to hand us a chart
a map
the secret one made out of skin and shadows
the black one humming to itself like a motor
like a car waiting on a highway at night
for its hitchhiker
its teenage girl
with her breasts edged in water
her teeth pointing backwards in her mouth
like a boa
her eyes
her hair of matches and straw.
20 / Earthly Pages
Even sleepers are workers and collaborators
in what goes on in the universe.
—
Heraclitus
on the moon it was two a.m.
on the earth it was almost noon
I stood in a house
where it was always midnight
or shortly after midnight
I had forgotten
that everyone was asleep
that everyone in that house
threaded their eyes
with meditations
from an earthly wind
I had forgotten
that I’m always with
those who are sleeping
with those who are curled
around an axis of genitals
and stars
I remembered that the dreams
of the sleepers were the work
of countless generations
labouring away with a mist
and a hammer in the dusty grass
that sleep is God’s way
of walking on the earth
then I went from room to room
taken away by a fragrance
by the dirty rose
of bed and wall
by figures whose desire
met the shoulder
coming in on the sea
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
21
the arm on the breeze
the chest on the shadow
the face on the rock
the anatomy of greater flesh
on greater bone
and the bone said kneel
and I knelt
and the flesh said pray
and pray I did
as anyone would
among sleepers heaped upon
a frozen road
or on a cathedral roof
or on an ethered stair
and there I stayed
a walker
a beater of clouds
a bloodman
awake and awake
the smell
the half-spice
of sleeping words
the flickering herb
on the flickering heart
and I’m kneeling
there still
listening and listening
my body covered
by that milky moment
just before birth
when all heads look back
one last time into
the jaws of nothingness
the jaws of sleep
the little sound.
22 / Earthly Pages
your face reminds me of an angel’s face
because an angel’s face is half-way
between a goldfish and a young girl
your tongue reminds me
because an angel’s tongue is copper-coloured
from having spent so much time
in a human ear
because an angel’s nails
are simply dimes at the end
of its fingers
polished dimes
just like yours
last night I heard god in the street
breaking bottles
rebel-yells
under my breath I said:
“It’s You who stay up all night
making noise in the forest,
noise in the cities, disturbing everyone.
no wonder we are always tired,
always yearning for religion.”
this morning I tried to rest
to float on breakfast
listen to the radio
to the evangelists do battle with
the blades of grass
but I kept thinking about you
not God
I thought about how your breasts
remind me of dark cabins in the woods
about the rain-scent of your body
I thought about wishing you were here
curled up in your straw chair
wearing those Tibetan slippers
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
23
your toes fluttering inside them
with such certainty
like the wings of an angel
no
like the wings of a marsh hawk
following a mouse deep
into the earth.
24 / Earthly Pages
after Sunday dinner
they were talking about politics in the next room
while I was sewing dust into my hair
painting my legs
to match the swaying grass beside the road
putting on a sweater the colour of heated water
poured from a tin kettle into a bath
I knew there was no use in hiding from you
but I try in my way to keep the day sacred
to keep it invisible
to conceal just a bit
of myself from your eyes
from your angel-bitten fingers
and besides they were already arguing about religion
which is really about the river that runs
through their conversations
carrying each word into nocturnal fields
where it becomes a shadow hunched over a stone
a stone that would fill a mouth or a glass
a stone you could throw into the wind
which wouldn’t come back or land
but travel like a perfect forehead
into the sky.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
25
and what if evil
was a tint of pink
against the bone
pink star
pink water
the pinks of a world
turned red by turning
what if the devil
was a cadaverous paste
stuck to your gun-blue shoe
and what if this point-blank demon
this anti-priest
this ape of God
was simply and closely you
dreaming of a better life
a better sun
better clouds
a greener field
bluer sea
what if all the evil
was in your hand
at its tiger-tips
at its dusty edge
would you suddenly dream
of heaven’s casino
folded under your skin
huddled high
in your blood
such a bright room
on a bright night
and the angels
bringing such gruff
and crumpled pages
26 / Earthly Pages
to your lips
to be read
earthly pages
to be explained
in the pink light
the pink spice
of their half-small-desire.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
27
he is a god
living in some origamic
paradise
where noon is always
folded over midnight
where the creased waves
splash their hems
on a dog-eared beach
where corners of skin
are tucked under corners of blood
and the body makes its way
bending between
flexions of the wind
he is the god
that folds the lovers
the night and the flutter
of an owl into
a deeper embrace
he is the god
that gathers the forest
into a billion pleats
so it can be slipped
under the dreamer’s door
presses the edge of joy
over the edge of melancholy
and calls it music
he is always loved
in that paradise
and sometimes in this world
28 / Earthly Pages
when you ask
for his guidance
you must fold your hands
in solemn prayer
because hell is a grave
an abandonment
an unfolding.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
29
for Anne Michaels
the candle in the window
waits for its match to be born
looks out onto a night
of clouds and stars
listens to the sound of walking
beneath day-old footprints
along the river bank
watches the cat filled with scissors
chase the mouse filled with paper
under the awnings of dahlias and roses
it is not a religious candle
or a romantic candle
but one for when the lights
of the world go out
for when the earth is wrong
for the bride who falls headlong
into the oil-padded sea
for the baby lost in mid-air
the husband missing in a room
it is a final decision
the last white breath against
the window pane
before the ogre attacks
it is a candle for when
the maelstrom comes
with its many orbits
of ciphering heads
its ten thousand passions
expanding infinitely
its black diapason pushing
into edgeless space.
