BC Poetry 2018: "the bridge from day to night" by David Zieroth (Harbour Publishing)

here in the wet

…a child stops on the street and tries to pry
from concrete the stuck-on part of a wing
some hatchling that grew big but could not
fly and was crushed, body so scant it 
vanished under rain and beaks of crows

only ribs of desiccated primaries remain –
and these he wants to lift up, but his mother
scolds him, laughing, nonplussed he has 
yet to learn what cannot be safely touched
and this stir returns to the boy later

when he has sons of his own, sees so often
hazards of the day, learns not to fear them
entirely and thus is pierced hearing his 
mother’s mirth, she among the long dead 
her shining hair once constant, comforting

gone, and he recalls a purple shadow
fleeting through that breath: his father
peered down as if he, too, could toy with
an emptiness that yet wanted holding
as it called out for a child’s moist hand

Who?

David Zieroth has published many books of poetry including The Fly in Autumn (2009), which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, How I Joined Humanity at Last (1998), which won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, and most recently, Albrecht Dürer and me (2014). He taught at Douglas College in New Westminster, BC, before retiring and founding The Alfred Gustav Press. Born in Neepawa, MB, he lives in North Vancouver, BC.


What?

The title poem in David Zieroth’s the bridge from day to night follows the speaker across the Second Narrows Bridge to North Vancouver, a well-worn moment in a daily commute that opens a window into the sublime: “from the apex / of the bridge with traffic flying / I look directly into / their deepest clefts.” Such moments occur throughout the collection, as Zieroth explores the resonance built from layers of such ordinary moments as they accumulate throughout a lifetime—indistinct and imperceptible as they occur, but creating unseen undercurrents through memory and time.

In this temporal landscape, the natural world becomes a touchstone, both entangled in and standing apart from the speaker’s internal narrative: “I brought from that forming hour a / precise smell of foliage: funeral wreaths / bore an acid scent.” Shifting fluidly through time, the speaker grows from a child to understand, reflect and then outlive his parents. Finally, the collection lights on the incongruities and contradictions in death: “still later I kick his flattened corpse / to the gutter, and it skids on concrete / a broken valise, weightless / on this segment of the journey.”

With his characteristic humour, subtlety and ability to find transcendence in the everyday, Zieroth traces the delicate strands connecting the most minute and familiar details to the most profound mysteries, giving voice to the unknowable.


When?

Arrived March 2018.


Where?

Purchase from the Harbour Publishing website or at your local bookstore. $18.95.


How?

Tracing the delicate strands.

Harbour Publishing * About This Series * More Books, Please!

The copyrights of all poems included in the series remain with their authors, and are reprinted with the permission of the publishers.