folio: Forty-five Ottawa poets
And the bartender
I am slow, and tired,
and coaxing a single beer into myself
over the course of an hour.
It's that time of week, of night,
when everything takes longer than it ought
and I dully wish I were somewhere else
or that I'd brought a book — damned old Graham
Greene,
as dusty and luminescent as the gleam of the bartop.
But here my hands are empty, useless.
The bartender turns the lights down, and down.
The Senators score and a man slaps the counter
in triumph, maybe, or else in grief.
He swallows his dregs, he pays, and he leaves.
I used to understand drinking, and I barely understand
hockey,
but I’ve never understood strangers — their grief or their
awe.
With the game over, the screen mindlessly reels:
a documentary about the Amazon, a steamship,
the perils of driving against the current,
the perils of trying to film it. It heaves itself forward,
merciless, as progress must be merciless,
carving through sandbanks, through jungle, through bush,
through a man whose body splits cleanly in half,
and I cradle my beer glass as though it is more than it is,
as though it is less.
And the bartender turns the lights down,
and down.
dessa dips into the water with the molluscs, disappears
I tried to write you a poem about molluscs and it turned out
like this: river, water, water, river, river, water, water, river
and you get the gist. I put your dog in the poem. I put
myself in the poem too, obviously, I always do, and this time
I put myself beneath the water — fully beneath it, unlike
your dog, who is only partially beneath it. I wrote about
his paws, the puncture of a claw through shell, the gentle
and inexorable crush of a heel against a mussel or a clam.
There’s a metaphor there I don’t like, don’t want. Instead
I am writing this poem, the one where the molluscs remain
whole, unharmed, unpunctured, serene. I write myself into
these creatures, just like I did in the last poem: I grow
molluscs up and over my fingers until my fists become hard
and pearlescent as the river itself. And maybe I become
the river: mussels shingling into my bloodstream, anchored
inexorably, slimed and stubborn. And what happens
next? says the you in my head, now a you in this poem.
I can’t say I know for sure, says the me in
this poem.
But the me outside of this poem does know, knows for sure:
river, water, water, river. River, water. Water. River.
What are you working on and through, Dessa?
I am currently and slowly working through a long, Canada Council-funded poetic project responding to the research question: what if we live in a simulation? We surround ourselves with simulations, after all, all the time: movies and soundstages, social media and main character syndrome, daydreams and yearnings and intentions that never come to light but nevertheless feel real. Does life mean less if some of it is fake? Is curation and obfuscation a kind of fakery? Is art? Is emotion? In what ways, large and small, do we shape reality without thinking? The result is a collection that swings from training simulation manuals to Star Trek’s holodeck to the prisoner’s dilemma, always and ever asking: is this real? Does it matter? The poems in this collection provide little direct answer to these questions, but their answer is, nevertheless, and surprisingly, optimistic.
Dessa Bayrock has lived in Ottawa for a decade even though she only intended to stay a single year, because time sneaks up on you and at least the sun shines here in the winter. She was the editor of post ghost press for three years and is currently the prose editor for Arc Poetry Magazine, where she is almost always accepting pitches for essays about poetry. She has published two chapbooks and plays a solid third base in softball.
