Canadian Poetry Online top banner link to Canadian Poetry Online home page link to University of Toronto Libraries home page

The Circle

Brian Henderson
From:   Smoking Mirror. ECW, 1990.


I am a stone knife in a bundle. You carry me on your back from place to place. Like the night, it is a medicine bundle that harbours and portends. When I rise I raze cities, trail comets of underworld B the night heaven B through the noose of the dawn. I breed boneseed in the humid caves from which you, who look into this smoking mirror, will one day arise like corn. Bright gold spun in the blackness, I shake you out of the night heaven like stars, words in this dreambook. I carry you in my mouth until you rush the blade int the sheath of my heart land you name me. You have hurled me into this story, I now I write you in blood, so that the story might be prolonged, and not end here with us. So that you might carry me from place to place, hear the bell-bird and the mocking-bird, watch the lemon-stained sky, the gold shield of water through the darkening clatter of palm fronds. But nothing, we know, is guaranteed. Only that the sun is also a doomed light-bearer. We are borne aloft like serpent banners by the always vanishing trail of blood.



Brian Henderson's works copyright © to the author.


Canadian Poetry Online bottom banner link to University of Toronto Libraries home page link to Digital Collections home page link to University of Toronto Library catalogue link to Canadian Poetry Online home page link to University of Toronto Libraries home page link to Contact Information page