Sunday Poem

COUNTRY DOG

real-estate baron,

in a field he is

the incarnation of field.

his cutting, racing

figure eights, feints and

about turns in tall grass

a hockey game against joy

summoned or coaxed to the scratched

back door he carries

seeds, the smell of wind and

the temperature’s date stamp

in his fur. burrs and leaping

insects latched with the barbed

malice of a computer virus

sheriff of the domestic lowlands

each half-floppy ear a catcher’s mitt

for the distinct plunk of itinerant food.

paratrooping carrots, sandwich emigrants

gravity’s scraps

desire on four legs he

animates the rooms

routinely visits the provinces

of nook and expanse

leaving warm oblongs of floor,

tumbleweeds of hair

in angled stretch, diagonal

sprawl or insistent stand

he is enormous, equine and then

enfolded, a black muff

beseeching both my hands

or a comma curled,

life’s hairy pause

the winter in his beard

is my discontent

the clicking ratchet of one hip

or glaucoma’s indicting blue fingerprint

on each eye of my animal self.

mortality’s mute

shaggy ambassador

From Origins (2012) by Darryl Whetter.

"Return to Metcalfe Street"

A new poem by Nyla Matuk.

(Photo by iKEN2010.)

On Erasure

Mary Ruefle thinks that, when it comes to poetry, erasure can reveal quite a bit:

"I use white-out, buff-out, blue-out, paper, ink, pencil, gouache, carbon, and marker; sometimes I press postage stamps onto the page and pull them off—that literally takes the text right off the page! Once, while working on an all-white erasure, I had the sense I was somehow blinding the words—blindfolding the ones I whited-out, and those that were left had to become, I don’t know, extra-sensory or something. Then I thought, no, I am bandaging the words, and the ones left were those that seeped out."

(Erasure poem from A Little White Shadow.)

Sunday Poem

IT ALL KEEPS

There are bells under your shirt.

An eye is an apple.

An eye is an apple.

And you have an orange for a waist.

Your legs are straws that draw water

to your shoulders.

Red and white striped straws.

Your laughter, when it comes, are fronds.

You clutter the sky with your green laughter.

I buy a grape

from your ear

and you hear me.

You give away

the grapes, green, from your ear

as I speed in this limitless blue.

I spiral in my yellow balloon

through your height.

The knotted ginger knees

up into the net of fronds,

and the leaf wrists

above you.

Each shoulder a fountain.

The hands . . .

I spiral through your height

untying the air

I pass through

in my yellow balloon

waving,

hello, hello

From Floating Life (2012) by Moez Surani.

Verbatim

"I pretended I was a small woodland creature, like a squirrel or a bunny in a burrow, late at night under the covers in my princess bed in Prince George B.C., circa 1980."

Elizabeth Bachinsky's earliest memory of being creative.

Is the Postmodern Poem a Dead End?

Leontia Flynn thinks so.

"Rather than figuring the endless textual networks with which we have all become so familiar, I want to stop clicking, scrolling and speed-reading and shuffling on to the next song, and instead focus on poetry which stays still and feels something. And this is what I want to write too. Not unmediated self-expression, of course, but not pre-emptively cut off with a glib reflex."

"Moth"

A poem by Michael Lithgow.