Amanda Earl : Am I Too Blue For You

 

 

 

 

after Lucinda Williams

for Steven

I need to be a better poet if the good poets are dying too soon. I only have so much time left. None of the above is acceptable. The language isn’t specific, it’s dull. My subject is banal. I haven’t made this into a poem just a box to stow away my feelings. A ham-fisted elegy to a friend who I’d rather be e-mailing. He’s become another ghost in my inbox.

I’d like the scotch neat please. a toast to a kin(dred), even though alcohol is forbidden to me now. I will have to drink his heady words instead, returning to the dog-eared pages of his books and the inscriptions he wrote to me and dated, so I remember each time I saw him, each conversation in the Royal Oak, at the National Library, in hospitality suites in Ottawa and Kingston, on a train heading west.

I was thinking of my friend off and on this spring as the snow melted and the sidewalks cleared. I told him about the scooters when they first appeared in Ottawa. He seemed delighted. The day after he died I imagined him roaring along on a scooter up Sparks to Darcy McGee’s in one of those bright blue shirts he always wore for readings. The sky today is Steven Heighton reading shirt blue.

 

 

 

 

Amanda Earl (she/her) is a big fan of Steven Heighton's. She also writes and publishes folks. More info at AmandaEarl.com.

Rob Winger : Late Arrival

 

 

 

 

 

Steve, I’ve been reading your collected Selected,
earmarking its final pages for a next exchange
– a party hat, sure, but also the next tower
on the bridge, without cables just yet,
holding space across this water between us. 

Why do you wait till the waiting fills years
you ask, here, on this page written the year
we might first have met. Why will you stall till
the stalling’s your life? Online, all my feeds
are hungry with love notes, mixed tapes, 

festival lineup chit-chat, craggy outcrops and
dog-filled mountain meadows, serious hula hoops
and basement hecklers, a kid’s constellations,
your bottle still sitting on the staircase down. It’s only
now I see the all the gravestones between your covers. 

I’d like to ask your thoughts on all these bridges,
Steve. But only the central girders, the primary
roadways with their cable-stayed towers, only
the ends of the cantilever levelling, only these
have yet been built across this water. 

In your second-to-last email, you said, it seemed
to you, we were uncannily similar men, so Chapeau
bas, you typed. If only. The new Champlain bridge,
I see, was built in independent sections, too, only later
linked with a clear roadway that looked like earth. 

It’s fix yourself now or always be broken you said.
So you’re still holding, I think, that whiskey glass
or some Martin’s slender neck. You’re still offering
your winter coat to some freezing stranger. You’re
listening to another final speaker’s ancient closing tongue. 

The bridge, then: not just a poem, but a poem written
with care across water. Not just a pointing towards the far
shore, but a way across this rushing gorge, less snow
globe than astral plane. Let’s catch that new thermal the next
time you’re standing here, okay? We’ll ride it all the way across.

 

for Steven Heighton (1961-2022), with three lines from his “Gravesong,”

 

 

 

 

Rob Winger is the author of four books of poetry, including his latest, It Doesn't Matter What We Meant. He lives in the hills northeast of Toronto, where he teaches at Trent University.

Natalee Caple : Hello, you've reached 1994. I'm unable to reach you unable to remember what I was trying to say. Please leave a message for me please don’t say, goodbye for now.

 

 

 

I thought I thought a waste a curtain in front of something I wanted to write 

I was going to phone and say no one owns the water friend to my way of thinking you would answer me beautiful astronaut sure sure we look older but answering doesn’t cost a dime don’t laugh but I remember you saying when I was sad as we kissed goodbye what a lovely kiss and I said tell everyone Gosh I think I’m drunk again! I want to be drunk again all of us in a living room a room where we are all alive

Hello those you awhile bereaved Hello daughters and lovers Hello wife and friends Hello

Black curls black irises insomnia guitars sunflowers chili

What if I keep saying bastard, is that a spell? Please don't cut me off by dying leave a voice in the void to stall goodbye 

Fuck nature & nature poems find signals on impossible winds keep from disconnecting right now cause it’s not time for you I'm screening memories in a factory and waiting up for an explanation 

 

                                                                 for Steven Heighton (1961-2022)

 

Natalee Caple is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Her latest book of poetry, Love in the Chthulucene/Cthulhucene was published by Wolsak and Wynn in Spring 2019. Natalee is an associate professor at Brock University.