Poetry

Under North America

by Tim Liburn

From the September 2006 issue of The Walrus


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On tongues of jammed horsetail, stacked as plates on the jaws
of fish, a scaffold of femurs and calottes staggering
from foundation posts of longhaired firepits, these
eyes on the backs of those sturgeon, the womanly, hydrocephalic
fish stunned in a current of coaled bees.
Five o’clock shadow along this night ladder, ice’s last thinking.
And, a step below, quartz bleep of knapped spark hominids
peaking along the rush of the bone ray, night
stair, moon-pulling round it, u-ed backs, the whitenesses unbending and
touching the shoulders in front, then arms shot-curved back.
Sink yourself, sew your eyes into the hole for the shark mouth
in a delirium cloud.
Now the nose, cavalry it into the trench up to the cliff face of the perfume
of the black feather, phallic, passed
from the slow mind of the bone to who holds it: the
brain tumour: given.
Tongue old as horsetail, the scent organ in your own jaw.
Beautiful city state land-lifting in the jumped nose in your jaw. That
bone hut place, pelvic rooves, a half circle in front of the bulging ice.
The bones with their welted, tripod hearts,

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