30 / Earthly Pages
you’re walking alone in the forest
the moon is directly overhead
eating her supper of astronomy
and wedding-gifts
there’s a thousand miles of trees
in every direction
which means there’s just
enough blood to go around
so you mustn’t spill a drop
of course every second tree
is the Tree of Death
every third one
the Tree of Life
while all the others
are doors to atonement
but you mustn’t knock
you’re like me
and want a straight line
through everything
but there aren’t any here
no path from A to B
no A or B
you’re not lost
this is the earth
you’re not human
but a fox or a rabbit
your life behind a desk
was an illusion
the shining city a madness
brought on by fatigue
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
31
there aren’t any cars or telephones
there never were
not a single clothesline or shoelace
in all the world
your heartbeats are so many
peapods being cracked open
between a finger and a thumb
your footprints swallow themselves
as you walk along
what I said about the moon was a lie
there were never any weddings
or any gifts
not an astronomer to be found
the moon is devouring you
just you tonight
with your long ears pricked up
in their sad salute to fear
this hour is called Abandonment
this night Bottomless
I would call you Insignificant
if you weren’t already named Essential
if you weren’t the very centre of the world.
32 / Earthly Pages
each night I spend whatever
God made during the day
spend it freely
on paper and empty air
I spend because God is only
a resemblance of God
only a conjuring built out
of nebulas and wheat
by a few old men
asleep in their escapes
I believe in God
because those old men
sleep among paintings
they’ve never seen
because they’re part
of the paintings
little dabs of colour
with stern faces
and arms akimbo
while these men were awake
and walked about in the world
their bodies were easily
corroded by any movement
of flesh in the street
they were terrified
they were as weak as sleeves
and God knew He was
as many arms
that filled them
with a total weight
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
33
God doesn’t exist
and that was His best idea
to keep it simple
as every priest knows
reality ebbs away by noon
so better to have
the rolling embrace
of being invented
like the wheel
which carries the silence
in baskets up the hill
I spend whatever God makes
because He doesn’t exist
and will never miss it
I believe in God
because I’m paid so well
so often
also I believe because
I’m saddened by belief
saddened by praying hands
by the little footsteps
that hurry back and forth
beneath the storm.
34 / Earthly Pages
Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers
I walked along a shoreline
and the boards of the sea
rose and fell
I walked along a ditch
and the train came by
to skate along its track
in the hills I walked among burrs
that shook like blind-wishes
only partly because of the wind
in the valley I walked
under chestnut trees
watching black ants
as long as pencil stubs
the ants Nostradamus
predicted would swallow
the world
I’m a lucky man
because I’ve seen such things
because every dog loves me
and crows fly by
like shiny raincoats
just minutes before it rains
I’m a lucky man
because the plague
hasn’t touched me yet
it will tomorrow
or the next day
or the day after
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
35
when it comes
I’ll feel the way
a fly does
as the spider
combs a web
through its hilarious hair
I’ll be like one of those parcels
our postman threw into the river
so he could go home early
to his new wife
I’ll be inside a parcel
and Death will break
all the fingers
of my left hand
to loosen the grip
to free the tight curl
of a memory
the singing of a few crickets
at night in a burning field
which all my life
I’ve held firmly and religiously
against my palm
it was while watching that fire
I realized I was in a world
that there were spaces
between the voices
that I heard.
