Purity of Absence. Dave Margoshes. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Dave Margoshes
Издательство: Ingram
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isbn: 9781770706729
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Hard Rain Falling

       April Fool

       Summer Solstice

       The Retreat

       Mad Cow Disease

       Wedding Gifts

       Martin and Lewis

       Ten2

       Man in the Moon

       Consider the Spider

       Mothers and Daughters

       Rat-Free Province

       Poem for a Reading in a Bar

       Out of Chaos, Order

       Latimer’s Statement to the Police

       Radio Silence

       Twins

       Dec. 6, Montreal

       The Spreiser

       Saving Souls

       Leave Wife

       Skin of Our Teeth

       Baghdad

       Faith, Hope, Charity

       Ghosts and Poets at Batoche

       The Immense Noise

       Fathers

       That Summer

       Radio Silence

       Twenty-Fifth Reunion

       Community

       Barium Moon

       A Warm February

      Many of the poems in this collection have appeared, often in earlier versions, in the following magazines and anthologies: Ariel, Border Crossings, Canadian Forum, Canadian Literature, CV2, Cross-Canada Writers Quarterly, Dalhousie Review, Dandelion, diverge, Fiddlehead, Grain, League of Canadian Poets’ Museletter, NeWest Review, Poetry Canada Review, Pottersfield Portfolio, Prairie Fire, Queen’s Quarterly, Textual Studies in Canada, This Magazine, Towards 2000 (Fifth House Publishers), Vallum, Vintage 1991 (Sono Nis Press), and Windsor Review.

      Some poems were broadcast on the CBC programs Ambience and Gallery.

      “The Persistent Suitor” won the Stephen Leacock Poetry Award from the Orillia International Poetry Festival in 1996. “On the Beach” won second prize in the 1997 Saltwater Poetry Contest. “Dec. 6, Montreal” won second prize in the League of Canadian Poets’ 1991 National Poetry Contest.

      My thanks to the editors, producers, and judges.

      Thanks also to the Saskatchewan Writers Guild’s colony committee, which operates writers and artists colonies at Emma Lake and St. Peter’s Abbey, Muenster, Saskatchewan, where many of these poems were written.

      And especial thanks to Christine Lynn for Red Hue Moon, the painting on the cover.

      And more thanks to George Amabile, whose lines “the purity of absence/kindles appetites that hiss/and fuse. One/last beginning,” from his poem “Tangents and Vectors,” are used, with permission, as an epigraph for my poem “Purity of Absence.” I heard George read his poem at Heaven bookshop in Winnipeg in spring 1996 and, struck by that phrase “the purity of absence,” immediately began my poem on the back of a napkin.

       for Shaya

      The farther you go

       the closer you come

       to every thing

       you always thought

       was out of your reach,

       the perfect breathless moment

       crystallizing,

       evaporating.

      This is the way

       the world turns

       itself inside out

       of the way

       beyond anything

       you could imagine

      the rising star

       shaking off night

       into the mouth

       of a jealous sun

      the rising star

       casting its light

       into the shining

       eyes of the beholder

      your light illuminating something we’ve never seen before.

      Men are struck by lightning five times as often as women.

      —Newspaper Item

      Taller, of course,

       more foolhardy, more’s

       the fool, and more likely

       to have forgotten an umbrella,

       to be out walking and fail to notice

       rain assailing our unprotected lives

       the way your love can if we

       let it, but that alone can’t explain

       why our lives are in jeopardy,

       why we take the chances no one

       would reasonably assume we

       should, not in this life

       with all its teeth and broken glass.

      Montreal haunts us the way livers

       do drunks. Sick and complaining,

       they insist we somehow are at fault,

       we who take all the chances,

       who put ourselves ahead

       of whatever comes, that we brought

       it on ourselves, and maybe we did.

       Say something often enough

       and even the liar starts to believe

       it, let alone the altar boys,

       lip-syncing the litany, big boys don’t cry, rats’ tails and snails, that’s what boys are made of.

      When it does strike, lightning,

       it doesn’t do it twice but over

       and over again till we’ve got

       the drill in our sleep, dreams

       blossoming up like fish surfacing

       with bubbles for kisses, till

       the choices dry up, even the few

       we started with. The house

       is in darkness, the children

       asleep, your breath steady as tide

       on the pillow, the owl silent

       in its tree. We lie awake,

       listening for thunder.