while she lay in the hospital and we combed out
her long hair and spoke into her ear, telling her
that it was all right, she could let go. The tree’s leaves flash
and they flaunt her senses though her old life is gone,
and she is in a play again circa 1930—
it is a play she could never have acted in until now,
though it was always within the play of her life,
and she is alive in the role and cannot know it, as the tree
cannot know she is the way it lives in the wind.
The Aeschylus Rock
Fresh corpse of a baby gull
splayed against a shore rock.
Feathers, guts, skin case, stain,
the sections of the skeleton
like parts of a pictograph,
neck, skull, eye hole, keel,
ribs, ilium, wing bones, claws,
thing that had not flown long
dropped by an eagle or hawk.
The tide will find it in an hour
and take what is left of it,
but for now the bones manacle
the carcass to the dry rock
while the shore rats run out
of nests to get at it. Sunlight
embraces it. The thief of fire
deep within the rock drinks
and eats it and lives forever.
Acknowledgements
Some of the poems in this book first appeared in the following publications:
A Verse Map of Vancouver (Anvil Press, 2009, Ed. George McWhirter)—“When the Big Hand Is on the Starfish”
Arc—“Men Fixing a Roof in the Rain”; “My Daughter and the Seagull’s Cry”
The Fiddlehead—“Burrard Inlet Ships”; “The Envelope”; “Greenness”; “The Man Who Sleeps in Cemeteries”; “The Work of the Creek”; “The Rain Bush” (Ralph Gustafson Prize Winner, 2009)
Global Poetry Anthology—Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 (Vehicule Press, 2012, Eds. Valerie Bloom, Stephanie Bolster, Frank M. Chipasula, Fred D’Aguiar, Michael Harris, John Kinsella, Sinéad Morrissey, Odia Ofeimun, Eric Ormsby, and Anand Thakore)—“Aluminum Beds”
The Literary Review of Canada—“Lead”
The Malahat Review—“Blade”
Maple Tree Literary Supplement—“The Praise Tree”; “Rain Wolf, West Coast Trail”; “Lost Rain Casting of a Deer”
The New Quarterly—“Andean Flute”
Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf Press, 2013, Eds. Yvonne Blomer and Cynthia Woodman Kerkham)—“The Aeschylus Rock”
Poet to Poet Anthology (Guernica Editions, 2012, Eds. Julie Roorda and Elena Wolff)—“The Oldest Rock in the World”
Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2008, Eds. Mona Fertig and Harold Rhenisch)—“Nest of the Swan’s Bones”
subTerrain Vancouver 125 Special Issue—“Burrard Inlet Ships”
The Winnipeg Review—“River Rainbow”; “Playing With Stones”
My thanks to everyone at Harbour Publishing, and to Silas White, editor par excellence.
Russell Thornton is the author of several collections of poetry, among them House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), which was a finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Prize (BC Book Prizes) and the ReLit Award, and The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006). His poetry has appeared widely in Canadian literary journals, and in anthologies such as Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry, Open Wide A Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, the Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 Global Poetry Anthology, and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012. He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine’s Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize in 2009. He has lived in Montreal, Aberystwyth, Wales, and Salonica, Greece. He now lives where he was born and grew up, in North Vancouver.
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