Fetishes of the Floating World

Don Domanski

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781771315678
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Governor General's Award–winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole.

Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don's lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world. Here is a spirituality that doesn't turn its back on the material and immerses us in earthly being.

The sustained apprehension of deep time underlies every moment of this work; every moment is held up against that more-than-human span and is relinquished to it. Domanski's full-bodied, incantatory language will penetrate your very marrow, calling you out of yourself to testify to the world's "inclement graces."

"Domanski's poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English."–Mark Strand on All Our Wonder Unavenged

And So I Came to Dewfall

Nocturne

1.

I have my night my hours of greater magnitude

my time to settle in with the essential form of things

I have fireflies and catchlights moving between the trees

a deer’s glass footprints along the ground a vapour

of rabbits in the hills I have the pulse of stones

and the dead ribboning through

uncombed grass

each night I lay down with the ghosts of Pikaia

and become glamoured by their incandescence

their glow like that last sunset in Doggerland

like the shimmer of dna sequences ancestrally

inserted into a genome that bounty of light

in the germline.

2.

a quiet night clouds rolling in the microgravity

of a single thought somewhere out there in the dark

it might be one of my own it might be something

created in the Paleolithic still wandering about

like the exoskeletal remains

of insects adrift in the air or simply be the spindrift

of comprehension between one life and another

I’m walking down to the lake with a dappling

of moonlight across the forest floor

with stars overhead migrating like fetal cells

into their mother’s body

a lip of water around a stone quivers

flies among the bitterweed polish their lenses

while angels in their ghillie suits

shift their positions

under the cover of darkness

out here human realities don’t matter much

and yet this is where you’ll find transcendence

the soul-enveloping absence that is the inner life

this is where you’ll find the true weight

of consciousness

those emanations of cloudless time

cerulean blue threading thought to flesh

flesh to intuition preordained like a fine

dust to fall on the loved and the unloved

in equal measure.

3.

there’s an old saying

night is the poet’s day

I like that and night’s dharma black-gripped

around each tree and blade of grass

holding tough to the tenderest gesture

to all the metamorphoses of a singularity

I like my unceasing belief that I exist the way

I turn my head when my name is called

the way night questions all my assumptions

as I walk as I add my shadow to other shadows

to the dark deities of postbelief

as I listen to someone shelling crickets

as I listen to the hymns of ditch water and cattails

motherwater carrying intercellular activity

at the intersection of corona and birth

I am one of those always in a liminal state

always thinning into reality

then fading out again always following

those lost on that long journey

between one thought and another.

4.

I walk along depending upon the surface of things

and loose approximations of thought

I have small reasons for what I do

for the blending of cognition and deed

I rely on the stabilizing properties of whisperings

exquisite and venerable

murmurations in the undergrowth leaf-talk

and moss-chant all that chlorophyll has to offer

my footsteps contain all the hard labour

of petals falling on lace

I move quietly slowly a walking

meditation a sleepwalker with no bed

to return to walking down an old logging

road overgrown with goatweed and fleabane

I am the sleeping one

I long for the mediumship of cicadas

the foretelling of their seventeen-year voice

the sweet arcana of their chorus to guide me

I look for the mercy of lost places for a place

that’s not a place at all I look for precious things

transformations of allegiances and pain

as I pass swamps and cranberry bogs

I look for the lowest places ones that might

teach me how to breathe like earth and water

help me find a place

time-lapsed between heartbeats

after walking for hours standing beside

the lake beneath a convergence of planets

surrounded by the synchronicit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Bestiary of the Raindrop
• And So I Came to Dewfall
• A Thin Place
• Notes & Acknowledgments
• Biographical Note