How does a poem begin?
Looking out the back door, waiting for the rain to let me out into the yard. Is it writing if I say I don't know anymore?
A sunnier afternoon this past weekend, Kay figuring out we got about half the mulch we actually needed, I acknowledge that this has all been something else than I described when I convinced us both to buy a place. The acknowledgment is well received, but here we are anyway, the last year of thinking gone into emailing contractors, writing the realtor, the notary, the bank, running numbers, and running them again. The things I've learned about spreadsheet formulas I can't put into words. Now, we exit the front door, we enter the front garden. Now, everything tells us people see owners, no longer tenants, not poets.
Did people see poets before? At the beginning, earlier into the thick of this, amid the ends that wouldn't take. Right now, I want to know what trick could still cut us down to that kilter of the old onset. I want to know if, just around the corner, there's still the magic of starting back, back there, without leaving this place.
Walking through the neighbourhood with a poet friend, they tell me they've been beginning the things and ending them and they look at the finished bits piling up and think, sure. They could keep doing that. But what they do do, increasingly, is wonder about all this collecting, this piling on again. They wonder where it's all going. They want to know if it's where we're meant to be. Which is to say, I'm thinking now, they know it's not where we're meant to be. Or that's the fun, let’s say, of the whole thing we do, there is no known *meant to be* in this—only the known not-knowing of it—really. This is what I so like about us, about my friend. The fraught part, the not-knowing, continuously outlives the knowing thing. Always wants to go on biting and unmoored and annoying, to really mean something. To carve down to the middle. To reach for the long shears and go digging up suckers.
Which is to say, I'm finding out I like to cut the shoots nice and small. The sun comes out and I'm back in the yard. I come out here to fixate on the cutting back. I unfurl what they call a garden waste bag. I hold the loppers low to the ground, I put a foot down on one of the handles, and hook the sharp end around what looks like too thick a branch. I place a stupid amount of faith in what can happen next. I bring down the blade and work through the limb.
Darby Minott Bradford is a poet and translator based in Tio'tia:ke (Montreal). They are the author of Dream of No One but Myself (Brick Books, 2021), which won the A.M. Klein QWF Prize for Poetry and was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and Governor General Literary Awards. Bradford's first translation, House Within a House by Nicholas Dawson (Brick Books, 2023), received the Warland Award and John Glassco Translation Prize, and was also shortlisted for the Governor General Literary Awards. Their second book, Bottom Rail on Top (Brick Books, 2023), was named a 2023 Best Canadian Poetry Book by the CBC and was a finalist for the Raymond Souster Award and the A.M. Klein Prize. Ring of Dust by Louise Marois is their second translation.
