EXPRESSWAY
EXPRESSWAY
SINA QUEYRAS
Copyright © Sina Queyras, 2009
This epub edition published in 2010. Electronic ISBN 978 1 77056 055 0.
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also gratefully acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Queyras, Sina
Expressway / Sina Queyras.
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-55245-216-5
I. Title.
PS8583.U3414E96 2009 C811’.6 C2009-900012-1
I
THE ENDLESS PATH OF THE NEW
‘Wait now; have no rememberings of hope ... ’
Wallace Stevens
‘If you can’t see the finish line in the near distance, don’t get frustrated – turn around! There you’ll see it, miles behind you.’
Daily Horoscope, January 18, 2007
SOLITARY
1
What sympathy of sounds? What cricketing
Of concrete, what struck rubber, what society
And shifting birdsong sweetens spring’s tumult?
She walks near the expressway, a patch
Of emerald turf besieged by doggy bags,
Where frolicking hounds squat to pee, crimson
Cellphone at her ear. She is calling home,
Calling the past, calling out for anyone
To hear. She is waiting, she is wanting
To be near, of flesh, of earth, on foot,
And this is her perspective: the 1-95, its
Prow of condos, the Delaware’s sunken
Ships and artillery shells, now the idea of River, so many years since any live flesh Could be immersed. Here the expressway
Smoothing each nuisance of wild, each terrifying
Quirk of land, uneven, forlorn paths; wanderer,
Wander, lonely as a cloud, dappled, drowned,
A melancholic pace and nowhere untouched. Nature,
One concludes, is nostalgia. Now, two hundred
Post-Romantic years – the Alps bursting into flames,
All the way to Mont Blanc, incendiary air. How far
Auschwitz? Darfur? Are we a hopeful people
Yet? She follows her uncle’s gestures, paced
For lungs, each strike of stick to stone, recalls
Wordsworth’s dog, the solitary path unwinds below.
2
What sympathy of sounds. Her father
A bag she carries in a bigger bag, lighter
Now, having scattered him across two
Provinces, up a goat path, where these
Struck peaks, a starburst of contrails, German
Songs like silt, and tiny woollen cathedrals
Whose bells mark the hours. Have we suffered enough?
Her uncle bends his century, a creeping juniper
Under which lies a tiny tin cup. Doucement,
Doucement, the water another source, a Knowing (even without language) where To drink, or how (and where) one foot
Should fall well before it does, recognition of
The stone’s slice; that even rock is not solid;
Such knowledge a long-time companion rarely
Of any use other than to remind: be open, flexible,
Eye on the horizon, thumb in air for change,
Change; history with its multiple pathways.
It is not her first time here, though, in truth,
It is. But what is truth? Fact? Body? Idea?
Word? The heat waking up now, a new century
Ahead, and at the top, a bit of bread and cheese,
A cellphone out, Ta mère, he says, Tell her your father is laid to rest.
3
But is anyone at rest? She traces roadways where
In occupied France her father rode his bicycle
High above the Durance, finding – as we all
Wish – a smooth path between rivets
Of the newly erected metal bridge, his hands
High above his head, or so one version
Of the legend goes. What balance, what
Lack of fear, what shock of hair, what finesse
Of foot and pout of mouth, what eloquent
Dismount, his aunts below not daring
To call out for fear of distracting he who
Like Christ could turn gravity on its head,
And for whom two sisters would devote their lives –
If not in flesh, then in suffering. What
Sympathy
