Two poems, by Alice Burdick

 

Mediaeval advice column
 

Compare your eels to hares,
their snowy bellies, many hidden holes.
Treasure your husband’s person -
keep him close, keep him clean.
Keep his feet re-shod, toes up
in secrets. Identify the season’s cheese:
a melting Lazarus, a minimum of tears,
only time. A thing like time tells us
that a border agent opens the suitcase
as we watch, small autumn-shaped fish
strapped to our bellies. I growl at
the husband, who is out sweating
or freezing, holding the keys to the keep,
nightcap quivering on his tipping crown.
Sing the song of the market riddle -
choose the clearest eye, the dullest
stone rolled from the cave. Oh
friend, oh husband, the timing is off,
whatever time is. We dream of electricity
while candles wax our halls. A gulp,
a soft landing. I have heard it said
that spring is the time for blatant florals.
The reason for voices is stories.
Light a fire under the baby eels, who
are an expensive industry. Maintain
the linen’s wave on an airy line of inquiry.
My forehead tells the time, whatever
time is. Drop the second husband’s decanter
against the canal’s hitch - a lock away
from distance. If a ship lowers itself through
the locks, it means time is a nightmare of inquiry.
Sprinkle a posy bouquet onto the sheets
of early spring. If your bed is full of fleas,
address the fleas, free the fleas - shake them
onto your neighbour’s food truck. The care
of the outside world is man’s work, the care
of the inside world is woman’s work.
Everyone knows this, and I’ve written it down.
These are the simple aspects of time -
it is here, it is now. It is not education
but discernment, which can be related,
but not necessarily. Use the slippery skin
of a good carp to mend your door.
Carp at your good husband, but let him
slide down the gross hill of dirty socks.
Give him orders. Make them gentle so
they sound like music, not conviction.
He’ll balk at clear logic. Let him.
You ask me for advice, so I’ll tell
you that worms produce a soft, smooth silk.
Just so, just as love does, the worms writhe
and expend energy, to look really fly.
They shine, alive in your life, figure eights
in the rubied ancestral chalice. Nod gently,
tag your wandering bitches. No plastic,
we have a simple rhyme in our beds.
It’s more for the telling than the teaching,
dear friend, dear sister. Mortar your ramparts,
storm the pestles, grind it out, grind
it down. May every seed flower.
Bend hearts to open them,
though they may break.
Fold your heart to start again.

 

 

The possible principal earth
 

Inside winter - congress of seeds.
No flowers from leafing light.
Violence blooms through doors. 

Flowers of design, a river
unrolled a boat into violets.
The gall stains change - no art. 

Employer of labour, wealth
can yield principles - dye
indigo into fast food. 

A thief in chintz loves
slow religion - the moon
misunderstands lectures, love. 

Study last-minute science.
Do not mow the end of the world -
illuminate the cold, stone, pink. 

Peaks like crusts, a small breath -
great loads a burden on height.
A sound blinks near the sea. 

Without a good captain, we would
not agree on earthquakes,
the demolition of whole islands. 

The sea a sunken enemy.
We are at war with the story -
a mast into the sky’s open eye. 

You are a country,
a torn route. Map
of torrents, map of hands. 

Dearness, not to be scanned -
stamp the silhouette
of each fallen leaf. 

Barnacles trek through
secretions. We take years
to amass carcass information. 

We talk on booms - buoys
bounce conversationally,
slow to conclusion. 

A universe is a law
of design. We will hope
for all that we can. 

Heart beef, a way
to the end of your ass -
the trail end of days. 

Feather and its quill
are based objects, birds
made into modes of communication. 

Wallpaper blooms and fades,
camouflage in flowers -
flowers hide in flowers, too. 

Time is an allowance
we can think of
as a line at a time.

 

Alice Burdick writes poetry, essays, and cookbooks in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. She is the author of Ox Lost, Snow Deep, a feed dog book/Anvil Press, 2024; Deportment: The Poetry of Alice Burdick, 2018, Wilfrid Laurier University Press; Book of Short Sentences, 2016, Mansfield Press; Holler, 2012, Mansfield Press; Flutter, 2008, Mansfield Press; and Simple Master, 2002, Pedlar Press. Her poems have appeared in such anthologies as GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Time (Frontenac House, 2018), Surreal Estate: 13 Canadian Poets Under the Influence, An Anthology of Surrealist Canadian Poetry (The Mercury Press, 2004), and others. She is the author of many chapbooks, folios, and broadsides since 1991. Her essays have appeared in Locations of Grief: an emotional geography (Wolsak & Wynn, 2020) and My Nova Scotia Home: Nova Scotia’s best writers riff on the place they call home (MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc., 2019). She is a freelance editor, manuscript assessor, and workshop leader.