Literary
echolalia by Dennis Cooley
the first thing you should know
about me is i am
a sound poet
i wind up &
throw my voice
into the tent
: like that
? how you like that
neat don't you think
all the loops in the system
some smart guy said well
what's the point
it's canvas isn't it
& you say yeah well so what
it's paint yr smearing there
all over the canvas yr words are paint
he's a real pain in the ass that guy
the important thing is
i take soundings see
i try to hear myself
try to hear you hearing
yur eyes grow green & big
that's how i find myself that's how
i find you
i can hear where you sizzle
& pop
The Lynx in the Rapids by Christopher Dewdney
It is a grey, rainless summer afternoon. You are
walking through a northern hardwood forest beside
a river. You hear a baby crying from the brush near
the rapids. As you approach the sound, the hairs on
the nape of your neck prick up. You step onto a
rocky clearing beside the rapids. A wet lynx sits on
the flat rock verging the cataract, its back to you.
The lynx turns its head to look at you over its
shoulder. Its eyes are almost entirely pupil, the thin
rim of an elliptical, gold iris barely visible around the
black crystal caverns of its pupils. You have stood
here before. In memory you scream magnetically as
you pluck the irises from your own eyes in a mirror.
The iris-tissue like gold foil slipping off pupils that
are dark openings onto an unknowable, alien
emptiness. The sirens begin to wail. You turn to run
as the world starts to break up. The lynx wheels and
leaps in one bound onto your shoulders, sinking its
teeth into the back of your head. You are drawn
whole into the black vacuum of the lynx's mouth.
The lynx transforms into an enormous horned
serpent, its body containing a universe of stars.
The world is a prison that has shrunk to the
outline of your body. You are now free to move.
Contemplation Is Mourning by Tim Lilburn
You lie down in the deer's bed.
It is bright with the undersides of grass revealed by her weight during the
length of her sleep. No one comes here; grass hums
because the body's touched it. Aspen leaves below you sour like horses
after a run. There are snowberries, fescue.
This is the edge of the known world and the beginning of philosophy.
Looking takes you so far on a leash of delight, then removes it and says
the price of admission to further is your name. Either the desert
and winter
of what the deer is in herself or a palace life disturbed by itches and
sounds
felt through the gigantic walls. Choose.
Light comes through pale trees as mind sometimes kisses the body.
The hills are the bones of hills.
The deer cannot be known. She is the Atlantic, she is Egypt, she is
the night where her names go missing, to walk into her oddness is
; to feel severed, sick, darkened, ashamed.
Her body is a border crossing, a wall and a perfume and past this
she is infinite. And it is terrible to enter this.
You lie down in the deer's bed, in the green martyrion, the place where
language buries itself, waiting place, weem.
You will wait. You will lean into the darkness of her absent
body. You will be shaved and narrowed by the barren strangeness of the
deer, the wastes of her oddness. Snow is coming. Light is cool,
nearly drinkable; from grass protrudes the hard, lost
smell of last year's melted snow.
Dangerous Words by Don Domanski
little by little the thistles suffer on the hill
bare trees enter the river
the wind takes the earth and blows
it drop by drop into your ear
you are ashes mixed with rain and sleep
leaves rustling in a closed hand
a mouse dropped out of a cloud
dangerous words pass under your window
words that no one has ever used before
you follow them into the woods
your find three words building a fire
one word skinning a rabbit
and another word far off in the shadows
pissing on a violet
what do they have for you
these five elves these little men
this little sentence in the forest?
they have but one knife between them
one hat one coin one pot
and a dark bag full of spoons
what good are they to you?
what can they give you
that you don't already have?
if you touch them
you touch a hanging bell
and a small tongue wakes in the grass
to speak to you to give you a name
to call you tulip or pincurl
or doll's breath
which means you'll never see
your home again not your parents
or their love
which means you will always whisper
but never speak
never escape these little men
these words burning their supper their rabbit-water
in an iron pot.
