Lines on Trout River in Public Reverie magazine

Some of the poems in Lines on Trout River have now been published in Public Reverie; thank you, Theresa Smalec! A chapbook containing the complete series of poems can be ordered from https://turrethousepress.ca/ Here is the first poem in the chapbook.

                    This is not yet the sea, it is the river.

             —Louis Dudek, Europe

  

It’s nice being alone
in old age, sitting
on the side of the bed
with the radio on,
classical music
on the CBC, and
a book I’m reading,
The Epic of Gilgamesh,
reading
by the light
of a lamp
bought at
an auction
thirty years ago,
and the lamp
even then was old,
made in the 1930s;
it was the MSO
playing Mahler’s
4th movement
of Symphony # 5,
and outside the insects
sing what my English
ancestors called “the
Canadian Symphony”
after they moved
to Ontario from Blackburn
in the north of England,
the least fashionable part of the UK,
they were builders, plasterers,
painters, carpenters,
workers in the mills,
carters, and landlords
renting flats they constructed, 
a distant cousin collecting rents,
and one was a publican
and farmer, at the Yew Tree
Inn—oh tree of death—and the sounds 
are Canadian sounds
on a fall night,
in the darkness,
before sleep.