Sunday, September 4, 2022

Pearl Pirie: heya Phil

from Report from the Hall Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

are we more than the height above our toes
and the residual
torque from our birth muck? gotta be,

yeah? a snag grabs a sock. a toenail clipped grows.
a torn one tears to blood, but grows, inevitably.

I retrieved the worm whose dirt I shovelled
into the puddle. grateful for mistakes I can fix.

a knife used for decades wore itself down to the hilt.
a useless stub of a scraper like a pencil of no use, kept.

until it wasn't. lost with dad's stuff. what the deuce was lost
in the shuffle?  jokers mislaid. never had use for them.

missing metal implied by all the knives that are
in mind complete. repetitions speak in the ghost blade.

the partial is seductive more than the revealed, the raw
data of everything, minutiae insisting on paralysis of no need 

to decide. 

but the complete and honed is sharp enough
for the carrots and saves the arms and teeth some work.

shall we, Phil, exchange our childhoods for a roll call of their
nostalgia.
what would we lose? injury still propels but glowing.?

those were green-skied stormy days, lightning rod children
and winds that swayed trees that were freer hearts than ours.

while I fled the chop of Mississippi Lakes, the waters
well, it did as water does & closed over troughs

as angels sealed the mouths of Daniels lions. community
patched over, fibreglass over rusty hole in barn roofs.

gumdrop people remain in place, walk the shorelines
we escaped. drink from that rising and falling water table.

the old ones then were only in their thirties. who knew
anything before forty. (at eighty our cutoff will be sixty.)

how i watched the waves, dizzying myself tracking droplets
and made for furthest shores as fast as I knew how
.

us book-marked 

flop-flippers. wind keeps catching whatever page we were on.
doesn't matter. act of sitting with is the thing.

at the funeral the thin became opaque. his fugues
sublimated to vapour. memories of humour sit in his chair.

one mismatched couple over thirty years shifted energies,
hi
s sped and hers slowed. how not to ask, what if

I became inert a while, locked as a carved barn owl
until my vole appeared. (I forget I can be detected.)

(so much time watching, in my hide, in my hidden
divide of people like me vs. incomprehensible novelties.)

a man who was alone then, smiles easily, banters.
I never saw him so happy with his ex wife. it was beautiful.

it was as if he was metal waiting for the welding torch
and there she is, generic, petit, from the outside, beside him.

a couple who had split in my time, are together again.
(three funerals in a row must count as real.)

the rain held off while it could and it suited our plans.
now it comes and what of it. we were always muddy water.

 

 

                Lac Notre Dame, May 2, 2022

 

 

 

Pearl Pirie's fourth published poetry collection was footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures (Apt 9 Press, Sept 2021) is her chapbook of minimalist poems. Not Quite Dawn (Éditions des petits nuages, March, 2020) collects up haiku, tanka and senryu. She is on twitter as pesbo, and on Instagram and Patreon at PearlPiriePoet. Her author site is www.pearlpirie.com