Five poems for The Pi
Review
1.
Hypothetical: the distance
a poem may travel. Margins spill, a flock
of miniature birds
or ants.
One speaks to the long journey
and the short flight, the position
of the sacred. How far
and at what pace.
To include everyone, one must leave behind
this entire world.
2.
One speaks of positives, options; a way
back home. A pandemic
of misspelled options.
Picture the lily. Filament, labyrinth, treacle. Vines
parry, jostle, pick apart
the bonds. A brick wall, groans
against the pleasure
of a single seed.
3.
I can tell you
anything.
4.
When we say forever, we do not mean
without end. We have been here,
but at one point, we
were somewhere else. The limitations
of a single myth. I am airplane,
starling, patterned
clipper. The sedentary rudiments
of layered rubble.
5.
Picture the house. These hands
are spilling. Rise up, gather. A concordance
of flowers, stone, abandoned clothes, his
errant speculations. I am not
your noun, your verb, your
action word. It is
impossible to write. My father’s texts
have reached their end.
Four poems for Spacecraftprojects
1.
In
the beginning was the imagination, the classic enemy
of
boredom. A lavish absence
of
artificial light.
Can
I see stars? Do I know English? Stories, away
from
the semantic charge.
A
revelation, visually
in
place, in space. A fixed act, sequence
of
discarded scraps.
Imagine:
once we looked up, without
the
thought of force.
2.
To
determine we are horizontal
in
the language. Perceiving only dots
across
horizon-line. They say to realize
is
to unearth. Is ours a measure
to
reach beyond
for
improvement or ruin? Warm hands, pulling hot
and
cold dead planets
down
to where we drown.
If
this a means. A means
of
access.
3.
Shadow
shapes itself, provides
a
deeper shadow. If one aligns, perhaps,
a
different order: Saturn, Mercury, Ganymede. Fly
me
to the moon. Firmly
focused
on
infinity. Mark the first word, and the first
in
space. These foreign bodies, exile. Formed
by
rhythm, language. Changed,
for
the viewing. No matter what we do,
obsessions
rise, and coat
the
surface of this inquiry.
4.
To
shift a little distance. The children flutter,
decorate
their bedroom door with scraps of paper,
carving
stars and planets, birthday hearts,
writing
out their names. All I want to do
is
work.
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, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for
the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC
Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe
Ottawa Hall of Honour. 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. An editor and publisher, he runs
above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor
of my (small press) writing day, and
an editor/managing editor of many
gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence
at the University of Alberta.
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