This Happened

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

THIS HAPPENED

On the penultimate day of January in the year 2009, two little girls sat huddled together for warmth in the back seat of their mother’s car. They were not at school this day, the eight- and ten-year-old sisters. A professional development day at their school left them at home, and their mother had hauled them along to do the grocery shopping with her. Trouble was, they detested accompanying their mother along the aisles of food and they insisted they would resist going into the store with her. So she had left them there, alone in the car, while she shopped.

As their mother slammed shut the driver-side door, the two little girls turned to one another with a bewildered exchange of looks. They hadn’t anticipated this. That their mother would so uncharacteristically relent, and leave them there on their own, while she shopped the aisles of the supermarket. It was cold and they felt abandoned. They suddenly felt a deep fear besiege them. It was true they were in the familiarity of their mother’s car, but they were overwhelmed by the unfamiliarity and threat implicit in their vulnerability at this strange turn of events.

They nudged closer together, mute with fear, the same thoughts flooding each mind. What if someone tried to abduct them? What if someone wanted to steal their mother’s car? With them in it. They knew it had happened. They had been street-smartened, they had been casually informed time and again how dangerous it might prove to be to their safety to place trust in people they didn’t know. They had been schooled in street-smart behaviour, avoidance of potential problems.

They were girls, and knew as though instinctively that girls, and young girls in particular were often the target of sick minds. They knew, but it hadn’t bothered them before; they had just accepted it as casually as their mother had spoken to them of it. Yes, they had on the rare occasion, spoken darkly, thrillingly, with their school friends of the dangers of the world beyond their experience.

But this, this being left on their own, so unexpectedly, was chilling and they felt fearfully apprehensive. It began to get dimmer in the car, the result of a sudden snow squall, the snow swiftly covering the car, its windows, and having the effect to the girls of further distancing them from their mother’s protective presence. They cowered together, held hands, and looked helplessly at the windshield before them, the windows on either side, as they became completely snowed over.

There likely comes a time in the lives of all children when they suddenly feel their immortality status to have been nudged slightly into the realm of loomingly-eventual mortality. A distressingly overwhelmingly painful recognition that often occurs in the deep dark velvet hours of the night. In this instance, the sisters were introduced to the reality of potential, as a brace of shivering abandoned coevals, the deep of night replaced by the dim of opaque car windows.

And then, it happened. As they watched, first puzzled, then with a growing sense of unease, submitting finally to horror, the side-front window on the driver’s side was being methodically brushed free of snow. To reveal an outline of a hulking figure intent on clearing the snow. When the window had been freed of snow, a large head bent, to peer through the window. The face of a stranger, a man, bearded, his eyes inquisitively searching the interior, toque- and winter-jacket-clad, suddenly focusing his attention. On them. The girls shuddered, shrank back, entwined their arms about one another, and opened their mouths in a chorus of shrieks.

The man withdrew from the window. There was a pause, and a silent apprehension overwhelmed the children. Suddenly the passenger-side car door was yanked open. There was the man, hulking above them. He reached into the car to grasp the arm of the youngest girl, sitting closest to the door. She screamed piercingly, her fear so palpable, it could be smelled. She clutched her sister’s hand, pulling against the mature strength of the man, and her sister reciprocated, herself screaming wildly, trying to maintain her grip on her little sister’s waist, as the man’s strength overwhelmed both theirs, and steadily drew the child closer to him….

That, however, never happened.

What did happen is that the man, startled by the sight of the two cowering little girls, leaped back in alarm at the untenable situation that his curiosity had precipitated. He bent gently toward the car window again, attempted some placatory motions, to indicate his harmless intent, his error in judgement. But nothing, it seemed, would stop the panic and terror in the little girls’ eyes, their ululating shrieks for salvation from the nightmare they had imagined come to fruition.

Finally, he stepped away from the car, not knowing what else, under the circumstances, he could do. The damage was done. He walked the few steps from the children’s vehicle to his own, parked facing theirs, in the parking lot of the supermarket. Where he too awaited someone’s exit from the food store.

Like the little girls, he detested entering the grocery store, hated wandering the aisles with his wife, and thought that, at age 72, he could finally assert himself and convince her it would be best if he waited, read the newspaper, until she completed her shopping assignment. It had become their weekly ritual. She no longer expected him to accompany her to the interior of the supermarket, respecting his dislike of the experience.

