Two Poems from Tall, Grass, Girl
Aubade, Red River Valley
The sun dogs warn that it’s colder than you thought.
Sit by my side if you love me into a tornado
that bends silos. Your neck’s a border crossing.
Turtle Mountain does not hasten the unrequited
prairie or trace water spirals of vyshyvanka
on quarter sections: bid me a dew.
Bid me a through highway and a pronghorn
running beside my truck as the wind
punches a hole in the silo, sucks up sweet with
alkali lake. The slough loops into the valley
going, they say, from you. Even cowgirls
pay their dues. It’s cold out there and
sitting by my side, a tornado
whirling down to a point
on the ground, the funnel
so prehensile it could
reach out and pluck
a dime from this valley:
you say you
are going.
Beside
A stutter-self, a shadow without edge,
a last echo, mitochondrial must,
every question I don’t want knowledge
of or an answer to. What lives in dust
motes and skin cells, in water vapor pushed
hot from lungs and past a nasal spur?
Beside me, sometimes, in the deft and rushed
disguise of an idea, sleek brain-blur,
mind-meld, earworm, cold ashes and mildew,
ancestral gravel and rain gulping air,
heron rising from reeds to flight: it’s you,
slow-motion, perpetual blue spectre.
Credit to John Roscoe.
Tanis MacDonald is the author of seven works of nonfiction and poetry, including Mobile, which was longlisted for the City of Toronto Book Award. She is a two-time recipient of the Malahat Review’s Open Season Awards for Creative Nonfiction and has also won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Teaching Creative Writing. She is the co-editor of the anthology GUSH: Menstrual Manifestos for our Times (with Ariel Gordon and Rosanna Deerchild). Originally from Treaty 1 territory/Winnipeg, she now lives near O:se Kenhionhata:tie (Willow River) in the southwestern Ontario watershed region.
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