I USED TO BE THE COULD YOU THEN I COULDN’T, by Stephen Collis

we laid them all off in writing

one at a time the stars formed

from the cloud of dust rent by trucks

crossing the Libyan desert / you see

we didn’t have to bomb every country

some bombed themselves

we just gave them grants / debt

and time to think

but this is a poem you said

and I fail to see the social relevance /

I need the funds to buy sheep

herd them to liquor barrels

calm the nerves a little / get back

to the computer / write my master

peace could have ensued but

like we said it was bombs and you

couldn’t even get a little nutrition from

licking the spent casings though my

sheep will certainly try to do this

battery-like and really it’s a memoir

of my time herding the unherdable /

I’m not sure there’s a keyword we can count on here

we want one demonizes some group

we’ve determined to be expendable

some bordered space we can keep closed /

didn’t I say the sheep were woven

into the very fabric of my art?

they are mobile and will not stop

until you are in deep sleep of lavender fields

pull the covers of the book closer

you will be warm enough in the coming

nuclear winter to spy the rugged outline

of a new ideology of lost hope

its lanceolate foliage my sheep have already eaten

which is of course my main contribution to society

2

Weren’t this supposed to be a research grant?

told myself this weeping

or maybe was laughing / hard to tell

leaky night boat to nowhere

catching a good wind

oh thanks friendly weather!

cool those jets and stop that heat

so to get back to the work

of this danse macabre

list subject matter to be covered

methodology employed etc. /

time runs through our fingers

no that’s water I said

maybe grains of sand

cool to the touch / hard to tell

differences / shabby aftershocks

the way you sometimes see lightning

in the ash plume rising

over a volcano erupting and think

really? Lightening too?

not trying to be bleak really

method is not trying to be anything really

and certainly not bleak or

just need funds to hole up in and be forgotten

but maybe / is just darker like sometimes

there just is lightning in an ash plume rising

reminding you the task is to become

minor / refuse standard measure

herd sheep and write poems to stars at night

there’s bigger fish to fry anyway so

that’s my methodology / any questions?

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks 2018). In 2019 he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.