Migration (by Karen Solie)

Migration (by Karen Solie)

Original Text
Karen Solie, Pigeon (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2009). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the 2010 Canadian Shortlist).
for Cathy
1Snow is falling, snagging its points on frayed
2surfaces. There’s lightning
3over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great central
4cities, debt accumulates along baseboards
5like hair. Many things were good
6while they lasted. Long dance halls
7of neighbourhoods under the trees,
8the qualified fellow-feeling no less genuine
9for it. West are silent frozen fields and wheels
10of wind. In the north, frost is measured
11in vertical feet, and you sleep sitting because it hurts
12less. It’s not winter for long. In April
13shall the tax collector flower forth, and language
14upend its papers looking for an entry adequate
15to the sliced smell of budding
16poplars. The sausage man will contrive
17once more to block the sidewalk with his truck,
18and though it’s illegal to idle one’s engine
19for more than three minutes, every one of us will idle
20like hell. After all that’s happened. We’re all
21that’s left. In fall, the Arctic tern will fly
2212,500 miles to Antarctica as it did every year
23you were alive. It navigates by the sun and stars.
24It tracks the earth’s magnetic fields
25Sensitively as a compass needle and lives
26on what it finds. I don’t understand it either.
RPO poem Editors
Ian Lancashire
RPO Edition
2011