Category: Lines from Saskatoon and Montreal

by Gord Sellar

out where my
boots did not go
old pliant soil
sinking underneath my shadow
                                          sleep

at first hearing only rushes’
rasp-dry tongues; sliding
into ooze

there is a shadow of me
standing
voice across the water
thick loam, heavy arc
down to secret bedding

geese, numberless pairs on
mirrored water,
bugle throats diving
wing-fins spread
under broken light
flight

my feet, backbone, haunches
dripping shady earth,
tremble at bedrock;
dwelling under that tremble, a droning
voice, bass trumpet beneath
sound, spreading in solid waves, in
sprawling caverns, wombs
of clay.

layered stone, rhythm
of stone, pushes me
up, into air, my
voice clarion,
breath

— Saskatoon, 1998

       too small, warm,
       foetal things, curled infant thumbs

pink and black beneath fur,
       i fear you,
       i feel pain sometimes
        (the tips of my teeth ache)
       i am soon to die

a piece of mold-bread or dry,
hard cheese:

“vermin”, or “pest”; you
exterminate; i hold on—
unrepenting, breeding, i am just like you
i am immortal,
multitudes surging beneath Lhasa and Vatican
and Calgary, even

i am— you
unknow it—among you,
unseen, i
feel death between my
ribs and tailbones,
                     feed and breed and hide and sleep and
                     feed and—

       carry plagues on my back;
       virus, bacteria in my saliva, in my muscle—
       forget me drowning in
underground rivers of shit?

murderer?

i will take
your child’s face away
away from you
at night

— Montreal, 1999

by Gord Sellar

He dreamt cold fishes
chanting
from the other side.
limped shadows, hunched
ghosts.
echo-circles crossing cold
water, light of hidden fire.
songs drift outward, blood
congeals in dark pools,
Then he was told:

hungry moths
came to him and crawled
into his belly, and spoke,
sang, danced air;
these things lacked
words only. not one
thing came dressed in words,
except the ending:
Remember what you have heard,
Remember what you have seen,

they pulled the cords within
and tugged him down
away from sleep.
they murmured as he rose
as he unfurled his
chalky wings
charging him to keep the rhythms
sacred.
they sang the music of all spirit-things
because everything forgotten

is souless. he
moves like whispers
into dark spaces.
the world is
endless from the ground’s surface,
where he flitters, cold.
seeing bulb-light, he stirs
and moves into the arc of vision.
flesh on searing curve, he
returns to the circling winds.

— Saskatoon, 1996

________

This poem is a Glosa; the original quatrain:

Then he was told:
Remember what you have seen,
because everything forgotten
returns to the circling winds.

is attributed, rather ambiguously, to “a Navajo chant” in a book I was once given.

(in Memory of Pierre Elliot Trudeau)
by Gord Sellar

was where he lived, I guess I was supposed to know
where, but I could never remember the number, you see.
I’m also dreadfully bad with birthdays. But I

remember a screen, it seemed wide at the time,
across the red shag of the carpet, and thereupon
this alien face looking out at me, demanding something.

Great man? Powerful statesman? Fascist monster?
I was too young to say. But I know one thing: his speeches
always seemed to be timed to pre-empt the Disney show.

In retrospect, I appreciate the interruption of American TV –
on Canadian business, after all – but back then it enraged
me to no end. Why not instead interrupt The Beachcombers?

So that my sisters and I, with all the impotent rage
of a long-wronged proletariat, fervently scowled,
and our hidden transcript bubbled out into the open:

an epithet. That was our eventual action of protest:
We called him Mister Bignose Crow-face Bottle-head Man.
If you look closely, you’ll see it makes sense, I swear.

It was just that, well, he was everywhere extremely pointy,
and somewhat red. With strange hair. A sort of
Kandinsky-ish clown; some kind of angular bozo.

I mistakenly imagined him on out on dates in Quebec,
with my homelier aunts, treading on their feet while they danced;
the desperate apologies, the revulsion. How far off I was.

I suppose I should show respect, now that he’s dead:
Can something good be said of Mister Crowface Bottle-head?
A brain in the crow is worth two of a Bush. Better a clown than a fool.

— 30 Sept. 2000

by Gord Sellar

banished lover of
day,   a word
        echoes within, sustains
                                 in exile

                                                                again, the breath of voice,
                                                                             the whisper:

                                                                                                   Out.

thinking of your bodies
        as clay dolls, life
        bestowed with kiss, a
          little air, too much tenderness;
        life rides into you
      on the back of
breath.

night precedes
 cognition. breath
       takes shape, haze
  soliloquy to the frozen world.

feeling winter
        inside my mouth,
                             throat, against the
                                                            meat-walls of
                                                                            lungs, the borders with the spirit world.

— Saskatoon, 1999

(for my mother)
by Gord Sellar

i am words not made
for speech, crafted and
carved by tongue from need
and air–the itch, discomfort,
craving that spasms through belly–
voice of inside, speaking liquid
song of bones, wrenching mumble
of lung, eye, the play of light against your
stretching skin, the smell your clothes carry
absent of you, the swell of connection–
the jittering of breath, skipping
pulse of sudden worry; walker of tightrope–
like umbilical stretched across dark warm ocean–
you bursting with stars, faces, names
all being written now inside you–all of those things i am
only because you
bore me first.

— Saskatoon, 1998

by Gord Sellar

Ai! tan gras enveya m’en ve
de cui qu’eu veya jauzion,
meravilhas ai, car desse
lo cor de dezirer no-m fon.
        –Bernart de Ventadorn, “Can vei le lauzeta mover”

Rainforests are dangerous things, they threaten us
with the imminence of their collapse: they are
mandelbrot webworks a thousand miles wide
whose guts shine and glitter like the sky
at night, spangled with the glossy wings of things
too numerous to count. And the greenness fills
everything it touches, spreading like sick.

And listen to me: every human thing,
each jealousy, each fear, desire, thought
is a rainforest perched on the edge of its own collapse.

— Montreal, 1999

by Gord Sellar

You all dream of America only because
night becomes, and tiding inside you are
limbic oceans, democracies of wanting
and the blisters may yet give the
way to what is not inevitable but instead
we can only make, over and over at
the root, the before of it, the ideal
of what is made without fire, without
bullet or megaphone because the roar
of human voices together is much louder
anyway. The thing is not what we call it, but
is always the striving, the hand outstretched.

–Montreal, 2000

by Gord Sellar

   nights waiting
to feel this life
         slip from me,
 sliding off, out
skinless
      making its own
   way.

                     —imagining it strut
        along narrow streets
  with walking
      stick, & slick under tweed—

lain on my
            husk-side, trying
        not to think: i
           need rather
                             to be the thing
itself—

hidden tremor
            pulls at all
the flesh beneath my
     ribs,
     shakes under
       morning;
   it keeps a secret.

i know it does.

            –Saskatoon, 1998

by Gord Sellar

i.
found an arrow-
head today; then
a tent-ring; and then
unspeakable history, the three spinning
hands across the numbered face:
angles, yawning a
slow promise

ii.

trash is the thing that
surrounds quietly
when we sit occupied with
other things.

the silent stacks of
stained plates, watermarked
mugs, the signs
that we walked here;
lived, even.

iii.
careful not
to disturb
what lies in earth

cracked screens, torn pages,
freezers strapped shut by
dark, rich humus of
history, filled with
desiccated turkeys, an
unwashed flask tucked behind
the tv.

these later people
cannot believe the way
we lived.

– Saskatoon, 1997