Sunday Poem

THE BENCH 

Forget the fiddle faddle,
make do with just one fact:
blueness runs deep as this ocean
he stares at from the bench
here where the bay narrows
to a stone throat words rush through
gushing at full throttle
as if with too much to say
and hardly the breath to say it
while he, scrambling events from his life
with fiction and the TV soaps,
nudges the scales in his favour
but getting no purchase on truth
has almost convinced himself
that, throughout,
he merely did what needed done.

From Some Dance (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014) by Ricardo Sternberg

(Illustration by Christopher Nielsen.)