Between Seasons
Two or three days after December solstice — near enough
anyway to be able to notice the lengthening day and day again,
the places it gets to. Somewhere out of the way of last
year’s extensions, forays and tributary meanderings; or
a moment, it may be, through/of the heron-plucked sunbranch
was it? on these roughened, discoloured steps — spit or smells or
sounds, cracked cracked drawings. The cling of memory seized,
dividing, hanging out, dripping through your fingers, etiolated
chunks and fragments of a never whole. The lapse of a syllable
whose only seem is expectation. And the sense of day again,
I suppose; the proleptic echo always repeating, outlining that
urge into what again that even the lean unsaying may; and
content him a now and again to wait.
The old man in the black coat come swinging his cane,
first quarter of the moon. (Who’m? I keep hearing it, that
foghorn’s falling fourth; maybe the dark returns.) And the
blear sun again. Waiting. My child has become her own
passage. Remembering the bounds of the rain — and maybe
a dozen candles, quickening who their silence.
~ Allan Brown
Allan Brown was born in Victoria and presently lives in Powell River, BC. His poetry has been published in various Canadian forums since 1962 and is partly collected in 19 books and chapbooks. His collection Imagines (Leaf Press, 2002) was co-winner of the bpNichol Chapbook Award. He is a member of the Federation of BC Writers, Haiku Canada, The League of Canadian Poets.
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