Meeting Walter Benjamin Poem by Karen Solie

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,
eyes down, backlit, its yet-againness. He mistakes you in kind
for a snag of brome, for in your loneliness
you have forgotten the grammar of description - no,
the why of it - and become just another little bit
of what's there, unable as grass is to explain itself. Here,
above the mudline of a Saskatchewan valley, and he
has never seen one. When he speaks
it's from midpoint over the dog-hued water, his voice
thrown, a bond loosened and winging on the updraft
past your ear. It's real, he says,
your disappointment. Wind stirs up hill colour like a stick
in paint, Fauvist with hidden deer in this seed-heavy
fall among a wet year's curious late-bloomers, the air convex,
retinal. Follow his eye: Angelus Novus up against
the barbed wire, blown backward, disconsolate as anyone
with a grasp of history. You've read that grace
abides in a law of downward motion. He says despair
is in the details. Don't look,
he tells you. Then, look.