Truth
Tired with Iteration
Days
of the nothing-that-can’t-wait variety, Spring’s
come
untucked, and the birds are revving their throats
with
nowhere to go. As soon as I’m awake I make my bed,
rendering
a service to later exhaustion. My phone is full
of
things that beat me to it, the hey and nvm of a dozen
retracted
warnings. Half a conversation from another room
feeds
its shadow through the wall, without colour, detail,
or
structural transparency; it’s not an inside voice
until
it stays inside your lungs, I think, and instantly
rescind
the flicker from the fuse, in order to ride
a
sequence of error, compunction, and ethical pride.
Then
I brush my teeth, a monotonous vigour
imparting
the fragrance of industrial spearmint.
The
kettle is rumbling. Wilted, the irises
resemble
a bouquet of sneezed-in Kleenexes.
I’m
not sure how compost works, but something
about
soil must be contagious. A homeostatic system,
the
body for one, predicates life upon a series
of
exceptions, from the usual commerce of heat
with
diffusion. I remember by Parliament Hill
a
series of locks, a staircase of water, and boats
idling
upward. He rises on the toe, that spirit of his
in
aspiration lifts him from the earth. He is a noun
is
a noun is a noun is a noun.
The
worn elastic of an overplayed song.
Synonyms
almost, abstraction and abduction.
Quasi
Fan Tutte
She
goes to bed. He makes his move
in
chess, preferring lately the fianchettoed
bishop.
Tucked behind a triad of pawns
it
is coiled like a diamondback, reptilian
tongue
about to lunge at a flicker
of
dislodged gloaming. They offer
an
exchange of threats which like all
threats
are questions. Equerries confuse
a
caved in roof for shelter. But he can
constellate
the table salt, decode
the
braille off a ribbed condom, even as
he
sails on a sea freighted with golden fire,
a
cynosure who—to the lodestar’s tug
—sings
the blinding of Orion, the sky alive
with
narrative and direction. The dark-square
bishop,
immured by the alternative, seems all
aspersing
verdict and episcopal swipe.
It
fidgets with a rosary and prays to patience.
He
pours a drink. She sees in a sleep
that’s
bribed with dreaming: a chapel on a bridge
or
a bridge that is a chapel. It connects
the
pasture to a palace which leans on the connection.
Sprockets
of wild asparagus abut the barn
like
frozen grass; disheveled on a chimney,
the
straw corona of a stork nest. Mating
season,
that mock apocalypse, never was
so
economic: nothing wasted and no one happy.
And
the waters burst like a zit, bulked in splash
upon
swell, swimming things vomited up
flagellant
morsels in diminished multiplication.
And
the cantilevered link went jack-knife-like,
unmooring
both stable and manor, which smashed
in
the middle air where light moistens, clouds
asphyxiate.
Not a nostril in the parish missed
that
fragrant blend of manure and chrism.
Asperged
in sweat, she woke, inhaled
a
glass of water, and heard the ticking tock clock
picking
at the stitches in its pocket.
Joseph Kidney has published
poems in Arc, Vallum, Oberon,
The Fiddlehead, The New Quarterly, PRISM, and Al-Araby Al-Jadeed (in Arabic translation). He won the Short Grain Contest from Grain, and The Young Buck Poetry Prize (now the Foster
Poetry Prize) from CV2 for the best poem submitted by an author under 35. He was shortlisted
for the Bedford International Poetry Award, Arc’s Poem of the Year, and The
Malahat Review's Far Horizons contest. Originally from New Westminster, BC,
he is currently completing a PhD in early modern drama at Stanford University.
His chapbook Terra Firma, Pharma Sea is available from Anstruther Press.