36 / Earthly Pages
forgetfulness is the weight
of a pigeon landing in the park
forgetfulness is a slight sobbing
just ahead of the wind
when I walk
I measure out the spaces
between forgetting
and those spaces
line up nicely
like mine shafts
down into coal deposits
which smell of late-night taverns
and complete success
at sitting alone
I remember forgetfulness
it was part of the greenery
it swallowed addresses
it ate the bright fruit
it was space
when everyone’s back
was turned
it was the sound of a closing gate
soon after going to bed
in old paintings it was always
represented as the beautiful child
with a broad leaf
for a mother’s lap
in its chubby hands
there was always a black key
a key that opened the lock of memory
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
37
I’ve never seen that lock
but I’m sure
it’s made
of flesh and bone
I know there’s a little darkness waiting there
to be manipulated by the key
two tumblers waiting
to be spun round
like two sleeping heads
who suddenly wake
stare into each other’s eyes
and turn away.
38 / Earthly Pages
the farmer walks as he thinks
with a wind blowing all the facts
along the ground
he carries both hands in his pockets
while the wind blows the centuries
back through time
till they’re stacked up
against the Iron Age
there’s no sword to defeat the wind
the farmer thinks
no good masterpiece
to hold up to a mind windblown
in an arid field
the sand grains are many-sided
many-scaled
and sing among themselves
like infinite choirs
while pounding their fists
into everything
the farmer’s eyelids are drumskins
the rhythm is like a quick
reading of the phonebook
numbers beat against his lids
addresses also names
and a good deal of emptiness
to his left there’s a cow
standing like a public building
closed for a holiday
on his right a huge maple tree
filled with handshakes
and lost conversations
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
39
he walks as if he were
wearing snowshoes
or had some small death
stuck to his feet
he looks like he’s moving
through bad reception
on a TV screen
but it’s just the world
filled with blowing sand
the farmer is at the bottom
of an hourglass
he’s a new way
of measuring time
time with its loopholes
its footnotes
its punctuality all askew
this man who became
a farmer at a young age
is now very old
he leans into the wind
like a monastery at night
filled with praying monks
leans into God
he’s a meditative man
he leans homeward
where the radio broadcasts
the flights of sparrows
when no one is around
where his dead wife’s slippers
manage the stairs without her
like two elderly dogs with a few sad habits
still intact
two votive mutts making
their long slow way to paradise.
40 / Earthly Pages
glass huddled in its frames
doors knocking on doors
everything afraid the phone might ring
a voice might speak from far away
like bees hurrying through human words
she lived there as a child
tonight the house thinks of her footsteps on the stairs
remembers the margins of her desires
folding in immense pleats all around her
her heart placed just so
like gravity
holding flowers in a vase
tonight in a city hundreds of miles away
she’s being told of a restaurant she has never met
where the cockroaches shine like mother-of-pearl
on the greasy faucets and walls
but the food …
the food is like cranes gliding in over marshlands at sunset
shimmering
she’s lying in bed
the man beside her runs his hand down along her thigh
there’s enough darkness in the room to fill a forest
the clock beside the bed glows white
the numbers are radiated teeth
from a mouth lying under the bed
another spirit no one understands
over her dresser there’s a photo of the house
the ocean is also there in the upper-right-hand corner
the photo has faded just a bit
one gull and a few leaves on an oak tree have disappeared
as the man kisses her neck she thinks
of windows hung like portraits of great
invisibilities
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
41
the basement flickers in recall like a campsite at night
her parents with their mouths drawn tight
each day was
a blindfold
black birds flew in to cover their eyes before they rose
a childhood spent breathing under blank waters
the house is afraid of her memories
they grow each time as immense thickets
up through the bare floors
even the closets are afraid and they know little fear
the attic penetrated by starlings trembles
and the sink of dry leaves
the spook of a black phone that glides the air
would rather be alone with the surface of empty rooms
a phone which once listened to everything
knew all the emotions
all the human words.
