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| Catherine Graham, one of Canada's finest poets |
Eyewear is very honoured to publish these four new poems by Catherine Graham, who I think is one of Canada's best poets born since 1960. She made the selection for my Selected Poems, due out in 2014. She has been writing during her recent treatment for cancer, and these poems represent her at her best. Her most recent collection will be published this fall, Her Red Hair
Rises
with the Wings of Insects from the excellent press Wolsak and Wynn; they make beautiful-looking books.
with the Wings of Insects from the excellent press Wolsak and Wynn; they make beautiful-looking books.
MRI
Slide
in like a deli-cut
of
meat, be domed
by
a crazed traffic of hellish sounds;
despite
the lend of (useless) headphones, dense
metal
filings of noise worm their way in
like
tics to melt your mental brain pan.
No
centre of pain to repel the whipped
sensation;
just bombs of clangs with gears
and
charging cracks and…
silence—
till
it gears again.
to
see cell deep
inside
what tocks
within
a calcified cloud, ready
to
burst its way out—
and
seed a master colony
of
take and take and take.
Catherine
Graham
---
Cloud insitu
You
branded the dream into me.
In
a plane, you, hightailing pilot,
newly
licensed and I, your eager passenger.
We
enter the blue you can’t see
when
you’re inside it. Ocean below.
Clouds
layered above. Until
lost,
we stop along a long floating runway, flat,
and
I walk out—too close to the cirrus edge—
to
look down at new Eden. See? Clouds can be solid.
(All
those water drops tight as ice.) But you
worry
until I turn back like a dream that can’t.
*
What’s
in me: contained.
A
deadly trap inside the breast, eager
to
snap (for cells are hungry to penetrate). Passed
down
from the mother, a genie
hankering
to fly out.
*
in situ Latin
in its place
Like
my manners—please
(stay
in) thank you (for listening).
But
carcinoma is a scary word
like
pain or death.
*
That
night the weatherman warns
of
tornadoes. Climactic sky
of
fungus green against chalk black.
Later,
when we look up—
shapes
we’ve never seen before—
giant
pouches hang beneath
a
bone of cloud, countless udders,
holding
viewers captive in a cloud.
Catherine
Graham
---
First Surgery
A
plastic gas mask is placed
over
your face, your mouth. “Breathe slowly.”
And
then, “Do you feel tired yet?”
Out
– into the land of the illusion
of
nothing, nothing but the cutting
around
the calcified nugget (wire-mapped twice
with
such dense breasts) and the surgeon’s skilful
lifting
– followed by a three-week stretch of hope
for
clean edges—
You awake
with a shake—
“It’s
over, Catherine.” And what rises from the inside out
is
primal through the IV drip of tears.
Raw-stunned
in your groggy state,
you
have entered her pain at the age of her death,
the
first operation before her last release
down
that long ago Christmas Day
when
she went to the land of nothing
of
no illusion without coming back, unlike
these
tears, rising so quietly wet, until you wipe them.
Catherine
Graham
---
Sword Lily
And
I am given the flowers
I
brought to your grave
that
long ago April day we
buried
you after the frozen
winter
finally let go, like the last
leaf
of fall, into the messy wind,
the
snow drip-dripping
the
slow melt of ice, the frozen
earth
becoming loose enough to take
you
in and close you up, shovel by shovel,
like
a wound with red blooming
swords
resting over it, spears
without
glinting edges, bandage
beauty
for sealing pain.
Catherine
Graham
all poems copyright 2013, by Catherine Graham.
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