For Display Purposes Only

David Seymour

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781552452745
• eBook ISBN: 9781770563414
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

These poems pause for the spectacle: cloning technologies, super-slo-mo photography, narcotic cab rides. Making fun of consciousness, they describe a system of tripwires, pitfalls, and decoys that this notion of daily viewership entails. These peoms are paeans to our facility for duplicity and self-deception, in which the act of living becomes more and more like a movie we're not in.

The Clones’ Brief Tenure

i. The First Reads The Phaedrus, Abridged

Now within the heavens are many
spectacles of bliss upon the highways.

Down here I’ll call the wind avenues of wrecked music,
and that anemic verge of yews lamping wiry shade
along the urban growth boundary its feeble instrument.
So, too, the ring of each coin’s cheap alloy
is a congratulatory note to this tinny autumn air

for such a succinct voice, with no appreciable distance
between the sound made and the sound heard as the coins
escape the hole over-laundering’s worried through my pocket.
A horse from the roadside pasture crashes the fence, humours
metonymy then clamours with impatient hooves into day-end

gridlock. All this moving about breeds souls, I’ve read.
That’s me, immortal matter, a smattering of universe made
coherent by reason. I’d love to kettle up late thermals,
view those aforesaid roadside exhibitions, but my wings,
already wasted and destroyed (same book), prohibit.

This means, then, that this means nothing, goddamnit,
right down to the threadbare rift in my trousers
which admits only vast indifference to my attention,
to its suppositious self, and to the nothing it also is
amid the rest that is also not within reach.

But such as have taken the first steps to the celestial
highway shall no more return to the dark paths.

ii. The Second Surfs the Net

Cleveland is lonelier and angrier without King James.

Lady Gaga, while wearing guts for garters, has begun
to weep openly during her concerts.

Patrice Brisebois visited the children’s burn ward
and the phones rang off their hooks.

After three Red Bulls in the helicopter, Jessica puked
during her morale-boosting visit to Afghanistan.

Gwyneth and Britney both wowed with risqué gowns.

Oprah says the great thing about life is
it’s the one thing we all have in common.

GSP continues to perform feats of diverted
sexual energy, and will finally fight in Toronto.

When Lindsay’s drunk she feels better looking,
that she’s better at most everything.

Dean Young leased a young heart on the open market.

CERN researchers are close to witnessing a Higgs boson,
which they affectionately call the God particle.

Merriam-Webster has announced ‘austerity’
is the word of the year. The runner up is ‘pragmatic.’

Snooki’s having trouble finding shoes to match the bag,
and tweeted it’s all just a big ball of fuckness.

Jackie’s own teammates tried to injure him at practice.

The day Captain America was killed by an assassin’s bullet
Jean Baudrillard also died, of a pointless illness.

Allan Baumgartner, funeral director and Texan,
auctioned off Lee Harvey Oswald’s coffin for 87 big ones.

Miley whiffed a bong of salvia, laughed uncontrollably
then had a vision of her absent fella.

Who is the future Mrs. Tony Romo? I can tell you.

iii. The Third Reads the First

When I read anaemic verge of yews lamping wiry shade
along the urban growth boundary I read
stand of trees casting shadows on the edge of town

and think I have reduced his thoughts, insulted him,
or oversimplified the yews, but no,
they have only grown

more complex since he laid eyes on them,
if he saw them at all and they weren’t fabricated
for the line to convey meaning of
another order entirely,

and now I’m stalled on the words, trying to uncover
a clue to the yews’ reality, a stark hint of certitude,
but find myself thinking instead about
the rapidity of urban expansion,

and inevitability – the likelihood
those yews, close as they were to the city limit,
have by now been expeditiously hewn to create more
living room, if they ever did exist.

And about death. The tone is rife.
But it’s not from death or ambiguity
that I want protection; those trees are close

to what memories are like,
which I am often in the business of retrieving,
elusive and puzzling as troglodytes as they can be,
though I’m still hung up on that horse;

the closest I can come is how I occupy
a sudden recess of thought, become unreal,
possibly only time and energy
borrowed from some larger entropy,

easily misplaced in the non-second
my mind takes to cajole persistence back – unlike
those drivers stopped in traffic

who have already propelled themselves
forward out from the cars,
past the dinner table, perhaps undressed

without a word to loved ones, and climbed
aboard their raft of sleep – here
I am. I am right here;

whether or not those yews will survive,
when the troglodytes appear, and from where
the horse, will be my safeguards.

About the rest I’m unsure, it may be
he’s missed the mark, misinterpreted,
so I’ll go check the source.

Ten Views from an Unreal Dwelling

[In the southwestern Ontario town, a forty-foot, white-painted tower stands beside the newer transit station, which whisks commuters to their metropolitan destinations eight times daily. Chipped and rusted from weather and disuse, off limits, the perched holding tank has a chute jutting over the tracks, having long ago poured tonnes of processed flour into patient railcars. Here and there in the evening-kissed backyards, children wearing cherry-blossom, verdigris, aubergine or crimson-coloured jerseys practice footwork and dekes before legging it to their soccer matches on the manicured pitches of the high school grounds. Beer bugs and fresh brick dust fleck the air with deflected sunlight, also gleaming from the waxen blades of sticky ryegrass and Kentucky blue. Fences between the close-set homes block the wind so that the cedar shrubs remain sufficiently undisturbed for spiders to take up residence, too. The next development over, cranes and shovellers sleep in long-necked bird poses near the exposed foundations of unfinished houses. Gravel piles lean against the sky, tall as the basements are deep. A wide suburban street lined with sapling maples runs through the finished neighbourhood. It is empty of cars, but for the packed double driveways nuzzling each set of garage doors, which offer a satisfying geometric repetition into the vanishing point. Across Thompson Creek, culverted under the asphalt, the road ends at tumbledown barbed wire that fences off cornfields, where a heron was onc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title Page
• About This Book
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Epigraph
• Wild Lines
• Eyewitness Testimony
• Clone
• Cyclops
• Dialectic Concerning the Deity’s Benevolence
• A Modest Sum 
• Several Takes
• Even
• Odd
• Fla.
• Cory on the Bash Awhile
• Slide Show of Uig
• BBC World News
• Insomnia
• Song for the Call of the Richardson’s Ground Squirrel Whose Call is a Song for the Cry of the Short-Eared Owlet
• Repeat Offender
• The Text May
• In the Company of a Lie
• Possibly About Everything and Nothing
• The Photo Double
• When
• American Ekphrastic
• We Are a Healthy Culture
• City Living
• Streetcar Monologue
• Same Tomorrow
• The Shape of a Casuist
• Tautology
• This Object Has Been Assigned Aesthetic Value
• Rewind
• Vertebrate
• Several Occasions for Happiness
• The Clones’ Brief Tenure
• Ten Views from an Unreal Dwelling
• Untimely Death in the Food Court
• The Secrets Cadavers Keep
• A Certainty Recurs for Gabe Foreman
• Symptom Diary
• With Love, Jan
• Whip Pan
• Nil by None
• Corpsing This Century
• Super Slo-Mo
• Zero Kelvin
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Colophon