POETRY: GREGORY BETTS

THESE ELEPHANTS IN CANADA


I

                     memory is
                                   a mammoth
                     failure
                                    a trauma dream
             a Zoroastrian declaiming upon
           a dead star weeping on
         a palimpsest of
                                 archipelagos on
      all that remains land written upon
                    by rising seas

     animals
      run
                  to land
        when
                    the sea
          spills over
                      its speech




II

overwhelmed by rising
  I spill my coffee
onto the once fecund table
  as it pools disorder
    into the shape
​of an elephant’s ear

        I gaze into the lifeless dream
     to hear a scattering of
   sound
 reflection





​III
​
alive
  a brown
    melted glacier
      going tidal

    the hot ocean
      of this elephant’s sneeze
         a disorder of all senses
            uncaging

           unguent memories
       drip out into the void
    of human space

​

Gregory Betts is the author of Sweet Forme (2020), a collection of visual renderings of the sound patterns in Shakespeare’s sonnets (published by Australia’s Apothecary Archive, available here: https://bit.ly/383XaTl). He is the digital curator of bpNichol.ca and a poet-professor at Brock University. His next book is Finding Nothing: Vancouver Avant-Garde Literature, 1959-1975, due out in February 2021 with University of Toronto Press.