Pluviophile

Yusuf Saadi

• Publisher: Nightwood Editions
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780889713741
• eBook ISBN: 9780889713758
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Pluviophile veers through various poetic visions and traditions in search of the sacred within and beyond language. Its poems continually revitalize form, imagery and sonancy to reconsider the ways we value language, beauty and body. The collection houses sonnets and other shorter poems between larger, more meditative runes. One of these longer poems, "The Place Words Go to Die," winner of The Malahat Review's 2016 Far Horizons Award for Poetry, imagines an underworld where words are killed and reborn, shedding their signifiers like skin to re-enter a symbiotic relationship with the human, where "saxum [is] sacrificed and born again as saxifrage." From here the poems shift to diverse locations, from Montreal to Kolkata, from the moon to the gates of heaven.

ii.

Root Canal

Tie a string around my tooth and pull. Offshore dental rigs won’t drill this skull for secrets. In my mother’s tongue I love you intimates I want you as my home. In her kingdom, wand’ring minstrels croon to cooling kadams, soothe bare gums with paan.

On St-Hubert a toothless snowman stares into my window, smiles. This wintry air is anaesthetic—ringing glass-on-glass of interlocking crystals. Walking past his porch I hear him sing in frozen key, Novocaine would numb your face, you’d never learn to love a place, my abscess lulls to ancient melody.

Pathetic Fallacy in November

The moon’s sallow rictus on a November night. Bleary stars barely keep their eyes open. The falling snow invisible except under white-light streetlamps where it rushes through like TV static, dies mutely in crystalline graves. The city’s collective sadness condenses overhead into brumous clouds, migrating in aerial continents from repressed regions of our minds.

Sombre in their sky march, only occasionally looking down at the blinking world, too proud to acknowledge that if I held a clump of cloud in my hand its heartbeat might understand what November feels like in its indecision that hovers between snow and rain. Vacillating degrees of frozen. That if I dissect a cloud to regions deeper than its molecular love triangle, I will only find atoms trying to fill silences between lives with stories. As if we are so different.

Remember: you are just water and I am just skin. Remember: despite their grace, clouds are blind. Forget: enchantment. Snowflakes are your sacrifice, signalling you saw me look up before you had to drift away, almost regretfully.

The Good News Channel

for Matt

i.

Tonight on YouTube, cable and satellite, a secret channel where clouds above Sahelian droughts outlast your pessimism. Moonlit rains beyond Tunisian plains craft a jeweller’s dream: in golden dunes diamond briolettes carve diamond rivulets.

ii.

California redwoods bless the earth tonight, invisible as gravity. Cities balance on their limbs, our wars on their capacity to breathe. They guard our beds tonight, our thankless, private gods. A sapling roots within the soil and gathers acolytes.

iii.

Tonight, there’s no commercial pause. A towhee by your window obeys the laws of flight.

iv.

The laws of light illuminate New York tonight—being shimmering with being. The report tonight: poetry is news that stays beautiful. Each word tunes a tiny instrument for a clause’s musical. (In Gaza children dance tonight. (But only for tonight.))

Phenomenology of Night

i.

From cloudferries, the angels cast lines into the night to reel prayers from our human hearts— threads pulling so desperately the clouds keel.

ii.

An angel unhooks a worm of light, heaves an unripe orison overboard to crawl back inside us— until it blooms with distress, rises of its own sincerity.

Surah

I’m intimate with three a.m.: outside my window a garden rose glowers at her blemished petals dreaming of bouquets. Potholes plot assassinations of car tires, and street lamps listen to all confessions. Shadows cling to conspiracies of light. On the dead-end street a solitary stop sign wishes it wasn’t born with a broken heart. A parking meter whispers its prayer before bed: In the name of God, most gracious, most merciful, thee do we worship and thine aid do we seek…

The tungsten moon inhales its tidal breaths to steel the firmament’s architecture, where a shooting star screams a valediction as an orbit drags it to the sun; a white dwarf recalls the warmth in the singular...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• i.
• ii.
• iii.
• Notes & Acknowledgements
• About the Author