Quebec

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

although in this world I’ve never known

either flames or dragons or the fury of war

in these lands where the sky was always calm...

Pierre Nepveu
b. 1946

The limpness of a bird's legs in flight.

The place, the question, the question.

The place, the interest, the question.

There is the place.

There is what you do in the place.

There is your belief.

There is the faith in a knowing.

There is your instruction

by the gods.

There is your instruction as you are told.

There is your relief...

Aisha Sasha John
b. 1980

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

and at the back of the room

women wrapped their arms around

nights of ink and dawn

calendar of murmurs

vague caresses about the planet and its water

we could have...

Nicole Brossard
b. 1943

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes

I was there, in the first of the long-term care centres, when he finished the story,

And we all shared the narrator’s sadness about giving up his donkey,

Not having...

Lynn Crosbie

Five Postcards from Jericho

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of

stone, age old, my burnished and bruised, hair lingering, hand

caked, spongy as November, my dear Relentless, my dear Aging,

...

Sina Queyras
b. 1963

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt.

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly

paraphrased and already cryptic passage

from one of Yeats’s later poems.

When she asked, “What was that?” I said, “Nothing.

Nothing. It doesn't matter.” It mattered,

of course. “Ma vie est usée. Allons, feignons ... ”

On second...

David McGimpsey
b. 1962

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,

mina and obol. Persia’s bullion had a lion and bull.

Athens an owl, Messana a hare, a jar for Terone, Melos

a pomegranate. Call it museum money, written...

Carmine Starnino
b. 1970

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

until I go there,

but the black-hatted undertaker

...

Irving Layton
1912–2006

I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries

I have not lingered in European monasteries

and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights

who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;

I have not parted the grasses

or purposefully left them thatched....

Leonard Cohen
1934-2016

The Lonely Land

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

and cloud-piled sky;

and in the bay

blown spume and windrift

and thin, bitter spray...

A. J. M. Smith
1902-1980

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;

No keys and ledgers were my heritage;

Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates

Writ mournfully upon a blank front page —

...

A. M. Klein
1909-1972

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,

This land stares at the sun in a huge silence

Endlessly repeating something we cannot hear.

Inarticulate, arctic,

Not written on by history, empty as paper,

...

F. R. Scott
1899-1985

Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)

In the onion, there’s

something of fire. That fire known as

Fog. The onion is the way

fog has of entering the earth.

Into the soil. Through the green leaves of the onion....

Erin Mouré
b. 1955

Insomnia

If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,

bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room

with twelve locks on the door.

I wouldn’t ask for a mattress

or decorate. I wouldn’t ask for beautiful.

...

Kate Hall
b. 1977

The Dead

How great unto the living seem the dead!

How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;

How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread

The shadowy confines of the dim unknown! —

For they have met the monster that we dread,

Have learned the secret not to mortal shown.

E’en as gigantic shadows on the wall

The spirit of the daunted child amaze...

Charles Heavysege
1816-1876

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