He had earlier in the day finally discussed with her the results of his search for the best possible buy in a new car, to replace their 9-year-old vehicle. There was nothing wrong with their car, it was a fine one, mechanically sound, in good shape, but he wanted another one, a new model with new safety features and above all, cruise control so he could relax on long trips. And he wanted something more well, luxurious than their 53 years of marriage and struggling to raise a family, paying off a mortgage had ever permitted them to own.

And there, before them, when he parked the car that morning, was the very model of the very manufacture that he had selected. He had done his research carefully, from perusing the latest results from Consumer Reports, to endlessly surfing web sites for makes, models, performance details, mechanical reliability, gas consumption. He hadn’t yet invited his wife to accompany him to a few area car retailers to actually view the vehicles, but that was next.

He was hoping to be able to finally take steps toward owning a new car by spring. And, he had decided, they would keep the old car. Not a bad idea to keep it, for when their children visited it would handily avail them of alternate opportunities to drive wherever they needed to or wanted to, without leaving them without a vehicle themselves. A good solution, he felt.

So, once his wife had departed the car to enter the supermarket, he had ventured over to the car parked before his, to have a better look. And he wanted to view the interior. It was, however, snowing so heavily, he could see nothing without first clearing snow off the car’s window....

He sat there for a few minutes, then was startled to see the door of the car where the children sat, suddenly flung open, and the two little girls make a mad, dishevelled dash for the entrance of the supermarket, hats askew, scarves trailing them, wildly looking about as they stumbled forward swiftly, awkwardly, still holding fast one another’s hands.

And he sat there, numbly, not quite knowing what to expect. He rolled down his car window, despite the ongoing snow and the cold seeping enthusiastically throughout the car. Soon enough the two little girls exited, each holding close to the coattails of two adult women. One, obviously the children’s mother, the other perhaps a friend. He looked deliberately in their direction, trying to demonstrate that he had nothing to hide, and tentatively smiled. What he met was two grim faces, returning his smile with implacably angry countenances.

He watched, dismayed, as the two little girls were ushered into their car interior, one of the women placing herself on the passenger front side, while the other woman began clearing the snow off her car windows throwing condemnatory, furious glances at him from time to time. He sighed, rolled his car window closed, and exited his car to approach the woman. And he stood there, only slightly stumbling his words, explaining to her what had occurred, and apologizing.

The woman listened silently, inclining her head toward the man. He could see into the car, the children agitated at his presence, cowering, and obviously saying something to the woman sitting in front of them, watching the exchange between the children’s mother and the man who had approached her. He experienced problems focusing on the face of the woman before him, his eyes straying to the children's strained and still-frightened faces.

You disgusting old creep, the children’s mother finally mouthed, when the man had finished explaining to her what had propelled him toward her car, and how shocked he had been when his attempts to view the interior had revealed her two frightened children. You miserable old reprobate, I’ll teach you a lesson. She stone-facedly reached into her bag slung over her shoulder struggled a few moments, then withdrew a pen and writing pad, leaned slightly to sight his license plate and made a show of writing it down carefully. I intend, she said, drawing herself to full height - slightly taller than the man in fact - to contact the police. You can expect a visit from them.

This never happened.

The woman burst into laughter, said that would teach her two girls a lesson, explaining that she had been fed up with their continual complaints and for the first time had decided to permit them to sit out her shopping excursion, waiting, in the car. And how utterly peculiar it was; she too had owned the same make car as his of similar vintage, had done her homework, and decided, after test-driving her ultimate choice, that this was the car for her.

This happened

composed and published this day of 31 January 2009
Rita Rosenfeld

Ariel, Volume 12 / Number 4

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

THE FATHER THE SON

They lean muscle and sinew
into their work
minds free to wander
tongues hanging silent
in the roofs of their mouths.

Companions they find comfort
in close presence
each teacher to the other
wordlessly
carefully
full of care for the moment.

They are masters of the mind
but yet lovers of hand's efforts
they dexterously play ideas
one on the other
casually
cut wood to fit delineated form
and and smooth
shave and stain
two jacks of variable trades.

c. 1981 Rita Rosenfeld
Published in Ariel: A Review of International English Literature
October 1981

Waves, Vol.8 No.2

Herewith, the latest selection from dusted-off published poetry and short fiction, circa 1970s vintage and beyond....

ARRAS

A field of snow
growing
in the silence.

Sun softening
the gentle swells
illuminating
crystals.

