Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Your Endless Edge,” a glosa by Jodi Lundgren.

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Your Endless Edge: a Glosa

By Jodi Lundgren

What if I was wrong?

If after years of creeping away

for mere minutes in your peculiar half-dusk,

half-dream, your endless edge

— Karen Enns, “Questions for a Muse”

We shot a gap

barely car-width

between unlit oak trees

on a two-way street

the open-sided jeep

blaring Tears for Fears.

The danger electrified us,

no shock absorbers

our tailbones slamming.

What if I was wrong?

Adrenaline-soaked events

might reverberate years later

for a purpose I hadn’t guessed—

not to make me wonder

if a past love could’ve lasted,

or how a wiser person might’ve acted

or whether, by post-#metoo standards,

I consented. Maybe reliving them pulls me closer

not to the people, or to healing; what

if after years of creeping away

to reminisce, it was the muse who drew me?

The cops were busting the party when you arrived,

straight from work, sober, with that Gatsby smile,

your friend, my date that night, too drunk,

the offer to take us home in your jeep welcome.

Generous, opportunistic, fun-loving,

predatory, the lines too fine to draw,

my date blacking out, your kisses skilled,

the scene would last for seasons in my memory,

for mere minutes in your peculiar half-dusk

basement suite at your parents’. Weeks later,

engine revving, I pinned you in my headlights

all Jodie Foster in The Accused. You plucked

a crisp hundred from your wallet and rolled it into a tube,

my only brush with coke until I wrote my novel Blow.

Thank you/I’m sorry; you’re welcome/it’s okay,

I’m telling you, all of you, my younger selves included,

those raw times I had to mull for meaning inspired me.

Even my first glosa has emerged from there, see?

My half-dream, your endless edge

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Copyright © Jodi Lundgren

Jodi Lundgren is a settler of English and Danish ancestry who lives on Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territory. Her previous publications include the novels Touched (Anvil) and Leap (Second Story). Her poetry has recently appeared in Dear Vaccine, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye (Kent State UP) and in Even So, I Sing, edited by Lorna Crozier (Nose in Book). She is a past writer-in-residence at Thompson Rivers University, where she teaches in the Open Learning division.

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