Thursday, June 20, 2024

Graham Pearce : No Distance – Three Poems

folio : Barry McKinnon (1944-2023)


For Barry McKinnon


No Distance

The beat & flutter, quiet among the band
The drummer asks time to hold no distance
The trick is to play as one

To aim for focus: maybe, that’s the point
in this mudscape the smuck of a boot
reminds the poet of the farm the woods

where there is no year zero, and the voices
are sparrows, horny angels, for in the forest
the death fugue sings the life fugue

The Death Fugue sings The Life Fugue

Old Man Winter laughs at the light,
the mind’s Libido

Blindness focusses
                   the poet’s inner plight

For to find oneself in the desert
with a coin or a little ice
placed over the mind’s eye
is enough
to fool the Miser

Hey, Virgil,
now’s the time

 to close the distance
                   between the teeth on the comb
                   the dog hair and the snow
                   your bare back on the backseat
                   between the blue tor of dawn

cigarette & musk,

the indistinguishable whistle
from the CN train

that    which                     wails

with lamentations of beautiful women
                                                              calling us home         


 

Heart & Time

Heartsease in the Gorse entrance
enchants the bar divers
who offer to drink the moat
& to cross the table
& to swim the distance
& to make poetry matter most

Does poetry matter most?
For whom does poetry matter most?

One swam to the desert
some swam to drown
some swam way up river
more than a few went
queerly down

squint, but the horizon
does not point one in a direction
the horizon only calls one forward

Poet, you knew
the distance,
           we drank away the time
           you knew the beat
           root hog or die

you saw what they wanted
           you knew the price
even when you were heartbroken
even when you looked blind

You tried to close the distance
You refused to make it rhyme
You played it softly
between your heart and time

 

 

Broadside

Side 1

We had afternoon light
energies
& a godlike thirst for poems

Our senses, the body, beat with telescopic tragedy
& and we made jubilee
talking ourselves into
poetic memory

I have seen beautiful women
turn to hags
and write with such beauty
ah, fuck it

I have seen friends
turn into devils, possessed
and write drivel

          yet there is room in poetry for Everyone,
         God damn it 

I have seen great poems go unread
so often, the books that hold them
glow as if breathed on by some spirit under my desk

I have seen love come from a keg
like pansies or poesies 
and go like friends

 

Side 2

The Poem’s love appears in the blue hour
in an dogged desire for friendship
& Beauty, we were ready
we were here for Love

the love I sing for
the love I dismiss
or the love I hide from
in the cold breath
of morning
a love that burns in the tealights on the table at the Cork
& in the phosphorescent lamps
in the late afternoon, the ones that turn on
at about the same time
we poets would meet

 

 

 

 

 

Graham Pearce lives in Prince George and teaches Creative Writing, Composition, and Literature at the College of New Caledonia.