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.
The author photo was taken by Rossanne Clamp.
Brick Books
115 Haliburton Road
London, ON
n6k 2z2
www.brickbooks.ca
For Rossanne and Alannah
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
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.
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.