Poems by Cameo Marlatt

Coyote

by Cameo Marlatt

From Canary Summer 2019

Cameo was born on the Canadian prairies, a stone’s throw from the South Saskatchewan river, but this poem was written half a world away in the “Dear Green Place,” as Glasgow is called, near where the little river Kelvin flows into the Clyde.

You might as well be wearing clothes.
Admiring a high-backed chair you cannot sit on,
lacking only thumbs for wearing tarnished rings,
you flash a lacy ear and rusty shank,
loping over threadbare rugs
spread underpaw like nets:
reflections glass-front cabinets
cannot catch.

Hat stands, table legs, start showing tree;
woollen coats smell of damp fields;
sounding a moth-wing rustle, silk scarves
shed a scaly dust. I understand your interest
in rows of leather books and shoes.

We hold each other’s eyes,
the space between us shuttled and stretched
like the darkness between subway cars.

The sharpness of your teeth earns you
the door.

© Cameo Marlatt

Under the Hunting Moon

by Cameo Marlatt

From Canary Fall 2018

Like a fox on the midnight streets,
feet bantering with the silent pavement,
coughs out its bark and listens
for a similar sickness

from down the bloodless river banks
beneath the bridge.

Like a fox on the midnight streets,
in the roughness of its body, carries off,
as if to bury it, a rigid
nut-shaped heart.

A hunger spins in me like a compass.

The needle spins, it catches, it must
be torn out, like the hook inside a fish
bleeding red into the bottom of a boat.

I wish it would name the thing it turns to
in a language I could understand,
the way we used to talk when we were
satisfied, and not buoyed up to the eyes
by emptiness.

I am moved by this animal feeling to shy
from the scratching of keys at the door,
to nibble off my itches and wounds,
to hoard a troubled solitude, to bear it

while the old knowledge strains me lean
as the tautened string of an empty bow.

I remember things I should not know.

How the fire was warm but there was something yet
of starlight in it.

How in sleep we gathered in the world and weighed
our bodies down with it.

How at the turn of every month, emerging
from their homes worn hollow by sleep, were
what we would call animals, newly wet
with darkness and forgetful of the moon,
saying

This blessed night,
light sheds a different shade of fear,
death takes a form and a name.

Eyes and mouths splitting open
with the ripeness of its gift, saying

Last night

I did not know my name. Belly or claw, artery, tooth,
which are you given this night? Which hand do you lift
to this violent prayer?

Made wild by the sight of their day-shy bodies,
saying

Carriers of life,
let us knock vessels in this dark forest.
these, our hunting hours, open
their leafy arms and mossy legs
to receive us.

Saying

Oh darkest rock,
fullest earth. Silver home,
you are holy tonight.

And our minds would wrench free of their moorings,
dirty themselves with singing the strange hymn-like
battle cries amongst the fighting beasts.

I remember things I should not know

When the old knowledge strains me lean
as the tautened string of an empty bow.

Like the last mad bird singing out the evening
wears its tune like a fading beacon, spinning
an amber thread through the streets till the dark
shuts over its gothic arch.

Like the last mad bird singing out the evening,
in its madness, draws the morning on.

I am moved by this animal feeling to say

Somewhere the long grasses bow
and rise and beat together like hearts,
and insects grate their legs into a sound
like the mind makes when it is emptying
and filling up with what it’s not.

Somewhere we are thoughtless as archers,
sights spanning rivers, slipping easy arrows
between our fingers, and the sky holds no resistance,
and our arms call out quick quick quick
in the one true language, calling out

we are
just bliss, and bodies ravening this life like a fire
burning a long mellow grief through time.