MxT

Sina Queyras

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781552452905
• eBook ISBN: 9781770563759
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

"Sina Queyras is a poet to read and reckon with."—Lambda Literary Review

MxT, or "Memory x Time," is one of the formulas acclaimed poet Sina Queyras posits as a way to measure grief. These poems mourn the dead by turning memories over and over in their hands, by invoking other poets, by appropriating science, by studying the history of elegy. Devastating, cheeky, allusive, hallucinatory: this is Queyras at her most powerful.

All the gods know is destinations. I have raised
A glass, my eye, your hook. Let's face it the world
Is a shrinking place and hungry: too much grief
To feed. I float away from you on hard

Covers. I step out on the stacked hours. Words
If they were soil how I would throw them back into the
Compost pile and wait for spring. Those "this is how
It is," speeches appear and later diamonds soft as bullets.

I went to the library looking to scaffold my thoughts.
Sure, now you say Lucretius. Intelligence is so often
Hindsight. Outside Holly Golightly's townhouse
There are taxis. The end of me, or you, is of no concern.

Frederick Seidel anoints me with the head of his penis.
It is soft as a chamois and spreads like egg across my scalp.

Sina Queyras is the author of the Lambda Award–winning Lemon Hound, Expressway (shortlisted for the Governor General's Award), and the novel Autobiography of Childhood (shortlisted for the Amazon First Novel Award). She often writes for the Poetry Foundation and runs the online journal Lemon Hound (Lemonhound.com).

Elegy Written in a City Cemetery

Somebody left the world last night, and last, and last, and last:1 wild is the glower2 of wind, and words too thin, too meek to shelter.3 Lament in rhyme, she says, lament in roses:4 he was, and is not!5 It will always be darker soon, colder,6 you who are part anger who bent down in winter,7 know that your prayers cannot dismiss the darting shade.8 No, let us not shit upon the ground9 near the lone pine with ivy overspread,10 and let me not your giddiness flatten,11 for so fine the season, so serene the hour12 and all I have left of that moment is this torn scrap.13

I weave my bones thru the freeway haze at Rincon,14 the self returns again, my natal self:15 what you see is the red-shouldered16 judge of the Quirky and Dead. I am not17 man, man is death, and the world pain.18 We were all uncountable stars then:19 the tilt of earth is beautiful20 from every angle.

I mourn for Adonis21 – I expected her to look more dead in the casket.22 Let them bury your big eyes,23 Death, be not loud; your hand did not give her this blow, she was borne to church on glasses of Grey Goose:24 Only the bottle knows she is gone.25 Damn the snow,26 an uneven basin to stroll:27 the curfew tolls the knell of closing time.28 The moon still sends its abundant light.29 It is a hard time among these stones,30 for all the toppled, liquid graves.31 A slumber did your spirit steal.32 At Wilshire and Santa Monica an opossum crossed.33 I thought, Two forms move among the dead, high sleep34 so prescient your absence.35

Small is the poet’s needle, God knows:36 but inside the heart37 a broken night advances in its glass.38 Death knelt among the39 starving children on your plate:40 I sometimes think of those pale, perfect faces41 who die as cattle, and I cannot sleep.42

The city you graced was swift.43 Now that the Summer of Love has become the milk of tunnels;44 now that the chestnut candles burn,45 so may the trees extend their spreading.46 There is blessing in this gentle breeze.47 What need of bells to mark our loss?48 Shall I go force an elegy?49 The dead sing Turn the lights down sweetly.50 No more for us the little sighing, nor the grand.51 All the new thinking is still about loss.52

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Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About This Book
• Epigraph
• Alternating Mourning
• Water, Water Everywhere
• Direct Mourning
• Dear One ...
• A Manual for Remembering
• Circuit Symbols
• On a lighter note ...
• Like a Jet
• Emotional Overload Sensor Circuit
• There you are ...
• Of the Hollow
• Emotional Field
• Dear One ...
• Five Postcards from Jericho
• Ohm’s Law of Grieving
• Yes, Dear One ...
• Emotional Circuit Breaker
• I said ...
• Over to You
• Emotion Frame Dimensions
• The endless loop of feeling ...
• Sylvia Plath’s Elegy for Sylvia Plath
• Elegy for My Father’s Labour
• Elegy for a Lost Brother
• He Was and Is Not
• Two Elegies for Grief as Jackson Pollock
• Elegy for the Letter Q as It Appears in The Waves
• Elegy for Ezra Pound by Gerhard Richter
• Elegy for Agnes Martin
• Elegy Written in a City Cemetery
• Solenoid
• Elegy for Photographs Not Taken
• Notes
• About the Author
• About this Edition