song - joanne weber

My hair once oiled your feet.
You, not I, knew what it meant.

Now you gather me, small and white,
freshly wakened from my sleep.

Please stay.
You are a tent over me,
a canopy of swallows,
and I will quickly embroider
in gold thread,
their resting and mating.

The swallows are startled into flight.
You gather me.
Now we cover the sky.

Weber, Joanne. "Song" Fast Forward: New Saskachewan Poets. Klar, Barbara and Paul Wilson, eds. Saskatoon: Hagios Press, 2007. 89.

cain's legacy - richard jackson

You can't stop the boxcars of despair.
You can't stop my voice from hiding out
like a virus inside your words, their knives
clamped between your teeth. You can't stop
the dogs gnawing on the bones from mass graves.
Thus your mirrors holding other faces. Thus your lungs
filled with someone else's words.
The eyelids of the heart closing. The sky drunk
on vapor trails. Otherwise, a few packages of conscience
to the refugees. You can't stop the sounds
of exploding stars as they approach you.
The anxious triggers. The land mines of idealism.
You can't stop Dismay from stumbling
out of the trenches of your dreams.
You can't stop these ghosts sitting around your table
gnawing on the past. Their candles burn down
to shimmering wounds in their cups.
Everyone holding their favorite flags like napkins.
The sound of bugles spilling from the room like laughter.
I know, you kill what you love just to hate yourself
all the more. You put on the cloak of distance.
A wind that blows away the weeks. The lovers' wilted embrace
that was your only, last hope.
Everyone his own Judas. After a while
even the moon is just an excuse not to look too closely.
You can't stop the past boiling up in the heart like lava.
Otherwise, a history written by shadows.
For example, someone says the universe is expanding,
more anxious optimism, but where would it expand into?
There's only the vacuum that's always inside us.
There's Stephen Hawking saying the past is pear shaped
but that doesn't feed anyone. You can't stop the brain
of the starving child turning into a peach pit,
not his body terrorizing itself for food,
not his face wrinkling like the orange you leave on your table,
his liver collapsing, the last few muscles snug
over his bones like the tight leather gloves of your debutante.
Otherwise your old lies yawning to wake in the corner.
You can't stop the pieces of the suicide bomber
from splattering all over the cafe walls.
You can't stop the walls the tanks crush from rising again.
Otherwise a few tired rivers, a few fugitive stars.
The seasons that ignore us. The cicadas giving up on us.
Hope's broken antennas. Love trying to slip out of the noose.
The betrayed lives we were meant to live.
You can't stop that town from turning its soul on a spit,
not the light chiseling away desire, the morning
wandering dazed through the underbrush of deception.
You can't stop these sails of tomorrow hanging limp
from their masts. All you have are these backwaters of touch,
this voice spinning like a broken compass,
this muzzle made from your own laws.
But you can't stop the bodies piling up.
You can't stop the deafening roar of the sky.
You can't stop the bullet you've aimed at your own head.

Jackson, Richard. "Cain's Legacy" The Pushcart Book of Poetry. Murray, Joan, ed. New York: Pushcart Press, 2006. 579-80.

robert kroetsch: selections from the hornbooks of rita k

[hornbook #1]

Often in the afternoon he cries for awhile. He wants a poem that will be as accommodating as a peanut shell. Sometimes he sits at his desk while he cries. Sometimes he goes outside and pretends he is weeding his rock garden. He wants a poem that will make him understand why men plant land mines.

Sometimes he laughs in the middle of his crying. He wants his fingers to recover their lost intelligence. He wants his mouth to speak. He stares out through the windows at the place where the sky should be. He wants a brick to crash through one of the windows, A brick thrown by a poem.


[hornbook #27]

The crescendo of our loneliness fills library basements. Books transform into dust, dust into landfills, landfills into gas. There is always hope.

The brittleness of our desire forces us to climb stairs on our hands and knees. We groan. We imagine we are praying. There is always hope.

He is always standing in the snow, watching for the sun.


[hornbook #28] 

     A poem is an empty house.

[Stranger, you must enter, then knock.]

In a poem, everything (including the hollow door, the reddening sky) is at risk. A risking business:

     
     once again the old thump

     onto belly or the rump.

[hornbook #[]] 

One of the considerable and neglected art forms is the stack of papers.

This can be at once a literary form and a version of performance art. In my own case, it takes he form, most often, of a stack of letters which I feel I should or must answer quite soon. But not immediately. The stack then occasions in me a complex mixture of delay, anticipation, dread, shame, guilt and self-condemnation. I am vaguely aware of the individual sheets of paper and texts in the stack, but the hole [sic] is much greater than sum of the parts. The mere and sustained appearance of the stack, unfortunately, announces a kind of completion. It is a completion which is flexible in that it can be added to but not subtracted from. The stack, like a poem, begins, if nothing else, to describe intention.

Kroetsch, Robert. The Hornbooks of Rita K. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2001.

the spirit is too blunt an instrument - anne stevenson

The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskilful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.

Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.

Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy.
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.

Stevenson, Anne. "The Spirit is too Blunt an Instrument" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 316-7.

men and women have meaning only as man and woman - joan murray

Men and women have meaning only as man and woman.
The moon is itself and it is lost among stars.
The days are individual, and in the passage
The nights are each sleep, but the dreams vary.
A repeated action is upon its own feet.
We who have spoken there speak here.
A world turns and walks away.
The timing of independent objects
Permits them to live and move and admit their space
And entity and various attitudes of life.
All things are cool in themselves and complete.

Murray, Joan. "Men and Women Have Meaning Only as Man and Woman" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 79.