3 poems
CONTINUITY
If Earth were flat
it would have an Edge
a place of precision
where what is, ends
what is not begins.
Flat earthers, those closet positivists
let sense dictate ontology, say
the unperceivable is
inconceivable, drop
parsimony down
on the horizon
severing the continuum
like a guillotine.
Since Earth has an Edge they think
they wink out
crossing over.
The unknowable stays
put
no longer here
nor anywhere there is.
Some claim this gets death
right and extinction
others persist
on an oblate spheroid.
AS IS
Rather shabby
it remains:
a study in neglect
battered, dilapidated
still turning.
Not what they hoped.
Somewhere in that slow revolve
a new planetary
wobble
begins
a shifting of the
polar axis
as meltwaters rise
converge
the missing mass of Greenland
calving iceworlds of the Arctic
the Antarctic
Earth
tilting in response.
They barely notice.
CASTING OFF
Winter takes its grip. Artic wind
yowls down
from tundra, permafrost
scours the prairie.
Near a house flanked by lines
of swaying spruce
deer paw snow for seed
under feeders
and a wild turkey
visits. Presses his body to a
warm basement window
blinks down at the woman who
sits, tending gaps
in time
singular absences grow
into the rest.
Her words drop like
stitches sentences unhem
lose themselves
worlds ravel with
small undoings.
Hand paused
poised to dip, intervene
she is about to end this run
as it happens.
The turkey watches.
Laurelyn Whitt's poems have appeared in various, primarily North American, journals. She is the author of Interstices (Logan House), Tether (Seraphim Editions), and Adagio for the Horizon (Signature Editions). She lives in Manitoba and in Newfoundland.