variation on the word sleep - margaret atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,

which may not happen.

I would like to watch you,

sleeping. I would like to sleep

with you, to enter

your sleep as its smooth dark wave

slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent

wavering forest of bluegreen leaves

with its watery sun & three moons

towards the cave where you must descend,

towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver

branch, the small white flower, the one

word that will protect you

from the grief at the center

of your dream, from the grief

at the center I would like to follow

you up the long stairway

again & become

the boat that would row you back

carefully, a flame

in two cupped hands

to where your body lies

beside me, and as you enter

it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air

that inhabits you for a moment

only. I would like to be that unnoticed

& that necessary.

 

Atwood, Margaret. "Variation on the Word Sleep" The New Oxford Book of Canadian Verse in English. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1982.

the way we live - kathleen jamie

Pass the tambourine, let me bash out praises
to the Lord God of movement, to Absolute
non-friction, flight, and the scary side:
death by avalanche, birth by failed contraception.
Of chicken tandoori and reggae, loud, from tenements,
commitment, driving fast and unswerving
friendship. Of tee-shirts on pulleys, giros and Bombay,
barmen, dreaming waitresses with many fake-gold
bangles. Of airports, impulse, and waking to uncertainty,
to strip-lights, motorways, or that pantheon --
the mountains. To overdrafts and grafting

and the fit slow pulse of wipers as you're
creeping over Rannoch, while the God of moorland
walks abroad with his entourage of freezing fog,
his bodyguard of snow.
Of endless gloaming in the North, of Asiatic swelter,
to launderettes, anecdotes, passions and exhaustion,
Final Demands and dead men, the skeletal grip
of government. To misery and elation; mixed,
the sod and caprice of landlords.
To the way it fits, the way it is, the way it seems
to be: let me bash out praises -- pass the tambourine.

Jamie, Kathleen. "The Way We Live" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: --Penguin Books, 1999. 481-2.

the great leap forward - matt rader

   *

and none and none and none and none and un-

   *

zip, a light before light, quickening, like children

   *

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

   *

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

   *

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

   *

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

   *

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.

bright world - carl phillips

—And it came to pass, that meaning faltered; came detached
unexpectedly from the place I'd made for it, years ago,
fixing it there, thinking it safe to turn away, therefore,
to forget—hadn't that made sense? And now everything
did, but differently: the wanting literally for nothing
for no good reason; the inability to feel remorse at having
cast (now over some, now others), aegis-like, though it
rescued no one, the body I'd all but grown used to waking
inside of and recognizing, instantly, correctly, as mine,
my body, given forth, withheld, shameless, merciless—
for crying shame. Like miniature versions of a lesser
gospel deemed, over time, apocryphal, or redundant—both,
maybe—until at last let go, the magnolia flowers went on
spilling themselves, each breaking open around, and then
apart from, its stem along a branch of stems and, not of
course in response, but as if so, the starlings lifting, unlifting,
the black flash of them in the light reminding me of what I'd
been told about the glamour of evil, in the light they were
like that, in the shadow they became the other part, about
resisting evil, as if resistance itself all this time had been
but shadow, could be found that easily. . . What will you do?
Is this how you're going to live now? sang the voice in my
head: singing, then silent—not as in desertion, but as
when the victim suddenly knows his torturer's face from
before, somewhere, and in the knowing is for a moment
distracted, has stopped struggling— And the heart gives in.

Phillips, Carl. "Bright World" The Pushcart Book of Poetry. Murray, Joan, ed. New York: Pushcart Press, 2006.610-1.

the dream world - alison pick

Shake up envy. Shake up
the impulse toward acquisition --
it batters you nightly, a moth at a bulb.
Shake up the trope of the moth at a bulb:

words take shape in fresh combination,
cheerleaders on court at halftime. A girl tossed
skyward, bent at the waist, a check mark
against a ballot's blank box. Vote for the moment,

vote for atonement, for taking a long walk alone
through the forest. Morning is raising
its snapping white flag. You exit the alders, hands
in the air, and wake: your final surrender.

Pick, Alison. "The Dream World" The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008. Bolster, Stephanie, ed. Toronto: Tightrope Books, 2008. 89.