Wind bends
a long straw
and winds it slowly
ornamenting the
pristine blanket,

with an oval
repeated
and repeated.

A mouse shelters
in a snowhole
nibbling windfallen seed;
leaving droppings
in the frozen nest.

Hare tracks
cluster under
shelter of a
snow-laden pine.

There - the
outspread wings
of a falcon
imprinted on the snow

- and there the
hare tracks end.
There is no blood
to colour the
monomorphic plane.

c. 1980
Rita Rosenfeld
Published in Waves, a quarterly York magazine

Wascana Review, Volume 12, Number 2

BY THE EYES YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL

She gambolled like a billygoat, that old woman. She was completely taken with Peggy's Cove. With newfound freedom of a born-again she clambered the rocks in her newly-affected sneakers. She led the children. Second childhood yes, but on reflection I decide it must be her first.

She never did have the opportunity to be a child in Europe and in her youth was already experiencing hells of uncertainty. When I was a boy she seemed to me an old woman although she can only have been in her late twenties when I was born.

As a youngster I can remember the embarrassment I used to suffer, the child of a shuffling immigrant, shy and inarticulate, speaking a garbled melange, a babel of anxious tongues.

*******************************************************************

Dachau. She has that in her experience. Better than say, Auschwitz. Dachau was classed as a Status I camp; only about three hundred thousand Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissenters, Jehovah's Witnesses; scum, affronts to the Master Race, perished there. In Auschwitz, it was more like two million.

********************************************************************

She's amazed seeing the raucous black-backed gulls; they circle the rocks, the water, settling and calling, my mind's pterodactyls. Her cohorts, Shauna and Gerrold, clamour after her. "Look - look Daddy! Bubie's found a whale!" When I lift the glasses I see the bloated carcass of a tuna.

The breakers roll in, white-capped soda water, and hit the oblique elephant grey rocks, spilling spume, tossing salt at us. I tell my mother, her grandchildren, they are too close. They refuse to move back. My mother calls me an old woman. Nothing will do but that I must trudge back to the parking lot to fetch the picnic lunch.
"It's raining."
"Whaaat raining! Whad'r'yu talking? God is crying a liddel. Go, go ... bring the lunch."
My children think their grandma is the cat's ass. They like to see me ordered around for a change. It satisfies a subliminal urge for revenge.

We sit on the rocks and eat egg-salad sandwiches. Soggy. She's delighted at the wet. All the other tourists have faint hearts. They park their cars, get out briefly to take photographs and leave. I absolutely refuse to take pictures. I abhor people who capture their images for fond posterity, standing before public monuments or natural wonders, polluting the environment with their pathetic egos.

There's a thick mist rolling in off the water and before long the lighthouse is obscured in a pudding of gentle grey. I'm uncomfortable sitting there but she is overjoyed, rapt, and the children are hyper. "Whad's the hurry?" she asks.

Three days ago, at the Minas Basin, Five Islands Provincial Park, another miracle. She followed the tidal bore, a crazed pied piper to my children. To me the sandstone cliffs looked threatening somehow, hostile. To her, another indication of theistic exterior decorating. The vast red sands brought to me nightmares of spilled blood. She capered through the sucking sands - three exuberant children to a squinting eye - finally coming back, like a kid, having to go to the toilet.

Her tennis shoes transformed from their recently sparkling white to brick red, looked like stigmata. I shuddered.

***************************************************************

I drank in experience, memory, with my mother's milk; relieved her eventually of all remembrance.
"Shush" she used to say - "shtill" and she would place an admonitory finger to her lips - "Deddie is writing his memories". Memoirs? Memories.

On the box cars it was hot. Many people pushed together. Solutions there were many. A chemical sprinkled on the floor. People had to pass water ... when the wet touched the floor the chemical worked and there was gas ... everybody dead.

Gas war-fare on a civilian cattle car.
Such respect for the written word. She communicated her homage to me and I tiptoed around my solemnly documenting father.

Special commandoes in the camps ... before the ovens, check the teeth for gold. A father throws in the body of his child. A husband pulls gold from the mouth of his wife's corpse ... maybe he follows here ... into the pit.

My brooding silent father, his lugubrious face hung with recollections of the abyss.

And all the village was there. Lined up beside the hole they had dug. When the firing started people fell. More fell over the first ones. They were told to be neat - fall in the hole. Wounded crawled over the still bodies. After, dirt covered everything - the dead and the still living.

