Blaine Marchand
Blaine Marchand is an Ottawa writer who is currently living in Islamabad. His poetry and prose have appeared in publications and anthologies in Canada and the United States, in a young-adult novel, African Journey, and in five poetry books, most recently Aperture (Buschek, 2008). His third collection, A Garden Enclosed, won the Lampman-Scott Poetry Award. A former President of the League of Canadian Poets, he was a co-founder of Ottawa Independent Writers, the Ottawa Valley Book Festival, and Sparks magazine. The following poems are from his forthcoming book The Craving of Knives (Buschek, 2009); the title poem took second prize in the LCP National Poetry Contest.
Void All night long, drifting in and out of sleep. The fan a hand trying to lift my skin. Earlier, in a crypt the ancient tour guide bent down, with thumb and forefinger raised a leathery flap of stomach, the remains of an old Coptic nun at peace for 500 years. Inside, her kidneys, liver, spleen brown as stones that the ocean deposits in a hidden bay. All night long, vendors swarm in market streets tug at my shoulders, arms, wrists, all night, a young black girl, the empty basket of her eyes crusted with rheum, fingers exploring her cavity of mouth, nearby, a Tureg man in a jade turban, flicking up the lid of a camel-hide coffer, inside, boxes dyed maroon, emerald, ebony, hollow spaces in a sunken chest I can't breathe drift in and out unsettled, searching for somewhere inside, a void where I can be mortared, brick by brick. The Pale Object of Desire Sleep weights the body, like the Rift Valley wall, between sheets and cover. At the deepest point, the moon floats above the rim. Sometimes ridged fingers of an inclined hand. Sometimes the pale plain between a rise of hip bones. Sometimes hair drifting across a face. Deep within the body, desire is an ancient land nomads wander through and never possess; is a water catchment drawn to the surface of the parched savannah. The tropic sun slides under the eyelids, dissolves. But traces remain, stippled with moisture. Morning light whets the canopies of acacia, douses the leafless baobabs like hairs on the folds of far-off hills, like down matted at the torso's divide. night's blind you are not here, and even when you are, you are distant, your body withheld withholding, stifling small cries, refusing the pleasure points of my fingers. the dark thread, night's blind behind which you watch my voice wants to fly up and scatter in a smattering of words like birds tearing themselves from the skin of ice but fear follows, fells me fear of deficiency, of speech or having spoken, the shunning silence, the body after its last breath the body once held and taken into the mouth, now just skin cold and unyielding concealed loss of faith, faithfulness, abundance abandoned lashed by winter winds white squall, the flurry wings pummeling, flight where, where are you? and why these shards, disguised images— a footprint rutted on a shoreline, an unmarked grave, a bird cleaved of its tongue? |