grey blue stone bifurcated
by a band of sparkling quartz,
glad eye from the Pleistocene,
it sits on my mind’s table.
Like sadness, it has the quality
of being wholly passive.
Dark to its core, it glows at dusk
like a dying bulb. Dry but shaped
by water, flung up by streams
and tides it exerts a force
against all expectation.
Seems to be saying anything
may happen: has and will.
One day, you may pick up
that stone and pitch it, leaving
behind a small depression.
Posts Tagged
The Stone
Patrick WarnerThe Old Neighbourhood
Patrick WarnerIt was never great, even back in the day.
Here Kumquat May had her episode:
Jack Hughes! Jack Hughes! she wailed
at a white-haired man, Der WeiBe Engel!
whose eyes behind tinted lenses flicked
like an analog needle. Then he was gone.
Some say she was his other woman.
Some say her beef was with Guinness
(that black door marked with a toucan)
more [...]
The Scientist
Patrick WarnerWhere did the seal heads come from?
They were a present from a fisherman
who wished to woo the scientist.
Not an answer. A queer posy these,
a devalued currency, almost contraband.
The Mole
Patrick WarnerAs though a hand had reached inside to rub
my liver. This was the nose of the mole.
Later, I felt a prickle, a draught in my eye.
This was the southwest breeze blowing
where the stone-blind mole had passed.
This was the meat of what was unspoken.
The absolute bedrock of morals, the top-soil
of incomprehension in which you turned
and said: Your wife tells me everything.
This was the unknown known, the mole
surfacing through the green. And blinking
by the swings on that suburban lawn
was my penchant for darkness and filth,
my penchant for sticking my nose in.
Found in Translation
David SolwayMy Greek doppelgänger, the heteronymic poet Andreas Karavis, who at one time enjoyed a certain notoriety, may be on the point of reappearing, if only briefly. I’ve received of late several inquiries from American readers who have discovered his work and professed an interest in his origins and purpose. Perhaps the time has come [...]
Opportunity Influence and Discernment
Ron ShuebrookOn Becoming a Painter (A Memoir)
“If you’re a painter, you’re not alone. There’s no way to be alone. You think, and you care, and you’re with all the people who care . . . To be right is the most terrific personal state that nobody is interested in . . .”
—Franz Kline to Frank O’Hara [...]
Stunt – Claudia Day
Rebecca RosenblumClaudia Dey’s debut novel, Stunt, is written in the present-tense first-person semi-omniscient. That first person is Eugenia Ledoux, nine years old for the first two sections before doubling in age overnight to eighteen for the final three. In meandering flashbacks, she gives us her history, including conception and birth. This knowledge about events she could never remember, in other parts of the city, or in the hearts and minds of characters she passes on the street comes across as absolute fact. Eugenia admits few maybes, few I imagines into her narrative; everything seems to come from a wise and literate oracle, and is often too beautiful to be doubted.
Noble Gas, Penny Black – David O’Meara
Alessandro PorcoWith the publication of The Vicinity in 2003, David O’Meara established himself as one of the best contemporary poets in Canada. As proof of O’Meara’s skill, consider his “Riding the Escalators” (from The Vicinity), which is the apotheosis of formal dexterity synchronized with inquiry into the very possibility of inquiry in a “post-post-modern” age (to borrow one of O’Meara’s formulations). O’Meara’s poem is a pantoum, a poetic form that recycles lines across stanzas (the second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the immediately proceeding stanza, and so on and so forth). The poem’s form is an iconic rendering of the poem’s department store “escalator,” which cyclically runs “from the clearance shelves in the bustling concourse, / and up into 2nd, 3rd, 4th floors.” “Let’s get lost in everything / as we glance around,” begins the poem. It’s unclear, however, whether losing one’s self is even possible in such a scenario – Keats never had to negotiate his Negative Capability in a consumer-culture wonderland of buy buy buy and more more more!
The Door – Margaret Atwood
Brian PalmuThe Door is divided into five parts: poems on the personal; on writing; on war and politics; on prophecy; on old age. I like the ordering here. It mirrors the progression of a life through identity, creation, worldly concerns, wisdom (real or imagined), and the long goodbye.
Orphic Politics – Tim Lilburn
Brian PalmuLilburn is not concerned with jotting down offhand verse of banal diurnal anecdote. In non-dual spirituality, there are the relative and absolute worlds, though (paradoxically) each can join with, and dissolve into, the other. But language is a logical construct. We can only converse in a relative sense. The idea or description or presentation, no matter how artfully transmitted, is not itself enlightenment. Lilburn’s spiritual antecedents were likewise concerned with the higher plane, but they knew the limits of words when it came to “falling/into knowing’s body” (“Theurgy II”). Lilburn, throughout his poetic career, has presented his terms (Names Of God), celebrated his epiphanies (Tourist To Ecstasy), wrestled with reconciling his visions to supreme consciousness (To The River, Moosewood Sandhills, Kill-Site), and amplified a change in that latter volume towards a frenetic, even desperate, attempt at union (Orphic Politics).