Karen Solie

Someone's walking toward you, tree to tree, parting leaves
with the barrel of a rifle. There's a scope
on it. He's been watching awhile
through his good eye, you, washing dishes, scouring
...

for Cathy

Snow is falling, snagging its points
on the frayed surfaces. There is lightning
over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great
...

You're still young. Someone curled an arm around you as you slept,
and upon awaking gently touched your face. The first sound you heard
...

A long lake in a swan-throated bed, longer
than wide by seventy miles. In his loneliness you mistake him
for shade creaking from the poplars, his gait that way,
...

The roads are bad and you miss
your old car, an even-tempered '68 Volvo,
those times jerry-rigged gaskets
and pantyhose fanbelts got you home
...

July 2005

Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat
an inanimate slur, a wool gathering, hanging
like a bad suit. Suspended fine particulate
...

The half-ton choked halfway up the boundary road and would not
turn over. He lifted the hood to shorted wire and the night adjacent.
To the south, the town on the old rail spur, a mile closer as the crow flies
than the number two highway, a slog through crown lands of chattering birch
...

Our hammers. Our sticks. This furtive
sporting life. Oh, our gasoline. Clothed
in low-rent autobiographies we slouch toward eviction
like dying brickworks. Outside
...

Jackfish and walleye circle like clouds as he strains
the silt floor of his pool, a lost lure in his lip,
Five of Diamonds, River Runt, Lazy Ike,
or a simple spoon, feeding
...

Yellow-legs ekes lower at nightfall to a stick nest
brambled in the shade-kill, doing for himself, deft

as a badger in a hammock. Mornings, toeing wracked heights
of the cottonwood, he flaps his brown flag above alkaline
...

One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky
east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia.
Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even
...

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit
of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert
through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier,
or grossly
...

When I learned I could own a piece of The World
I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those
who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it.
As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary
...

Off-season brings rain and new life
to old habits. Whatever it is that we're doing, we can't help
wanting to. Roadside attractions of the great southwest
are nothing without us. The World's Largest animals,
...

More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some hellacious
minor island on which options
...

Two hours on that road, and we saw no one but jackrabbits,
those innocents of plane and direction who seemed compelled
from the middle distance, magnetized to the undercarriage.
All creatures are plagued by dangerous ambiguities
...

Gratitude toward the houseplants, shame
for what they must endure. Of particular concern,
the azalea, flowering like the gestures and cries
of someone off the trail who sees a
...

Look at your past, how it's grown.
You've known it since it was yea high. Still, you,
as you stand now, have never been there. Parts worn out,
renewed, replaced. Though you may bear the same name.
You're like the joke about the axe.
...

The 1980s. Beginning of the long decade, the century's
late works. Snow on the grid, field bisected
by a late model John Deere's progress in low gear
with a front-end load of straw bales. Its operator's daughter
...

The perspective is unfamiliar.
We hadn't looked back going in,
and lingered too long
at the viewpoint. It was a prime-of-life
...