Sturgeon (by Karen Solie)

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

Original Text

Karen Solie, Short Haul Engine (London. ON: Brick Books, 2001). This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from a volume on the 2002 Canadian Shortlist).

1Jackfish and walleye circle like clouds as he strains

2the silt floor of his pool, a lost lure in his lip,

3Five of Diamonds, River Runt, Lazy Ike,

4or a simple spoon, feeding

5a slow disease of rust through his body’s quiet armour.

6Kin to caviar, he’s an oily mudfish. Inedible.

7Indelible. Ancient grunt of sea

8in a warm prairie river, prehistory a third eye in his head.

9He rests, and time passes as water and sand

10through the long throat of him, in a hiss, as thoughts

11of food. We take our guilts

12to his valley and dump them in,

13give him quicksilver to corrode his fins, weed killer,

14gas oil mix, wrap him in poison arms.

15Our bottom feeder,

16sin-eater.

17On an afternoon mean as a hook we hauled him

18up to his nightmare of us and laughed

19at his ugliness, soft sucker mouth opening,

20closing on air that must have felt like ground glass,

21left him to die with disdain

22for what we could not consume.

23And when he began to heave and thrash over yards of rock

24to the water’s edge and, unbelievably, in,

25we couldn’t hold him though we were teenaged

26and bigger than everything. Could not contain

27the old current he had for a mind, its pull,

28and his body a muscle called river, called spawn.

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2011