A series of black, red, and turquoise lines crawl around and across the page, creating an intricate maze. There doesn't appear to be a beginning or end, nor is it constrictive. The maze is open and one can enter or exit at many points.

Copyright

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

 

Title: If you discover a fire / Shaun Robinson.

Names: Robinson, Shaun, 1980– author.

Description: Poems.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190238348 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190238380 |
isbn 9781771315272 (softcover) | isbn 9781771315289 (html) | isbn 9781771315296 (pdf)

Classification: lcc ps8635.o2638 i3 2020 | ddc c811/.6—dc23

 

Copyright © Shaun Robinson, 2020

 

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.

 

A stylized, illustrated blue tree sits to the left of the words 'Canada Council for the Arts / Counseil des arts du Canada.'' The word Canada is written out with a Canadian flag—a red maple leaf flanked by two vertical red stripes—situated above the final A. A large red A is bisected by an angled blue C, with a green O balanced between the two letters on the left. To the right of the OAC logo are the words 'Ontario Arts Council / Counseil des arts de l'Ontario' over a red line with the words 'An Ontario Government Agency / un organisme du gouvernement de l'Ontario' below the line.

 

The author photo was taken by Rossanne Clamp.

 

Brick Books

115 Haliburton Road

London, ON

n6k 2z2

 

www.brickbooks.ca

Dedication

For Rossanne and Alannah

Table of Contents

Greyhound Depot, Cache Creek

Trivia Night

Where Do You Bury the Survivors?

Convenience

If I Wrote a Poem About My Father

Punxsutawney Bill

Tyler, You’re Terrific

Sunomono

Pilgrims

Shared Accommodation

New Year’s Day

The Future Lives Here

Versus Nature

Stereognostic

Balcony

The Cop-Shop Deer

Your Love Will Help a Child in Need

Carpe Dos and Carpe Don’ts (ft. Panda Bear)

You’re Fine, Tyler

Where to Find Help When

How Soon, How Likely, How Severe

Disaster Preparedness

Material Safety

Annie, Annie, Are You Okay?

We Must Now Accept All Evidence Suggests

Year of the Monkey

New England Epithalamium

Tuesday

Student Night

Halftime

Terminal

Frozen Waffles

Package Gravy

The Man Who Took Photos of Windows

I Used to Walk Around With a Tiny Forest

Try Harder, Tyler

Ash Wednesday, Kingsgate Mall

Chelsea Motel

Intimate Mechanical Forces

Transactive Memory

 

Notes

Acknowledgments

Greyhound Depot, Cache Creek

 

In the dry-mouthed intermission of a three-act journey

you stand in line and consider your choices:

chalkboard specials and blackened bananas,

hot dogs that bob like pool toys on rollers.

 

You settle for coffee, for five minutes alone

in the blank stare of a Cache Creek afternoon,

the smell of sagebrush and Mama Burgers.

You’re not a smoker, but you feel down

 

to your last match. In ten years of changing

buses here you’ve never seen anything change.

The motel pool’s still closed for repairs.

The same gap-toothed assortment of stale candy

 

and travel shampoos in the vending machine.

When only the weekly paper marks time

it’s easy to forget that anything happens,

that your parents met here, decades ago,

 

in the incomprehensible era of Kenny Rogers

and indoor smoking. All you have from that time

are a half-dozen Polaroids tucked in a paperback.

You shuffle through them sometimes like a bad

 

crib hand, wondering what you could do

without. You have your father’s duffel bag

and your mother’s laugh, a watch they gave you

when you turned sixteen that’s never kept

 

the right time—3:02 could be 3:05, or midnight,

or 1978. You could turn around and see them

framed in the window, sharing a cigarette

and a plate of fries in the moment they sensed

 

their future idling at the curb and decided to board.

With no idea that journey’s end point would be here,

this wasted hour from which you’re trying to salvage

some revelation. But don’t bother looking—

 

you have what you need to get where you’re going.

Take a newspaper, maybe, some motel matches.

The highway asks only patience, offers nothing

but time to think about your choices.

Trivia Night

 

It’s important to get things wrong,

even if it feels like fighting

with a lover, forgetting important dates

and the names of her friends,

and she thinks it means you don’t care.

We do care, America, just not about

your state parks or your presidents,

the pretty coins stamped with their faces

spinning through the pub’s gloom

to settle a bet about the year we landed

on the moon. Remember that, America?

High-fiving the cosmos, trampling

the dusty surface of eternity? Four-hundred-

whatever years after Vasco da Gama

discovered whatever it was—

Florida, maybe, or fire, or the fountain

of youth, which I imagine surrounded

by marble parrots and bubbling

like a vodka soda. It doesn’t matter

if it’s real. The helicopter has only existed

since 1936. The zipper was invented

in 1891, and before that we lived

without it. Picture Lincoln fumbling

with hooks and loops above a chamber pot

in the Ford Theatre moments before

every fact he’s ever known is blown

through a hole in the back of his head.

And the facts in yours will one day rot

into a black soup, the capitals floating

in a stateless void, every letter

of Mississippi emptied into the Gulf.

Isn’t that why you come? To test

yourself in the blackout shrine

of a neighbourhood pub, to honour

the knowledge you’ve lived without?

You know as much as you need to.

Your mother’s maiden name, floating

inside you like a slice of lime

in a vodka soda. You know the story

and the shortcut, the password and the prayer.

You know you’ll wake on your bathroom

floor, the toilet glowing above you

like a ceramic moon, like a match

struck on your zipper in the dark room

of everything you’ve forgotten.