Tim Bowling was born in Vancouver and raised in the nearby town of Ladner. He is the award-winning author of a number of books, including the novel The Paperboy's Winter (Penguin, 2003) and The Witness Ghost (Nightwood, 2003), which was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. He edited Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood, 2002). His most recent collection is The Memory Orchard (Brick Books, 2004), and Bowling appeared in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, 2005. The following poems are reprinted by permission of the author.
Any letters for me, please put them
In the burnt-out jack-o'-lantern.
If you find a fallen leaf
from my tenth or thirtieth year
please hang it on the clothesline
with my grandmother's linen.
Please don't press your face
to the screen on the porch door;
the moth-hunger in the human eye
is more than I can bear.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll begin again
the terrifying heart of life and muscle,
scrape the ash from the lantern
and circle my eyes, reel in the damp
of memory on its rusty wheel,
and greet you as any other man.
But not tonight. Please,
If you would come to me at all,
come as the smoke of one fire
to another, or as the voice of the moon
to the body of the slackened river.
At daybreak
a gull walks between
the empty beer bottles
the teenagers arranged
like birthday candles
on your bulk,
then flies off,
a vivid flare.
But there's no rescue now.
The absence of god
is filled with the longing
for the presence of god.
Night after night,
the stars attend
your stench
as scholars attend
the turning of time
into history.
Whale jaw, jack spring spine, rock cod gill,
scallop under skin of my hand; these
are the bones I'm burying now. Tomcat skull,
sparrow wing, spaniel paw, full moon behind
my bluest gaze; I'm planting them all.
No animal returns to gnaw its gnawed limb
left in a trap; I've thirty years to dig
the deep six for, and hard shoulderblades
to gunnysack. Darling, carry the spade
for me, chant my years without you down;
I want the sunlight on a new foundation,
my old bricks in the wormsweet ground.
Cattle hock, heron claw, muskrat rib,
mast I hang my breathing from; I'll part
the grass and roll and die; I'll build
new castanets: here's a fresh gentility:
as the hummingbird twines its tiny nest
of spiderweb and moss, so I build
my hope and sleep from the marrow
of your kiss.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading