while others say that it’s more like a stem;
some say it unfurls up from the spine,
and a few that it periscopes out from
the page. Still more contend this is all wrong,
that it happens the other way round:
it begins as a nub between the eyes
and then sprouts like an antler or horn.
Some say mineral, some vegetable,
still others hold its kingdom is animal —
among these are a few who will point
to the garden slug’s mating ritual,
particularly to spotted leopards or greys
who, suspended on bungees of slime,
produce from the shoulder sex organs
which change as they slowly entwine.
Some say to watch is to be a voyeur
and that watching is somehow perverted,
and yet these few of religious upbringing
seem disposed to being converted:
news of a visible swirl in the siphon
and they are quickly up on the stump,
describing the swirl as sleet in the snot-
coloured bulb at the side of a gas pump.
Though whether this fluttering movement
is one way only — from book into brain —
or is somehow the other way round
is the subject of heated protracted debate:
does it pull like a plant up from the soil;
and is it capable of changing course;
or does it trick the eye the way a turning wheel
on slowing seems to run in reverse?
Among these a critical few will venture
( with barely concealed abhorrence )
that the change for both reader and book
is a movement away from presence.
Others, seized by this point, will say
the only real change comes later,
when the reader, flushed, snaps shut
the book, leaves off this lightest of labours
and splay-limbed languorously stretches,
so that hair roots retract into the spine
and begonias or hardy lupines bloom
where a rush of blood pools in the groin;
proof positive, surely, of appetite whetted,
of the trying on of a new perspective
in which ordinary everyday things
are found somehow less expected.
Bibby Wonder
All his days were dirty greys he folded
into tri-point flares, semaphores secured
with the ankle snap of an argyle sock.
Only one thing whet his ooze to trickle,
made him stare in bibby wonder,
a hutch he filled with fired figurines.
Who saw these figurines as figurative
looked hard at him and tried to guess,
some faulted him, some fell into largesse.
The Old Neighbourhood
It was never great, even back in the day.
Here Kumquat May had her episode:
Jack Hughes! Jack Hughes! she wailed
at a white-haired man, Der Weiße Engel!
whose eyes behind tinted lenses flicked
like an analog needle. Then he was gone.
Some say she was his other woman.
Some say her beef was with Guinness
(that black door marked with a toucan )
more than it was with him or his missus,
camogie queen and once runner-up
at the Rose of Tralee: Hurly Mary,
now best known as the mother of Gord,
that poet’s poet of the common man,
whose particular brand of strum and dang
can still be heard, from time to time,
the famous twang of that broken string
on There’s a Love Knot in my Laureate.
But things are better today. Much better!
Streets that once burned like phosphorus
are now prosperous. Signs everywhere:
Spa Wholesaler: Martin Loofah King.
Joomange: French, all kosher, safari.
Prosperous maybe, but still a bit shady:
note the camel-coat crewcuts in suits,
flipping through on-sale racks of thobes,
while a diva in burka winks knowingly
at a man sipping tea in Mahatma Grande’s.
“Golan shites,” the lot of them, says Lloyd
E. Dawe, the oldest retailer on the block.
But the old have a way of forgetting
just how bad it was back in the day
with the brothers Quixote, Don and Wiley,
two hard men — no soft centaurs these —
running a little behind from the Deli Llama,
selling it to all in tents and porpoises,
but strictly medicinal, the whole front
innocent as chasing rabbits with a hoe.
Innocence thrives where we begin.
My old self follows me around like an
idiot suivant, who knows only one thing
in this world. And how that thing ran true,
and still runs true today. A radical naiveté —
Oh little turd who made thee? Take this
couple, twenty-somethings turned thirty,
who have traded in their designer dogs
for an all-terrain stroller. Hi, Digger!
Hi, Digger, squawks their two-year-old
at an idling truck, a cement mixer,
while twirling a bead with chubby fingers.
His parents gape at him in astonishment.
And I gape in astonishment as well,
when behind them, exiting The Gap,
a dwarf in a three-piece pinstripe Armani
barks, like some kind of small arms dealer,
into the beak of a throwaway phone.
Premature
Like a tiny toy horse I trolled in the sea,
a black and white horse near the end of my line,
I trolled to see what might be hooked
and though I caught none of the deep sea dark
a lot of strange creatures swam by and looked.
There was Randolph Scott with his thin turkey neck,
nervous and sweating outside the church door,
two hitching posts up from Miss Daisy’s Saloon
where the louvered doors swung to and fro,
keeping the beat of what was in store.
It was late Sunday night in front of the telly,
when out of the side of her eye distracting
she kept catching the tap of his green tartan slipper,
the fringe of hair around his scrawny ankle.
Will we go up to bed? she said to my father.
From somewhere high in the air in a corner
I watched her watching him watching her undress
in the dresser mirror. Then she turned, and he
swept back the covers, and they collapsed together,
eight months and two weeks before I was born.
Like a tiny toy horse I trolled in the sea,
a black and white horse near the end of my line,
I trolled to see what might be hooked
and when I was pulled from the deep sea dark
a lot of strange creatures swam by and looked.
Stone
A grey blue stone bifurcated
by a band of sparkling quartz,
glad eye from the Pleistocene,
it sits on my mind’s table.
Like sadness, it has the quality
of being wholly passive.
Dark to its core, it glows at dusk
like a dying bulb. Dry but shaped
by water, flung up by streams
and tides it exerts a force
against all expectation.
Seems to be saying anything
may happen: has and will.
One day, you may pick up
&
nbsp; that stone and pitch it, leaving
behind a small depression.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Rochelle for being my first and most graceful reader.
And for being beautiful.
Thanks to Annie for the many long walks and conversations about creativity, social relations, and death.
Thanks to Greta for being five and utterly herself: our petal-flower, our pistol.
Thanks to Ken Babstock for his sharp eye and light touch in editing this collection.
Thanks to everyone at House of Anansi Press.
Thanks to Memorial University of Newfoundland, and especially to the staff of the Queen Elizabeth II Library for creating such excellent collections of books and periodicals.
Thanks also to the editors of the following publications in which a number of these poems first appeared: TickleAce, The Newfoundland Quarterly, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Canadian Notes & Queries, and Jailbreaks and Re-Creations: 99 Canadian Sonnets.
About the Author
In 2007, PATRICK WARNER won the E. J. Pratt Poetry Award for his collection There, there. His first collection of poetry, All Manner of Misunderstanding, was nominated for the 2002 Atlantic Poetry Prize and for the 2003 Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards. His work has been published in TickleAce, The Fiddlehead, Matrix, Signal, the Sunday Telegram ( St. John’s ), Poetry Ireland Review, and Metre ( Ireland ). He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
I The Turn
Precious
Coronation
The Interval
Claremorris
Picket
II The Archives of Minneapolis
Psychoacoustics
Therefore: a theory of sonnets
Evidence: there will be no evidence
Couch Potato
Entertainment
The New Economy
The Snows
III Augur
The Mole
The Scientist
The Pews
Snowbirds
Starlings/Waxwings
The Hinge
The Lost Years
Historical
Sermon to the Immigrants
The Memory Warehouse
IV The Poet
The Touch Tank
Basho
The Children of Critics
Reading
Bibby Wonder
The Old Neighbourhood
Premature
Stone
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Mole Page 4
