The crusher, by Ken Belford

I will think of your road when the open pit is flooded
and the immediate receiving water is authorized,
and habitat destruction and the flow losses begin
in the final version of the plan. I can say it now,
I can say goodbye Amazay, the crush disposed
under your natural body of living water. And
I don’t have much to add except to say always
these proposed strategies to compensate for
whole lake destruction are lies. I would love to
go back to T’am Uumxsit one day because I was
ageless in Sakxwhi Tax and here you are
needle face, in the crushing café circles of
Seattle, where the wheel of fate is red.

There is a net loss when options fail, when
transplants like me, in the combination
of boulders and woody debris, can’t adhere
to the drainages like a Dolly in another
watershed or lake or upstream passage, here
in the upper Ingenika, when the like for like
transplant men remove the barriers and
mix sacrificial samplings into streams.

They are creek robbers,
and in the spring
they will be lifting gravels and lifting fishes
where slides run out across the channel.
The mainstem reaches
and dewatered Chuckachida
slides in the cascade
along the valley bottom
to an isolated lake downstream.
Still, the bedrock falls
and the function of the passages
angled from the confluence
might destabilize the structure,
so I count rays along the shoreline
while the channel is hammered out.

Form controls and Amazay is powerless
against these men who cannot keep their hands off.
Every second year during the stable summer flows,
they will lace their boots and return
to dominate the waters. Amazay was nature’s body.
This dead body of water was never an idea
and the acts done to the reproductive systems
have everything to do with fragmented bodies,
spawning beds and making money off women.

I can’t imagine compensation lakes.
The littoral truth of the shore zone keeps
Amazay’s structures and cascades in place.
Sediments extend across the bed, across
the gravel, the sand, the silt and clay.
Beneath, the ground water flows
across the inflow and outflow barriers
they plan to blow. But the passage
structure inhibits the over-story
and they say the barriers will be removed
and the classes within the system
will fin their way to the two-way,
to the small lakes at the end.
If transplanted fish squirt over the divide,
and cross over in the headwaters reach
and the flow path length is extended
to the glacial headwater lake,
then poison will seep over the area
and the pure water above the barriers
will be within the system no more.

Photo of Crow

A gurgle ruffled from a morning
fog hunkered over the park, black
spruce float the sound higher
a sharp click and chuckle.

Lack of definition circles
the tallest evergreen, barks a tattoo
against the white air.

Myth a luminous absence—
the corrosive text, its toxic
sentence flowing out.

Poised here, an intersection of opportunity,
garbage, vantage, and disinterest, the possibility
of flight caught in a thick cracked beak and
a penultimate purple.

Poetry is dead, a photo
not taken, a scavenged plot
adapting itself to the wastelands.

File sharing, by Ken Belford

I have another job on the weekends now
and my neighbour goes about her business.
A foreign-born worker, she’s moving,
living under a married name. I’m thinking
of file sharing and the fiction of the self,
remembering the day I flew out, leaving
a new person in my place. I’d like to thank him
for coming. It takes a lot of energy to think of
his vacant face. And I had a real sense of place,
even though I’d never been here before.
She never winked at the camera. Apparently,
the man who worked in my shadow slept
through the whole thing. There were episodes
of confusion and frenzy in the south. And
contradictory opinions and book tours gone
after I shot the wrong person. Write down
I’m a traitor. I’m in the mood to work backwards
so I’m hanging on to my name right from the start.

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.