Summer Grass (by Roo Borson)

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

1The willows are thinking again about thickness,

2slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

3and day by day this imaging transforms them

4into what we see: dragons in leaf, draped scales

5alongside the river of harried, spring-stirred silt.

6The magpie recites Scriabin in early morning as a mating song,

7and home is just a place you started out,

8the only place you still know how to think from,

9so that that place is mated to this

10by necessity as well as choice,

11though now you have to start again from here,

12and it isn’t home. Venus rising in the early evening

13beside the Travelodge, as wayward and causal as

14will, or beauty, or as once we willed beauty to be –

15though this was in retrospect, and only practice

16for some other life. Do you still love poetry?

17Below the willows, in the dry winter reeds,

18banjo frogs begin a disconcerting raga,

19one note each, the rustling blades grow green--

20and it tires, the lichen-spotted tin canteen

21suspended in the river weeds like a turtle

22up for air: such a curious tiredness deflected there.

23And what would you give up, in the beautiful

24false logic of math, or Greek? In the sum

25of the possible, long ago in the summer grass …

26Here beside the river I close my eyes: there

27the little girls lean continuously across a rusted

28sign that says Don’t Feed the Swans

29and feed the swans. The swans are reasoning beings;

30the young cygnets, hatched from pins

31and old mattress stuffing, bright-eyed, learning

32what has bread, and what doesn’t. What doesn’t

33have to do with this is all the rest:

34one more chance to blow out the candles and wish

35for things we wished for

36that wouldn’t happen unless we closed our eyes.

37Not the gingko or the level gaze, or the speaking voice

38beneath the pillow, or the waking in the morning

39with a name. But cloud--or grief, when grief

40is loneliness and you close your eyes. Speech,

41when speech is loneliness, and you close your eyes.

Publication Notes

Roo Borson, Short Journey Upriver Towards Oishida (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2004). " target="_blank">This poem is reproduced on the Griffin Prize Web Site (from the winning volume on the Canadian Shortlist 2005).

RPO poem Editors

Ian Lancashire

RPO Edition

2011