42 / Earthly Pages
Taking the Train to Fredericton
we’re moving through dark hills
forest on either side of us
the woman with the Harlequin romance
is sound asleep using her thigh as a bookmark
the old man next to me makes the noise
of a smaller train with each escaping breath
beneath us it feels like loose handshakes
coming together
coming apart
giant hands that otherwise would be
tearing trees out of the earth
or obeying a power greater
than the stealth of engineers
we lose out strength by just sitting here
tire of newspapers and conversations
nothing to watch out the windows
except a moon where they get the luminous clock face
the winding sheet
sand for the hourglass
but sometimes you see a square of light in the blackness
a couple seated at a kitchen table with a child between them
or a family gathered around a television screen
and it always feels like part of your life
part of your past
for a split second you feel excitement
a reaching back
then the forest reappears and you can’t see once again
having gone too far back in time
where time is untranslatable
cells divide in shallow pools
one small blindfold growing out of another.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
43
the mind is emptiness or almost so
no more than the small space between
the horse’s shoe and dry soil
no less than the gallop of a horse
across clefts of nothingness
under birches that lead to the river
the salmon in the river are almost so
still you hardly notice them holding open doors
decorated with venerable black gills
doors that breathe
that lead down into the earth
the passageway has no room for the mind
or the body with its needlepoints of sorrow
these must be left behind like clothes on a riverbank
along with the horse who knows the way so well
what’s left of you must travel
like the child asleep in its mother’s arms
but you’re not sleeping
and you’re no longer a child
you’re a lamp through which fire passes
but you see no light feel no heat
which means you’re coming close
upon something that’s motioning to you
down there in the darkness
it could be a swell of teeth
it could be a stranger or an enormous storm
or the deepest word that knows nothing of pity
or your struggles with loss and desire
44 / Earthly Pages
whatever it is you’ve been carrying it all your life
and must finally meet its gaze
eyelids that opened the moment you were born
when you rose up into the world
eyes that are creatures in themselves
that are slayer and slain
scream and whisper
all the shadows lying down.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
45
what does it mean to walk away from everything
reeds so still along the riverbank
like the eyes’ motion held back against the heart
the water is a binding of one day to another
but never the day you live in at the moment
I walk and the hills are straining
in the stamens of asters held away from the wind
walking among spruce trees that fence in
a private light around each piece of dust
around each dandelion seed shaped like a casket
worn down by children inhaling sorrow
from inside its plush interior
wandering away from everything
passing the miles from hand to hand
the wings of sparrows hide in the cheekbones of deer
when my footsteps are heard in the brush
I want to go north to meet a dry leaf
a flake of snow
to witness a bear’s hibernation
the energy that lives on in its paws
that gathers up the dark
from around antlers on the forest floor
the light from the labour of bees
passing directly through the sun
a bear in winter is like the Virgin after her son’s death
it dreams of the heat of the good
blood of almsgivers
the medicine of walking for a month without stopping
then lying down upon brown twigs that held up the ancients
their robes stiff as bark
their hands hunting in their pockets
for stars and the father of stars
the slightest thing
46 / Earthly Pages
I walk northward
cries of loons feed the pine needles a faith
curled tightly around rain and the shafts of feathers
the pine trees lean inward like sentries guarding things unborn
they know the nourishment of drifting
through secrecy after secrecy
their roots halfway down into bedrock
root hairs following the blonde caravans to Elysium
the dark processions to Tartarus
they know these paths and roads
the stones in the road
what it means to walk away from everything.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
47
after many sorrows and thoughts broken
body pains and blows to the heart
after living in poorer lands
with human company in every mirror
I remembered what the bestiary said
and allowed the deer of the slender sadness
to take my voice and my hearing
the wolf of the impenetrable eyes
to remove my flesh and bone
the salmon to take my spirit
and I lay on lichens worn clean
by whispers close to the ground
so that I was the nothingness there
with only the beetle’s breath to carry me till morning.
48 / Earthly Pages
in the abattoir after closing hours
when the walls and the floors
smell sweet as taverns
warm as bedrooms where children sleep
when the fifty meat cleavers and the two hundred knives
hang from wooden pegs shining
like ice skates
and bloodied aprons are no longer flags
hung at all the entryways of death
you hear a whisper distant and alone
no crying any longer
no sobbing
no piercing screams obstructing the ceiling fans
just this rustling of a tongue
between two dry leaves in a corner somewhere
a feather between two stones
and the whisper is like a salamander descending
an immense staircase on such small legs
that the fatigue almost makes it stop
the whisper is our longing
for the inner eyes of the predator
teeth of the insectivore
a herbivore’s composure
all the marine animals we wish we were
birds that simply fly away
those invertebrates that mate with a flame
inside their deepest selves
those larvae that need and know of nothing
but the earth’s hold on duration
it asks “Where is the total weight
of being alive?”
it asks “Where are all the dark paths that lead
our lives astray?”
