~
fromanimal masks on the floor of the ocean
long gone are the insects
you forgave
this storm, the whale
of oblivion’s
white feast, this moon
the word
moon
*
I go places
in my ghost
that are children
when I arrive. they call me
high grass, lord
of the wind’s
blood. most of them
have lost
babies
with dog
names
to birth
or touch, our brief
attractions
to déjà vu
*
to be unthought of is to be one more person away from pain. no cricket you hear is alone. in my boy’s drawing of jesus, the ears are all wrong. his first sad poem is about an oven. his second calls dust the blood of a seashell. his third is so terrible that I tell my friends I’m just a gravedigger who wants to open a hair salon. my friends they are made of grief and brilliance…
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like everyone else
I only smoke
at funerals
sleep and death
bathing
in a me-shaped
emptiness
were never seen
by the same
ghost
when an animal
reading
dies
Mother an ache through which has rolled a hula hoop
Father a broken tv
missed by lightning
Eye a longing, a spoonful of milk
On a blue
arm
a mosquito
born in god’s
erasable
kiss.
A clown
so early
to the unmoving
dog.
Most movies
are hidden
by sleep.
newborns
playing tag
in a dream
Requisite
Tanya Holtland
Platypus Press, 2020
–
Does silence ever notice the quiet? Can doom move the past? Are we, by listening, able to pose our ask into a speaking that might enter unheard the conversation so lovingly and urgently remembered in Tanya Holtland’s Requisite? What language, what ghostly origin, what presence. With unassigned awareness, and while swallowing the clinical eye of attention, Holtland knows to talk underwater about distance and to use both our archival futures and communal isolations to render a spiritual economy of verse enough for us to picture multiple ecologies from the vantage point of some same animal with the ability to wonder secretly which four shapes will be on the test. And what of those stills of misplaced exits that were slipped into the water-damaged photo album of an escape artist, and what of our walking, and what of our inaction? Whether one scores…
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