Sunday Poem

WHAT WAS THE LAND BEFORE IT WAS LANDSCAPE?

All those years, before I became lost, I lived a different life. 

I am like the stones people place on graves to make them a little heavier. 

Some bring boxes of burning words grown from roots. 

Each attempts to read what the other has scripted. 

The rocks here are volcanic. They rise from the sea. 

They give a light unequal to the light that's cast on them. 

I've seen how the sky becomes the echo of what's flown through it. 

Not that it's easy to keep certain moments. 

What makes me break this silence and speak to you this way? 

Graveyards have things to say, and say them gently. 

There's nothing so wonderful as to be heard to the very end.

By Ruth Roach Pierson, from Untranslatable Thought (Anstruther Press, 2016)

Sunday Poem

COLD JULY 

for Elise Partridge (1958–2015) 

1.
I have seen it a beaver-dammed
lukewarm dribble, but this summer the brook’s a river,
deep and cold, running steeped tea
and a skim of froth around lichened rocks,
roaring like an air conditioner.
Its white noise is enforced by oversized pines:
their branches albatross
from broom-closet dry to green ends shagged
with cones the colour of peanut skins
and flecked with crystals of sap.
A cindery sentry guards the top:
his ash beak clacking as he hunches
for takeoff, his wings branching
from a light crate core, eyelashing at the tips.
Timber creak in his phlegm-fat caw.

2.
Down on the strand, big surf bangs,
lifting gulls from where they sit
like electric clothes irons. They leave
lead-white splotches
and webbed wavery wigwams.
A piece of driftwood perfectly catches
the boomerang of a swimmer’s arm.
Six-foot kelp bullwhips
have the trapped viscosity of poured motor oil
before they flare to lasagna at the tips.
Out where the ocean betrays
its breathing—closer in than the endless flat,
but farther out than the surf—a whiskery face
rides a swell and watches: time on the Nautilus
would bulk those milk bottle shoulders.
Drawn-tight hoodies small our faces
to beach stone ovals
on which our features perish.
Your message to us was simple:
look closely, and cherish. 

By Patrick Warner, from Octopus (Biblioasis, 2016)

(Painting by Mats Gustafson). 

Sunday Poem

BOREAL SWING

My mother hunted moose

as a child my grandfather taught her

how to field dress a bull:

make an incision from the throat

to the pelvis

the abdominal cavity emptied

haul him up between two pines

the body inverted

antlers almost grazing

the soil

each hind limb leashed to a trunk above

to allow the flesh to cool

then she’d climb inside

the open chest

fix her toes along the ledge

of two ribs

and with a kick to the bull’s left shoulder

he sent her

swinging

By Liz Howard, from Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent (McClelland & Stewart, 2015)

Sunday Poem

WAX LYRICAL

One day I take a little razor and shave it all off.
Looking obscenely young, I admire myself,
head bent or staring forward in a mirror.
Cool and young and sexy,
I’m available, stripped to possibility.
Discover me or I need to discover myself.
For in the shower every drop of water is felt.
I am exposed and experience it as an intrusion.
Hair is an extra layer of skin, a means not to feel.
Being now so naked I sense my modesty even with clothes on.
Edge a blade across my most intimate skin,
a clean, marble look, with a slight rose glow.
By evening, there is a blue tinge,
little heads below the skin,
a female five o’clock shadow.
Shaving then isn’t an option.
It speeds growth and thickens the bush.
It leaves a latent feel of uncleanliness.

I try waxing a stylish square of hair.
Return to a woman where I don’t mind unfolding my legs.
She touches without fearing the smell of me.
Obviously one showers comprehensively
before such an intimate appointment.
She cleans me up and pats me dry like a baby.
But after, the sides are red,
the pores stand out,
bruised,
little specks of blood where tough hairs were extracted,
discolorations in the soft folds between thigh and pelvis,
a bikini wax gone wrong, the sensitivity
of my pubis renders it unsightly.
After a number of days the region temporarily
settles into cinematic perfection.
Before the hair grows out, still too short to redo.

