were flat between hands,
or dialing out their limits of energy
in a glass of stale beer.
When Voyager 1
was scheduled to clear
the solar system,
NASA signalled its onboard camera
to swing back
and take a picture of home. Six
billion kilometres out,
Earth’s photo
a ‘pale blue dot’ .12
pixels in size.
I am in there too,
a child in trampled clover.
If I stand on a scale
and hold the fruit fly in my hand,
does the needle drop a bit
the second it dies?
Where once there was nothing, something.
Where once there was nothing, nothing.
Close All Tabs
I’ve been reading how they still dredge up
tacks and ivory eyelets
scattered near Simon the Cobbler’s shop,
where Socrates
often stopped to chinwag in the Athenian agora.
As the weather clears
and the austere linden sags into leaf, I watch
our neighbours
empty out their rooms across the street,
propping odds, ends and bags
of garbage against the realtor’s sign; a big, bold SOLD
in red Calibri.
Of the agora scrap, the ancient inventory
piles up: amphorae,
broken capitals and ostraka used as votes to exile
fellow citizens,
so many loops and lines alike the same hand
must have carved them,
proof of ancient vote-rigging. We think the news is over,
but it never is.
Mid-May I watch and rewatch the Madsen doc
on Onkalo, the ‘hiding place’
in northern Finland. Did I mention you should see it?
At surface the clocks
run very fast, Peter Wikberg notes in his Scandinavian
accent, while in the rock
it goes very, very slowly. His subject is the shelf life
of nuclear waste,
where they hope to stash it away forever.
Greek diggers raised
curse tablets found in ancient wells. Socrates might
have known their authors:
students, merchants and neighbours who shared a bench
in the Theatre of Dionysus
and heard the rhapsodes stitch Homeric tales into local
stories of their own,
the orange Attic sun radiant on the southern slope
of the Acropolis. Onkalo
will be closed and backfilled with rows of radiation tubes
secured in passages
five kilometres below. Conditions on the ground
will change, Berit Lundqvist
admits at the table next to Wikberg. On the surface you never
know what’s going to
happen. It could be wars; it could be economic depression.
A caribou lifts its muzzle
and listens across the taiga’s granite and snow. My neighbours shift
a shovel, rake
and lawn chairs from back shed to scuffed, grey porch
for moving day, clear
a bookcase of knick-knacks and novels, then clear the wall
of shelves and art,
posing tiredly in bare windows as I browse
‘I bind Euandros with a leaden bond,’ one tablet states,
the goal to handicap
a rival actor in performance. This curse was scraped
into hammered lead, rolled
and clasped with tacks, then submerged to set its spell
in motion. Online
new headlines replace Fukushima and Damascus, the late
Eurozone undertow
shored up in an Athenian square where a pensioner
in protest and despair
has blown his brains out. Sing, goddess, sing the rage
of Peleus’ son Achilles,
Euandros intones to the festival crowd, his voice
steady and clear,
the theatre’s tiers raised with broken stone from older
temples. By June,
new neighbours paint the pine railing and steps
with two fresh coats
of biscuit-brown acrylic. I’ve watched them watch the street,
weighing their lives
by what they chose to leave or take, knowing
we must make
strange with a place before we inherit the sense
of never having been
anywhere else, and curse it for ruin, and stoop to paint
the porch again.
We sing to free ourselves from the room
–Wild Flag
Notes and Acknowledgements
‘Vicious’: Ethos anthropos daimon: ‘A man’s character is his fate.’
‘Dance’: Osel Hita Torres, the name of the boy chosen by the Dalai Lama as a reincarnation of a spiritual leader, denounced the Buddhist order in his twenties, citing ‘the misery of a youth deprived of television, football and girls.’ Taken away from his family as a child and forced to live a monastic, secluded life, he had been allowed to socialize only with other reincarnated souls, and by eighteen had never seen couples kiss. At the time of writing, he was studying film in Spain. The epigraph for the poem is his reaction to his first disco experience.
‘Circa Now’: Michael Madsen, dir., Into Eternity: A Film for the Future. (Denmark, 2010); Claudio Magris, Danube (London: The Harvill Press, 1999).
‘In Event of Moon Disaster’: Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates was an Antarctic explorer on Scott’s ill-fated expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole. Aware his severe frostbite was jeopardizing his companions’ survival on the return journey, he famously announced, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,’ before exiting their tent into the blizzard. His body has never been found.
‘Ten Years’: see Virgil, The Aeneid. Book 3.
‘Loot’: Lawrence Rothfield, The Rape of Mesopotamia. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
‘Talk’:
‘The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work …’
– ’The Choice,’ W.B. Yeats
‘End Times’: This poem borrows images from the article ‘Life in the Zone’ by Steve Featherstone, published in Harper’s magazine (June 2011). Lines in italics are borrowed from Svetlana Aleksievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. (New York: Picador, 2006).
‘Charles ‘Old Hoss’ Radbourn’s Finger, 1886’:
(First known photograph of the middle finger)
Greeks weren’t the source of its phallic connections necessarily, though
first to imply an offensive nature,
documents claim. In The Clouds by Aristophanes
Socrates lectures on poetic meter. A novice who
stresses he certainly knows what a dactyl
is, then produces his middle digit, since dactylos
signifies both a finger and rhythmic measure, a long and then two
shorterish spans like the joints of
fingers, or a penis and testicles, the last a dactylic word like poetry
which has a falling rhythm ...
So many thanks to my family and friends. I am extremely grateful for support provided through the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the City of Ottawa and the Banff Centre Leighton Colony during the writing of this book. Some poems were published previously in Arc magazine, The Walrus, The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 and Toronto Poetry Vendors. Thank you to the editors. A version of ‘Vicious’ was performed as part of the Very Short Play Festival 2011. Much thanks to John Koensgen and New Theatre of Ottawa. Thanks
to Alana Wilcox, Leigh Nash and Evan Munday at Coach House; to Harold Hoefle, Simon Armitage and Ken Babstock for comments; and I’m especially grateful to Kevin Connolly and my editor Jeramy Dodds for superb edits.
About the Author
David O’Meara lives in Ottawa, Ontario. He is the author of three collections of poetry, including most recently Noble Gas, Penny Black (Brick Books, 2008), and a play, Disaster, nominated for four Rideau Awards. His poetry has been shortlisted for the Gerald Lampert Award, the ReLit Award, the Trillium Book Award, a National Magazine Award, and he has won the Archibald Lampman Award twice. He is the director of the Plan 99 Reading Series, Artistic Director of VERSEFest (www.versefest.ca) and was the Canadian judge for the 2012 Griffin Poetry Prize.
This ePUB edition produced at the Coach House on bpNichol Lane.
Typeset in Albertan,which was designed by the late Jim Rimmer of New Westminster, B.C., in 1982. He drew and cut the type in metal at the 16pt size in roman only; it was intended for use only at his Pie Tree Press. He drew the italic in 1985, designing it with a narrow fit and very slight incline, and created a digital version. The family was completed in 2005 when Rimmer redrew the bold weight and called it Albertan Black. The letterforms of this type family have an old-style character, with Rimmer’s own calligraphic hand in evidence, especially in the italic.
The print edition is typeset in Aragon and Gala and printed in August 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg KORD offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.
Edited by Jeramy Dodds
Designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover Design by Eric Schallenberg
Cover Design by Rémi Thériault
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