My father was sure his older brother was still living. Somewhere. He wrote letters of enquiry everywhere. My mother's family was gone. Everyone was gone. They met here, not there. A sweatshop. Both were union agitators. Both committed to the socialist ideal, but timidly. When I was eight years old I was as tall as my mother. When I was twelve I was taller than my father had been.

**************************************************************

The landscape stretching on either side of the road to Peggy's Cove had been eerie. Inhospitable rock surfaces, scraggle-bushes and misshapen trees. Insisting on growing where no vegetation could reasonably hope to thrive. A desolate moonscape. If sitting on the granite at the cove amidst swirling fog, tasting salt, seeing the Atlantic dimly through a grey mist uncannily resembled to my mind primordial time, the saline soup out of which amino acids brewed biological life - then the barrenness of its approaches heralded an aftertime, yet in earth's sere future.

****************************************************************

At the Ovens, we walked along a stony path. every now and then we'd stop at a lookout to peer out over the vast Atlantic, the breakers assaulting the peculiar rock outcroppings. Above, the sky was a threatening slate grey. You could taste the salt in the air.

A sound like thunder. Trudging down precarious cement steps to the bowels of a cave, where the thunder reverberated. The inexorable force of water wearing the weary stone.

My mother is indefatigable. The children encourage her, disparage my lagging steps, my nagging voice. There, at the end of the trail, she clambers down like a moufflon. The children right after. I don't want to follow but feel I must. I watch incredulously as she looks about closely at the rocks, the sand below, and begins to fill a paper bag with rubble.
"Maw, what are you doing?"
"Gold!" she whispers, an excited conspirator "You diden see the gold? I'm taking it you should send the kinder to universidy."
"My god, that's not gold - it's pyrite!"
"Nu, nu. You watch for pirates, I'll take the gold for my darlinks."
And the children, excited too by the tourist garbage they had read, scrambled in their eagerness to gather gold.

****************************************************************

Vituperative accusation, recrimination. You'd think having been through all that, they'd have learned to live in peace with one another. After living hell wouldn't security bring serenity? Instead, my childhood atmosphere was continually bruised with imprecations, accusations - shrieks in the night. Hysterical nightmares.

My father taciturn, brooding, recalling - writing. A reminder, a living reminder of Auschwitz - a number III camp. Death-intensive.

Often, in my later years, long after he died, I would wonder. Is this the stuff I am made of - my genetic inheritance? Might that explain my modest temporal success, my failure in matters spiritual, as a human being? Sara always liked to say that, to observe that I had no depths of emotion, no vital inner springs.

Oddly, as I grew older my mother seemed to shed the weight of her years. Oh, she still looked a little old lady; more grey, wrinkled than ever. But her character changed. Her vitriolic spite seemed to languish and die when my father did; subtly at first so one could hardly notice. And trust was regained.

Ever since I can remember she feared goyim. "The eyes" she'd say again and again, "you can see by the eyes". And what did that mean? It meant if ever one was in doubt whether a new acquaintance, a passing stranger, was a Jew, a look at the eyes was sufficient.

I grew up with the admonition never to trust gentiles. So I never did. Instead, Jews screwed me. And when I'd say to her, how do you know? She'd cite specific instances. "Ven I'm in a strange place ... alves a Yid vill come and speak mid me, Yiddish." Never mind that I'll point out to her all she has to do is open her mouth to pronounce her Yiddishness.

It's the eyes, always the eyes. A fellow sufferer. The torments of hell gloom in the orbs of every Jew; vicarious experience through antiquity.

"Don' talk mid strangers" she always told my children. They have her example. Voluble and expansive she became as she grew older, and she even began, tentatively, to admit that gentiles might have worthwhile attributes. Before long she began trustfully, like an eager child, smiling at strangers, inviting exchanges in her febrile, fractured English.

*****************************************************************

In Lunenburg the first thing I noticed was the huge old trees festooned with grey-green hangings - Spanish mosses, and lichens flourishing in the damp salt air. Another otherwordly look, albeit partially dispelled by the flow of tourists, the clink of cash.

Old wooden gingerbread houses from Victoria's heyday. Widow's walks, second stories humped over the narrow streets. The waterfront, the shipbuilding yards; old ships in dry dock, old men working to repair them, a lost art. The sharp odour of the cannery. At night when my mother and the children slept in the motel, I walked around. Past the railroad tracks, the creamery, through a back alley to stumble across an ancient cemetery - a monument to the sailors, the locals, the fisherfolk.

