DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL

The Rusty Toque | Issue 4 | Poetry | February 15, 2013

THE CORRECTION LINE (A MESSAGE FROM THE FINAL COLONIAL)

To compensate for the curvature
of the Earth, and promote orderly
settlement, you corrected the meridian lines
at the edge of the townships you founded
in the Dominion Land Survey. This

was in keeping with your correction
of the lines of people who wrongly wasted
that uncorrected ground. It’s all for me,
the fix: the cuffs, the cleanse, the impending
discovery of the outcast-marking gene.

To account for my coming hunger,
you teach the world to teach the world
to starve. With the wild whipped from every
latitude, wipe yourselves out next. I am
the one who waits to rule as the first

total colonial, when everything out of line
is corrected, and man-made drones survey
a wholly man-made world free of all men
save the last. Like meridian lines rising to fuse
in the frozen north, all that you make and are

strives to converge in the rousing of me.

UPON FIRST LOOKING THROUGH A RUBBER MASK INTO LYNCH'S MULHOLLAND DR.
reboot of a poem published a few years back

The professor lectures before the film. We interrupt,
late because of the smokes we smoked outside. It’s that 
time of year again: the bicycle racks are filled more
with falling leaves and shopping bags than bikes. 
Cigarettes burn slow when inhaled through rubber 
mouths. We couldn't have removed our masks. 
We suffered so long without them! When will time
follow the lead of space and finally rhyme with 

“embrace”? This is the kind of riddle the masks ready us 
to erect a Sphinx to pose. The professor doesn’t ask us shit
about our masks, or shit about our faces. Our classmates,
murmuring, are minnows the professor nets with a shush. 
Her notes absorb her. They are cult leaders. She spreads
their words like five cent daisies. Does anyone see this
but us? What kind of disguise does it take to reveal
the truth? At the Value Village, first spotting the masks,

we had assumed our peers would cheer our fresh facades 
as they KO’ed our old ones. Our prof, we thought, 
was destined to praise the genius of our grace 
as it animated anew our fixed features and fake hair 
the way a dream animates bodies under new names 
in new distensions, which, through generous observation, 
briefly set us free. One hour in, I have missed most 
of Lynch’s film. My breath, mask-taxed, fogs then clears

then fogs and fogs some more the lenses of my specs.
The screen’s light reflects on my frames in that space
between the rubber eye-openings and my own eyes, the gap 
between seeing and the inside unseen from the other side.
DANIEL SCOTT TYSDAL is the author of two books of poetry, The Mourner’s Book of Albums (Tightrope 2010) and Predicting the Next Big Advertising Breakthrough Using a Potentially Dangerous Method (Coteau 2006). Predicting received the ReLit Award for Poetry (2007) and the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Award (2006). He currently teaches creative writing and English literature at the University of Toronto Scarborough.