There’s an acid lotion that eats away the hair.
You smear it on like cream,
wait,
scrape it off with a pink plastic tool,
scared to burn your fingers
while lathering it directly on intimacy.
It stinks of putrefaction and dissolution of tissue.
Why complain, professionals say,
laser hair removal is permanent.
Permanence sounds traditional. I flee.

Initially when I decided to tidy up pubic hair,
I was told, there are styles, you need to choose an identity.
Do you want nothing,
a strip of hair,
a pattern?
If you leave some, will it be trimmed or naturally curled?
People like to say, au naturel, as if it’s funny
or an aesthetic choice to be yourself.
Hair has a life of its own. It splits,
devilish,
two hairs per root.
It bursts through the surface, pubescence vying with maturity.
Or it won’t grow at all, sticking beneath the skin,
a type of pelvic acne. I read somewhere,
who cares, just pop them as you’d do on your face
I’m shocked, can’t believe what I see.

It’s all about surface.
To do with connecting the inner and outer planes
of body, while also destructing
the flatness of skin.
When hair is removed, uniformity is installed.
Feeling the leg, so smooth, but empty.
One-sided touch, a hand running along skin,
but body not reaching back.
Surface can mean that which is obvious,
or that which is not obvious at all.
Like the area of my visible body, a first superficial layer.
Like what still needs to surface, what is hidden deeper.
It’s in submission then, with a gesture of penitence,
that one day I start removing my body hair one by one,
plucking each out with a pair of tweezers.
The guilt of imperfection weighs me down.
I sense that my body is in the wrong.
It should be crystal clear.

By Klara du Plessis, from Wax Lyrical (Anstruther Press, 2015)

Sunday Poem

HEIRLOOM 

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page—

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;
Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew. 

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save
The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac. 

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,
The tallow stains of midnight liturgy—
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry! 

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,
When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

By A.M. Klein, from Complete Poems (ed. Zailig Pollock, University of Toronto Press, 1990)

Sunday Poem

HUMANITARIAN WAR FUGUE 

We killed with the best of intentions.
The goals that we died for were sound.
The notions we killed for were sterling,
our motives the sort that one mentions,
frankly, with pride.
                            Quit scrupling,
quibbling, lying down
and lay this down:
                            Bad guys by the graveful we gunned down so girls, little girls
by the classful, could go to school. Girls, too, busing to school,
           we slew so girls could go to school unharmed, in error
we slew them, with better intentions, bad eggs however we harmed
           to win hearts, warm cockles, gain guts and livers and
                           limbs and minds
with decent intentions, good eggs we even armed (only good eggs
           armed)—the rest we smashed, truncated,
atomized until the doves among us
                                                   buckled, seldom seeing dead men un-
           dismantled, while heads of this and that kept touting,
hawking our cause like crack,
           our crystal intentions, motives one mentions
especially when aim is less than exact
            and friendlies get fried… 

With downsized intentions we killed and we strafed
and we mortared and missiled and mined,
sniped too, droned too,
           till we wilted to haunts in OSI wards, nightly
wading tarns and tar-ponds incarnadine,
and they dosed and discharged and forsook us,
but on we kept killing with credible reasons
in a lush neural loop of gibbering visions
from hovering gunships, maniacally hooting,
culling the groundlings with motives forgotten
to a playlist of metal eternally cycling… 

Of course, looking back, you would like to reboot
and start over, but there is no over—
this spraying and shredding forever recursive—
this Gatling drum always ample with ammo—
and papa and papa our weapons keep bleating—
a ceaseless returning and endless rehearsing—
you’re killing with the best of
with the best of them
killing with the best of
with the best of them, killing,

By Steven Heighton. from The Walking Comes Late (Anansi, 2016)

Sunday Poem

VISZONTLÁTÁSRA

You are here you leave and
come back you
look back through before this you
     used only hello to say

Looking over your back
     you are still greeting until
     again and you are lying
you will leave this home not
     your home you have left
            your own home you have

Just started to settle in before
going back again and you will
again say hello or again and

Be back, that look, the one
               you exchange until again and
                           there is no end.

Goodbye until again.

