Orion Sweeping

Anne Marie Todkill

• Publisher: Brick Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781771315692
• eBook ISBN: 9781771315708
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Anne Marie Todkill's debut recalibrates the anxiety of the present. It gives doubt a hearing, finding resilience in fragility and grace in unexpected places.

The poems assembled in Orion Sweeping take nothing at face value. What are we to make of a radioactive souvenir, a shape-shifting dog, landscapes made strange by time? The speakers gathered here seek to set the record straight: a mink gives advice; a wolf disputes a rumour; a photographer zooms in on a kill; a military strategist gives lessons in peace. But the sum of the evidence is not bleak. A baby arrives as robustly as a whale; the solidarity of marriage is enacted in surprising ways; father and daughter share a gift for reprieve. Under the penetrating gaze of these poems, beauty and tenderness come quietly into view.

Familia

Orion sweeping

Approaching midnight,

you on a ladder

planted in the berm

that slumped from the solar panels

before rain and graupel

made this sticky amalgam

that will foil our clever plan

for photon capture

after days of snow,

our batteries and comfort

running down.

So I brace the ladder

at this crazy hour

while you get the job done,

preparing for sunrise

on the second longest

night of the year.

The array rears

against the blueprint sky

like the wings of a satellite,

gargantuan contraption

for phoning home,

while you, apologizing,

send avalanches down,

plastering me, stuccoing the dog,

who shrugs off her surprise

with the usual equanimity

(she loves the cold, the night,

the trace of mice on the ground).

I take my chances,

scanning the sky

while we plunge at a thousand

klicks per second

toward the Great Attractor

and constellations

dredge the near horizon

of blackened cedars

oh so slowly. There, Orion,

whom some call Winter Maker,

belt and dagger sharp as ice,

pitches back-footed

to load his bow; and you,

Winter Sweeper, thin as a diagram

underneath your duffled

silhouette, aim your push-broom

against the dark, leaning

to the edge of the glass,

swinging, one-footed,

in your orbit,

for the moment

undisturbed

by the reckless earth.

Clearing windthrow from the trail

Striking, how trees

so often fall in pairs

like the long married,

the ground heaving

under one and then

so quickly the other

that it’s hard to say

which was propping,

which leaning,

or whether they’d grown

together so closely

that it was all the same.

We slice the boles

with bow saw and

pull saw rather than lug

the new Stihl all this way,

but use the cutting

order we were taught—

compression, then tension—

to avoid pinching the blades.

Even in these soft logs

straddling the path, balsam,

slender, we hear the snap

of the last fibres taking

the remaining weight,

then breaking.

Wash day

After forty-seven years

the laundry tub gave out.

Just like that.

Finally, my mother said,

like she’d been waiting for this day

to dispense her standard line:

Well, nothing lasts forever.

Just think of the uses

for that phrase—infatuations,

lilacs, good ice for skating—

the curiously strong lozenge

she always had ready

to clear our minds of grief.

(Cool as peppermint she was,

the day I left my husband.)

But I’d have to say

that in the family inventory

of things that didn’t last,

the double concrete laundry tub

was the most surprising.

It sprang a leak and we said,

It was bound to happen eventually,

as if we really had believed

that such a simple thing could fail.

Those modern detergents, my father said,

were eating out the wire mesh

all this time.

The sound was quite a shocker:

metal on stone,

rising from the basement

while they whacked the thing

into pieces.

Clang

forty-seven years

clang.

Tough as the dickens,

my father said, resting

the sledgehammer on the floor.

When my mother took it from his hands

he showed her where to land the blows.

Las...

Table of contents

• Earth
• Air
• Familia
• Loss Lessons
• Assisi Variations
• Notes
• Thanks