Three poems follow. The first was published recently in _The Malahat Review_ and the other two are from a series I've been working on for a long time under the name _A Century of Inventions_.
At a nameless bend in the river
We don't understand the first thing
about most of what goes on around
us.
The
operating system
without which the disk drive won't boot.
The inner
workings of the sewage treatment plant downstream.
Currents that lead fish to this reedy spot
where we cast our lines from
shore.
How to cleanse the putrid streams of Eastern Europe.
How a dollar is still
worth a dollar
after all that's gone down. Even this:
why at sunset white-tailed deer
come down to the river and graze
unconcerned at
our presence
where all the parched afternoon
they hid in
shadow.
The heaviness
of flesh and bone
we dream of more often than hold, and hold
too tight
sometimes, not quite believing. You.
The simple rise and setting of the sun
confound our pretentions. The
way we
still
dial a touch-tone phone, confide our secrets
more readily to
pollsters
than lovers.
How we can speak in any voice
other than our own. The
constitution.
How the fish we counted on slip our hooks
and glide away into darkness.
The red sky is omenless, our string bag
empty. White-tailed deer
lie
panting in
a field of clover
under skeletal hydro towers.
On the far shore
throbbing
windpipes
unnumbered as leaves on the trees
sing the only tune they
know
to the waning light.
Man in Boston eats Thesaurus of Slang
What creatures are barn animals? Fish, eel,
contemporary art; pigeon,
crow,
quail,
cub, bear and pig; rodents, cats and live mice
eaten in a
performance
that makes all
mouse dismemberment obsolete; kittens
so torn apart it
amounts to freedom
of expression. Only one around.
Education violates students' rights,
but some California moms use
tactics
that
put the dissection of frogs to shame.
A little girl makes a human eel,
bee,
chicken, bird, wren, fox; some dream or other.
Dozens of such
words; dictionaries.
God bless thee dictionary. Ignorance
isn't short; it's a street brawl. Who
would tear
apart two live mice and call it art?
Makes you sick, that cruel little verb.
"You kids don't tie up that toll-free hotline."
Cutting up frogs make you
happy
for the
biology students? Help clarify
your feelings? As a writer in
London,
Shakespeare wrote, "In art is truth. Religion,
sex and warm chunks of
mouse are just air."
True London low-life. You can't print what he
had to do for a living. No
one can
forget encounters, red lights, good money,
night-time company. Those who
disgust us
did not see it as a decision.
In the dictionary I was born.
I don't believe what it all boils down to.
Maybe I'll move to Boston. You
can
leave
the country "on ethical grounds," but that's
muddle-headed
sentimentality.
Frogs make a nice light snack - true or false?
Walking Ogden Yard with an Eye on the North Star
Heavy oils exuded from the sluggish
earth seed oils distilled into steel
balloons
whatever won't slide through a pipe
and pipeline too
stacked in
street-wide sections
rolls here on its way somewhere
I've never been
figs and
bananas in cold cars
hopper cars piled high with sulphur
slip by
toward port or
terminal
Lakehead or the sea Canadian Pacific
Great Northern Northern
Pacific
Baltimore and Ohio CN
CGTX 64341
tanker out of Midland Texas
empty
boxcars for
Winnipeg maybe Chicago
cattle cars high with ammonia abandoned
after
their brief mortal shuttle
from the stockyard at the yeasty
brewery end I walk the track
all the
way to
Bonnybrook and back
and forth and back each day
way cards in hand
tagging every
car
its destination alone
amid so much connection I walk them all
humming a song
I've heard in the wheels
earth's distillations aflow on steel
the new
season's
cars parts for assembly
sides of beef sides of mountains
to be tooled
into parts
for assembly
hopper cars rolling home to the lonesome prairie
a flat
car I could ride all the way to the Gulf of Mexico
a song without words until now
eighteen and hungry Vancouver
Omaha
Montreal
itinerant spaces
roll away full roll back to be filled again
while I
go on
walking these lines empty
night shift this week afternoons next
then
days then
nights again
dealing a deck labelled westbound
southbound eyes on the
North Star
still here walking the length of the track
till I figure out why or the
union
pulls me off the job.
- Colin Morton