11/21/2020 POETRY: SUE GOYETTEEXCERPT FROM OCEAN forty-nine The harbour didn’t like being held captive by the shadows of our buildings. We treated it well but still its dorsal fins weakened and flopped. The tide was nothing more than a sleepy scratch of water up over rocks and then a yawn back down. The balls we threw to it sank. It stopped slurping, it stopped nibbling. It hardly growled. Some days it looked like a carpet, other days, a flooded campsite: disks of paper plates, lipsticked cigarette butts, the wet embers of our vacations. What was the fun of these skyscrapers if the only view we had was a petulant body of water? We bought fish from the market to feed it. The older women crocheted the most tender dialogue skimmed from our dreams, carrying afghans by the armload down to its shore. In this way, they invented nets and managed to catch the grit of starlight from previous nights. With the right amount of sugar and boiled darkness, we soon had vats of a nectar so potent it bubbled. It wasn’t that we got drunk but forgetful and became so greedy for more, we over-fished our dreams for their tenderness. When poverty arrived, we were down to the bones of our talk. If we rubbed two sticks together, briefly we’d be nourished by the smell of their wood. fifty-five Our elders insisted the ocean was still there. That we were born with a seed of it and when we spoke, its waves pressed against our words for a further shore. But we had let ourselves become sub-divided and suburban, buckling our talk into seatbelts, mad always for safety. When had our schedules become the new mountains? We were doing our best to ignore how grey our memories were becoming, how stooped and hard of hearing our laughter was. The ocean, apparently, was right in front of us and we were dropping like flies. We bought the dried flowertops of our politicians’ explanations. We tuned our radios to the sunsets and downloaded whalesong overdubbed with protest songs. Our intent was good but with airbags. The poets rigged antennas to the antique words of gratitude with a cayenne of the unexpected but we were tired of the poets, they were chesterfields or they were curtains. We wanted pure ocean podcast into our veins but tethered while we slept. We wanted death to be a stranger we’d never have to give directions to. We consulted the beekeepers infamous for not getting stung but they were in a meeting with the poets. We consulted the gamblers but they wanted to see us only to raise us ten. Our voices were rarely coming home covered in mud anymore. fifty-six Filmmakers had started making films of the ocean in 3D. Scratch and sniff coastal cards were sold at lottery booths. Material for dresses was cut with the froth of tide in mind. We had wanted the ocean to be the new flavour, the new sound. We’d drive for miles to get a glimpse of it because, let’s face it, it revitalized the part of us we kept rooting for, that apple seed of energy that defied multiple choice career options. The ocean had egged the best part of us on. And it scared us. We never knew what it was thinking and spent thousands on specialists who could make predictions. And the predictions always required hard hats and building permits, furrowed eyebrows and downward trends. Why is it so hard to trust something that leaps, disappears and then reappears spouting more light? When had our hearts become badly behaved dogs we had to keep the screen door closed to? Have you ever run along its shore, the pant of it coming closer? And that feeling that yipped inside of you, the Ginger Rogers of your feet, your ability to not get caught then, yes, get soaked. Didn’t you feel like it was part of your pack? When it whistled, whatever it is in you that defies being named, didn’t that part of you perk up? And didn’t you let it tousle you to the ground, let it clean between your ears before it left you? Wasn’t that all right? That it left you? That we all will? "forty-nine,""fifty-five," and "fifty-six" published in Ocean (Gaspereau, 2013) Sue Goyette lives in K'jipuktuk (Halifax), the unceded and unsurrendered land of the Mi’kmaq peoples. She has published six books of poems and a novel. Her latest collection is Penelope (Gaspereau Press, 2017). She has been nominated for the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Award and has won several awards including the 2015 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award for her collection, Ocean. Sue teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Dalhousie University.
2/8/2020 POETRY: RAE ARMANTROUTCIRCLES 1 First they told me the future would solve the present. Then they told me the present would solve the future. The present is the world minus intention. I’m not allowed there. They know this. I begin a string of letters, picketing distance. 2 The Cheerios in the babies’ cups are full of Roundup. “Circle,” one girl chirps. "Circles" previously appeared in Conjunctions 73. Rae Armantrout's book Wobble (Wesleyan, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A new collection, Conjure, is forthcoming from Wesleyan in Sept. 2020. She was recently interviewed in The Paris Review's "Art of Poetry" series.