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
49
the city is empty enough for offices
to fill with afterlives
which means
snow is falling on the streets
which means a dog is somewhere
which means the heart and liver are wet
with darker ages than the surgeons have ever known
I came to the city from the grasshopper’s wing
from stones struck hard against a beach
from roots and frogs and my mother’s hair
I was born because millions of years ago communities
grew out of ponds
because ponds need a way to say goodbye
because I’m always saying goodbye and so are you
we grew up side by side
eye to eye through the rigging of tadpoles
out of sluggish heaven
out of sleep’s ova
like flowers growing from the camera’s hopeless light
that next photograph taken on the green
the snow comes because of desire
because it has to have its place beside the dust
because someone is changing horses in 1829
because someone is arguing with his wife in 2078
and this is the storm’s way of listening to them
this silence in the streets
this wind blowing
all the gleams
blowing the loose railings
that lead your hands down into death
what I carry through the storm
is what I carry through sleep
the shadows of crows across my shoulders
tongue and groove of age across my face
the small cusps of history in my shoes
misspelled memories all along my spine
50 / Earthly Pages
I’m walking headlong through the weather
the snow is a coastline
beyond it a spooled and posthumous forest
nothing scary
just that sleight-of-hand motion
of being born and dying and being born
a forest like a bedroom at night
when someone opens the door a crack
but nobody comes in.
The Poetry of Don Domanski /
51
these birds are all the wedding dresses of the world
these trees all the brides waiting
you can begin no journey here without marriage
when I arrived I knew the shadow
would be long and hard to follow
shadow of a matchmaker stretching thinly through the grass
but I came to walk here
to marry the heartbeats that collect
on birch leaves after rain has fallen
the minute ones without home or chest in which to beat
without blood to send pouring through the silence
I love what can’t be seen
I marry what can’t be seen
and so walk through the forest via homages
the invisible knowing of no hand that it hasn’t held
no hand without a wedding ring like a quiet storm
moving round a finger
shy gold that carries every moment darkened on currents
studies of one flesh
every bird in the air.
52 / Earthly Pages
53
And this is why we write poems. Through them, we try to fix
in our consciousness—it, too, formed by language—those
moments which open to the intuition that all language refuses.
—Yves Bonnefoy
Once a Moslem theologian and one of his disciples were walking along a
street when they heard the sound of a flute being played. The disciple asked
his master what the sound was. His master replied that it was the voice of
Satan, weeping over the transitory nature of reality. That Satan was con-
demned to fall in love with everything, which passed away, to suffer the loss
inherent in creation at every moment of his existence. Satan, he said, was
bound to the very fabric of grief itself, by his attempt to hold on to what is
essentially so fleeting. He was lost in the flutter of blood in every heart, in
the long sighs of civilizations being blown out like candles, in all that play
of light and shadow.
In this instance, my sympathies lie with Satan, because each of us who
have given any thought to the fragility of life could just as easily weep, play
our flute, or write our poem. Like existence itself, the poem hangs by a
thread; its range and depth can easily be misunderstood and absorbed into
the banality of the surrounding sociocultural monologue. The impermanency
of everything that I attend to in my work, my own attentiveness included, is
ever present. Being mindful opens up the phantasmagorias of each word; the
seemingly endless possibilities reflect the cosmos at large and our place in it.
There is a deep vulnerability in that, because language itself is transient, and
the usage we lean so heavily upon is nailed to thin air. To reinvent meaning,
to add to the assailability of the word, is the poet’s job. Undermining what is
already sabotaged by common use is at the core of poetry. Endangering what
is already threatened is the nature of the work. Being in tune with the vulner-
able positioning of existence means relying on nothing but the defencelessness
of meaning.
I can’t write without knowing that each thing I define will be erased in
time. There are no safe and secure places for language. The death of meaning
is like the extinction of a species. But other meanings come forth to fill each
54 / Afterword
ecological niche. The poet routinely wipes out entire taxonomic groups in
order to make room for new forms of life. This culling is necessary; the poet
who doesn’t do this is in peril. You must join with the fragility of sentience,
recognize the elementary or undifferentiated consciousness where language
originates. Writing poetry is like playing the piano with your hair. You don’t
know exactly why it works, but somehow you’re able to make music. What
I’m describing is intuition, the golden hunch behind all the explanations and
theories, which allows you to take advantage of the fluidity of meaning. To
intuit is to step outside language and view it from the air. What’s seen when
you’re flying over language are the ruins of custom and interpretation, mighty
edifices meant to last millennia. But in fact they’re made of straw, built on
flowing water. No one who is seriously writing poetry can live in them for
long.
