Sunday Poem

YOUR FATHER'S LIVING ROOM RUG 

After your father's death, you brought home
his rug. It was frayed and faded. It did not match
our walls. I explained that no, we couldn't use it
in the living room: there was no place for your father's
rug in our home. You argued for it.
I said no way.
                        You took the rug, finally,
to the basement, to the odd little room
no one used. For fifteen years
it remained there. Forgotten by me, but not,
of course, by you. The time came
when we needed space for storage and I went down
to the room; you followed. There was the rug.
Mildewed, damp to the touch. It has to go,
I said. You said no. I called our daughters
down. They held their noses, stood
beside me.
                  There was not space enough
to roll up the rug. Its bulk was so great
it took the two of us even to fold it lengthwise
in half. Its backing stiff, heavy
with memory. And I
still blind to it. 

The two of us pulled, shoved, forced.
            Got it out of the little room at last, into the dark
of the furnace room. We shunted our bodies
against it. The air filled with fibres and mould
and stink.
                We fought. I cursed, you shouted.
Over and over you said it couldn't be done. I said
it had gone in, therefore
it would come out.
                               The rug stuck at the turn
             to the stairs. I gouged at the wooden trim with a shovel.
We got it 'round at last. Rage pushed the rug up and out.
I see the scars of that struggle every time
I go to the basement with the laundry.
Dream, sometimes, that I'm
           still pushing your father's rug
through the long tunnel of basement,
                           still breathing in what it shed.

From A Bee Garden (Cormorant, 2013) by Marilyn Gear Pilling 

Sunday Poem

CLEARCUT 

It pleases us to think the sun
redeems the logging roads with cane,
with high cicadan orisons,
with fern and black-eyed Susan. 

Picking our way amid the slash
we say blackberry rosaries,
we finger their knotted beadwork, one
for the bucket one for me,
as in he loves me not he loves me. 

Watching where we eat our prayers
the trees themselves might pity us.
When autumn comes they lose their leaves
by accident, deciduous.

From All the Daylight Hours (Cormorant, 2013) by Amanda Jernigan.

(Painting by Paul Saari)

Sunday Poem

Shark Chaser 

For my father, shark repellent was power. He flew
bombing runs over the pacific, confident in the lie
that if he crashed, the canister would protect him. 

For our foreman, power was salmon: endless aisles of tins
stocked beneath the surface. When that promise
went to sea the last time, the lights in the cannery
flickered. Gathered on the floor, we expected each word,
yet could not contain our astonishment
as they splashed from his brackish mouth. 

For us power was paycheques. We stood dazed
in the parking lot, pink slips floundering in our palms.
Our wives wouldn't expect us for hours.
One of the guys decided to change
his oil and we circled around,
a gesture akin to friendship. 

He tipped the can up, but nothing came.
He shook it and banged it frantically,
then tossed it aside and laughed
three sharp busts
which cut at the air like propellers blades—
the laugh you make but once in your life.

From The Other Side of Ourselves (2011) by Rob Taylor.

(Illustration by Michael Glenwood )

"Moth"

A poem by Michael Lithgow.