Somewhere out there, in the vast wetness, a foghorn sounded as regular as time sifting - a lonely wail. I could almost believe it was a grieving leviathan lost in time's fey mists.

On my way back to the motel the romance dissipated. Two carloads of village cretins burned rubber around screeching turns. Yelling incivilities, tossing emptied bottles and used condoms on the road - a precipitate jolt of modernity.

In the morning, waiting impatiently for hundreds of shining Winnebagos to leave the huge parking lot across from the motel, I fumed. They had been parked there for the three days we spent at the motel. A pride of metal motor homes, gregariously touring the Maritimes.

A head trailer, the proud property of 'Jim and Mable Marleysides of Barre, Vermont' (inscribed on the sides), outfitted with a walkie-talkie, directed the flow of traffic, holding up all other vehicles. While I swore, the children tumbled on the back seat pummeling each other for choice seating. Sometimes the left side is the preferred one, sometimes the right. My mother sat beside me, untroubled. Wasted time does not bother her.

"Relex, Harry - relex" she tells me placidly, herself looking out the car windows, enjoying everything - the prolonged wait in the stifling heat, the children's querulous voices, the honking of car horns behind us, the malodorous fumes of the canning factory.

Finally, I pull up beside the Tourist Information, a kitschy replica ('cute' my mother says) of a quaint old lighthouse. A light drizzle has started and here, on the other side of town, the mock lighthouse stands on a spit of land raised high, looking down over a sheltered marina, sailboats bobbing around a wharf.

Inside, only two other tourists - an elderly couple, tall and refined looking. Dressed in vacation wear, but distinctively so. They look attractive, moneyed, intelligent: perfectly teamed cover models for Geriatrics On The Move.

On the counter, a display of travel literature, sightseeing brochures, maps, guidebooks. Behind the counter, an attractive woman. Smiles at me, returns to conversation with the gentleman. A huge coffee pot bubbles and wafts its aroma around the room. Beside it on a tray, an inviting selection of doughnuts. A sign reads 'coffee 15 cents, - doughnuts 25 cents'.

My mother bustles proprietarially over to the offerings and dispenses largess to the children. She pauses beside a visitor's book on the counter, sets down her coffee to laboriously scribble her name, the date, her city and province, with the stub of a pencil. Everywhere we went on this trip, every little museum, information kiosk, art gallery - every place that boasted a visitor's book had to be signed by her. She was even jealous of my signing in at motel registers. She had a compulsion to leave an indelible mark behind her; an indication, a tangible one, that she had been there.

I listen to the tail end of the conversation, the young woman shaking her head in agreement to something the old man is saying. It appears that they will be taking a ferry to ... where? I don't know. they turn and are about to leave but my mother is starved for new faces and, flanked on either side by a child, she corners the couple on their way to the door. I mentally shrug my shoulders; the old couple can no doubt look out for themselves; and decide to ask the young woman about the ferry service - where it goes, what it costs.

"You like this place, this Lunenburg?" my mother asks them innocently and they, pleasant enough, assure her that they do.
"Ve hef been here before, many years before. Zer hef been many changes, but we loff zis place." My mother nods solemnly.
"You zchud go and zee ze canning vactory" they tell my mother. "Ze children vud loff it." Despite their accents they sound somehow cultured, patrician. Unlike my mother's lumpish turn of speech.
"Mine zon diden wand to go: she tells them turning a peevish glance in my direction. I refuse to be drawn into the conversation.

The woman at the counter tells me there is a very nice lookout upstairs. From the top of this building, she says, one can look out across the bay, on a good day see quite far across the Atlantic. No, good viewing days are not frequent, she says, and we both agree that this is far from a good viewing day. Wordlessly, by motioning, I invite Shauna and Gerrold to come up with me. They're agreeable to leaving their grandmother for the view.

"From Detroit you are ... Doktor and Mrs. Neumann?" my mother's voice coyly asks the couple, drifting up to us as we climb the steps. I wonder how she knows - I didn't hear any introductions - then I recall the visitor's book. It occurs to me then, that my mother may think they are Jewish, the old couple. She wouldn't know the subtle distinction between Neuman and Neumann. But, I tell myself, the eyes, she'll be able to tell by the eyes.

