Sharawadji

By Brian Henderson

Nominated for the CAA Award for Poetry [Canadian Authors Association]

A renowned poet lets language ride its own musically-malleable syntax into unfamiliar regions of consciousness.

Brian Henderson has established himself as a poet who brilliantly makes us aware of language as an instrument of discovery. In his work we realize, over and over again, that each of the mind's worlds speaks a secret language, which it is the poet's task to discover and translate.In Sharawadji, this includes not only such worlds as those created by the surreal paintings of Jacek Yerka, but the intense, re-humanizing experience of loss and grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Sep 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9781771310185

Book preview

Sharawadji

Sharawadji

Brian Henderson

Brick Books

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Henderson, Brian, 1948-

     Sharawadji / Brian Henderson.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-926829-69-2

     I. Title.

PS8565.E51S48 2010          C811’.54          C2010-907675-3

Copyright © Brian Henderson, 2011

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The cover image is a photograph by Brian Henderson.

Brick Books

Box 20081

431 Boler Road

London, Ontario

N6K 4G6

Canada

www.brickbooks.ca

For Charlene, for ever

Contents

TWELVE IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES

Perfecting Thirst

The After

The Gleaner

City of Heaven

Test

The Jetty

The Replicase

The Sea, the Valley and the Temple City

The Sect

The Survivor

The Welcoming Catastrophe

When the Dead and the Living Change Places

NIGHT MUSIC

The Before

Half-Lives

Last Note

Unresectable, 11 May

How to Free the Past for the Future

As If in an Henri Rousseau Painting

Collection of Photographs

The Ruthie Tree

Belonging

Night Music

What Will Become

Well

The Lighthouse Dreamer

What Can Never Stop Having Been

The Answer

Returning

Coda of Sighs

Last Walk in the Garden

LIKE THE SOUND OF A GRASS FIRE

Things Beckon

Arrowhon Anniversary

At the Pond

Early Spring Night by the Lake

Himalaya

Every Part of You Has a Secret Language

Nagarjuna and the Grackle

On the Skyline

Residual Messages

The Clearing

The Counter-Tree

Two Time

Were You to Walk

Three Quotations

The Book That Can Be Read from Its Shelf

The Last Word, A Sharawadji

PREVIEWS

Animal Light

Apocrypha

Hospital of the Dark

In the Zone

A Momentary History of Time, or, The Sheer

Poisoned

Portrait

Something to Remember the World By

Among the Harvested

The Invasion

The Last

Then

Time Runner

Notes

Acknowledgements

Biographical Note

TWELVE IMAGINARY LANDSCAPES

Oh time thy pyramids

– Jorge Luis Borges

Perfecting Thirst

Golden drench of sand, the backsweep and golden suck of the tides of wind here in the flooded desert of our endless listening, our endless attempts at incarnating water with the stone lintels of mind and the small smirking mouth of a candle, a stubborn blind icon. Trilobites of prayer puncture the walls like shrapnel. On the night table I have closed the Book of Listening on waiting, since the disappearance of the animals, for the beauty of their return. The parched trees out there staggering toward their own mirage. Something about who we’ve always been, between water and sand, inoculated with the backsweep of light, endlessly recalcitrant.

There is, blindly, no after, so that if we were to say, We were the ones who were always here, we would not be talking of time.

The After

A dark purple plunge, one that has the light set back in it, windless, where you could imagine running on empty, the one sticky fuel where the meteor had fallen, up the curved stairway