A canoe emerges from an armor of mist.
What is it which arrests
my amazement, curtails
my capacity to be arrested—places
glaze on my own frowning scrutiny
Of glaze?
To swim out beyond the mist-obscured
boats—clambering
from the wetness, swollen & ethical. Perhaps
a dream? The snow
of looking.
It is soft, a wave. Broadening,
the metropolis bends with a thought
The sun shines
down through a sanitized sky. Petals
of color (vacuumed of every meaning). It’s
afternoon—the helmet smoldering
negative wonder—curse
of the tapestry’s grandeur, dynamic & encrusted.
The tools fold shut,
It is
surface, plunging wonder:
sheathed in myth.
An exhausted world but exhausted
because still—a single slide of reality
In the foreground, canoes. At home
I sought to—each
of the geometrically decorated canoes
extrudes its blurry silhouette
upon the waters, dangling the reflection
of the wooden oars as they merge
with the distorted, watery geometries
of the hull.
The new debate between
shadow & light on the prow is spontaneous—
the vessel emerges into what materializes
A clearing
The lamina bleeds out from the deck
as a card—a component of motion. The images
evaporate into purple in the half-dark, light splashing
the room in rhythms. You’re in the blackness
with parents, they
regale you of some late-century
adventure on skis;
weather-damaged—bitten by epoxy glue
in the downstairs drawer.
The land has been
used, carbine gliding
off the torso. The paddle
swabs
And stabs the water. Beams of light—pinning
a breeze.
I have not reckoned
with air
This interaction, between
shades of water:
warm, fluid, lacustrine as a plume.
In that canoe, representational
blazes with lucent hull:
the distances allow a raw scale effect
to cohere into a surging result.
(Non-human,
relieved.) So the sublimity
is evolved to the purr of an onboard motor. Something
in the mechanics of the lake is
sputtering—a 1991 veneer—choking
acrylic particles. Irrepressible modernity. I think
it exists for me in
thoughts, the mantis of
the present, flickering
sponge daubed to the gunwale.
The leisure
of water swimming in trees
For you
I will remember
places touched by Rust
& thorn,
sky gleaming
Larks—a dull,
pried-apart
freedom That darts & bursts & folds
in a dream of distances.
I will
dream
of mist &
sky, & pain
for you
To hold
in the giant dapple
of my change. I will delay
every sentence. Moths tapping
at the glass.
For sky, dandelion
tremoring from the hill. We lay there
We Will
—
Monroe Lawrence (he/they) is a Canadian writer and author of the poetry book About to Be Young (The Elephants, 2021). Winner of the Robin Blaser Prize for Experimental Writing and the Kim Ann Arstark Memorial Award, he has published writing in The Capilano Review, Annulet, The Brooklyn Review, Prelude, Flag + Void, and Best American Experimental Writing, among other places. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Brown University and are a PhD candidate in Literary Arts at the University of Denver. They were born on Vancouver Island and grew up in Squamish on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw land.