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Sharawadji
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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.
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.
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Sharawadji - Brian Henderson
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
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