Taking Shape
by Ed Carson
I
The idle days of autumn close. The planet tries to keep to itself.
It is a place where the thought of everything comes
back to caress the ferns. History lies on its back and dreams.
This is a place where nature has misplaced its urge
to compose itself. The leaves tremble with the shifting earth.
The cooling wind turns itself inside out.
We lie here beside the open window and wonder what
on earth can keep us from each other. Our sex is a shape
that finds itself taking the shape of the other. In coming
together there is no shape of things to keep in mind,
as if we knew the differences between this way or that.
First comes the hot invention of love, the silky stroke
of your bedclothes against me. Then, the ragged need to make
sense of our inarticulate breath, our cold sweat, our absent fears.
What takes shape around us is a rhetoric of words, an island
of knowing one silence, pressed up, hard, against another.
II
The long night closes. The tree’s broad branch reaches out
to shake itself free of an incomprehensible darkness.
The shape of things, taking shape, has no knowing motive
in mind. What it takes for one thing can soon
be another. Understand, then, this is one thing now,
and another tomorrow. This shape is no shape at all
but a target of time and the time it takes
its crimson leaves to reach out, to fill another description.
Minute by minute, the swelling of our lives, like the wind,
Moves across from one to another. We reach out to find
the argument we harbour keeps a dark space
between us, has become almost familiar,
though even now I dream, delaying perversely,
of reconciliation, dream you dream
of running my hand along the sheer nylon heat
of your thigh. A dark space, wholly surprising,
this darkness we listen in. Not to be denied, not to be
forgotten, we need to shake this darkness out.
III
When morning breaks, it does so like a tide
moving along a long, flat shore. It does so
with the pace and cadence of a thousand thousand
years of patience and practice, streaming in our window
to find our waking flesh. This might be the glory,
this might be the shape that has no shape at all.
This might be the wind of a wind
that knocks at our door and finds us waiting.
There is everything around us to give us pause.
There is everything around that brings us into
a long history of finding this shape of things.
When morning breaks, the night surrenders.
The clouds before the sun fill the thoughtful sky,
moving this way, moving that, breathing in, breathing out.
We are careful not to wake everything at once.
We are careful not to find more than one thing at a time.
IV
The water is cold. It needs tasting.
Then, reach out and wrap the water in your arms
and imagine its small pink mouth and tongue
circling your nipple, pulling it in, pulling it out
till you know you just can’t take it any more.
The water evades the shape you thought
it might be, fills the suck and glory of your love,
laps in a lick the passion beginning to fill you.
The water fills an empty space, admitting its
swelling shape to be whatever you might wish for.
The water has a hold on you that lifts and shakes
more than you might have adored its simply symmetry.
V
The shape of things to come is the very last of things
we think of, the last of a generation of thought
moving between us, inventing the time and place
of our love and laughter. Together we will summon
the part of the day, and the part of the night,
the part of the land, and the part of the water
where we have lain so gently in each other’s arms,
where we have dreamed so much, and said so little.
There is nothing left on this wide earth to explain.
There is nothing else for us to come home to.
E.J. Carson received his M.A. in English before joining General
Publishing/Stoddart as an Editor in 1980. There he rose to the position of
Publisher in the newly formed Stoddart Publishing line. Moving to Random
House Canada in 1985 as VP Publishing, he began and developed over the next
six years that company's very successful Canadian publishing list. He has
edited and published many well known authors such as Carol Shields, Dennis
Lee, Eli Mandel, Leon Rooke, David Suzuki, and John Ralston Saul, and
launched several successful book series such as New Press Canadian Classics,
Spectrum Poetry, and the Canadian Living Cookbooks. In 1991 he joined the
newly formed HarperCollins Canada, eventually rising to the position of
President. This was followed in 1999 when he joined Pearson Education Canada
as President of its newly formed trade division, Pearson PTR Canada. Ed Carson has published one book of poetry, Scenes (Porcupine's Quill).
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