by Walid Bitar
my giant footsteps flattening by night
a planet you know perfectly well is round,
though we don’t speak merely from experience.
My consolation: neither does thunder,
worshipped, like me, in free-trade zones
demanding my axes, and supplying lumber
on black markets while I sack psittacine
castles in air, in mid-air become
an archaeologist pocketing less than thieves
from whom I buy back my discoveries,
all forgiven. The future is either
in running out of space or insisting
it stand still on your calvary float
for yet another tickertape parade,
a nest resembling a crown of thorns,
and a first drop of water a second.
From my vantage on our bustling shore,
a drop vanishes – not so the ocean.
CLOAK AND DAGGER
Decades of cloak and dagger have changed
our manumitted colony’s dress code –
I promised we’d meet the natives halfway,
while making myself completely at home,
etching self-portraits as a fifth column
the viewer’s cordially invited to join.
If there weren’t persons inside me I’m not,
who’d suffer terror I’m busy enjoying?
Prepare a list. How quickly he’s grown,
the ex-blastocyst ensconced in power.
I became somebody ghosting his blow-
by-blow memoir from cover to cover,
throw his weight around, unconcerned
he’s looking askance at us; we’re aesthetes,
prefer our pure forms to their content served
up as live game, after all, not raw meat,
share with a first tribe a second’s illusions
about assorted assets it may claim
for its encampment from the universe,
then wait: they’ll squabble over our telescopes.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Early versions of ‘The Good Reason,’ ‘Contractors,’ ‘Exact Change,’ ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Margin of Error’ appeared in Perihelion.
‘The Picture of Concentration,’ ‘Atheling,’ ‘Waterboarding’ and ‘Not So the Ocean’ appeared in This Magazine.
I am grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for its support.
I thank my editor, Kevin Connolly, and the book’s designer, Alana Wilcox, for their excellent work. Thanks also to Evan Munday, Leigh Nash, Simon Lewsen and everyone at Coach House.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walid Bitar was born in Beirut in 1961 and immigrated to Canada in 1969. His previous poetry collections are Maps with Moving Parts (Brick Books, 1988), 2 Guys on Holy Land (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Bastardi Puri (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2005) and The Empire’s Missing Links (Véhicule Press/Signal Editions, 2008). He lives in Toronto.
Typeset in Freight and Freight Sans.
Printed in February 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited by Kevin Connolly
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
Toronto ON M5S 3J4
Canada
416 979 2217
800 367 6360
[email protected]
www.chbooks.com
