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2:22 a.m.
By Catherine Owen
—For Tomasz
I woke from a dream in which you had a wound on your head.
You can't stay awake in lectures otherwise.
It was not moist. It was not conditional.
Something was groomed about this injury and unlike the others
it did not go on for pages without saying anything.
A dark beer on the roughly-hewn table, a faux-ethnic
ambiance.
I remember the word blue and how you stumbled, loved
in the beautiful circles of poems, coached me in Spinoza
on how not to, effectively, deploy.
Yet the gray day accepted nothing, such predictable accumulations,
stratospheric, a disco of academe.
I forgot to mention the wound was opaque. Unlike you,
it evidenced closure.
Your notebook full of luminous erasures, intertextual
amorousness, the server's patterned dress torn a little
at the margins.
Maybe more than that.
How still we are silken, ravaged, as the moment we first met,
strutting in that field of tongues, piled high with signifiers.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The clock has little red boots on, never apologizes.
Catherine Owen is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent being Frenzy from Anvil Press in Vancouver, BC. Her work has been translated into three languages, published in five countries and nominated for a range of honours including the BC Book Prize and the Air Canada/CBC award. These poems are from a manuscript called Quadrants.
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