It isn’t winter that brings it
out, my cowardice,
but the thickening summer I wallow in
right now, stinking of lilacs, green
with worms & stamens duplicating themselves
each one the same
I squat among rows of seeds and impostors
and snout my hand into the juicy dirt:
charred chicken bones, rusted nails,
dogbones, stones, stove ashes.
Down there is another hand, yours, hopeless,
down there is a future
in which you’re a white white picture
with a name I forgot to write
underneath, and no date,
in which you’re a suit
hanging with its stubs of sleeves
in a cupboard in a house
in a city I’ve never entered,
a missed beat in space
which nevertheless unrolls itself
as usual. As usual:
that’s why I don’t want to go on with this.
(I’ll want to make a hole in the earth
the size of an implosion, a leaf, a dwarf
star, a cave
in time that opens back and back into
absolute darkness and at last
into a small pale moon of light
the size of a hand,
I’ll want to call you out of the grave
in the form of anything at all)
~ from Poetry by Canadian Women, edited by Rosemary Sullivan
(Oxford University Press, 1989)