Intuition, that non-linguistic gnosis, places us deeply within nature; we
find our roots in a pre-verbal reality and gradually work towards lexical
design. Intuition gives us a richer sense of the potential of language, coming
back from a nonverbal stance we’re allowed to see the wonder of its inten-
tionality. This is what Emerson meant when he said, “Every word was once a
poem.” Of all the things I’ve learnt over the years about the craft of poetry,
intuition has by far been the brightest gift. Discovering its use has been an
invaluable aid in the understanding of metaphor, which has been central to
my work. It has been of more importance to me than my intellect. The intel-
lect evolved, because of its nature and origin, into a worthwhile faculty for
practical use. However, I have strong reservations if it was ever meant to
answer many of the crucial questions that art poses; if anything, it sometimes
hinders the act of creation itself. It can feel a bit like having your grandmother
in the room while you’re having sex.
The gestural sway of the mind over the ground of being can be an inti-
mate, intense experience, opening us to new textual opportunities. Intuition
shamanizes language, bringing back to the cognitive process the abandon
of nature itself. The wildness inherent in this new position frees us from the
restrictions of habitual thinking, it allows for spontaneous reorderings of
intent and meaning. Pushing the linguistic limit, exploring the non-sedentary,
nonlogical conceptual realms, creates a larger eye and heart. We may still weep
along with Satan, but our field of vision has been expanded, we are allowed
to see more fully into things. Seeing is believing, but seeing is also a function
of compassion and empathy. Rearranging and increasing the depth of our
creative sight become sign-functions in themselves; this sight speaks to us
before we think, before we formalize an approach to the work at hand. This is
the word behind the word, the poem behind the poem. The kennings of our
endeavours link us to a connective reality. Unlike Satan’s inertial sorrow,
which is his own irreversible insecurity when faced with love, we can share in
a fuller realization of being, a fuller sense of the isness of things. What are
exemplified are the complex relationships we have with both language and
a living universe.
Whatever else you can say about intuition it is trans-intellectual, involving
direct insight into some portion of reality. Instinct on the other hand is pre-
intellectual. The question is how and why it happens at all. Scholars during
the Renaissance thought the rational soul was divided into two main sections:
discursive reasoning and intuitive reasoning. The latter of these was consid-
ered the higher of the two because it was an inspiration from God, while the
former was associated with human will. This makes sense, because intuition
works for me only when I let my will fade into the background. When I can
manage to do this, a “gut reaction” floods in to take the place of my will. The
romantic view of inspiration, of a muse, or divine influence on mind and soul,
remains as a popular cliché. I can understand its origins. It makes sense on
one level, but my own experience has failed to come to any definition.
The enigma of intuition is described well by Marina Tsvetaeva: “A poet
is the reverse of a chess-player. Not only does he not see the pieces and the
board, he doesn’t even see his own hand—which perhaps is not there.” It feels
like that, like an absence that fills an approximation of the self; it seems at
times that the “I” disappears, or is reduced to otherness. Perhaps it has some-
thing to do with transhuman consciousness as theorized by Pierre Teilhard
de Chardin, or with Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of a noosphere, a sphere of
human thought. Vernadsky’s idea was that the emergence of human cognition
transformed the biosphere, in the same way that the emergence of life trans-
formed the geosphere. Both appeal to me. They are after all “poetic” and
rather beautiful. I would like to think that intuitive moments could simply
be pulled out of the air at will, like the hooked atoms of Epicurus, found
moving in every direction, swarming around us like billions of golden bees.
Fundamentally, intuition feels to me like a lived experience, and beyond that
I quickly reach my omega point, becoming an infinitesimally small speck in
the continuum.
In poetry, intuition allows us to sharpen our twilight vision where language
and meaning fade out beyond conceptualization. There in the vastness of
mind are many other expressions and manifestations of lyrical intent. Poets
must be able to retain the capacity to access many areas of consciousness and
this necessitates a withdrawal from consensus reality. Space-time itself must
lose its social and cultural baggage, if we are to see deeply into things. The
transformation of consciousness involves a biphasic push; first, we need to
Afterword /
55
extend our “knowingness” beyond the simplified viewpoint of the ego, and
second, we must embrace new behavioural patterns. In my twenties, I learned
to write by letting go of the poem. I found that I could begin by sitting in
front of a blank page with no preconceived ideas of what should be written
there. I discovered that meaning is like so many matrioshka dolls, one inside
the other. Unlike the dolls, there is no final one. When you’re discussing
meaning, it’s matrioshka dolls all the way down. So, without any search for
meaning, or any goal-directed purpose, I developed a free-floating sense of
metaphor. Eventually the old paradigm I’d been working under started to
crumble, until even communication fell away. Instead poetry for me became
communion, a primal expression of the underlying wonder manifested in the
world around me.
