“Dusk, March, Humber Floodplain” by Kevin Irie

November 4, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Dusk, March, Humber Floodplain” by Kevin Irie. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

Dusk, March, Humber Floodplain

By Kevin Irie

Go in, down, past the encircled pond where only the rich can rim the high shores with houses you envy but never will own. Their deck chairs thrones under canopy sunsets, their lamps lanterns shining your way to show just how far you stay cast in their shadows. Walk on, farther, at this time of year it is easier to follow the trail than your thoughts, no uprising of sudden growth, just straw yellow stalks — cattails, bulrushes, choking loosestrife — whatever has withered this past winter stands alongside what waits yet to bloom. Make your way to the edge of the land, its reeds always taller than your height any year. Stagnant water, transient channel where the river divides against itself, a map folded so it can never be read, creased as a palm you have opened to no one. If March is the mirror reflecting November, then what does it see when it looks in your face?
Always warned to avoid any strangers, now you are the odd one being alone. Feel the ache in the thigh bone, femur, the body’s covert canes, the ribs a grate draining flesh so slowly. Time is tethered to each torn leaf, each cut stalk; pulls its strap tighter around each slackening wrist. Its hand holds the chickadee you feed in your palm. Look at your foot prints left in the mud — one always fleeing, one pressing ahead. What do you choose? Two hands, two feet, what direction guides you? The new moon, a dangling blade of silver. The sun, a socket of Lear’s plucked eye.

Copyright © Kevin Irie

Previously published in Viewing Tom Thompson, A Minority Report (Frontenac House 2012). First appeared in Poetry Pause on June 25, 2020.

Kevin Irie is Japanese-Canadian poet whose poetry has appeared in Canada and the States and been translated into Spanish and French. His book, Angel Blood: The Tess Poems (Frontenac House, 2004) was nominated for the ReLit Award. Viewing Tom Thomson: A Minority Report (Frontenac House, 2012), was a finalist for the Acorn-Plantos People’s Poetry Award and the Toronto Book Award. His latest, The Tantramar Re-Vision (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021) was picked by the CBC as one of the Spring Poetry Books for 2021 and by Quill and Quire Magazine for its 2021 Summer Reading Guide. He lives in Toronto.

Subscribe to Poetry Pause, or support Poetry Pause with a donation today!

Browse the Poetry Pause archives