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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.
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  • Home
    • Issue 1 >
      • Creative Nonfiction: 1
      • Fiction: 1
      • Screenwriting: 1
      • Poetry: 1
      • Contributors: 1
    • Issue 2 >
      • Visual Art: 2
      • Fiction: 2
      • Poetry: 2
      • Masthead: 2
      • Contributors: 2
    • Issue 3 >
      • Poetry: 3
      • Visual Art: 3
      • Comics: 3
      • Fiction: 3
      • Reviews: 3
      • Masthead: 3
      • Contributors: 3
    • Issue 4 >
      • Prose: 4
      • Poetry: 4
      • Reviews: 4
      • Visual Art: 4
      • Contributors: 4
      • Masthead: 4
    • Issue 5 >
      • Nonfiction Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark
      • Drama: 5
      • Prose: 5
      • Poetry: 5
      • Film: 5
      • Comics: 5
      • Reviews: 5
      • Visual Art: 5
      • Video & Sound: 5
      • Masthead: 5
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    • Issue 6 >
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    • Issue 10 >
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      • Masthead: 10
    • Issue 11 >
      • Poetry: 11
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      • Masthead: 11
    • Issue 12 >
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      • Masthead: 12
    • Issue 13 >
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      • Masthead: 13
  • About
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