Appetite
By Mia Anderson
()
About this ebook
Appetite includes the long poem sequence "The Saugeen Sonata" which won The Malahat Review's Long Poem Prize in 1988.
Mia Anderson
Mia Anderson is author of six books of poetry, including The Sunrise Liturgy (2012) and Light Takes (2014), which contains the 2013 Montreal International Poetry Prize-winning poem "The Antenna." A retired theatre actor, Anglican priest, and shepherd, she's also a committed organic grower--and still married.
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Appetite - Mia Anderson
APPETITE
APPETITE
Mia Anderson
Bricks Books • Coldstream
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Anderson, Mia
Appetite
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-771311-65-6
PS8551.N44A8 1988 C811′.54 C89-093012-0
PR9199.3.A54A8 1988
Cover: Claudio D'Angelo, Wolf by the River
(detail). Oil on board, 18×28
Published with the assistance of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council.
Brick Books
Box 20081
431 Boler Road
London, Ontario
N6K 4G6
Canada
www.brickbooks.ca
for Tom
and because of
Jamie & Virginia Mainprize
Ho! Let your soul delight itself in fatness.
Isaiah 55: 1, 2
CONTENTS
I Lake & River
Northern Lights
Advent
Le Muskoka
Dear Arne & Marie-Françoise
Familiar Song
Choring
The Diver
Thaw
Alter Heron
Animal Crackers
Have I Told You How Lovely
Halfway from Equinox to Solstice
The Leaving
II River
The Saugeen Sonata
Poke's Progress
Song of the Lonesome Latchkey
The Carrot
Scherzo
Affordances
III Lake
Lake Muskoka
Went with the Wind
Not About Peeing
Wit's Appetite
Messengers
IV Land
The Dead Man's Shirt
4 Dozen Lines for Chernobyl
Elegy for Myself
Lahar
February: A Love Poem
Bulletin from February
scruie
The Milky Way Goes into the Food Processor
The Sign
Advent Pageant
Notes
I
LAKE & RIVER
Northern Lights
Some events stretch the soul,
loons, lichen, and
walking the dog at midnight I see
northern lights.
Northern lights. People twig when you
say it. You don't need to explain
why you are glad you saw them, the
northern lights.
You are aseat, buttock to granite in the dark,
it is the dark of the moon, the stars are stippling
one half the sky, in the other you are seeing
northern lights.
Only if you stay up late and then, still haggling for more,
break the bonds of your interior, boozy or lit or loud as
Muskoka Sands, or still, and step out onto this faint shaft
will you see them.
The water is invisible, the air is invisible, the trees
are shadows, you grope, you stumble, you could fall in,
split your head, instead you fall up, split your head on
northern lights.
White, faint green, ghosting rose, stretching silk-
screen scrim shaken, reflected campfire of the gods,
there is nothing to say, northern lights, nothing to say,
northern lights.
To live here, have nothing, to say,
nothing more wonderful, north,
nothing northern more in the dark than
you this night;
but this light.
Advent
Up betimes.
Chimney smoke. Sniffs of cherry & chestnut.
Sleet thawing the freezing-rain crust on the ground's
hair-shirt of snow the dogs pile through. O!
trundling freestyle they
rumble up mini-bits of nacred jig-saw that slick about
like door knockers under 20 carollers' mittened fists, glass
carillon continuo: ca ta ka! ta ta ka! tin tinn a bu la ta!
Délices de neige.
To the barn, and chores in the mangers.
Penitential joy. The art or craft
of purification. The readiness. New water
for old, into the pails and the old
hauls-it up a flight
to hurtle down the waste stones that bank the barn riverward,
scudding, decrusting,
cataracting rackety corn-skiing
rivery slop-water, sloop-deck-swabbing
& sloping & skidding down the glaceway stones
scattering klistered shards of spearmint granité ca ta ka!
ca ta ke te!
Frozen Mozart.
These are Dog Days! Not the loU-drooping, tongued wavers
of August, flea-ridden and burred, but
hearthy, hoppy, ice-fired and vigorous rigor viris of
December: Advent.
The sheep mooch about, waiting for birth. Ice
pellets their wool with little balls, a few berries of
turd from their straw pallets
tangle with the fleece, straw tickets and tags of
pure unvirgin wool
loop from their burthen bellies, their knees are brown
with kneeling, they're getting ready.
The dog who grooms the ram's face grooms the ram's face,