All I really want: to hide between the sheets
of my childhood bed, sleep
until the sun stops coming up.
Could I walk home if I had to,
if things keep getting worse?
Google calculates it’s 90 days
by foot, not counting rests. A ferry
pass waits in my wallet in case
I’m broke when I get back
where waves cough and swallow
in stone-hollows along
the nightbound shore,
where water-walking Orion
and his star-map
mirror sparks from plankton
in the sea.
Rain pops
on the daylit lake. Inflows
oxbow through bulrushes
and bushes of Labrador tea.
Wings shush: three ravens clap
their calls across the lake. Fir boles
catch the ghost sun.
A fawn’s skull yellows
in the creek. One by one,
siskins trickle
from fir to fir.
Is the internal
world a city or wood? I ask myself
that often, walking downhill
the bag-scraped streets
at night where dead leaves bristle
on municipal trees.
Header photograph © Jason D. Ramsey.
Daniel Cowper is a poet from Bowen Island, BC. His poems have appeared in various literary reviews in Canada, the US, and Ireland, including Arc, Vallum, and Southword. He is the author of a poetry chapbook, The God of Doors, and a book of poetry entitled Grotesque Tenderness, forthcoming from McGill-Queen’s University Press in Spring 2019. He and Emily Osborne live in their small cabin on Bowen, and edit poetry for Pulp Literature.
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