by Howard White
quiet, slip by the shadows, spit
in the fire
hiss & burn—
Each day is
as it is in the rain.
Thistles along the drive noisy
& prickling interrupt—
What did you say?
Eurithe tells me classics need rereading.
Prometheus wanders looking for light,
turns on the hall switch, & stumbling
all thumbs, is useless
to fetch a pail of water,
or catch the drip drip under the door
umbrella finds so funny.
Trojans fill the house with rain,
& spill golden apples on the floor.
Bruised, the season turns. Dandelions,
wheels of the world, spin when Spring rises
to the tips of her toes, hovers
by the window as if she might grow too big
for box-books, too tall for antiquity.
Head spinning, the ceiling sways,
the hanged man’s noose tightens
the knot. I bend at the knees & pray
for a miracle, a small thought
fills my head—
The screech of a boiling kettle.
Tea, for two I say.
Dogchild agrees.
There is promise;
there is this. Small breath,
this seed of a poem.
Unaccustomed to speaking, chair
squeaks as I shift my hips close
to the window a robin turns
as surprised to see me
as I am it.
& the rain keeps
& the pails fill
& you are
in the tree a poem
as far as far
as antiquity—
Peter Trower
The Last Spar-Tree on Elphinstone Mountain
for Al Purdy
The last spar-tree on Elphinstone Mountain
through drunken-Sunday binoculars
pricks the blue bubble of the sky
on that final ridge where the scar tissue peters out.
Been four years quiet now on the battered mountain’s back
except for shakecutters, hunters and stray philosophers.
The trucks are elsewhere; some of the drivers dead
and the donkeys gone to barber another hill.
I’m always shooting my mouth off about mountains
sometimes climbing them
and sometimes just distantly studying them like this.
My eyes need no caulk boots
I can vault to that ridge in my mind,
stand at the foot of that tree, forlorn as a badly used woman
become merely landmark and ravenperch.
I can touch its bark sunwarm as flesh
feel the engines still shaking it functional
with vibrations that never quite die.
It’s either a cornfield or a catastrophe.
Either a crop or a tithe or a privacy
has been taken from this place.
What matter? It’s done. Beyond that ridge is a valley
I helped hack and alter. There’s a gully there
three hundred feet deep in places
where we tailholted on its rim.
Dizzy abyss that scared the wits out of me
you furrow down the mountain like God’s own drainage ditch
and stopped a forest fire in 1965.
At your foot is the dirtiest show of them all
where we logged in the box canyon with debris crashing down
and the rotten hemlock snags trembled over us,
the haulback stumps pulled out like bad teeth.
The hooktender said: “She’s a natural-born bitch!”
The lines broke—the omens spoke
and I quit from fear to become a brief boomman.
I’m getting melodramatic again but it’s hard not to.
Logging’s larger than life. Keep your sailors and cowboys!
I’m always stressing the sombre side
but there was much of comradeship and laughter—
great yarns beside noon donkeys; hillhumour between turns,
excellent shits behind stumps with the wind fanning the stink away,
sweat smelling good and cigarette smoke celestial.
Dream on in peace, old tree—
perhaps you’re a truer monument to man
than any rocktop crucifix in Rio De Janeiro.
Autumn Richardson
When the Deities are Tended, Morning Comes
I see the curvature of the earth
its great bent back
wind-sore pines and juniper
crouched into stone.
Stars roost in high darkness.
All here bend to the elements
and so do I
leaning into fire, tending coals—
this is the altar and I offer
the sun’s cells, excised from cedar
and birch, joints of driftwood
“become the heat of my blood
the sap of my lips”
smoke blooms, antiseptic, alterative
enters the cavities of my body
the pores of the forest
mingles with the violet notes
of coyote, who comes in close.
Jeanette Lynes
Roadtripping
to a Kingston ex
I can tell you now that you’re not listening
why I stayed: because it was like living
inside an Al Purdy poem. Good grief
we drove, didn’t we, that country
north of Belleville as it disappeared
before our eyes and like any
self-respecting man you refused
to ask for directions when we got lost.
And you could build anything
from scrap lumber. You were handy.
