reading

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Our latest in folktales / Matthew Gwathmey.

Names: Gwathmey, Matthew, 1983- author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2018906773X | Canadiana (ebook) 20189067748 | ISBN 9781771314978

(softcover) | ISBN 9781771314992 (PDF) | ISBN 9781771314985 (EPUB)

Classification: LCC PS8613.W38 O97 2019 | DDC C811/.6—dc23

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Chantal R. Mercier.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

Franklin the Icebreaker

Mid-October sees

steamers and barges slowed

down by bumpers of frost

along their polished hulls.

The freeze spreads from cape

to cape, closing the gash

in our abode.

Only pummellings

of gossip roam free,

wafting through stalled boats

waiting for the icebreaker.

Pointed bow, iron

rigging, the name Franklin

its only insignia.

As the game ship rises,

it cracks veins of passage

in the bay’s crust, releasing

long, muted thanks

from a multitude of horns.

At Arcadia Dump, Later On

We meet a shepherd amid a trail of discarded electronics, his staff assembled out of PVC pipe. Impressive, his change from a parabola of methane to a camber of mercury, summing up the whole landfill season that stretches before us. “When I started,” he says, “I had everything I needed in the cloud.” The smell of sulphur caught in the art of natural selection—a breezy genetic drift. We watch a few beady-eyed sheep play off the dumping ground (darting noses, probing hooves against the slag-heap edge, wool newly wet). Avian swimmers dodge steam-powered waves. Country folk dressed in hazmat suits search the undershow, snoop through garbage bags. At a yelp they huddle to marvel at a crunched statistic or a shiny zippo. The siren signals the next level of hide ye mouse and seek ye cat. Soon, the falling sky will be so close at hand.

Knocker Bats

Knocker bats are like regular bats, in that they only labour at night, except instead of hunting for plodding flies and overripe fruit they tap on doors with heavy sticks. Rather than two tiny, pinched claws they have one club on a pivot joint, which they use like a hinge ring on a strike plate. Then they fly off, to echolocate the next threshold. Sometimes they might knock through ten or more choice neighbourhoods a night. A night! I’m going to build a door of oak and cedar, six by three or three by seven. Cut, glue, sand. No better note in the world than a solid rap on oak rails. Cedar panels for their subcurrent of citrus. It must appeal somehow to their sense of audacity, like bill collectors coming in through your kitchen windows. Then, I will frame my woodwork up in the boreal forest amid a conspicuously-cleared deciduous element, so it sits there alone, with silent conifers ridging a background bog, just to get those knocker bats, knocker bats, knocker bats thinking. Soon, this irresistible gateway will captivate them all, and then, as they bang away at the urge, louder and louder, I’ll sneak to the other side, throw it open, and eureka and brilliant, they’re gone.

Turning Thirty

Think the wise but say the common, my desire’s to be a popular footnote, to keep my character count within reason. Cacti graffiti, cliff tag rejoice, You & Me Forever our nouveau cave art. I want to witness the hedgehogs at the TED Talks. I want to control who gets my parade of babble. Expanding my mental checklist— switch off the Wi-Fi while asleep (love); water the artificial plants (haha); germinate seeds on the cable box (wow). I’ll sling kingdoms, glistening tweets cut from the stuff of bandwagons. I’ll document lessons learned in quick-fire mobile photographs. As my data turns into a gas and rises out of clutter.

Turning Thirty-Three

I’ve been wearing a black ribbon pinned to my lapel for so long I can’t recall what for anymore. The wormhole essential to the scene. But I forgot the rest of space-time, bygone shavings proclaimed by the mortals and demigods that came before me. I muddied some rivers, clouded the deep, saw in double— what was and what was supposed to be. I wanted to give more eras to kites chasing after lightning, to electric sockets two by two, to the things of Earth that grew already trimmed— grandfather paradoxes, alternate timelines. I’ve been to that factory. Venus melted down and poured into bottles. Even drank from them. But I’ve yet to believe anything better than the feel of worn leather.