By Helen Hajnoczky, from Magyarázni (Coach House , 2016)

(Painting by Derek Overfield)

Sunday Poem

SPRUNG 

Crow goes off, a gravelgullet.
An exit wound beyond the pane.
What day? Fuck fuckmonday.
Fivefifteen a.m. Wrong time.
Unholy hour. Rollover, ah—
Squawksquawk! Notetoself:
Fellthatdamnedtree where crow
now Everests exhilarated as
Hillary. Here, radio goes off.
Gawd. Pop song's off. Sloppy,
not in time or tune. My ears.
Brain's gone off. Altered state.
Not quite sprung. Ungodly March.
Note to Nature: keep your sex
to a dull roar. SQUAWK! Right.
No sleep now. Stare at where
roof apparently is. Conjure
a silent reveal of stars. Far off. 

By Ingrid Ruthig, from This Being (Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2016)

Sunday Poem

INCLUSION 

First was the claw and the claw
clasping clay, closing in breath. 

More turns to them than to sea-snails,
brain and gut ravelled like yarn 

into clews to be threaded through.
Like Theseus, I was closed-in 

with an abomination of bestial desire:
she wanted to be nailed by a bull 

and she did a bull and bore
a bull-of-a-thing with a menacing club. 

It's with this thought that I'm locked,
throughout this maze that I travel. 

I've no key, no clue: only minatory echoes
and shadows to see it through.

By Asa Boxer, from Etymologies (with essay by David-Antoine Williams, 
Anstruther Press, 2016)

Sunday Poem

KELVIBRIDGE, GLASGOW, 2 P.M. 

Look below: the sable-eddied Kelvin
flowing fast, despite the town’s depression;
never angry, only bloody-minded,
rolling on to reach the red horizon. 

Glaswegians put their trust in how it carries:
they toss into its care the things they use:
lolly sticks and condoms, knives and bottles,
babies’ toys, a jilted lover’s shoes. 

A force that churns has somewhere else to be,
especially when spattered with this light.
Someone got it started; it is free.
To go a little closer must be right. 

And sometimes there’s a child from an estate
pulled from games along the muddy edge,
and this is why the branches bend and wait
and why we always pause upon this bridge.

By Alexandra Oliver, from Let the Empire Down (Biblioasis, 2016)

(Photo by Greig Middlemiss)

Sunday Poem

PILLOW

How solitary
and resolute you look in the morning.
A stoic in your cotton sleeve.
Do you dream of walking out 

rain or shine
a truffle balanced on your sternum
and passing me on the sidewalk?
Or is that a smile 

because you interpret nothing
and statelessness is where you live?
How calmly you indulge my moods. 

See you tonight, by the sovereign chartreuse
ceramics at the Met.
Let’s hear what you’d do differently.

By Jana Prikryl, from The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016)

Sunday Poem

AMIDST THE FOG OF BLACK FLIES, A BULL CHARGES 

Trying to escape an insect’s hunger,
the thrum of his gallop is like hail across Nairobi’s tin roofs,
like salsa dancers burning alive on scuffed hardwood,
old women arguing on a corner in Chinatown,
the clatter of sticks in road hockey, breaks in the pool hall,
like rooting around the Tupperware drawer, like when
the girl dropped her polka-dotted laptop in the parking lot,
or when fifteen horses jumped from the Bow River bridge
and plummeted ten metres on their way to the Calgary Stampede,
or when you tripped over the box of Christmas ornaments,
the plosive pop of their shined red glass
or like the sawtoothed corners from the curses that followed,
like your brother learning Teenage Wasteland on electric guitar,
like the kid next door who skateboards down the sidewalk
at midnight while his mother sits on the stoop
and tells the gel-haired bachelors she loves them,
like dropping enough nickels into the pay phone
for a long distance call to Sault Ste. Marie or the braided river
of semis and cars that cascade by without stopping
and the pothole puddles detonate and retreat into form. 

Collapsing into the creek, the bull crumples.
His breath becoming the sound of you
in the kitchen this morning, washing the cutting board;
you come back, lie down, your hair spilling across my pillow,
a glacier melting the sand off its skin.

