I wrote this poem when I was completing my undergraduate degree in Calgary. Chris Wiseman, who expressed great hopes for me, had it published in Arial. I had forgotten about it until I found it a couple of weeks ago.  

I include it here because it focusses on a theme that has been a constant preoccupation for me. I have always been susceptible to a sort of swooning. Sometimes this took the form of lightheadedness, a seeing of stars. Other times it induced complete collapse. With this swooning came blissful emptiness and a sensation of understanding. My mind was a tempestuous place of ceaseless regret, cataclysmic fear and desperate hope, but for some seconds the tension would slacken, and storm waves would subside on a sea become mirror-still. I craved these little deaths above all else.

The swooning came on me in moments of extreme tension or exhaustion, when I was approaching breakdown. I took great pains to induce this swooning with various techniques of self abuse. I garnered such methods from the Kwakiutl Vision Quest, Matt Talbot, the lives of Saints, and Schoepenhaur’s conception of a timeless aesthetic moment; but drink, drugs and a general wild abandon were my primary tools. Mind-tormented, I fed on loss and pain.

I have recently learned that after years of practice this state of emptiness can be induced through meditation. I am working on an essay, “The Trembling of the Veil,” that looks closely into palliative benefits of the destruction of the mind.

It was sound more than sense that impelled this poem, the precariousness of words uttered in silence and solitude; emptiness expressing itself. For this reason I include a recording of the poem being read.

This is not my favourite of settings: I have gone to great lengths to inhabit other locales. This poem leaks shamefaced from behind a curtained Calgary window.

Frail Grace

I watch my fraying face in the mirror.
Shadows seep down my cheeks
and cling to my chin.
Shadows seep down these walls 
from the sky and lie in piles
of laundry, corners, compartments and cracks.
The house hollowed out
recalls not a thing,
its windows blind white 
towards shame quiet dawn.

Trees beyond hold ten thousand shook rags.
Ten thousand shook rags clean empty
my drum-hollow, spider-scrap form
for an instant, before I am back, 
web blocked in shadow,
palms upon the dust-pure sills.