CATHERINE OWEN
The Rusty Toque | Issue 13 | Poetry | November 30, 2017
Homeless heart, where are you now? [J Ashbery]1. So the beautiful morning is back, where everything is visible, compartments of people glitter over the bridge, traveling to feed themselves with longing, the lines of the mountains are securely drawn, and we can forget there are no fish in the exquisite river. How can there be such anxiousness as this? 2. All is symbiosis and we, the interrupter. Yes, there is consolation in the inevitable, enviable takeover of wild flower and ivy, the winding of green over the theme parks where Dipsy Doo the Clown hues with lichen before vanishing into a forest of the future. But that’s aeons away, is it not? They who have denied science so successfully have made us content with backdrop. 3. Did we ever belong and this anger, is it a reminder of that, a ghost in our loneliness? How we fill our mouths with Twinkies and other myths of childhood until our stomachs ache; then we take a pill. When morning begins and it’s beautiful, we feel worse, that unmatched to the loveliness, so a steer must die or a wolf; a cedar must die or a small rare lily. This is how we operate, homeless hearts. And the leader of us is a wound. 4. Take me back inside that time when I was warm & fed & a liar. O glorious love! Forgetting about the harmony of the spheres, what Archimedes cried, who said we are but halves of a rolling whole in Plato’s tract, the river grows colder, leaves hear the chlorophyll retreating. Some days I am too tired to even speak. And what would I say? The day has turned on its antique notion of hope and presents freshness. Everything, in the homeless heart, gleams. Who can say: a villanelle on a line by Anne ComptonWho can say how or why it all blazed away. A woman dies twice; the first time is her beauty. Day follows day follows day follows day. Knowing nothing, whether good, whether bad, ever stays. Yet the mind cannot settle into such clarity. Who can say how or why it all blazed away if one doesn’t admit the transience of clay, and how does one do that in a moment so free of day following day following day following day. Yes, we’re speaking of love and its feelings of play. A long childhood afternoon lost by the sea when who can say how or why it all blazed away and suddenly the creases, the aches and the grey as wants become hushed and we lie about need, day after day after day after day, while we hope (still, we hope) and pray if we pray until the rest of our life turns a quiet sad plea that we learn how or why it all blazed away as day follows day follows day follows day. |
CATHERINE OWEN lives in New Westminster, BC. She is the author of 10 collections of poetry and 3 of prose including her compilation of interviews with Canadian poets called The Other 23 and a Half Hours: or Everything You Wanted to Know that your MFA didn't Teach You (Wolsak & Wynn, 2015). Her latest book of poems is Dear Ghost, (Buckrider Books, 2017). She works in film, composes Marrow Reviews, and collaborates with multimedia artists in bands and on theatrical projects.
