The Province of Poetry & Prayer

 

Lane behind Girouard Avenue, 22 October 2009 

there is a listing or taking of priorities

these things as i have noted them here

are taking place have taken

are the true & proper province of poetry & prayer

                                                             —bpNichol

                                                            The Martyrology, Book Three

 

 

                                                Make my dark heavy

                                                Poem light, and

                                                light

 

                                                —John Donne

                                                “The Progresses of the Soule”

 

 

 

 

1.

only love

has moved me

 

2.

this is my long stopover, my

place in the journey /

 

3.

What is the progress

of my soul? The tree of life,

Adam's fall, Isak Dinisen's

"Sorrow Acre"

 

the skyline, clouds on the horizon

 

the strata of years, the smell

of the air on an October morning,

 

the melting snow in March,

the inflection of words

of what is said, places and streets

places and streets

where my family lived

 

the generations are buried here,

like layers of sediment

where water washed silt across the shore,

 

broken pottery, cracked mirrors,

rust and bones, boxes of soil,

places and streets

 

4.

I woke in Dante’s dark forest

distant from when I was young,

 

surrounded even then by shadows,

someone is dragging in the sacrificial bull,

the stag, the lamb, the erosion of truth

 

could a little corruption

do that much damage?

 

it seemed minimal, collateral

damage to the soul, but no one gets off lightly:

we wait for the apocalypse on our acre of dust

 

that is when

I was delivered up 

to grief and regret

 

5.

a long winter moved across this land,

my life

 

            where the trees

                        had been cut down,

 

a northern storm

like an army in retreat

 

fled across a hundred acre field,

fear blows down

 

from the frozen north,

 

snow hardened into dunes

by the blowing wind,

 

            and beneath the frozen earth

 

                        a sheet of ice,

where houses were abandoned

like wooden ships

 

whose crews had fled

and where empty windows

 

stare blankly

at my approach

 

Written: 15 April 2018; retrieved, 04 February 2026