Category: Lines from Saskatoon and Montreal

by Gord Sellar

the anapests and dactyls of jazz
combine, enfold, iambs hidden at
the inner ear, and I could be
any city, could write any city
but this one. plastic bags, small
bits of paper float the dark lit
air; breeze menuet, impressionistic
jazz, Nefertiti sings the mannequins
their static pavanes, lachrymae,
lachrymae, behind glass walls;
advertisement at night, when we all
are least at risk, undressed and
sleeping, though I neglect my
Faulkner, take a long way back,
trochée Miles and miles of concrete
blooming us its incandescent wildflowers,
I pick them, with mind set
aside, knowing I pick here;
deciding with my feet that I
have come far enough; then home.

— Montreal, 2000

by Gord Sellar

there is only one book that secretly all
are obliged to read, its single page
covered in scrawl that changes with each breath,
with every thought, the lines of text that turn
and bind themselves into knots, each one.

it is much harder when cities don’t sound exotic
like, say, Atthis under a rose-fingered moon
much harder when there is no room for music,
no room weave in, no snide ελεπτολιζ,
no ελανδροζ on which to lay the weight of the world.

fishy shadow and whitecap everywhere, the brine
fails not to wash over the bodies of those
who manage to swim to the shore, to come to a land
close enough that they speak the same language, can tell
you the way home. even there, the ocean comes

to the body again, scouring. some ways it cleanses
but only brackishly. you lie on your back and try
to breathe. you wonder what your name was, or is.
you imagine seeing land, seeing masts, strange women
crossing the surface of the water to attend to you.

— Montreal, 1999

by Gord Sellar

the bear feasts
picnic bloodfeast under the
gibbous moon
THE END

— Montreal, 2001

by Gord Sellar

if I could but drink the blood of Oberon
and feast his flesh, and suck the marrow coarse
in half a dream, I could (I do believe)
come to bring the south unto the north
and light to dark worlds would then come,
and I as King would then collect the taxèd sum.

for Oberon is Alberich–yes elvenking is dwarf;
he ought to travel south to drip his golden rings for me.
and in this shape I wear tonight, this form of beast
I could rule this shattered world, both brittle earth and sea;
tearing concrete from the soil and metal from the loam
and make in wilderness my seat of power and my throne

my name is not a spell these days; ’tis dry
my pow’r is ever on the wane, a well of dust
and if I should ever more come across unpair’d man
his forgotten ancient words make barrier to my game
but underneath your dreams, along the tidy shadowed streets,
Puck rhymes your dreams, and lies betwixt thy so-clean sheets.

— Saskatoon, 1998

by Gord Sellar

woke to
dark; terrible noises–
wings crackling and
all birds in the world
fleeing my
approach

trees bear dark
slick of oil, heavy
on the fingers of branches:
standing silent, crowded
grey breathing light
from their pores
leaking

gliding pale through
shadow-murky figures
of sleep: then, cool thin strip of light,
scrutiny that splits forest open, from
shape into void; me;
itself

voices coming, echo
between high heavy dark
timbers; pale rowed descendants,
voices from her womb above,
moaning from topmost branches

— Saskatoon, 1997 

by Gord Sellar

an ocean of scotch, imagine,
fuming raw honey flooding
the plains of the earth

think of casting nets into it,
speaking in a secret cant
with the men on those boats

think of every red-rimmed eye
every bleared face moving slow
at the sight, sighing themselves on

but look closer, equip your
puny fumed mind with a lens,
an equation, the rupture of calculation

it is a raging wild soup, beneath
isotopes lurk leptons, quarks,
filaments of everything

whose spin is not spin; galliardes
of meaning, boson and antiproton:
the teeming immigrants of the underworlds’

uncertainty, not knowing your feet
on solidity, the movements of your eye, the pang
of missing, of empty space everywhere

this world you are convinced you see, the one
you think we share, I have not seen, it is a
crust, I cannot speak your kant and

unfixed it falls apart, this liquor may be
art, and perhaps we should set keel to breakers,
breathe deep and fall into the mind-murk

of fabricated absolutes, in a world without
where blind men teem after chryselephantines, floating
in the intoxicating haze of the world

— Montreal, 1999

When I studied with David Solway, one of the exercises we did in our course was to taste Scotch — Balvenie Doublewood, to be precise — and take notes about how it tasted to us. The object of the experiment was to demonstrate that — in writing, as in whiskey — individuals will have variations on what they find, how their palettes are attuned to noticing, but that themes will emerge nonetheless; that, indeed, there are aspects of a text that can be discussed “objectively.” We then had to turn our notes into the bones of a poem, and this is what I produced.

