The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short and turned toward stone, the moment filling with its slow stratified time. Standing there, your face cratered by its gawk, you might be the symbol signifying eon. What are you, empty or pregnant? Somewhere sediments accumulate on seabeds, seabeds rear up into mountains, ammonites fossilize into gems. Are you thinking or being thought? Cities as sand dunes, epics as e-mail. Astonished you are famous and anonymous, the border washed out by so soft a thing as weather. Someone inside you steps from the forest and across the beach toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean.
Petrified -
your heart’s tongue seized mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow you fled. Fixed, you stiffen in the arms of wonder’s dark undomesticated sister. Can’t you name her and escape? You are the statue that has lost the entrance into art, wild and incompetent, you have no house. Who are you? You are the crystal that picks up its many deaths. You are the momentary mind of rock.
who comes to the table fresh from killing the pig, edge of edges, entry into zip. Knife who can swim as its secret through the dialogue or glimmer in a kitchen drawer. Who first appeared in God’s hand to divide the day from the night, then the sheep from the goats, then from the other sheep, then from their comfortable fleeces. Nothing sinister in this except it had to happen and it was the first to have to. The imperative mood. For what we are about to take we must be grateful.
2. Fork
a touch of kestrel, of Chopin, your hand with its fork hovers above the plate, or punctuates a proposition. This is the devil’s favourite instrument, the fourfold family of prongs: Hard Place, Rock, Something You Should Know, and For Your Own Good. At rest, face up, it says, please, its tines pathetic as an old man’s fingers on a bed. Face down it says anything that moves.
3. Spoon
whose eloquence is tongueless, witless, fingerless, an absent egg. Hi Ho, sing knife and fork, as off they go, chummy as good cop and bad cop, to interrogate the supper. Spoon waits and reflects your expression, inverted, in its tarnished moonlight. It knows what it knows. It knows hunger from the inside out.
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? – wants not to be voice any longer, wants something whispering between the words, some rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will hearken back to breath, or even farther, to the wind, and recognize itself as troubled air, a flight path still looking for its bird. I’m thinking of us up there shingling the boathouse roof. That job is all off balance – squat, hammer, body skewed against the incline, heft the bunder, daub the tar, squat. Talking, as we always talked, not about living past the age of thirty with its labyrinthine perils: getting hooked, steady job, kids, business suit. Fuck that. The roof sloped upward like a take-off ramp waiting for Evel Knievel, pointing into open sky. Beyond it twenty feet or so of concrete wharf before the blue-black water of the lake. Danny said that he could make it, easy. We said never. He said case of beer, put up or shut up. We said asshole. Frank said first he should go get our beer because he wasn’t going to get it paralysed or dead. Everybody got up, taking this excuse to stretch and smoke and pace the roof from eaves to peak, discussing gravity and Steve McQueen, who never used a stunt man, Danny’s life expectancy, and whether that should be a case of Export or O’Keefe’s. We knew what this was – ongoing argument to fray the tedium of work akin to filter vs. plain, stick shift vs. automatic, condom vs. pulling out in time. We flicked our butts toward the lake and got back to the job. And then, amid the squat, hammer, heft, no one saw him go. Suddenly he wasn’t there, just his boots with his hammer stuck inside one like a heavy-headed flower. Back then it was bizarre that, after all that banter, he should be so silent, so inward with it just to run off into sky. Later I thought, cool. Still later I think it makes sense his voice should sink back into breath and breath devote itself to taking in whatever air might have to say on that short flight between the roof and the rest of his natural life.
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