from Little arguments: stories,
Only in connection with a body does a shadow make sense.
Rosmarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of Profiles
~
I carved my boy from balsa wood. Once the Blue Fairy worked her magic, he began to breathe, and woke with a sneeze. The balsa wood allowed his body a softer texture, which also meant taking three times as long to carve. My boy would never tell a lie, never let himself be conned. He would never run away to join the circus, never fall into the belly of a whale, never need to be heroic and redemptive just to dig himself out of the complicated mess he’d made.
~
The laptop thief was bold as brass, lifting directly from her knapsack as she sat reading in the park. To steal one’s laptop, she realized, should be as criminal as stealing a man’s horse in the American Old West. To steal a man’s horse was as good as killing him.
~
In a television interview, the filmmaker we both admire mentions how she never uses bookmarks. She has always been able to remember the last page she read of any book, and is constantly baffled by the inability of others to do the same. She glances, distractedly, behind her as she says this, somewhere off-camera, in the direction of the studio floor. What might she be looking at? Her films are like distances we have yet to reach, capable of articulating broad silences. When so many others are unable to comprehend that silence has a language at all.
~
I remember the summer we lived in the abandoned blue 1970 Ford, resting in a field between farmhouses, nestled amid ancient maple and oak. It sat on the boundary of our two properties, at the back of the treeline, and neither of us knew who might have left it, her father or mine. Do you drive out a car until it slowly stops, or was it brought out and left? The summer she kissed me. We were thirteen years old, and perhaps shouldn’t have been playing in an abandoned car, more rust than blue. The difference between English- and French-speaking families, I suspected, was where one left your non-working car. In French, they sat in the driveway, the yard, the garage. In English, they lay far afield, the back forty, as distant from the house as was possible. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. Perhaps this might have been particular only to us, our small corner of Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.
~
It was not so much that we crave suffering, but to understand precisely what the suffering means.
Only in connection with a body does a shadow make sense.
Rosmarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of Profiles
~
I carved my boy from balsa wood. Once the Blue Fairy worked her magic, he began to breathe, and woke with a sneeze. The balsa wood allowed his body a softer texture, which also meant taking three times as long to carve. My boy would never tell a lie, never let himself be conned. He would never run away to join the circus, never fall into the belly of a whale, never need to be heroic and redemptive just to dig himself out of the complicated mess he’d made.
~
The laptop thief was bold as brass, lifting directly from her knapsack as she sat reading in the park. To steal one’s laptop, she realized, should be as criminal as stealing a man’s horse in the American Old West. To steal a man’s horse was as good as killing him.
~
In a television interview, the filmmaker we both admire mentions how she never uses bookmarks. She has always been able to remember the last page she read of any book, and is constantly baffled by the inability of others to do the same. She glances, distractedly, behind her as she says this, somewhere off-camera, in the direction of the studio floor. What might she be looking at? Her films are like distances we have yet to reach, capable of articulating broad silences. When so many others are unable to comprehend that silence has a language at all.
~
I remember the summer we lived in the abandoned blue 1970 Ford, resting in a field between farmhouses, nestled amid ancient maple and oak. It sat on the boundary of our two properties, at the back of the treeline, and neither of us knew who might have left it, her father or mine. Do you drive out a car until it slowly stops, or was it brought out and left? The summer she kissed me. We were thirteen years old, and perhaps shouldn’t have been playing in an abandoned car, more rust than blue. The difference between English- and French-speaking families, I suspected, was where one left your non-working car. In French, they sat in the driveway, the yard, the garage. In English, they lay far afield, the back forty, as distant from the house as was possible. Out of sight, out of mind, I suppose. Perhaps this might have been particular only to us, our small corner of Eastern Ontario and Western Quebec.
~
It was not so much that we crave suffering, but to understand precisely what the suffering means.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob
mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two
wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade
books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award
in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was
longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was
inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include
the poetry collections A perimeter
(New Star Books, 2016), How the alphabet
was made (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018) and Household
items (Salmon Poetry, 2018). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground
press, The Garneau Review, seventeen
seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics, Touch the Donkey and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater.
He is “Interviews Editor” at Queen Mob’s
Teahouse, a former contributor to the Ploughshares
blog, editor of my (small press)
writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in
Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly
posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com