FOR DISPLAY PURPOSES ONLY
DAVID SEYMOUR
About This Book
‘Whip-pan-smart, fleet and protean, David Seymour’s poems seem to contain the speed of the age. I love their ranginess and ambition, the way they rove through a here-and-now teeming with there-and-then, their speakers’ flights and turnings through the blizzard. This is a different world, and we live in it.’
– Paul Farley
‘From an unemployed Scot in mid-gripe to a photo double floating in a shooting tank, Seymour places us in the domains of various carefully considered strangers “made coherent by reason,” but also by an energized curiosity and a humane amusement. Worlds only notionally, minimally there – worlds belonging to whoever briefly inhabits and dreams them – become fully dimensioned, clearly edged under his attention. It’s uncanny how he pulls this off. David Seymour is a magician.’
– Tim Lilburn
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copyright © David Seymour, 2013
first edition
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Seymour, David, 1971-
For display purposes only [electronic resource] / David Seymour.
Poems.
Electronic monograph in EPUB format.
Issued also in print format.
ISBN 978-1-77056-341-4
I. Title.
PS8637. E95 F67 2013 C811′.6 C2013-900223-5
For Display Purposes Only is available as a print book: 978-1-55245-274-5
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for Karen
2
‘You climb a mountain
leading seven men who look like you. They depend
on you for their safety. You climb higher
and higher until you are alone under a sun
gone pale in altitude. You climb above birds
and clouds. You are home in this atmosphere.’
– Richard Hugo
‘From being to being an idea, nothing comes through that intact.’
– Jay Hopler
Wild Lines
The best design survives
a narrative compulsion
Adhere to your personality and I
guarantee prediction
As you radiate I’ll collect you
analyze your information
When I tell you I love you
you smile like
Our old television advertising
a clearer HD television
There goes the apartment performing
accurate impersonations again
Our snuggly companion repetition
returns with a difference
Far more pleasurable
than pity or reprieve
Time is the classic dimension
and chronic plot point
We’ve hurt one another
and haven’t been sorry
I love you in the radiant sense
of you emitting duration
The best design dissolves
into behaviour
Our rooms, our bed, our windows
and unused corners
Bungled angles, disturbed dust
bunnies and flakes of us
The man who was killed died. The gun
had gone ballistic in the parking lot. Up ’til then
all he’d done was have nothing to lose.
His hair was growing right out of his face.
Earlier, from the precipitate sky, hail the size
of golf balls pelted the clubhouse. Errant
hail-sized golf balls shanked the clubhouse
before the golfers ran for cover from the weather.
This occurred. On the fringe of suburbs
and their evident neighbouring. The cars
remained parked in the lot where he fell,
immobile necessary machinery.
The woman at the scene sporting leopard-print
spandex was way too realistic. She lacked
conspicuous panty lines. Her description,
though relevant, was weapon focused.
The report from the shots fired was heard variably