By Richard Kemick, from Caribou Run (Icehouse, 2016)

Sunday Poem

REGATHERING 

I searched everywhere in the back-
scapes of my life—through the backlogged paperwork,
the back of the topmost cupboard, the backs of old books—
to find my heart. I think I lost it 

this time last year. I’d given up on it all. Allowed
mortality to piggyback onto everything, blowing the roof off what
I’d built. Why try, I thought? And here

the computer exacted an ounce of my heart,
and there a drink in the afternoon took some of it; the lion’s
share was carved up by sleep and meted 

to the various wishes my body made
when I wasn’t around. My heart was scattered. It would be
near impossible to gather it all back. Michelle watched
as I travelled the apartment like a streetcar at night—as vacant
and vulgarly lit.

She hugged me to bed, cupped her life,
her workaday problems around mine and held them aloft. She sung
such elegant music. I searched the back-scapes, 

thinking the shards of my heart would have dumbly
fallen somewhere. I tried to find it, actually, because
there have been a few deaths around me recently
and I could really use my heart. I did find it, too. Quite 

by accident. I’d given up on getting it back, when I crawled
into bed and Michelle flung a half-asleep arm
around me. And there it was, gathered. I have to give
the little bastard credit, my heart, it knows how to get home.

By Vincent Colistro, from Late Victorians (Signal Editions, 2016) 

Sunday Poem

THE WARLOCK'S FORELOCK 

The rain reminds me how I fell
in love with steel drums as a girl 

in Detroit’s Hart Plaza, wanted to hear
that patterned ting-ping-ping all day 

while brushing my teeth, while reading
my horoscope in the Free Press, 

while unpacking a packed lunch.
My son’s father pours me a glass 

of terrible wine. We joke it has notes
of strawberry, rhubarb, and lake trout. 

I watched a decades-old documentary
in which the author’s father handled 

hemlock on an island outside Ottawa.
My father tells me I’m his greatest 

regret. He means not knowing me, one
hopes. It reminds me of a dumb song. 

My son is asleep after drinking from me
too soon after I consumed that bad booze. 

When I was 22 I drank a bottle of rosé
and zonked out under a tree beside 

the intended tent. I was in a campground
in Menton. France. That’s all I remember. 

Also: the English girls I travelled with didn’t
much love museums. Did I see Jean Cocteau’s 

chateau? Maybe. My son thinks I’m perfect
when I do nothing but lie silently in a room 

feeding him while I try not to dwell on
my mother’s bills so that worry won’t 

pass from my nervous system into his. One
time I drank a rancid mud-thick brew 

that made me see snakes in the floor tile.
I thought I was the Virgin Mary, radiant 

and swaddled in borrowed white skirts
issued to shield my ovarian vibrations. 

We stood up and sat down as we sang
allegedly magical phrases in Portuguese. 

One guy saw light shoot out of my head.
Tonight, I tune the rain. Our least-favourite 

cat trapped in the worst of it. I felt
love as we rescued him from his tiny 

terror. Once he was safe I lost interest.
I cried this afternoon. It’s my new thing.

By Damian Rogers, from Dear Leader (Coach House, 2015)

(Illustration by Sean Lewis)

Sunday Poem

ROAD ENDING 

At the end of the road a hunter’s hut
boarded all summer, the fraying bush
backing against it, a ragged fringe
of beggar’s ticks, rust tassels, thorns,
and boulders pushed to the water’s edge
where the graders turned.
There was no one home. 

And no one in the water. Overhead
the white threads spidered from a jet
drifted across where the evening star
was not yet shining. 

What were the words I could not use,
the thoughts I could not think to say?
The white lake shook in the early dusk. 

Something was lost we were waiting for,
summer, perhaps, or snow.

By M. Travis Lane, from The Essential M. Travis Lane 

(ed. Shane Neilson, The Porcupine's Quill, 2015)

Sunday Poem

LOID 

Getting in’s all in the wrist,
a steadfast pitcher’s grip
when you let drop
your instrument
of admittance: Visa, ID,
thin plastic jimmy swiped
down the fissure with
a satiating swish
like perforated paper’s
creased swift rip, or the fission
of insight almost missed. 

