New Narrative (or, why things don’t happen)

When
there is always
an elsewhere, an otherwise
to the placed moment, the event—when

Poem sits in a restaurant
named Papa George’s (Winnipeg
or Jasper?) as three vacationers
pose for a fourth who
takes a picture but looks
like she thinks the photo
will not turn out or when

events recede into the larger
integration which, when named
become an event—when

the picture is taken, it
is not one but four emotions
which are taken (but where?)
by Poem—who

recedes, in time

Poem the Fish

Poem creates the escape
hatchery of ideas—a frayed
patience, a silver sliver dithering,
a small fry leap over
the enclosure bank, a moment mid-
air, fin wings—

but if Poem were farmed, he wouldn’t
be Poem.

By the shoreline, cool and swift
the current’s curve of neural swirl,
that’s where Poem rests.

The imposition of story forms, by Ken Belford

I have been erased in the stories
that are now told of the Blackwater.
Everybody talks about stories
but nobody remembers them long.

I have a little black bag I wear on my back.
I was an outlaw and my story was killed
without sacrifice. More human than divine,
I am not a man and I live between the forest
and the city. I think the way animals think.

There is the subject and the subjected and
everything happens as if. The cities
at the headwaters of the nass were dissolved
by cutting through the subject but I made places
for rest and found something to eat.

The camp was originally a line cabin
from which one could see both ways –
to the Skeena and the Nass, Blackwater to the front,
the forest on three sides. When I first saw it,
there were no trails and the value was zero.
It’s still unroaded but it won’t be long before it isn’t.