the great leap forward - matt rader

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and none and none and none and none and un-

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zip, a light before light, quickening, like children

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of early enzymes feasting, each of each, protean
seas gone glacier, gathering footprints, thread, skin

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for collection at the Exhibit of Humans, a mountain
casting a mould from a city of walls and curs, women
at wash with basins of ashen water and no reflection

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to recognize their own husbands in a crowded pavilion
of charlatans, quack doctors, snake-oil salesmen
shilling goat glands for impotence, a foolproof gin,
horse semen brandy, and on the buckboard,a Christian
with hurdy-gurdy accompaniment hawking salvation

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in the antebellum lands, where black winds separate us kin
from kin, and the people of the plains hear the coming din
of cattle crossing the continent forty days before it even
begins, and leaded tins of fruits and vegetables poison
Franklin and his men, leaving them delirious and rotten
in the head, composed of thoughts and faith in a northern
passage from ocean to ocean that consumes them like vermin
in the cutch of an owl, picked to pieces, or else frozen

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in the mind like that line from Keats we failed to learn,
heard melodies are sweet, unheard sweeter, so play on
into the cool afternoon of touching under tables, linen
hung on the line, saxifrage, stonecrop, phlox and gentian,
common-touch-me-not, the meadow beyond our garden
gate opening into bittersweet, death camas, fool's onion,
and again farewell-to-spring arrives in the parched season
of brittle grass, titian leaves, auburn and tawny crimson
infecting the edge of things, as dusk draws from dawn
to envelope us in dark arms like hope or lust, wintergreen,
the flowering weeds we kneel in without naming one
or all or none, for that is a kind of love we call possession
and have abandoned, Dominus vobiscum, a woman, a man

Rader, Matt. "The Great Leap Forward" The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008. Bolster, Stephanie, ed. Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2008. 95-6.