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DAVID GROULX

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The Rusty Toque | Issue 3 | Poetry | October 12, 2012

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THE TRUTH ABOUT LOVE

It’s cold and raining outside
I want to curl beside you
like a cat
dying of tetanus
from an infected wound
you gave me years ago

THE BUSINESS OF MARRIAGE

Let’s be pragmatic about this
business like
because
it is business

You may kiss me
but neither of us
want to be kissed

We may stare at each other
but neither us of want
to be stared at

We desire
each other
but we cannot say
and we cannot hurt

Our business is another kind of pain

You may stroke me
with your words
or with your hands
press hard
against me

We crave this wicked
kind of love
soon it will be over my love
soon it will be done my dear
this wretched necessity

This sad business of ours

DAVID GROULX was raised in the Northern Ontario mining community of Elliot Lake. He is proud of his Native roots—his mother is Ojibwe and his father French Canadian. David studied creative writing at the En’owkin Centre, Penticton, BC, in 1998–99, where he won the Simon J. Lucas Jr. Memorial Award for poetry. He is the author of Night in the Exude (Tyro Publications, 1997), The Long Dance (Kegedonce Press, 2000), Under God's Pale Bones (Kegedonce Press, 2010), A Difficult Beauty (Wolsak & Wynn, 2011), Rising With A Distant Dawn (Bookland Press, 2011), and Chant Terra Indigenia (forthcoming in 2013 with Bookland Press). David’s poetry has appeared in over a hundred periodicals in England, Australia, Germany, Austria, and the USA. He lives in a log home near Ottawa.