If flicked just so—
technique tricking
mechanism—you’ll knock
back the spring bolt
to hear its plosive
click. Next, the creaky hinge,
bird call of ingress,
light’s tilted L edging
an inched open door.
You’ve made it, in or through;
what’s inside you wish you knew.

By Danny Jacobs, from Loid (Frog Hollow Press, 2016)

Sunday Poem

DRIVING WEST FROM MILK RIVER

Blue, a ragged stripe of blue
in the far distance and a cord of road

hauling me towards it, a tumbledown
house by a dried-up marsh, no other home,

the sun spreadeagled across the stubble,
blue teeth in the sky’s mouth, a coyote

bounding the highway, no other journey,
always blue, its gravity, its lightness, turning

slowly into mountains, thin grass disturbed
by peals of wind, a dozen black cattle

near a waterhole below a yellow slope
browsing what they can, no other life

and the blue rising closer, waiting to grasp
whatever offering I am.

By Mark Abley, from The Tongues of Earth (Coteau Books, 2015)

Sunday Poem

PROCEDURES FOR ESCAPE 

The train hovers along the track
somewhere between Oshawa and Belleville
and I sit in seat 14
in the aisle across from the emergency window
with a little red hammer
in a small gray box—
the one which every kid, including me
would give up their seat
just to smash 

The attendant explains the procedures of escape
to the family of five sitting ahead of me
She’s a cute brunette with high cheekbones
and low lips and probably close to my age
and she asks me if in the event of an emergency
would I be willing to climb out the window with her first
to help her assist all the women and children off the train 

I tell her yes, and stare back out the window
at the blurred trees and old telephone wires
listening to the sounds the train wheels make
across the rails
which always sound a bit like thunder
and a bit like a steel mill in full work-day swing
and I imagine the two of us, hand in hand
leaping out the shattered window
looking like two children jumping off a small cliff
into blue water on a sun-blind afternoon
using their fear of heights
as a meager excuse to hold hands 

I look back at the tiny red hammer
in the little gray box
displayed like a javelin
and repeat her question over again in my head
thinking, yes I would be willing to do that
you’re just the first person
to have asked

By Blair Trewartha, from Easy Fix (Palimpsest, 2014)

Sunday Poem

ELPENOR FOR YUSEF 

When he broke, he broke
like an oak box
full of castanets tossed
into the frozen river.
He broke like a stuntman
through the plate glass
of Odysseus’ conscience.
Broke like a breakdancer
shattering his right knee
while doing a backflip
under the Liberty Bell.
Broke like the promise
he swore he’d never break.
Like the teen who leapt
out of Another Gravity.
Broke like the brakes
on an underground train
hurtling at breakneck speed
into Rubén Darío station.
Broke like bits of glass
strewn over the steps
on a Sunday morning.
Broke as all hell. Keen
for the cool night
air broken. Roused
by soldiers marching,
when Elpenor broke,
he broke the spirits
of all mortal men.

By Nick Thran, from Mayor Snow (Nightwood Editions, 2015)

Sunday Poem

GIFT HORSE 

No old-time bonnets with eyelet trim;
this baby wasn't born yesteryear.
No plastic shoes. We eschew

things that scratch / bind / itch.
Ditto Velcro and rompers with
buttons up the back, sans front closures.

Please nothing with cutesy
embroidered pseudo-French expressions
or amicable-looking snails

slithering amongst pastel-toned garden tools.
Nothing advertising an institution.
No fossil-fuel-eating-vehicle motifs.

Anything laden with thwarted dreams
(however bright, however lovely)
will be promptly set free to the Goodwill.

No mohair shrugs, pleather
skirts, animal prints,
rhinestones, fun-fur, pinstripes, no hint

of a life wasted or scripted.
Nothing too girl, nothing too boy.
Nothing redolent of upper crust.

Nothing sad, ugly, tired, prone to stain.
Nothing that reminds us of pain.

By Susan Elmslie, from The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2015 

(ed. Jacob McArthur Mooney, Tightrope, 2015)