A Purdy sort of guy. You wouldn’t
give up when we couldn’t find
the Quinte Hotel, even after the locals
said it burnt down. It’s in a poem, I insisted
so it must exist. The locals looked at me
funny but you defended my insistence
and remember the man in Marmora,
famous for his dragonfly photographs?
You also drove me to lilac forests
so I could quote “May 23, 1980.”
You liked the barroom brawl poem best—
a man who could stand up for poetry
and still be a man, even though poems
won’t buy a goddam thing. But now
I must also say those “north of 7” jokes
got old fast and you laughed a bit
too heartily and anyway, they
weren’t in the poems. They were life
imitating life.
Rachel Rose
Iowa City
for the writers of IWP 2015
Tell me, do the cicadas sing in your country?
Here the trees whose names I do not know
tremble with the voltage of their music.
Here we gather to compare the suffering of our people.
Tell me, do monarch butterflies fall from the sky
in your country? I saw one yesterday, walking
along a sidewalk at the edge of the gleaming river,
wings ragged as the flags of invaded countries.
A butterfly walking is a sad thing. Perhaps this one
had seen the newspaper whose pages blew
in endless circles at the corner where t
he bridge meets
the earth, the same bad news lifting briefly,
then dropped again by invisible hands.
I live on the western tip of a northern country,
too cold for cicadas, too far west for monarch butterflies.
Don’t speak to me about politics. Once I had answers,
but even when I did, people gathered in the squares of the world
with candles, with children on their shoulders, and were shot down.
Now my questions are butterflies walking.
Now, writers, when we sit together
under the nameless throbbing trees
to read the book of our lives aloud
to one another, I feel the red joy of the cardinal
at riverside, another bird unfamiliar as this heartland landscape.
In rooms too small to hold our great desire to connect,
the Nigerian writer asks to be translated to Chinese,
and his wish is granted; the Brazilian writer
who expects to be lonely with his Portuguese
discovers he was never alone.
I tell you, before we leave this place,
I will shape my mouth to Spanish verse,
I will dream in Arabic, hold the acrid smoke
of Cairo and Ulaanbaatar in my lungs
as we stand together in the only permitted place
for writers to exhale. We will breathe each other in
and Northern Lights will burn in each of you.
Ben Ladouceur
Stockpile
I think the time for fires has begun.
For constant fires: a depletion time.
I have less taste than ever for these ghosts.
If I can see my breath when I wake up,
I put this place behind me and come home.
You mustn’t fall in love with logs. A log
is gone the day its tree bursts from its seed.
A log is unfelt fire for decades. Then,
you start the fire. You feel the fire. That’s life.
That’s logs. My father chopped the wood for me.
That’s life too. When you’re born, you only love
the woman. So the man must earn his love
as my father earned his. With a blue axe.
While I sat in the cabin, writing this.
Dymphny Dronyk
Ode to Al Purdy—A Litter of Poets
Walking the puppy amid the ruins
of another long winter, lawns sepia with mould,
the snow dying without grace, gumbo on my heels,
the dog is happy, her tail a flag of joy
but I curse this exile north of 55
and the circumpolar wind, ugly as seal breath,
that haunts a landscape unfit for anyone
but skittish trappers or a priest
on the verge of being defrocked.
T.S. Eliot was right—this is the cruellest month.
Litter thrusts out of the snow
like a thousand rude gestures
and I long for the tsunami of green
that is April on the West Coast.
But this morning my mother insisted
she was not crazy, there was a robin perched
on her steaming compost box
and so I listen for bird song and follow
my small white wolf, who unlike me
is bred for a lifetime in Siberia.
Then, there in the snow bank
brazen as strippers, blinking in the sun,
a posse of beer bottles,
trapped mid cheers.
I freeze, entranced by the arctic blue
of the label, a silver effigy of the Kokanee glacier
that defined the horizon where I grew up.
I think of my friend Tom
who wrote a poem about his friend Al
and beer bottles as prairie crocuses
and endless highways and hope.
