Migration (by Karen Solie)

Griffin Prize for Excellence In Poetry, The (2001 - 0)

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