(Homage to Pindar; Prayer to Battus)<\/em> come away, unclean lovers of pure things, while we have time: you. ocean depths, murk filled with fat glory is thirst. sleep eternal, mouldering god it was pulsating, sighing flesh(earth) above him twine lust, curved melons, voices(arrows) droplets of light borne in bone-dark jars — Saskatoon, 1997<\/p>\n This poem was published while I was living in Saskatoon, in a chapbook titled Odin Swings<\/em> (1997).<\/p>\n In a course, much later, I was urged to rework this material into a more narrative vein, and this was what I came up with:<\/p>\n An Ocean, History<\/strong><\/p>\n Murk, frigid, full of voices and salt-flames: — Montreal, 1999<\/p>\n Still later, I produced this:<\/p>\n A Diaspora<\/strong><\/p>\n Always<\/em>, for us, is a bounded time\u2014a hundred the wavering world, horizon stippled with watery light It feels sometimes as if the oceans were emptied out.<\/p>\n and the men set out, murk beneath them, their voices rowing fleshbone frames, were these the boys who feared Imagine being lost, tethered by knowledge carrying strange ghosts, naked and rapacious spirits starved minds in those days were paved with wide heavy stones, Death, we acknowledge, will create such hunger.<\/p>\n how far was it to Libya, or home? months, perhaps years What we must learn is that a petty utopia — Montreal, 1999<\/p>\n Somehow, I still prefer the first version, however.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (Homage to Pindar; Prayer to Battus) by Gord Sellar come away, unclean lovers of pure things, while we have time: soil-bright glistening to rotten feet; I can\u2019t breathe without you. ocean depths, murk filled with fat luminous stars, burning salt-fire, frigid grey breath. glory is thirst. sleep eternal, mouldering god braided into the middle root […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"series":[],"class_list":["post-179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-poems-canada"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xIep-2T","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=179"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":181,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/179\/revisions\/181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=179"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gordsellar.com\/texts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n by Gord Sellar<\/em><\/p>\n
\nsoil-bright glistening to rotten feet; I can\u2019t breathe without<\/p>\n
\nluminous stars, burning salt-fire, frigid grey breath.<\/p>\n
\nbraided into the middle root of (y)our city<\/p>\n
\nthat drew us here, naked of fathers, alone; one eagle feather.<\/p>\n
\nmusic, entwined all and pressing like sex<\/p>\n
\nto awaken the new-kissed soil<\/p>\n
\n
\nMen in rows, barren, and naked of fathers,
\nCross darkness, history, rowing fleshbone frames.
\nEagle songs, and ocean smoke; who bothers
\nTo recall? But carrying such bone-dark, naked ghosts
\nWrapped in sacred bundles between frigid bones.
\nAnd through our minds’ wide paving stones, dark hosts
\nSing down to him who in ice-bright soil moans;
\nThe founder, whose buried voice crawls from no throat
\nTo now and to us drowned in filth. And for his folk
\nLibya was far as Andromeda. Set out,
\nCleanse now, wash in strange waters, thus he spoke.
\nBut otherwise engaged, our ships unbuilt;
\nour civilization nestling into the silt.<\/p>\n
\nthousand years is the length of our<\/em> always.
\nAnd always, we\u2019ve felt it pushing beneath the surface
\nof the mind, deep in the underworld of instinct.<\/p>\n
\nbeneath the surface burns the fiery salt, the voices and
\nmemories of history itself, frigid and barren: the igneous
\nocean is distilled and solidified into a passage-way.<\/p>\n
\ncarrying sacred songs of history: stories of a single feather
\nand bearing the world in bone-dark jars; blood wrapping
\nhoary bundles of truth, hidden among bones and hungers.<\/p>\n
\nthe night? who fled to mothers and nurses when sun slept?
\nthese men, long ago lost in the trudge of always, demigods
\nthey were not. they shuddered on seeing the gloom beneath.<\/p>\n
\nalone to the infinity of stars in their shifting places;
\nlost in the world with only the secret language
\nof sky, voiced quiet when the others sleep.
\nImagine navigating the world by skylit darknesses;
\nthen imagine your world left far behind.<\/p>\n
\nfor blood, for promises and betrayals. the seas were filled with
\nthe eyes of the dead; diverting roads across the dark water,
\nthey steered the course of the world as fully as the stars above.<\/p>\n
\nand beneath, churning, bound in glittering ice-bright soil,
\na voice crept up from a corpse, cracking the foundation
\nbecause the founder, the father of the city, feared loss.<\/p>\n
\nif fate, as it often lusts to, betrayed them. yet they
\nset out. they knew that the only atonement to death is
\nsearching for anything. and they, at least, dared to set out.<\/p>\n
\nis no more than a diaspora from history:
\nno matter what we do, we cannot drive
\nthe yearning from us; always, that urge to be lost.<\/p>\n