Modern and Normal by Karen Solie

Author:Karen Solie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brick Books
Published: 2010-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

Meeting Walter Benjamin

A long lake in a swan-throated bed, longer

than wide by seventy miles. In his loneliness you mistake him

for shade creaking from the poplars, his gait that way,

eyes down, backlit, its yet-againness. He mistakes you in kind

for a snag of brome, for in your loneliness

you have forgotten the grammar of description – no,

the why of it – and become just another little bit

of what’s there, unable as grass is to explain itself. Here,

above the mudline of a Saskatchewan valley, and he

has never seen one. When he speaks

it’s from midpoint over the dog-hued water, his voice

thrown, a bond loosened and winging on the updraft

past your ear. It’s real, he says,

your disappointment. Wind stirs up hill colour like a stick

in paint, Fauvist with hidden deer in this seed-heavy

fall among a wet year’s curious late-bloomers, the air convex,

retinal. Follow his eye: Angelus Novus up against

the barbed wire, blown backward, disconsolate as anyone

with a grasp of history. You’ve read that grace

abides in a law of downward motion. He says despair

is in the details. Don’t look,

he tells you. Then, look.

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