Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Twelve Short Canadian Poems
"Rubus Ursinus:
A Prayer for the Blackberry Harvest"
Reaching through thorns,
milking the black
udders with stung
wrists. Sister and
mother and un-
named stranger, say:
whose is this dark
blood on my hands?
-- Robert Bringhurst
* * *
"A Small Music on a Spring Morning"
Why did they put the
blue and white live
balloons out with the trash
this morning just because
the party's over -- when they
thub on the cardboard still
roundly, and lift on their leashes?
Having balloons about on an
overcast morning is
celebration. O in the grey
nothing distracts from the bobbling
lightsomeness of a drift of
all-alone trembling to be touched
balloons.
-- Margaret Avison
* * *
"Nobody Belongs"
nobody
belongs anywhere,
even the
Rocky Mountains
are still
moving
-- George Bowering
* * *
"Fusion"
no welding
of ores or floes
no liquation
of salt pillars
no sunthaw of drift
deliquescence of hardness
is like the melding
wherever my bones
fuse & dissolve
in your soft body
& we sleep into one
twinned
& twined
till we wake
and rise
still welded
-- Earle Birney
* * *
"Dumb Animals"
You don't want to read
this sequence. It's about us, I say.
I've read part, he says.
It's sad. Have you got a title yet?
It's about how hard it is to talk.
Dumb animal, was what I thought.
He smiled and shook his head.
Dumb animals, you mean, he said.
-- Sonnet L'Abbe
* * *
"Ultrasound"
As in water face answers to face,
full moon awash in the autumn
waters of the lake
in the last, late ferry's wake
answers to the moon's face: pale madonna. And you --
wavery shape in the still, unbroken
waters of the womb, how you blink
upward into the world -- still blurred --
you gazing as if intent to see out, to find
that lone, beloving faced
that peers down, suckles you with first and
perfect light, then draws you,
tidal, into the world.
--Steven Heighton
* * *
"Age Is A Recurring Dream"
The boy died: he left at dusk
with the last butterflies of summer.
A young man now sleeps in the gilded cage
of his bones. In his dream,
the boy returns -- an old man
carrying his poverty and his shoes.
And moving very slowly, like one
who has lived a long time,
he pulls his shadow across the fields,
the moon's last remains.
-- Chris Banks
* * *
"Coming Back"
Saying crabgrass, plantain, begonia,
saying Queen Anne's lace, devil's paint-brush, flag.
Time I was young I thought
letting them go was holy.
Quartz, saying granite, saying dirt-farm, outcrop,
limestone, fossil, saying shale.
Coming back who needs it -- giving up the
things I never owned?
Saying city, chevvy, collision the sirens;
hungry, saying finger, saying food.
-- Dennis Lee
* * *
"Paperweight"
You set your heart down on mine.
A bloody paperweight, heavy with
somebody else's grief -- not mine.
No wonder I'm tired.
No wonder I can't put one foot
in front of the other.
I will stay like this for years
until I finally learn to slip away --
a dark shiny page falling
to the floor.
-- Laura Lush
* * *
"Anglo-Saxon Guidebook"
man woman
breed work eat
house shriek
-- Sandra Alland
* * *
"Monster"
Under the bed, I wait for you to drop your book.
One by one, I will eat the pages, every word,
until I grow fat on your illiteracy, then
slither like an unvoiced question out the door.
--Priscilla Uppal
* * *
"Hunger"
to roll in sage
to smell of it
to tear it to pieces
to swallow the silvery air
to eat sage
to graze
to dig like a dog beside it
to have sage grow from me
-- Alison Calder
* * *
* * *
# posted by Hedgie @ 12:19 AM 
