Sunday Poem

UNION LOCAL 64 

Last night I caught the boy I'd been
in fishnet and gutted him
on the government wharf
by the light of an oil lamp
hung from my dead father's hand. 

Above the dyke, over the road,
the town was just the same:
weeping willows, widows,
whale-stains on the cheesecloth walls
of the first houses
and an overwhelming sense
of a last breath being taken. 

The worst of it was
the ordinary blood
on the ordinary wood
and my father saying
as he gazed out to sea
"It's no good.
The companies won't pay.
They didn't pay for mine
and they won't pay for yours." 

I watched him through my mother's eyes
as he sighed and bent
to the stiffened body of our time
together not worth one red cent
to anyone and picked it up
and took his life and mine away again.

From Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief (Gaspereau, 2014) by Tim Bowling

(Photo by Barry Pettinger)

Sunday Poem

THE GREAT BLUE HERON 

Prehistory stands in the saltmarsh
on stem-thin legs sinewy
as a sailor's twisted hemp
and cries once, brief and hoarse,
the bugle blast of a tubercular angel
heralding another apocalypse 

then lifts into the ashen sky
ponderously
and skims the tufted cattails
along the muddied riverbank,
large eyes still reflecting
an earth before time,
blinking away with jaded calm
armies heaped below China's Great Wall
the first stigmata cooled on the cross,
the basketed pallor of French aristocracy,
all the race's casual carnage
running dark and constant beneath
the beating of awkward wings

now flies through the light drizzle,
an umbrella with a broken spine
swept against the darkening sky,
a failed sketch for Kitty Hawk
slowly erased from the page 

and reappears at dawn
alone as always, perched on a rotted piling,
hunched in its shabby raincoat
like a terrorist, smoking long
cigarettes of mist,
coolly staring at life,
waiting for the final bomb to go off,
waiting for the end of history.

From Selected Poems (Nightwood, 2013) by Tim Bowling.

Sunday Poem

READING MY SON TO SLEEP

Last night, for the first time, I went down the well

my father went down with me.

It plunged deeper than the back of the little skull

whose edge lay page-thin on the while pillow

and darker than the earth's dusk seeping in

to blot the secret passwords I spoke.

"Hello," I tested with each downladdering breath,

the letters pattering like rain in the murk

and echoing off the cavernous stone. A blink,

a butterfly's tentative settle, and the slight

way back had briefly closed.

Another blink, and I was left

with the aftersound of uttered entrance,

my eyes guttering, my arms loose as rope.

With an inward cry I could not help

I watched darkness flood the praying-book.

From The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry (2005) by Tim Bowling.