They looked like nice people. Your average citizen. Yet I couldn't help imagining a typical conversation with such people, post '45. Conversation? Interrogation, perhaps.

But Madam Neumann, how can you say you knew nothing?
It iss zo! Ve mind our own bissniss. Ve had no idea ...
But the odour, the stink everywhere - unmistakable! And when the wind was just right ...?
No. Zer wass nozing like zat! No zmell.
Herr Neumann. The boxcars of people. Where did you think they were going? What was to be their ultimate disposal?
Ze camps. Ze vork camps. (Arbeit Macht Frei)
All those numbers could never be accommodated in those areas! Did you never wonder where those unending numbers of people, those unrelenting box-carred humans were being deposited?
To vork. to build ze Vaterland. Anyzing elss wass imbossible!
You heard nothing of mass murders? Ovens? Genocide? What about book bindings, lampshades, and soap?
Bropoganda!
The statistics speak for themselves.
Nonzenss! Zix million iss bropoganda. Zousands berhaps, but in effery war iss zivilian gasualties. Bezides ... ze Jews must haf done ZOMSING to merit zuch special treatment as you describe ...?

Those names, those damn haunting stinkplaces that cloud my brain. Treblinka, Belsen, Nordhausen, Dora, Buchenwald, Ohrdruf, Dachau, Flossenburg, Maidenek, Auschwitz - that infamous lineup of hellholes. Deutschland Uber Ales!

First the lineups, the medical examinations. Healthy men - there. Strong women - there. Old people, sick people, children - over there. There was like this: The Disrobing Room, The Disinfecting Room. Everything will be all right, they said. We will take care of you.
The Shower Room - Zyklon B. A big room, the Shower Room. Windows high up to look down when everything is over. A hose to wash away the ordure of fear.
Next. The Storage room - bodies stacked like wood; fuel for the ovens. They perfumed Germany's air.
The Crematorium - the Chimneys. From the Storage Room a last look for gold.

***********************************************************************

From the top of the observation tower on the pseudo-lighthouse we leaned over a wooden parapet running the length of the platform to look out over the water - other waters anointing my children's dark heads. The woman at the counter was right. the view must be spectacular on a good day. Even now, in the mist and rain, I could see that; standing on this promontory the view must be very special.

I could imagine the conversation downstairs, my mother happy to make the brief acquaintance of such 'nice' people; another souvenir of her sojourn to the Other Canada she had never seen. And soon we hear her steps, uncharacteristically heavy on the stairs and I turn to see her face, grey and tired-looking. Confused and childlike, she looks at me.

"I wass sure ... I said to them in Yiddish ... by the eyes you can always tell. Harry, I couldn't believe. His face got hard and she got funny and they pushed away from me. Ran away from me! Harry, how could this be?"


c. 1977
Rita Rosenfeld

Published: Wascana Review, Fall 1977

Canadian Winter

SNOWSHOEING

No wind
but cold enough
to chill still cheeks
so we move off
over the snow
sky dense with stars
moon a quarter-light
trees limned
against the night.

No sound
but our snowshoes
creaking the snow
lifting puffs
with every
wide-legged stride.

No perspective
but before us
an undisturbed sheet
covers the
hidden country
where we orient
our winter landscape.

No trouble
breaking trail
before us
snow neat as a
new-laid counterpane
behind us a path
undulating
like some unknowable
nocturnal beast.


OUR SHADOWS MOVE LONG LEGS

Snowshoeing ravines
we wind carefully down
where streams rush headlong
in summer. Tree roots hang
icicled like hoary whiskers
like your beard with its exhaust
glistening back the sun.

Animal tracks lead a crisscross
a braillework of animal lore
and we stop briefly to study
speculate, wonder if they're
watching us awkwarding
their byways. The trees

stand like dolmens, stark
against the white plain;
among them great elms
sieved by woodpeckers
creaking murderously
in the wind. Ghosts of

summer whisper from beeches
and redpolls flicker
from branch to branch as
chickadees dart and tease
us with their silly name.

It's cold enough so
our snowshoes creak and
groan on the wind-tufted snow
yet we plod on
red-cheeked but comfortable
in our cocoon of energy.

Clouds string the horizon
as the setting sun
illuminates and warms
the trail we leave behind;
animating it like
a giant caterpillar.


