CANDLES
For Phyllis Webb
I.
That there’s a difference between the limit of desire
and desire exhausting itself,
that one can wait long enough for the warmth
found in the reticence of a garden,
that it’s okay to be as gentle as peach fuzz,
bamboo yarn, a secret,
that privacy itself can be a bright
lodestone,
that separation is a bruise taking the time
to feel and forgive its shape,
that there is a cadence to failure
that unfolds a brilliant shade of blue,
that of all the demands that present as being,
I’m happily fleeting, becoming a child of cloud.
II.
Patience is an answer found in grief:
a knowing that evades intension,
that fickle second skeleton.
What is left of me tries to take after you.
I breathe in the space between the moth and the candle,
where the warmth of the other
tenders the dust of the flame.
III.
I’m not floating across Fulford Harbour
avoiding the wake of the ferry,
nor am I watching the cobalt water turn dove grey.
I’m not the soft fist felt weekly on the radio.
I’m the purple starfish offset with yellow,
that lily you didn’t make the subject of a painting.
Somewhere in the life of peacock blue,
so much of what I am
places my ear against a candlelit page,
listening to your footfalls, echoes of the humane.
IV.
And
there
and there and
there
and over and
over your mouth
even in silence
continues to love
to sing
INSOMNIA
I once fell under the visitation of sleep when
I imitated the memory of a sleeper’s breathing.
But I don’t convince myself anymore;
there’s still the day working behind my eyes.
It doesn’t arrive because there’s nothing becoming
in what I pretend to be. Something about sleep
is relief tapping attentiveness on its stiff shoulder,
but simply saying this feels like a dragnet on a bankless river,
a lost cause: like picturing adulthood spent in the bamboo fort,
flanked by the stretch of bramble we called Death Valley
whose thorns pierced the hairless legs under our jeans,
closer to the four-cylinder we dug out with our hands
and deemed a site of great archaeological importance—so great,
it had to be kept a secret. And now I’m there,
at a culvert where we found a car’s side mirror, a chance at fire.
There’s me in the blackberry, bamboo, a field of horsetails.
And now there’s no wristwatch on the nightstand ticking.
There’s just a mind someplace unaware it’s unawake.
For once, remember amid all this tall green life
that it’s not the mimicry of sleep that brings it about,
but the work of imagining what it is to dream
at the edge of what was once attention’s parapet.
M.W. Jaeggle's writing has appeared in The Antigonish Review, CV2, The Dalhousie Review, Vallum, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize. He is the author of two chapbooks: Janus on the Pacific and The Night of the Crash. He lives in Vancouver, unceded Coast Salish territory.