CBC Literary Awards

Invertebrate Poems

Second Prize, Poetry

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Disgraceland

A highway at the end of the world.
The gluttony of a mouth… It’s okay.

You can’t be expected to remember
the earth is flat – it bends

when you hold feathers in your teeth,
when you find the breath to laugh.

We were doing well before Saint
Thomas Aquinas named five new ways

to sin – five hundred years of peace
brought us the cuckoo clock,

desperation oscillating on a pivot.
Here. Even in this lost heat

we wait for a wooden bird to appear
once an hour and rattle the quartz

in its breast. Whatever we see in those
seconds draws back, a tongue

returning to the cave of its mouth,
the origin of sound. Ta-da!

The HMS Hood, Disarmed

For three minutes the Hood
shouldered the paunch
of salt and flame flooding

its pores, clutched the heft
of a cyclone to its Saturday
finest. Bulkheads closed,

fifth salvo of shells an act
of kindness, only the fog
felt the tractor beam

pull quicker. It was the year
the Alaska Highway
unfurled its tongue, long

before a baby grand tumbled
through the Aquitania’s ballroom
ceiling – the seascape complete

with a chandelier of keys,
a drowned wheel and three
new ways to cross the ocean.

Rock Paintings of Sierra de San Francisco
1100 BC – AD 1300

Ochre. Hand to slope, your blood
orphans you from the Cochimi.
Supine, tourists flood the dark,
capture pumas at touch,
forgiveness. You never needed
a javelin to slake your tongue,
myths to hone aim. In Baja,
lynx still run the grasslands,
blot topography like a pack
of feral suns. Not that this
is the business of your skin.
In January cold you don fur,
handfuls of claws. Paint dry
for centuries, you name yourself –
voice, breath, door. This rock
the only place you fail to exist.

The Night Kitchen

Incandescent, midnight lamps wheel
grey flies to grey paint, deconstruct

the shapeless radius of their passage –
a blizzard over the Pacific Ocean,

low tide under miles of stars
and a moon. Wild, we arch and aim

coiled newspaper at the maniac swoop
of flight, the creature waltz

of clear elements. Soon smoke drifts
from the night kitchen, a river

of breath arranging itself like stone
in our lungs. Under waves of sackcloth

the drunken heat is all that’s left
of symmetry, your heart’s animal thrash.

9.69

In brisant sparks of charcoal, history reveals
its progress. AD 1044, the Wujing Zongyao
tells of siege engines, China’s surge of incendiary
bombs – speed unknown to the world beyond.
Those were our first gestures of warning –
thunderclaps settled in plush fields of rice,
scored earth exposing the value of distance.
Translated, a gunshot still means run,
a moment that begins with kinship,
spectators imitating the stutter of legs – recoil,
pause until each sprinter splits from the blocks,
hopelessly elemental. In those seconds
we forsake what we’re running from,
or to – evolved to suffer the impossible,
catch the protozoan glint of flight
that can carry a man 100 metres in 9.69 seconds.
It must be that the moment we look away,
some of us travel as breath.

Jurors

POETRY

Victoria’s Tim Lilburn is the author of eight books of poems, including Kill-site and Orphic Politics and the editor of two influential anthologies on poetics: Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy.

Priscila Uppal is the author of the novels The Divine Economy of Salvation and To Whom It May Concern as well as five poetry collections, including Ontological Necessities, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Her work has been translated into several languages.

Order of Canada officer Roy Miki is a Vancouver writer, poet and editor whose published poetry includes four books: Saving Face, Random Access File, There and Surrender for which he won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry in 2002.