One can find a spiritual richness in the ascension to new forms of aware-
ness. It opens us up to other lives and states of being. Using language, we can
see beyond language. The Lakota people describe a sacred person as “going
beyond knowledge”; poetry amounts to the same thing. The turning away
from cliché and verbal weariness is in many ways a leap into the unknown.
“The mind,” as René Magritte said, “loves the unknown. It loves images whose
meaning is unknown, since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown.” Per-
haps the unknown is also a recollection and joining with precognitive know-
ledge, the silent partner as it were, receiving sentience without the normal
sensory means coming into play. The spiritual dimensionality comes from the
openness you must have to all the possibilities of an empty page. This open-
ness can present the poet with the noumena of existence, Kant’s “thing in
itself ” becomes a more real experience. The self grows to include described
reality; empathic intuition encompasses what it delineates from phenomena,
absorbs it into our being. The disinterested, self-conscious, “normal” use of
language is replaced by one that penetrates objects and living things. It iden-
tifies with them and in the process enlarges itself beyond strict cultural and
social definitions of the self. In many ways, this is reminiscent of the Gnostics,
who taught that intuition led to the mystery of the larger self, which led
further to revelation.
That transitory nature of reality, which caused Satan so much pain, can be
for the poet a source of awe and sustainability. In some schools of Buddhism,
it is believed that paramartha satya or ultimate truth cannot be expressed
verbally. Here intuition is used to bypass dualism and empirical phenomena,
to see into a richer reality. This is similar to what the poet can achieve when
the work forces logic and intellect into the background. The amplification of
presence, rather than reason, brings with it manifest signs of deeper concerns.
The essences of things are seen as transient and wholly acceptable, because it
56 / Afterword
Afterword /
57
is in their nature to be so. We can choose to love not simply the thing itself,
but also its fragility, what the Japanese refer to as “the slender sadness.” This is
where Satan fails; his ego does not allow him to accept the impermanence of
matter. An intuiting poet, through his or her work, can find a sustainable
position there, one of love and compassion, which if viewed correctly can be
indistinguishable from the life process itself.
Intuition delves beyond appearances, is independent of facts, or mental
constructs. Its seemingly magical properties come from its sudden appearance
in our mind. But we could be looking at an ongoing process just below con-
sciousness that wells up after a considerable amount of time has passed. When
I’m writing and a metaphor arrives spontaneously, it might have been gesta-
ting for months. The clutter of mundane reality may have to be reduced to
allow what is already present to bleed through to awareness. Emptying myself
of preconceived ideas when I face a blank page may be a reduction of that
clutter, allowing a fuller sense of deeper possibilities to break through to the
surface. Perhaps that is magic of a sort, pulling a nonverbal rabbit out of a
precognitive hat, a sleight of hand without the hand.
The sorcerous feel of sensing words and phrases that are needed always
surprises me, despite decades of writing in this way. That bit of witching
hangs in the air for a while afterwards, as sensory warmth just outside of any
explanation. I wish I could interpret it, reveal the meaning implicit in some
intuited definition, but that would be like Ouroboros swallowing its own tail;
it might simply disappear in a fizz and a flash. That might be the unknowing
of it, or at least proof of my own superstitions, afraid to place a jinx into the
mix. I suppose there is a bit of hoodooism in all of this, a fetishism shining
through all my conscious meanderings here on these pages. Perhaps the poem
is a fetish offering to that transcendental experience, welcomed each time,
after all the periods of frustration, failures, and dead ends in my work.
The mediation of language distorts any definition, inhibits any effective
explanation of intuition. There is no immutable, irreducible text that could
carry the weight of this type of perception. No methodology that adheres
to the rules of logic could encompass what is essentially an unpredictable
whisper against the skin. Any representation taken from successive rational
points of view is bound to fail. Any dialectic has strict limitations when con-
fronted by intuition, which is at best vague and discontinuous. Lacking a
cogent theory of how neural activity gives rise to intuition we are often left
with the idea that intuition is created ex nihilo, which brings with it the notion
of the supernatural somehow lending a hand. That divine interpretation can
bring traces of old gods back to our psyches, like minute particles of gold
collecting along our neural synapses. But each of these approaches falls short
of the mystery itself. The penumbra remains regardless of all the analysis. You
can’t reduce intuition to elements previously known and explained, celestial
or otherwise.
