Here

Fraser Sutherland
From:   Matuschka Case: Selected Poems 1970-2005. Toronto: TSAR, 2006.

I. Driving Back

Each pit, each pockmark of the road.
The shapes of night,
companionship.
The branches wave goodbye.

We have travelled great distances
inside each other's bodies,
slumped in the half-light
a headless rider.

Once the engine kicked into overdrive.
The auxiliary's
activity of the spirit.
The chalice overflowed.

The moon enormous on the harbour,
I could drive into it,
pushed by the white line streaming past
while cormorants tuck into their wings and sleep.

The world is fleshed with dark.
The earth drinks me greedily.
Come home, it says,
Go back to her.


II. Waiting Here

This is This is not my room.
It's quiet, cool.
The cat has more right to be here.

The scotch is waiting.
Also the ice.
You haven't come home yet
but your smell remains from morning.

The bed's been made.
The place seems untenanted.
As if you were waiting for a
candidate from the day's heat.

Why expect the walls to beat like a heart
bringing you back?
On a small pad
this writing's squeezed.

Now the cat has gone,
its place taken by the ticking minutes.
I would have been more at home
to have passed through the open window,

come to beg at the spread table.


III. The Misty Heart

Through the clouds of bedclothes
comes your face, a misty heart.
What beats with it
not the shallow muscle in my chest
but another deep within,
a tiny pulsing heart.

So the moon embraces night, her brother,
drained and sick of himself.
She has taken his strength from the day,
the moon in gauze,
now veils herself in white.

Odd that in this darkness
I should feel the white of your arms
as pink suffuses through your face.
Odd you should be living here with me.

Poem 1 | Poem 2 | Poem 3 | Poem 4 | Poem 5 | Poem 6

Fraser Sutherland's works copyright © to the author.