Jen Currin: The Whole Wind
THE WHOLE WIND
Someone at a party told me Mercury was in retrograde
& then asked how I found my poems.
Later he read a list of vulnerabilities &
we all held hands.
The children always steal spoons & listen to the dogs –
I can just barely bandage the past
enough for them to believe to go on.
It’s early morning & the I ching is not promising.
Tribes/tribal/hive-mind: the old way of loving.
A relentless tallying, a keeping track –
& calling this relationship.
I ate something selfish yesterday & now feel sick.
The whole house smells like mouldy dirt,
the curtain rod whipped off by the wind –
Jen Currin has published three previous collections of poetry: The Sleep of Four Cities (Anvil Press, 2005), Hagiography (Coach House, 2008) and The Inquisition Yours (Coach House, 2010), which was a finalist for the Relit Award, the Dorothy Livesay Award, and a Lambda, and won the 2011 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. She currently lives in Vancouver, where she teaches creative writing at Kwantlen University and English at Vancouver Community College.