For the poet, the aesthetics of the experience reaches its fruition on the far
side of language. It must be brought back by a quantum leap, from an unar-
ticulated silence to a system of symbols, which in the end can represent only a
part of what has happened there. The rest is lost, escaping through the wide
net of words. Yet what is lost to consciousness is integrated, finding its home
in flesh and bone; it resides in our bodies like the ghosts of supplications con-
tinuously falling through our blood. That shimmer in our veins is the residue
from long journeys through time and space, our explorations of what lies
beyond and between the words themselves. From the infinite spaces between
words comes pouring forth into consciousness a non-linear realization be-
yond the rigidity of names and forms. It comes as a ministering grace that
allows us to lessen the grief of definition and separateness. Through intuition,
we realize that the entire universe stands where we are standing right now,
every stone, cricket, and star occupying the same space and moment with us,
sharing the same presence that we identify as the self. Like intuitive meanings
themselves, each becomes interchangeable with the other; there’s the rub,
there’s the trembling, there’s the wonder.
—Don Domanski
58 / Afterword
Acknowledgements /
59
Poems from collections now out of print—The Cape Breton Book of the
Dead and War in an Empty House, published by Anansi Press; and Wolf-Ladder
and Stations of the Left Hand, published by Coach House Press—appear here
with permission of the author. Poems from Heaven and Hammerstroke are
reprinted with permission of Anansi Press; those from Parish of the Physic
Moon, with permission of McClelland and Stewart.
The Cape Breton Book of the Dead (1975):
Beldam
Angels
Summer Job: Hospital Morgue
Heaven (1978):
Summer-Piece
The Sacrifice
Sunrise at Sea Level
War in an Empty House (1982):
One for an Apparation
A Netherpoem
Sub Rosa
Hammerstroke (1986):
Snowbound Letter
Visiting the Grandmother
At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue
Hammerstroke
Hammerstroke ii
Wolf-Ladder (1991):
Dangerous Words
Looking for a Destination
The Sleepers
Love Poem on the Sabbath
A Perfect Forehead
The Ape of God
Stations of the Left Hand (1994):
The God of Folding
Excathedra
Fata Morgana
Epiphany Under Thunderclouds
Before the Plague and the Breaking of the Fingers
Lethean Lock
Mneumonic Key
He Leans Homeward
Parish of the Physic Moon (1998):
House
Taking the Train to Fredericton
The Passageway
Walking Away
What the Bestiary Said
Sentient Beings
Sleep’s Ova
Banns
60 / Acknowledgements
This page intentionally left blank
Books in the Laurier Poetry Series
Published by Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Di Brandt Speaking of Power : The Poetry of Di Brandt by Di Brandt, edited
by Tanis MacDonald, with an afterword by Di Brandt • 2006 •
xvi + 56 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-506-x; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-506-2
Dennis Cooley By Word of Mouth: The Poetry of Dennis Cooley by Dennis Cooley,
edited by Nicole Markotic´, with an afterword by Dennis Cooley
• 2007 • xxii + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 1-55458-007-2; isbn-13: 978-1-
55458-007-1
Lorna Crozier Before the First Word: The Poetry of Lorna Crozier by Lorna
Crozier, edited by Catherine Hunter, with an afterword by
Lorna Crozier • 2005 • xviii + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-489-6;
isbn-13: 978-0-88920-489-8
Christopher Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
Dewdney by Christopher Dewdney, edited by Karl E. Jirgens, with an
afterword by Christopher Dewdney • 2007 • xviii + 60 pp.
• isbn-10: 0-88920-515-9; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-515-4
Don Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski by Don Domanski,
Domanski edited by Brian Bartlett, with an afterword by Don Domanski
• 2007 • xvi + 62 pp. • isbn-10: 1-55458-008-0; isbn-13: 978-1-55458-
008-8
Tim Lilburn Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn by Tim Lilburn,
edited by Alison Calder, with an afterword by Tim Lilburn • 2007
• xiv + 50 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-514-0; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-514-7
Don McKay Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay by Don McKay, edited
by Méira Cook, with an afterword by Don McKay • 2006 • xxvi +
60 pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-494-2; isbn-13: 978-0-88920-494-2
Al Purdy The More Easily Kept Illusions : The Poetry of Al Purdy by Al Purdy,
edited by Robert Budde, with an afterword by Russell Brown
• 2006 • xvi + 8o pp. • isbn-10: 0-88920-490-x; isbn-13: 978-0-
88920-490-4
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