9/22/2019 poetry: sina queyrasENDLESS INTER-STATES 1 They go down to the expressways, baskets In hand, they go down with rakes, shovels And watering cans, they go down to pick Beans and trim tomato plants, they go down In wide-brimmed hats and boots, passing By the glass-pickers, the Geiger counters, those Guarding the toxic wastes. They go down Remembering the glide of automobiles, the Swelter of children in back seats, pinching, twitching, Sand in their bathing suits, two-fours of Molson’s In the trunk of the car. They go down, past The sifters, the tunnellers, those who transport Soil from deep in the earth, and are content To have the day before them, are content to imagine Futures they will inhabit, beautiful futures Filled with unimagined species, new varieties of Plant life, sustainable abundance, An idea of sufficient that is global. Or, Because cars now move on rails underground, The elevated roads are covered in earth, Vines drape around belts of green, snake Through cities, overgrown and teeming With grackles and rats’ nests, a wall Of our own devising, and the night Watchmen with their machine guns Keeping humans, the intoxicated, Out. I am sorry for this vision, offer You coffee, hot while there is still Coffee this far north, while there is still news To wake up to, and seasons Vaguely reminiscent of seasons. 2 Web-toed she walks into the land, fins Carving out river bottoms, each hesitation A lakebed, each mid-afternoon nap, a plateau, Quaint, at least that is my dream of her, Big shouldered, out there daydreaming The world into existence, pleasuring herself With lines and pauses. How else? What is a lake But a pause? People circling it with structures, dipping In their poles? Once she thought she could pass by Harmless. Scraping wet shale, her knees down in it, she Tries to remember earth, that ground cover. She tries To reattach things, but why? What if the world Is all action? What if thought isn’t glue, but tearing? She sits at the lake edge where the water never meets Earth, never touches, not really, is always pulling Itself on to the next. 3 Now she sits by her memory of meadow, forlorn, shoeless. She could scoop PCBs from the Hudson, she is Always picking up after someone. But what? What Is the primary trope of this romp? Where her uterus Was the smell of buckshot and tar, an old man chasing Her with a shotgun across his range. Cow pies and Hornets’ nests, gangly boys shooting cats with BB guns, Boys summering from Calgary, trees hollowed out, Hiding all manner of contraband goods. When she peers In the knotted oak, classic movies run on The hour, Scout on the dark bark, Mildred Pierce with a squirrel tale wrap. Nature is over, She concludes. Nature is what is caught, cellular, Celluloid. She sticks a thumb in another tree, a Brownstone, a small girl—her heart a thing locked. It’s been so long since she felt hopeful. (Perhaps nature Is childhood.) The morning after Chernobyl Out there with tiny umbrellas. All those internal Combustions. This is a country that has accepted death As an industry, it is not news. She has been warned. Her ratings sag. She scans her least apocalyptic Self and sees mariners floating, Ben Franklin penning daily axioms, glasses lifting From the river bank, planked skirts on Front, China-like through the industrious, thinking, traffic Clogged city, its brick heavy with desire for good. Memory of meadow, Dickinson an ice pick scratching Wings in her brain: if you see her standing, if you move Too quickly, if you locate the centre, if you have other Opportunities, by all means if you have other opportunities. 4 Abondoned mine shafts on either side, those Tight curves between Kaslo and New Denver, Hairpin at glacial creek, splash of red Bellies muscling, streaming up, we see them From the open window. Or once did. Even here? Salmon stocks diminish, mammals dying off. No, he said, not in your lifetime. Vertical; Traces where the charge went off, Ruggedness is your only defence, he Said, be difficult to cultivate, navigate. Offer No hint of paradise, no whiff of Golf course. Uninhabitability your only Recourse. Lashed, that moment, prolonged Leaving, her father on the roadside Dreaming his world fitting in some place, Without being reigned in, her father’s fathers Throwing rocks down on Hannibal, Straddling the last large elm in the valley, Knowing where and how to lay the charge, or Sucking shrapnel from an open wound, The lambs all around, bleating. 5 Which liftetime? Beyond what brawn? Who Knew where the road would take us? Neat, neat, the rows of apple trees There in the valley, red summers, the heat Of Quebecois pickers, VWs in a circle, Firepit and strum. Men from Thetford Mines dreaming peaches, dreaming Clean soil. Hour upon hour the self Becomes less aware of the self. Beautiful, beautiful, the centre line, the road, This power station and control tower, these Weigh scales, these curves, that mountain Goat, those cut lines, these rail lines, that Canyon, the Fraser, the Thompson, The old highways hyphenating Sagebrush, dead-ending on chain Link, old cars collecting like bugs On the roadside, overturned, curled, astute, Memory of the Overlanders, Optimism, headlong into Hell’s Gate. Churn of now, The sound barriers, the steering Wheel, the gas pedal, the gearshift, The dice dangling, fuzzy, Teal, dual ashtrays, AM radio Tuned to CBC, no draft, six cylinders, The gas tank, the gearshift, easing Into the sweet spot behind The semi, flying through Roger’s Pass; the snowplow, the Park Pass, sun on mud flap, the rest stop Rock slides, glint of snow, the runaway Lanes, the grades steep as skyscrapers, The road cutting through cities, Slicing towns, dividing parks, The road over lakes, under rivers, The road right through a redwood, Driving on top of cities, all eyes On the DVD screen, All minds on the cellphone, The safari not around, but inside Us: that which fuels. 6 No matter, the slither of pavement is endless, Today the rain, a gold standard, all the Earmarks of, never mind, all is well, all Is well, and who doesn’t want to hear that? She gets on her scooter and roars, she gets On her skateboard and feels the air under Foot, she shakes out her hair, thinking of California, Thinking of allergies, thinking of the wreck Of place: who ever promised more? The iris With its feigned restraint, the daring tuba, The horn of shoe, utilitarian, delicate. Such Useful domesticity, such hopeful electronics. Once she disappeared by turning sideways. Now she finds it difficult to reappear. She lifts The sediment of time to her palm, feels it sift Between her fingers: bone, bits of event. Aren’t We all a bit fluish this century? Nothing bearing any Mark of otherwise. No prescript, nothing a bit of hope Won’t cure. Such a churn of optimism: That which consecrates will not kill. Maybe New York? She fits herself on an easterly course: been done, Been done, but what better than the well-trodden Path? Beautiful, beautiful, the seams Of the rich, their folded linens, Their soft bags of money. If it ain’t broke Don’t fix, if it ain’t resistant, don’t Wince, if it fits like a boot, then boot it. And so she does. Sina Queyras, “Endless Inter-States” from Expressway. Copyright © 2009 by Sina Queyras. Reprinted by permission of Coach House Books.
Source: Expressway (Coach House Press, 2009) |
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