Nightwood Editions

      P.O. Box 1779

      Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

      Canada

       www.nightwoodeditions.com

      Cover image: Michael Caines

      Cover design: Angela Yen

      Typesetting: Carleton Wilson

      Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

      This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled,

      ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free

      and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

      Printed and bound in Canada.

      CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.

      ISBN 978-0-88971-326-0

      This is a book of anxieties, you might say, an address to better understand them, an articulated relief. It’s dedicated to a few who have been a balm or a cure: my mother and sister, who have loved me longer than anyone, my grade ten high school English teacher Elaine MacDonald, who read my first poems and very likely saved my life, and my husband, Francis, who illuminates the corners.

      … in poetry there is no one behind the language being prayed to. It is the language itself which has to hear and acknowledge.

      —John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos

      Prayers

      Prayer for Irony

      After his wife left him for a juggler

      they met in the supermarket—a tall

      reedy man with fingers too fine

      for his short, plump torso—the artist

      did what he’d always wanted and

      bought a young terrier at the pound.

      He named it Irony, a cleverness

      in the face of grief, because wasn’t it

      he that suggested they invite his future

      cuckold, the juggler, for coffee?

      Around the house the dog pissed

      everywhere paper hadn’t been laid,

      making damp the hall closet, the sofa

      and bed. Irony was a model pup

      when the artist was free and the holiest

      hell at deadlines. If the man had baggies

      the shit was diarrhetic. Each evening

      the artist cried, the puppy padded

      across the room and slept. When, after

      weeks of being single, the artist said yes

      to an invitation to picnic in the park

      with that intern who held the elevator

      on occasion just for him, of course

      he brought Irony who vomited

      grass on the girl’s light blue Mary Janes.

      Finally, the artist thought himself savvy

      to rename the beast Happy. All day

      the terrier bawled for the moon in

      his small, convincing yowl until

      the sun rose on the seventh day

      and the man tried again with Lucky.

      By noon, a transport had flattened fur

      to grille, the nimble way a round dull

      period at the end of a sentence

      can render a trumped-up thought

      finite.

      Prayer for Hatred

      Would evolution have given feathers

      to the reptiles had they loved

      the risks on the ground?

      You resent your limitations, hatred

      being the best of them. A force

      for undoing, unavoidable,

      hatred is your beast rising up

      in the face of that which stands

      between you and fresh water.

      Must we debate if love

      is its bright twin, or if love, siametic,

      could live on its own?

      Has hatred not liberated

      more people than those who have done

      the enslaving?

      Dear hatred, sweet hatred,

      do you not move our enemies

      to know us better?

      Prayer for Envy

      Canvas envies paint.

      The bullhorn envies

      the voice without need

      of a battery.

      The diamond envies our indifference for coal.

      Pavement envies the boot, whereas

      the stiletto envies grass

      which is more true than

      the stiletto envies the boot

      or that pavement

      could envy grass.

      The needle envies

      the wound it closes, the scalpel

      envies skin.

      The ground the air

      for how it moves; the Earth

      its steady orbit.

      The dead envy the living,

      above all, for their smell.

      Envy

      envies only itself.

      In a song, all silence is envied by its notes.