Poetry Workshop

I've been eating honeycomb, so now I'm drinking weak tea to melt the beeswax from my teeth before I go to bed.

I bought the honeycomb at the rain-walled farmer's market on Saturday -- that and bright late strawberries and a sachet of strong lavender.

Saturday was the best day I've had in ages -- the kind where you forget the good things you did in the morning because the good things you did in the evening were even better.

The best thing I did was see, or I would say witness, Tanya Tagaq perform Qiksaaktuq.

I hope to write about that as soon as the words to do so have been invented.

The next best thing I did was attend a poetry workshop. I'd been violently nervous out of mostly phantom social fears, but in the event there was much mellowness and pleasant chill and a little magic.

We did three pieces of freewriting: one based on people reading out various poems and bits of prose (the only one that comes to mind now was a Poe poem); one a letter to a friend (I had trouble with that); and one was a set of directions or instructions (the guy next to me had a lovely line: "Don't go down / go back down").

This is a second draft of my first, vaguely Poe-inspired piece (& obvs. a whole raft of Romantics are running around in there). I don't know if it can be anything, ultimately, what with its oddly formal voice, unless something speculative from a world where such a voice would fit, but I liked things about it enough to work with it a bit.




Where is my
Ozymandias?

What is buried up to its neck in me?

In this deep old desert
where all experience is reduced
to rubble, to gravel, and at last to dust

Whatever I broke, whatever I toppled or shattered,
it fell where I pushed it and lay there, decaying.

Who built these monuments? Of what materials?
I must have built them. It must have been of sand.
Statue or pleasure-dome, shattered,
fallen, sifted, heaped up,
bound with lime and water, refashioned.

Do they improve with iteration, my idols?
If inhaled, chewed out of the air,
do they provide -- sustenance? Flavour? Information?

Make up your mind: are you a ruin or a desert?
If a ruin, you must once have been magnificent.
If a desert, you must once have been
a forest full of cool vapour
or the bottom of a sea, seething with life.

Who is the wanderer?
Who is it breathes in my dust,
contemplates my ruin?

It must be me again. How tiresome.
Unless someone else can be recruited.
Unless you will do it.

Who is my Ozymandias?
It must be that man
I thought I could become
through imitation.

I must be the sculptor who captured his curled lip.
No kiss, not even of this outsized stone mouth.

Well, why not? Climb up and kiss it. As dry
as anything imaginable.