“Between His Finger and His Thumb” by Catherine Graham
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Between His Finger and His Thumb” by Catherine Graham.
Between His Finger and His Thumb
By Catherine Graham
The way the sun peeks out from a continent
of cloud, a geyser of light that rams the sea
and breaks all meaning into knuckling diamonds,
he gave me full instructions re weather once he knew
what I needed to know. Dumb as a round square,
I sat there while he sped the car over green hills,
the bleating sheep too fat to be clouds, too warm
to be snow. We rode through a tunnel of rock,
blasted to give route โ back and forth each season,
light cloud cover over the sea. Always the clouds, even
at night. But the moon pushed the bloom
of the ivory in waves that rippled less than diamonds,
more like the glow of a spotlight we felt when we did
what we did, and the round moon entered and
took us in, like the sun at an angle like this he showed me,
and I believed him, even though he wore the evidence
of ceremony. But whatโs a band of hollow gold?
A ringless moon or a sun eaten by dark circles.
We saw the dark circles; we were the dark circles,
but who can see when the night is strung (between
his finger and thumb) and the sky just like that
after โHow to See Walesโ by Dorothy Molloy
Copyright ยฉ Catherine Graham
Previously published in Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems, 2023 (Wolsak and Wynn / Buckrider Books).
Catherine Grahamโs poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry Prize and have appeared in Poetry Daily, Best Canadian Poetry and on CBC Radio. รther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year. Her eleventh book, poems inspired by artist Remedios Varo, is forthcoming.
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