Restoration

Alternatives Journal, August, 2009 by Tim Lilburn

I want to be the knowledge that is one sleep in the sunward shoulder
muscle of the two-year-old doe coming out of hills and down to
Moon Lake.

I will get there by seeing.
The whole body and virtue will rise up and form the look.
Seeing is the extreme courtesy that comes when desire is broken.
Desire will be broken and will continue with a bright limp.
We will move toward high bush cranberry and the smell of water.
I will be attentive, an oblique crescent near her spine, touched
by the light of her liquids. We will be going to Moon Lake,
the diamond willows,

old oxbow lake, reeds round it, the true river a ruin of water
in dust further on, the red century ending.
I will see my way into that place and into that body.
This will come only after I've been sitting in the long grass
eating loaves of shadow pressed up through the ground.
I will have been dreaming there of one day opening milky eyes
and finding myself sick, inside her body, high up, near the
spire, poor, relieved. Sometimes it happens: you lose everything
and wake in the strange room of what you want.

Except I won't be awake but asleep and full of gnosis.
In my ears, gold pulse of her footsteps.
We will go down the hill and enter the shadows of frost-burnt roses
and the shade of the smell of water in which reeds and elms are
rotting, October sunlight the shore of a country a small boat
is just now pulling away from.

I will smell her, light of one locked room in the mansion.
I will be in the muscle, a painting on the cave wall of her flesh.
I crane into the deer.
I am in the bright-dark cloud of knowing her and could walk for days.
She is at the top of the hill and starting down in early evening.

From Desire Never Leaves, 2007, by poet and essayist Tim Lilburn,
winner of the Governer General's Award in Literature. Reprinted with
permission from the author and Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
"Restoration" bridges the traditional divide between human
consciousness and the animal world, thus it is political. A more than
anthropocentric politics may begin with eros of this sort and with such
hubristic aspiration; providing a home for this sort of desire is,
I believe, poetry's competence."