Here are my actual tasting notes from the whiskey itself (dated 11 Jan 2000):

Gord’s Balvenie Doublewood (12 yrs) Tasting Notes

Colour: raw honey
Nose: not harsh; slightly sweet but insidious
Body (“mouth feel”): full; sharp on the edges and smooth in the middle.
Palate: powerful; rich and slow with swirling layers.
Finish: dizzying; flare with long and slow decrescendo; I’m still dizzy.
Score: 1×10³³

Apparently I was impressed, though I did not proceed to get into Scotch whiskeys.

by Gord Sellar

Can there be true purpose in a project that is never completed? Can existence be meaningful if it consists of an unending journey toward a destination that is never reached?

If there is a purpose to the universe, and it achieves that purpose, then the universe must end, for its continued existence would be gratuitous and pointless.

— Paul Davies, in The Last Three Minutes: Conjectures about the Ultimate Fate of the Universe

but paul, sex travels only at the speed of chemicals: have you realized that? no, of course not—you aren’t yet even an embryo, you, who will walk, breathe, fly someday,

you who will also spread the double chain, send half of it spiraling forward into time, in children and grandchildren and the lists pile up quickly, but not to us. you can always shift the clock though, shift it instead to layering dust and stone. geologic time=solace?

past a couple of generations, i can’t see my half mattering to them, though, just as i don’t see them reading this, rightly so. it’s like being 1/64^th Apache or something… never the same ghosts, that much farther across the brink

oh, yes, paul, it hurts to see that your thumb in the pie of even marginal immortality dependent on them—on others, often badly educated, boorish/selfish sometimes. needing other people; that your descendants are as much them as you; that you are yourself risen from such a slough:

– great great great uncle who beat not only his own children, but everyone else’s;
– a woman who said nothing as her husband drank their last pennies from the liquor bottle;
– a sullen scribe who subtly (but perversely) changed the sense of this or that word in a translation of a text now lost to us;
– the man who raped the widow and stole her purse, too;
– the mother who smothered her barely born, sleeping baby to death on the bank of a deep, slow river;
– all of the bits, strands, tiny ripples in the self

our families, we may not be able to pick—but we do set the boundaries, though somewhere under the press of dust, of layering ash and stone, the borders disappear; bloodlines collapse, meld into finity

paul, on the way to the damascus you fell, and i think you had a vision of a kind of subtle teleology; who ever told you there was a destination? paul, i think there may be something to this; if there is a destination, we have to stop looking for it, paul, and when we’re lost at least we’re moving again; but we’re already lost? we need to be lost from being lost—to wander away from having wandered away from the path

those scribes believed

i am sure you believe paul, you think that there is a meaning, a direction, paul,

illuminated manuscripts, lit by fires: what they thought were dreams of heaven, really the raging fiery soup of the universe exploding outward, becoming itself, becoming stars, wasting itself and moulting atoms and elements, chafing against itself, calming, cooling into us, agitated strands colliding and exploding in fiery bursts—

at the speed not of light but of chemicals

— Montreal, 2000

by Gord Sellar

the first women
emerged from oceans
carrying within
fistfuls of it, hidden
salty-womb-drink

to anoint husbands,
baptize children, months-long
to pass a sacred drop into each daughter

what is a tear
except whispered
memory, brine, carried from
home?

do the fishes weep? do they
fill depths for
us, mourning lost cousins?
Do deep ones,
freakish luminous things,
nameless jellies, floating
shadow-tentacled monsters? Through the glass
you shudder, snapping pictures;
wonder, does it remember
me?

families have limits, boundaries,
barriers, photos that will never
be kept in albums, names
not made for genealogies

you will never learn to
swim.

— Saskatoon, 1996

tonight for 10
minutes past sunset
sky clung blue

moon was fierce
with light, and smoldered—
begged my eyes

cross the blue
creeping migrant suns—
false, pretty;

our voices
outstretching voices
glittering

— Montreal, August 1999

by Gord Sellar

the thing carried in the
belly of neolithic man,
woman, is the skyline
riddled with lights, leaky-
faucet nightsong

time is the womb of city.
cathedral, gothic, that
huge closed eye, always
carved after pattern of Lascaux, cave-wall
painted herd hunting

all inevitable: city
was carried in bellies ape-people,
whole kingdoms hidden in viscera
our ancient guardians; but for
time, i hunt and pray in dark dripping caves

— Saskatoon, 1998