1.
A
seismic accumulation. Words as slow as paint.
This
memory, pastoral. My father: a handrail,
new
against the homestead,
his
unsteady gait. A shoal
in
his head.
If
this a fixed point: I have felt this age
forever.
Surroundings swirl, and shift.
2.
The
O-Train as it snakes, construction. Timetables,
walked
and walking. Wherewithal.
They
aim to build this
needlessly
slow. I kid, of course. But then:
the
concrete
does
nothing to absorb the water. Floodplain,
streets.
The carved precision
of
caged liquid. But,
the
clouds. The lightest rail.
3.
Bang
on: the texture of
an
instant. Letters patent, by which
we
mark such passing. Year
against
idiot year. Simultaneous,
this
miniature,
unpremeditated.
How to defend
the
little beasts of wear. Would rather
this
than otherwise, long
in
my death-bed.
4.
Disorienting:
just how large is forty-nine?
What
are
numbers, really? What a year? I can’t
wrap
my head around, mid-
century
clatter. Resist! Old enough
to
have a daughter
who
marks her milestones. The pages
flip,
flip back. A wooded terrain
of
pineapples, sage. A hand-
carved
dream.
We
are all born free
of
history, until. I set my age
to
airplane mode. Hold on.
Four poems for my forty-ninth birthday
by rob mclennan
produced for the sake of the author’s forty-ninth
birthday, March 15, 2019. sigh.
above/ground press broadside #347
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. His most recent titles include the poetry collection How the alphabet was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and the forthcoming Household items (Salmon Poetry, 2019) and A halt, which is empty (Mansfield Press, 2019). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com
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