Fast Backward
Concord Casmir the cat has predicted spring weather by eating a perogy, as opposed to flipping it from side to side. Quite reasonable, this means of measuring how much longer we’ll be using our blue SAD light to stave off the bloated dark. I am but a lowly rolling pin and you my plot of ropey knotted muscle. Tomorrow is the Festival of Broken Needles, during which women will place a household’s intricate sundries and miscellanea on Shinto shrines: paper clips, stray earrings, bike keys flashing their buckled teeth. I sputter and simmer my envy of sacred miniatures a palm can cradle. Somewhere. off in the distance, but still close enough to tremor in viscera, the Great Lake rears its foaming head, taking a smattering of islands with it on the down-crash. I am a guitar neck and you my embracing capo. The street calves; it births toxic fumes; it chokes on its own offspring. A nimbostratus cloud patrols the block, laughably unthreatening. Squirrels protest evictions from tree encampments. Whoever thought we’d find ourselves here, nostalgic for the days of breezy coffee dates and benign divination. Buzzards draw near, circle near-extinct languages. I am a metal measuring cup and you my bag of steel-cut oats. A fan whirrs out our love in syncopated shadow. The only blades a body trusts.
I’m Not Being Hard on Myself, You’re Being Hard on Yourself
Why am I such a dunce, I ask my teapot,
as if it knew beehive from lacewing,
as if my spiraling had its roots in the
travails
of a serial pragmatizer. It seems I am
forever
revisiting that year of my life when
everything felt
like a massive leveling, gypsum and
wishbone
dust swimming in mucous membranes.
Isn’t this, really, what I’ve wanted
all along?
Not absolution but acknowledgment, not
a soapbox
but a touchstone, minus the cheesy
synth?
Someone to hold the step-ladder when I
need
something off the top shelf. It’s hard
to recall the moment I stopped occupying
myself with such trivialities as
genealogical
excavation and took up lawn bowling,
quoits
and other pastimes that involved the
tossing
of metal and wood across a shimmering
pitch.
How I turned like a two-bit Sisyphus
to rolling my own heart up a steep
landfill
incline, bumping to a halt amidst all
the other
obsolete mechanisms chillaxing in the
no-man’s-land
of my idealism, sampling all the finger
food.
At the Oracle of Delphi
At
the Oracle of Delphi, flak was given and received.
A
salamander could spend its life crawling over a door
hinge
made of phosphorescent scrap metal.
There
could be no mistaking the squeal of the lopsided
clouds
set nightly ablaze. Even the stoplights were waterproof.
If
you shuddered you would miss the turnoff.
What
an uproar that day, when the silversmith’s
watchdog
walked off the job, ignoring
the
preparations in the works for its glorious veneration!
From
the watchtower, you could observe
the
sea in the process of berating itself,
each
splendid, solid wave suddenly unfreezing
and
slapping down onto the next. What was
to
be done with this newfound similitude?
In
the face of such exquisite insurrection,
who
had time for forgiveness?
Lisa Richter is a Toronto-based poet, writer, and teacher.
She is the author of two books of poetry, Closer to Where We Began and Nautilus
and Bone, winner of the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, the
National Jewish Book Award for Poetry (US), the Robert Kroetsch Award, and
longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award. Her work can be found in The
Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, Literary Review of Canada, The
New Quarterly, and other places.