Four poems for battleaxe
1.
This cartography of tissue, bone, was never
meant
to eclipse landscape. Victorian swagger,
allocated;
to tame the gardens, menageries,
heathens. Tarzan, swings. If all you see
is someday yours, what
have you? A heart-
shaped box. This generosity of garbage, strewn.
Abandoned shipping containers. My love
outpaced.
2.
An era of floaters: Garfield telephones
that insist
on dialing ashore. Anthropocene: the human epoch,
staggered syntax, centred. This question
of lyric amplification.
3.
If any dead writer might take you into
their confidence. Re-tread. Read. To live
in the past
is to infer a lack of risk.
Anne Carson: Genre is basically
a matter
of occasion. Goodbye, Norma Jean. What
might it cost
to put this house in order?
4.
Blockchain. Lost again.
Four poems for Timber
1.
This act of vanishing: felled, in
foul swoops. Once part of the Territory
of Nebraska, aboriginal lands carved later
into
six new states. Neither solid
nor liquid.
2.
An altitude. The rain falls. Silt
bears
witness.
Please. This phrase is withered, tired.
At times, I tell my daughters stories of my
life.
They pick and choose, absorbing
what, I could not know. A powdered trace
of who I’ve been, and am,
against their bones. A well
of drawn
and undrawn facts
in parabolic orbit.
3.
Where are you, mountains. Miners heft
and hollow, historic hustle
burrow layers-deep.
Elegiac time: contrary to nostalgia,
an avoidance
of permanent facts. Fountain Formation
translates
this endless, impermanent view.
Mork
and Mindy: the music shop
rarely saw enough on-screen customers
to subsist.
4.
The buffalo. They followed, henceforth. One
by one.
Four poems for Ottawa Arts Review
1.
A sunrise, overlay.
The oldest door in Ottawa.
Light orange, pink; curls
the locks, compress
the grammar stone. Capacious
parents, stroller. Tourist,
if you will.
The morning ringlets,
summer. Wind,
a clear momentum.
2.
These sandstone coffers,
brazen. Gargoyle.
We would not
market death, the many bones
this framework lays upon. Why
would they. Speak it, point
to unmarked graves, a grace of curves
against these candied tulips.
3.
List, this limestone swell, girdled north
by the river. Grand,
in their estimation.
The past is language, sheets
of fiction. Whitewash. Even
the anecdote might scare you.
Stencil
of a practical joke.
Repurposed. Statues glean,
a biographical life. This wall of whispers,
politics, nope. A sequence
of promotional links.
4.
Where Algonquin stood, and
Mohawk, staring down
cascades, escarpment,
the northern shoulder
of the Ottawa Valley. Laurentian foothills
backdrop
interprovincial bridges, government
office complex; churches, hotels, this
cauldron boil. A portrait
landscape. Breathing in,
and in. I studied
the outcrop, for
an unknown amount of time.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital
city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time
with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than
thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent poetry
titles include A halt, which is empty
(Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life
sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book
of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press. In spring 2020,
he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is
extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in
Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly
posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com