Suddenly I am elated
as I stagger on with the dog,
drunk with joy that it is April,
that I can call myself Canadian, a citizen of
a country of countries, of 13 solitudes,
where a poet drinks beer at school
and throws the empties out his office window
and is not only forgiven but celebrated,
where the geese over my head chant
about the typewriter ribbon highways
they’ve traced back to this still-empty north.
A country where poets
work their lines in factories,
where poets weld stanzas at Syncrude,
where in April poets thumb our noses
at cruelty and spring blizzards,
pack a sack of beer into the trunk
and head out on the road with the geese.
A country where poetry is not
the only place that truth is spoken,
where we may still speak truth
and be forgiven.
The dog glances up at my laughter
her eye as blue as an ice chip,
and I tell her I am drunk too
with reverence for the voyageur poets
who shaped our collective voice,
the big footsteps
in which I am walking,
where words stumble along with me,
in love with this land
and its April pussy willows,
the coyote trails through my small city
and the vast aching wealth
of distance that unites us
from coast to coast to coast.
Autumn Richardson
Chrysalids
Following the curves of Salem
Road:
a thin bleed of sumac through ditches
and thick November woods all the colours
of a coyote’s back
countless barns leaning, splitting;
clay-blue, faded green paints flaking
into winter-white fields
trees are nearly leafless;
their sap-pulses slow; they’re spooling
inwards, becoming slim overwintering
chrysalids.
At the edge of Roblin Lake heron arrives
as calligraphy each evening.
All the voices of morning—cicadas,
crickets, tree-frogs—have vanished.
Ian Williams
Ground Rules
Let’s begin with
Do not microwave caribou head.
I am told the eyes will explode.
Do not hunt or microwave polar bears.
Same reason.
My homeroom teacher
who had a nervous breakdown
said we should not pee on the walls.
We hadn’t been, as far as I know.
But I feel that should be on record here.
Do not microwave robin eggs. Do not
microwave Johnny Cash songs. At any time
do not microwave the terror by night
nor the arrow that flieth by day.
Did I—yes—don’t hunt polar bears.
No reason.
Do not microwave the Arctic
or the Rockies because my doctor friend takes all
of March off to ski. He’s quite quiet. He is quietly
avalanching. So you don’t want to cross him.
Do not microwave turbo prop planes
as they take off. Or memories of people you love.
Or the memories of. A thousand shall fall
at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand;
/> but it shall not come nigh thee. Thou shalt not
microwave the sun.
Cornelia Hoogland
Al Develops His Pleasures
Al’s arm was amputated,
this made him so miserable he got
a species reassignment.
He grew four legs. Became a horse.
Immediately his friends wanted a ride.
Whoa! he said. He wanted to develop his new
identity slowly, wasn’t sure what his equine pleasures
involved. Movement and speed?
A concern for the terrain? Blinkhorn Trail,
for example, involved too much footwork.
As for his love life, he was the only horse around.
This concerned him. And Eurithe.
She scrolled obscure websites
for combs to curry his backside in a way she hoped
was pleasurable, and yes, she noticed
he twitched his mane, half-closed his big eyes.
Or should she post an ad, find him a more suitable mate?
It wasn’t clear if the change was permanent
or transitory—how much effort should she, or he, invest?
Corralled in his horse flesh, what could he do,
people saying, Let’s go see Al who’s become a horse,
and cracking horse jokes. A horse walks into a bar,
the bartender asks why the long face?
Al might have explained, but all that came out
was a whinny. And his friends only wanted rides.
Al didn’t budge, he stood there, sniffing the air.
Ken Babstock
Cromwell’s Head Under the Antechapel
Under a standing back-to-work order,
each leaning in to their angle grinder,
the cicadas of Empire Loyalist country
react to a splatter film live-streamed
on a windscreen.
“Windscreen?”—shield. One local birder
from Wellington, or lone hoarder, or Auditor
of the College of Silver, scans between-channel poplars
for rock peplars, tits, bobble-link bracelets, lost kites
and induced seizures.
He’s had enough of quiz night. Crests, crosses,
pubs, and Elizabeth’s, he’s had enough of. His rebus
has “Basta” over Malevich’s black square. A low float
plane burps across the left aural quadrant
and all extant
literature on voluntary statelessness
compresses to lake lap in a lab’s ear. One tosses