Lost Rain Casting of a Deer
I
The waters of the run-off surge through the ravine,
an unending succession of lightning strokes,
the mist drives down between the steep banks and the trees,
the rain shuts its vault, the creek shakes the skeleton
of its rock course, it shoots along skull after skull,
the waters become a liquid natural wax. The creek
of wax moves smooth and quick into the mouths
open to receive it and let it fill the mould.
II
Curved white edges of creek ripples cut away the confine,
the entire creek pulls itself into the body
of a leaping raincloud-coloured animal. The moments
that animal of wax is encased and melted out
are the moments the iron oxides, charcoal and oils
of the first paintings run wet on the walls
of caves illuminated by fires, the colours
still deepening within the bounding outlines.
III
Dark grains of the unencumbered musk pod
flow out with the creek’s lost and shapeless wax,
and over the waters faceless as the first waters,
the creek mist thickens, the musk it is carrying
of ravine leaves, glacial till and ozone thickens.
Metals present at the beginning melt, and the alloy
rushes again into the mould it finds, and that finds it,
within the shifting vacancies and probabilities.
IV
The living deer stepped out of mountain top mist
into the envelope of a clearing in the mist,
its eyes glittering soft black, the way a sculpture arrives,
the mould removed, the polished bronze undraped,
but this deer melted into mist leaving the blackness
that poured in its eyes, and in the blackness
its scent, the sweetness of copper, the nullity of tin,
and the musk of the rain that was always the traveller.
I have always appreciated Russ’s poems. To catch up with these is a reminder of how talented and unique a poet he is. Chad Norman