Frances Boyle: A Poem
Frances Boyle
The Sky is Unnatural
Shrovetide, the banishing of winter
A morning of dawn-treading,
a rented cottage, a marshy lake.
Yawning noon after sleepwalking. A parade
of tiny ants, redolent of old rites, fears
converted to straw-stuffed rags.
A rough-made doll.
Blue-black vibrations, worn-out moon
wanes. Two fish—no, there’s a third—
whiskery fish invisible in water, bump
against logs.
The abstract shame that surfaces
in memory, a shape filled by twisting
vines that grow along my nerve endings
as a bounty of zucchini spreads
in the cold frame.
I check
my phone the way I used to smoke:
to distract, to pull myself away from intensity
to boredom.
The jar
empties, the jar will refill, and a courgette
seems to be a cucumber when I reach
for it in the crisper.
The sturgeon bright, the salmon bright,
but which is which? The way I look
at the bathing
moon realigns my face to the active crime
of not knowing. The sky is unnatural.
If this shell
is hard to drink from, I’ll scoop up
what’s calm, what’s beautiful. I’ll place
gladiolas on this beribboned doll, the burning
Marzanna, fill her arms
with poppies. But I must not
look upon the effigy, drowned, aflame,
or s\he’ll inhabit me.
I shift
from complicity to focus, a ghostly habit.
Hairy stems, scraps of red
will mark her whelming, and mine.
The Marzanna sits up, ripples wash. And I
surge upward, rise from the shallows, grasping
vines that float upon my palms.
from Openwork and Limestone, by permission
Frances Boyle’s most recent book is Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022). Her first novel, Skin Hunger, is forthcoming from The Porcupine’s Quill in 2024. Raised on the prairies, Frances has long lived in Ottawa on unceded and unsurrended Algonquin Anishinaabeg territory. Visit her at www.francesboyle.com.
Photo by Miranda Krogstad