The Scarborough Bluffs

Lista, Michael (1983)

1You will not find me among the women of the earth,

2Their hair wound up in buns upon their heads,

3And goosebumped legs bridged above the bath—

4I am not with them. But let it not be said

5That an Orpheus doesn’t sound them,

6That behind me suddenly he isn’t

7Eurydice, his the face to which I may not

8Turn and look, or else,

9As prayers of rescue rise to no messiah.

10Decades later and a block away

11The Alzheimer takes off her glasses and her coat

12And half-naked amid the snow she lays

13In the cedar-ribbed hull of a boat

14On neighbourless Lake Gibson, June, as five

15Stone blocks of thought trouble the lakebed.

16And all alone tonight I’ll drive

17These empty streets

18And for the first time in forever feel alive,

19Feel the secular roar of the Gardiner,

20And smile at how in the land of the nightmask

21Mascara is a kind of queenmaker.

22I leave the zoo with the moon on the park,

23The wolves asleep, the lions going down

24(even the sun leaves Scarborough before it’s dark)

25And the lot of us descend to the bluffs, dawn

26Still dog weeks off. A poker hand fresco,

27Or the close-up teeth of the damned—

28A figure in the bluffs emerges like Francesca

29From Rodin’s Gates of Hell. We discandy from the stone,

30Paolo and me, split a sweating Fresca

31And walk the eyeless avenues alone.

RPO poem Editors

Jim Johnstone

RPO Edition

2013

Special Copyright

Poem used with permission of the author.