WHITE HIKE

Muckluks harnessed
we hoof it over the snow
into a cedar swamp
its waters sleeping under
the winter blanket. The
sun, high and sharp
glimmers off the contours

of the swamp; here
and there a dip where
water still runs. Rose-
breasted grosbeaks
wing the still air

as we stalk tracks of
hare and grouse - one fox.
A sapsucker patterned
the trunk of a pine. My
toque is grasped - a trophy

on a hawthorne's greedy
arm. We stomp the snow
for hours up hills and down
treed sides to retrace
finally, beating dusk
by a winter's shade.

Rita Rosenfeld c. 1980

Published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books
Fiddlehead Poetry Book No. 293

The Days In Careful Measure

LANDSCAPE IN CHIAROSCURO

Striding wide on
webbed bear paws
crunching winter's crystals
we share the night with
luminous-eyed raptors.

Circled by snowtopped
silent monoliths we move
the frozen stillness
ornamenting pad-silent prints.

Wind blows sharp bites
nudging burden from
smothering branches. The
pursuers echo sounds of
silent blame as owl and hare
play their endless game.

Shade reflects the grey
blanket. Pines and spruce
limned against the sky's
blue canopy; the tallest
wearing the moon on its
spire like a cocky trophy.
Hawthornes spread crafty
arms thinking they are
hunters.

Moon spills from
her silver bucket
glowing the way of the silent chase.
Polaris! Greetings from
this ghostly landscape.

Published by Fiddlehead Poetry Books
Fiddlehead Poetry Book no.293
c.1980, Rita Rosenfeld

Northward Journal 1981

Early Spring Climb

Our purview limitless
through trees grey and bare
as a haze in the forest.
The stream gathers
winter's last gasp
sounding like a hurricane mounting
and we watch the water
dash white-spumed
over green-lichened granite.
Beside the stream
coy unfurling of ferns
slits of white as
trilliums raise heads
to the newly-compelling sun.
We step around
winter's casualties
sloppily strewing
the forest floor;
fir and spruce
mourning spindly spires.
We even doubt
survival of the fittest
observing great pines
split - sundered
by winter's trantrums.
The ascent is less gradual
than summer's memory
as we sit on a promontory
overlooking the lake
where three blunt-winged
marshhawks laze on the wind
pinions etched
on the lowering sky.


Landscape

It's below zero
a mean wind
ripping the sky
the sun hard
and white
snow
whipped off branches
cutting faces.

We
slide into a ravine
snowshoe along
the frozen creekbed
tufting snow
in a gridwork
over nocturnal paths
of grouse and hare.

Earlier a thaw
freed the creek
so great ice pans
lie chunked on the banks
and we detour
hauling up
wooded slopes

cracking
winterhard branches
of balsam and fir.

Rita Rosenfeld c.1981
Published: Northward Journal, a quarterly of Northern arts

Northward Journal 20

The Stray

The marsh hums
and swells with
renewal
and ripe sound
spills from the turgid water.
Peepers trip over new notes
redbirds creak their calls
swaying on last season's
sere rushes
tender green pushing
through the straw
as reeds
and rushes
perpetuate cycle.
A sparrow-hawk
soars on a stray wind
casting its
predator's eye
on spring-tizzied mice.
A tulip
grows conceitedly
at the edge of the marsh
ready to burst
into nonchalant colour.


Voyageur Route

We slip in where
the Ottawa hungrily laps
a sandless beach
paddle straight across river
slicing rollers
humping waves
for the mouth of the Lievre
then cut current
kissing the motherstream
paddle now-quiescent water
where cottages lean from banks.
Seagulls ornament a cloudless sky
and in the distance a hawk hunts.
We head upriver keeping time
with a muskrat
submerging surfacing.
The water seems turgid
swelling with message
as pulpwood heaves on the air
and a mountain of pulp appears
at the CIP installation
and the intake of a powerplant
greedily sucks the river.
We turn downriver
see giant cranes and chutes
spew pulp like corn popped
from a titan's mouth
rumbling like thunder.
Effluent eddies laying a slick
of filth particulating the surface
scumming the bottom
revealing the enigma of
the river's opaque turgidity.
We paddle to the Ottawa
into a lagoon thick with
luxuriant waterplants
flowering in shades of purple
like bruises on the landscape.
Raw sewage skelps the backwater
faeces languidly blossoming tendrils
swirling on the dips of our paddles.
We turn in rare panic
from this historical river
this voyageur route.

