What range of tones are possible
in the phrase See for yourself?
Sarah Gridley, Loom
*
Expand, to widen. Borrowed hours, function. Blazing heat.
Perhaps, we stay awake. We know: the summer still of discon-
tent. Excessive: rooms we can’t yet leave. Her kingdom for a
working AC unit. Cool down, some. She swims the mornings.
Sixteen weeks: we measure eyelids, ears, the length.
Shifting eyes to front. A habit of apples. The white flesh of page. The
moorings. Rush, a second time. Starfish sing. Nuance, of tiny
boats. A tin ear.
*
A small discretion, slight. Exactitudes. This question still of
luck. Adrift. Spread out, across. To pre-exist. A stubble, roughly
nine months. Dailyness. The pattern, of little feet. A landscape
of pretending. Stacked boxes, letters. We write in colour, songs
of lightening. A dedicated commons. Shadow. The desire of
mothers. Certainty: the handle of an axe, a hammer. Vowel-
thin and unaligned. A spider’s web of chance.
rob mclennan lives in Ottawa and is the author of more than 20 trade books of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. He won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for Little Sleep (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012) and grief notes (BlazeVox Books, 2012), and a second novel, missing persons (Mercury Press, 2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, the Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry annual ottawater. He regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.
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