The Sentinel

A.F. Moritz

• Publisher: House of Anansi Press
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780887849299
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Mortality, Love, Ethics, Civilization, Divine Presence, Human Body, Modernity, The Natural World, and Constructed Spaces. The Sentinel watches and reports back to us in a voice that is timeless and worthy of trust. Whether describing renewal and regeneration, the despair brought on by global capitalism, or a place where decay and loss meet their antithesis, A. F. Moritz's magisterial voice, rare insight, and supple craft are on impressive display.

IN A PROSPEROUS COUNTRY

AT TWO SOLEMN MUSICKS

We sit in the wind gloating on our lump

of sorrow. Then we move along sidewalks, I mean through forests,

under trunks, walls, cranes, signs, branches and windows

singing, O susurration

of leaves, wires, groins, high iron, moon

on scaffolding. But over there —

I like it better over there than here where we are:

there they stomp around a trash fire

to insultingly stupid honkings that litter good silent air.

Sometimes they too are quiet and melancholy as we are here.

Sometimes one of them or a whole family will close the door

and commit suicide in simple despair.

But that is sometimes. Now, how thin the sorrowful

painted face of the petrified moon here has become

that over there is the bell of a trombone:

its high white note and black mellow note

hurt alike and as long as they are not dead

in last spasms they live.

THE ANT

The splendour and simplicity

That sealed my childhood eye

Are dearer than the world now is,

And like the dews that lie

On grass tips to be drunk while down

Beneath them, ants pass by.

The ants pass to their morning work.

Do they sleep through the night

Like children, or work on and know

Nothing of dark and bright ?

And if they never sleep, is work

Their sadness or delight ?

Angelic was the child I was,

Who followed the black ant

With sight from heights he could not see

And let that supplicant

Wander as lost as lost he seemed

All morning, till I went.

How could a question not occur ?

But I absorbed his pain,

If pain it was, or his pure joy,

And found him, the same one

Or one just like him, searching still

When morning came again.

THOU POEM

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer ?

I do not love the self less than the others,

my name is legion and my mouth one cry.

Thou poem of the unwell, of the dry well and doom,

and the snake’s on your lip, in you the toad persists.

Did we come here just to read of what exists ?

I champ at my winter bit to be in bloom.

But what’s the difference between you, poem, and the flower ?

Don’t both break from the compost as long as it may be ?

You are the one who knows what metaphor

and imposes it. Two dandelions are not similar to me.

Thou song of all-powerful individuality,

if only I could rest in you escaping me . . .

You would never again be troubled by the nudity

of the mother, or the Heart Fall’s killing roar

as you slid toward it, catafalqued on the fluid

descents of a new old world, shrouded in greenwood.

Thou ignorant epic of half-knowing ever more,

thanks in thought’s ruin for reminding me.

PHILOSOPHICAL CONTENT

I know that words should shriek in pain and gleam

like a cat’s fur, like beautiful black and white

starkly opposed — the night and light, the day and sea —

on the one supple sufficiency of her body.

I know that tears fall into the pit and rise

like the cries of a pink mouth: the beast’s, the pet’s

instinct of desperation, her confidence,

in the measure and delay, starvation’s threat,

of the fragile food supply, in the poor human house.

OLD PET

Come, my body, leap up, while you still can,

onto my knees, into my lap. Come let me pet you,

comfort you and take comfort while there’s time,

while you last. How calm you are: content, it seems,

with your infirmity, your age, in the almost changeless

youth of your soft hide, your pelt and shy quiet,

expressionless as you huddle and crouch for this leap

you can still make, though it’s grown great, this petty

piece of your young and many springs.

Why did I never, body, cherish you enough ?

Although I thought I was spending all my minted hours

on you, till I’d cry at the long waste of time, chained

by eyes and tongue, the ends of every extremity,

to your pleasure. Now I can’t recall ever once

kissing you, lying locked in you, deep as I want.

You’ll die, it won’t be long, body, swiftly

in animal nobility — how you wear your decline unnoticing,

the way a poor man walks in his only shirt to work —

and then, without you, in what mud of my own

making will I linger, falling apart ? Purr now

and fuse your old pleasure into crotch of my torso,

palm of my hand, vision of eyes and sag of diaphragm

inseparably: they’re yours. Give me your indifference

that a once forest-wide range comes down

to couch and counter now, and this lap. Give me

your unrepentant having-known

a more-than-ant’s-intimacy with the grass,

a more-than-god’s-innocence in the hunt,

a greater-than-winged-agility in branches

and light. Leap up, body, while you still can,

let me finally hold you, feel you, close enough.

SWIFTNESS NO LONGER TRUSTED

Swiftness no longer trusted,

you were my voice, flickering

lines and ideas in violet shade

and green sun: goldfinch wing-strokes

keeping impossible

fragments of flight — moments

of wing-folded hurtling

in the air — linked and aloft: the bird

would flurry its wings and close them,

careen along and imperceptibly

fall, then beat out again, rise,

hurtle again and fall, and so

always, along the bank, as sweet

as pencilled breves and macrons marking

the syllables down a line

of Vergil in an old

schoolbook, or the droop

of wires from pole to pole

beyond Mesopotamia on a long road

when corn is ripe and a cloud’s

a golden bat or butterfly,

or a hawk stooping from the sunset, so

we stop our car, terrified

for the moment to pass, and it passes,

fireflies come out and climb

through trails of spice

and now the world-colour is

of cooling sea,

of still rhythms and space.

IN A THUNDER SHOWER

Cardinal singing in the rain, what was your name

bef...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• The Butterfly
• In a Prosperous Country
• Better Days