Rita Rosenfeld
Published: Northward Journal, a quarterly of northern arts
1981

Found This Day

Winter's Deep Heart

Nuthatches and chickadees
thawed from the night's brutal plunge
orchestrate above
in a paeon of homage
to Beethoven's Pastoral,
Hayden's Toy Symphony.

Composers' hubristic conceit
Nature's mocking deceit.

There is a gentle stillness
blanketing thick layers
of snow.
Our cleats bite deep
carrying us forward
onto this frozen, white landscape.

A slight breeze rattles
pale bronze, paper-beige
leaves of hornbeam and beech.

Bird-pricked and pale
Sumach candles
bittersweet berries
Hawthorne haws
illuminate the
black-on-white narrative
of winter's scape.

Snow lies thick
on the solid old limbs
of outstretched
apple trees. Pine,
spruce and fir shed
their white embroidery.

Our shadows twin us
as we lope along
under a bright midday sun.
Suddenly they plunge
deeply elongated
into a chasm
rejoin us on crossing the bridge.

From high above us
a red squirrel scolds
berating our trespass
the rash indignity
of our presence;
that of our two little dogs
padding alongside.

A pair of cardinals
blaze deeply
into a needle-lush pine
sublimely trilling
their defiance of
the deep heart of Winter.

Published this day on my consciousness
trekking the snowbound ravine. 2009.

Watercolour Sketch

Watercolour Sketch:

An Autumn Day on Lac La Peche

Our red canoe slices the water
like an arrow splicing air
its colour echoing the squadrons
of leaves tumbling to the lake
as the maples surrounding this place
repeat old patterns - bleeding Fall.

A far-off mist rises over the hills
and the lake is a slate mirroring the
surrounding shore, the islands populated
with maple, alder and ash splendid in
chartreuse and crimson. Not a breeze
to freshen the water which breathes a

torrid fishy presence encouraging the
seagulls squawking and screeching at our
intrusion - climbing stray breezes or
themselves like white canoes bobbing in
the lake. Although the water appears to
swell beneath us the level is low and

waterweeds skirl under our paddles
churning sand. Rocks of the Canadian Shield
protrude on the shoreline, in the water,
painted like flags by the guano of years'
roosts. A brace of Mergansers watch
unblinkingly as our canoe nudges their rock
then lift in a panic of wings beating air.

Fish-hunting kingfishers splat the lake
from the shore's edge and a surfacing/
submerging loon ripples the water as we
skirt shoreline and island outcropping.
The perfect line of the water bissects a
double world of glorious colour and we

cannot discern which one is real; the one
we inhabit or the symmetrical other-half;
a faithful reflection and truly obverse
yet as real as the other. In that double
world is twinned beauty with beauty

objects become other than what they are
and we, like insects, skim the surface
middling this strange new otherworld.

From EARLY HARVEST by Rita Rosenfeld
Gusto Press 1980

lost.and.found.eureka!

I, Rita Rosenfeld, do solemnly here swear (dammit) and attest, (gravely and honestly) that the following - all of the following hereinafter, blog entry by blog entry from this day hence - represent my modest contributions to the Canadian literary oeuvre.

I give witness on my own behalf that I am the sole creative force behind these literary constructions of poetry and short fiction. And that the publication sources cited, and the dates attributed, are correct and reliable.

And a one, and a two, and a - here goeth they forward...!

Apocrypha

In the beginning
there was chaos, but then a gregarious atom
encouraged a clubby atmosphere
where they all gathered and there was order.

At first there were hot gasses, but then
cool season prevailed and
minerals and metals crusted the fires.

One lone amoeba suffered incurable hubris;
thought she could do better
and founded a dynasty
on her vision.

In time a she-ape clambered down from the trees,
pointed at the sea, and declared 'there is my creatrix!'
Named her daughter Eve,

and set her the task of naming others. So Eve
chatted up giraffes and elephants,
whales and crickets. She called
a brash Adamai snake-in-the-grass

for offering her figs when she
couldn't give a damnation
for his ignorance. Everything
was fine until he learned to
wield a pen while she

continued to till the earth.
Eve provided crops for their
offspring and Adam pushed
back the night of eternity,
offering superiority and his

own rendering of ineffable truth:
That of himself as
Supreme Creator; half of him
up there, the other down here.

From: ...Bound Books
Samisdat, Volume 21, #3, 82nd release
Copyright, 1979, Rita Rosenfeld