Why write poetry? For the weird unemployment. For the painless headaches, that must be tapped to strike down your writing arm at the accumulated moment. For the adjustments after, aligning facets in a verb before the trance leaves you. For working always beyond your own intelligence. For not needing to rise and betray the poor to do it. For a non-devouring fame.

--Les Murray

The Soft Speakers (1741)

Traversed east-west the axis
of seasons a motion not a span. The rivers
then went around not through.
Less lush than overdone, the walkers
from there to there, when
here wasn’t somewhere. Back when
the traveler's track recorded
in hush and snare.

Imagined trails leading through
the poem, not from. The sentences
on the line cut
wide, overtaken as it
should be. Like parkland from
Grand Rapids through Saskatchewan
Rivers, then over. The living
was hard, a seasonal take.
The old tales moved. Still
do. Just not here.

Thieves & Preachers (Fort George 1914)

The salmon-coloured mirror leans
closer, closer and then
smack into the forehead

Don’t mistake repulsion
for submissiveness, she crowed
from the back of a boat
heading north

All this dog garned country
is good for is growing Christmas trees
and trading posts for
modernity to land on;
fence-posts disguise the limit

The Dreamland Theatre moved
on a sledge, the tickets
taken as ransom

South & Central in the same tired drawl

The site clear cut for practice
the trees a nuisance even then;
how to get through not why, and
the lens trained to look back south

Each southerner drawn
closer, closer and then
damned and darned
shut, a strange voice
heading away, north

Ball too small to see, by Ken Belford

- for Si

The same ideas seem more likely now
as we move toward completion at the end
of our cycle, when time speeds up and
boundaries dissolve. An occluded line
grazer, an all-at-once animal beyond
syntax in the liminal slime, I’m drawn
toward you through time, to all the last things,
and all the lost things. Why all this talk?
The phone rings in the middle of the night
but I don’t answer. No-one’s ever there.
An updated node and ball too small to see,
when I rearrange my room, interference
patterns and three-dimensional images
reflect living forms. Telephone used to
be a noun made by combining forms
but it’s a verb now. You are not here,
and you are nowhere, and I wonder
if that coherent beam outside my door
is you, casting your shadow in.

Poem Shops for an Image

Anything really, a visual
cue to go along with the abstract
status of being arty, or vaguely
original. Poem casts about,
almost frantic, for his image.

He tries make-up, you know,
mascara and blush, but
it seems redundant and his white
skin reacts in odd allergic ways.

It doesn’t seem appropriate to go on . . .

He tries acting school, a good one, and
shows promise; his vocal range is
wide and he is able to slip
in and out of character at will. His timing
is impeccable. But his stage presence
sucks and soon the director has him doing
voice-overs for animated films instead.
Poem talks to mirrors, trying to project,
to evoke, to smash through that
blank vacant stare . . .

Poem flails.

An animal, he thinks, I could
be an animal, a bold creature,
majestic, loaded with national
fervour, a history of violence . . .

Poem is not himself.

A musician who radiates light and
transcends the stage, climbing the scale
higher and higher until he blinks out,
a flash of recognition spilling down
onto the upturned faces.

Limits. Poem is what is not-Poem.

He gathers himself, sets off
out the door. The ordinary day
follows him.

Not a Fighter

Poem’s Industry & Progress

A review board convenes, votes
to lift the restrictions

lines on a map appear

for the prime investor, it is a coupe, capital
flows into the machines

reading extracts the resources,
truck loads, driving unsafely on questionable roads,
filled with significance, leave
for the container ports, and markets
overseas send a cheque

but jobs are created, review
publications, chapters propped
up thriving on Poem’s product,
that shining bin, that exasperating cargo

economic forecasters watch him,
his subsidiary paper product tax shelter,
and then, the vein is near
exhausted, the reserves spent,
the harvest dwindles and
Poem is left vacant

the road is abandoned,
saplings grow through the windows,
a wealth of rodents move in

Poem pleads, ‘Wait, wait
I can do other things—
look, this waste can become
something else useful or
I can be a call centre or, or
I can, I can sing!

but he is alone, a ghost
town echo

only the knowledge
that his wares, bobbles and
cheap lining material have traveled
the globe, filling drawers
and lost and found boxes

Poem rests, coos at the rafter
pigeons—it’s okay, everything is okay