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Lyrical Unification in Gambier

by
December 2001–January 2002, no. 237

Lyrical Unification in Gambier

by
December 2001–January 2002, no. 237

(i)

What remains barely the weather report: sentencing labours of history

against all beginnings, the maples

leafless, the houses barely porous.

 

(ii)

I ride roads I am not familiar with,

a figure of speech, chrome strips

between windows. To the south,

burial mounds. Resolution

deep and simpatico. Northwards:

 the lake effect, the snow plough.

 

(iii)

Deer go down to bow and gun,

roadkill is a ‘cull’: beauty

in the eye of rhetoric

keeps the engine

ticking over.

 

(iv)

Cornstalks like rotted Ceres’

thin black teeth. To end with this.

A season of political arrangements,

remnant snow quarried

like that pitiless ocean.

 

(v)

The driver must resist

all beauty, the smell

of an unfamiliar passenger.

A door rattles, the car

is almost new.

It is shut properly. Speed limit.

Farm machinery. A (solitary)

white field enclosed

by thawed pages.

 

(vi)

Maples, oak ... all kinds.

A tornado ripped through here

 three months ago and didn’t

touch the houses either side.

Birds warble in the engine

cavity. A cord of wood

stretches out below

the kitchen window.

He says we listen

differently.

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