MATT RADER
The Rusty Toque | Issue 10 | Poetry | June 30, 2016
THE ILIAD OR THE POEM OF FORCE BY SIMONE WEIL
Someone was there and, the next moment, no one. I’ve been reading the Iliad for years. The bath Andromache warmed for her husband is cold now. But Hector, alone beyond the city walls, was not Too far from warm baths. He was The two hundred-fourteenth man killed in the Iliad. MUSIC LESSON
All the children of Bevan crowd around To study the xylophone of vertebrae The deer has left on the school house floor. It is so serious in the abandoned school We can hear the fiddleheads perform. Ever-so-slowly, the students pair-off And dance a reel over the broken floor And the tree roots and between the trees. THE IRISH CLIFFS OF MOHER BY WALLACE STEVENS
At the Cliffs of Moher we sat in the hired car And I read you “The Irish Cliffs of Moher” By Wallace Stevens while a barefaced rook Went jackbooting across the silver hood. “Who is my father in this world, in this House,”—linebreak— “At the spirit’s base?” I read slowly and as if there were no question Who understood and who was “shadows Like wind” and who was going “back to a parent Before thought, before speech,” and who Finally, was queued with the cold buffetings Of air fleeing the Atlantic, with the despotic Crow and his skin-helmet and his look, That weird black bird, “at the head of the past.” |
MATT RADER’S most recent collection is Talking Trojan War Blues (M&S 2016). His poems and stories have appeared widely across Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia. Born and raised on Vancouver Island, Rader teaches at the University of British Columbia Okanagan in BC’s interior.
His poem “Music Lesson” refers to the Vancouver Island ghost town of Bevan and the ruins of the schoolhouse that can still be found in the coastal forest of the Comox Valley.
His poem “Music Lesson” refers to the Vancouver Island ghost town of Bevan and the ruins of the schoolhouse that can still be found in the coastal forest of the Comox Valley.
