Lucía M. Polis's Blog

the poet makes…

Inspired by Samantha

the poet makes
the poet hard
to live

Labour Day

For Michael Turner

It is high noon in Baghdad.
To her empty living room,
Cappelbaum quietly hums,

Sleep Country Ca-na-DA!
Why buy a mattress
a���nywhere else? ���ding���


When she closes her eyes,
Cappelbaum thinks she can hear
echoes of distant times:

(Double your pleasure, double your fun���)
Wait . . . what do you mean
Barq’s has bite? When she


opens her eyes, she can hear
the zuhr from the muezzins’
duelling calls.

They are loud,
these voices,
and piercingly clear:

Taste the rainbow!
Roll up the rim to win!
It’s the beer out here.

���� Granville: 20th Anniversary Edition, Expanded & Revised

Returning to Granville, the debut poetry collection (inspired by Michael Turner’s Kingsway) that she had self-published in 2005, Lucía M. Polis retraces her steps back to a time when her own life and growth as a poet became entwined with one of Vancouver’s main thoroughfares (and all the places it took her). In reimagining her collection, Lucía invites you to board the number 10 bus at the southern confluence of intersections where Southwest Marine Drive becomes Granville Street; to make stops (and poems) along the way—pausing, diverting, looping back; and to arrive at the waters of Vancouver Harbour, changed.

Read about the book Read advance reviews View an interactive map of the book

Wiegenlied

For Sasha Stepanova

It is now half past midnight in
die Eidgenossenschaft.

The birds are sleeping;
the bees are sleeping;
and nobody mourns.

The city drifts
past soft purple clouds.


And here, in The Harbour City,
honk horns; it’s half past three.

The cars are rushing;
they’re so very loud;
they want to be free.


For now, sound asleep in your bed;
’til dawn, neither alive

nor dead; but a third
secret thing, your breath
buffets wrens; turns leaves

in eaves; chases away the clouds;
falls and rises again.

My Neighbour the Devil

For Samantha

The Devil lives on the margins
of my domain.

At dawn, he sneaks through the brambles
his wizened face
cut up by thorns
again.

In the day, while I’m at work,
he snips at my trees,
he pees in the breeze,
he gulps down his beer
then burps.


Honestly, I don’t think that he
means true harm.

I don’t even think he knows what
meaning is to begin with;
he just tends to his shed
of weed

or to his apple trees, or pears.
He just seems not to look
when his pointed tail whips
through the air
singing his grass.


Nor does he hear in the night
the chickadee���s call,

when throaty Cerberus
walks past my house with him,
just barely there
at all.

After Eliot II or, The Storytelling Man

The lanky storytelling man
Rests on his back upon the bed;
Although he seems so sane to one,
He is crazed and nearly dead.

Nearly dead he hides within,
Susceptible to nervous fray;
While the she-poet calls to him
To leave his shell and come away.

His storied Roman lips oft fail
To say the gospel to its end,
While the she-poet raises sails
To take away her ailing friend.

The ’teller, he can never reach
The mast-head on his ship’s main mast;
But stands bewildered, ears enwax’d,
As the she-poet pilots past.

At adiós, his rasped refrain
Reflects she-poet’s fare-thee-wells,
But each time these two meet again
It in the heart e’er briefer dwells.

The storyteller’s anguished day
Is passed in work; at morn he runs;
She-poet’s time runs counterways—
At daybreak she turns in at once.

I saw the ’teller run his course
Descending on Chinookèd valleys.
As blaring drivers damn with force
The name of God, in concrete alleys.

Water and soap won’t scour his spleen
And he won’t in Peace’s bosom lie,
Amongst the porc’lain he’ll be seen
Standing in fear—ne’er speak nor cry.

He shall be sat, dressed dark as night,
By hamlet pub’s oak panes at dawn,
While the she-poet waves adieu
Raises her anchor and sails on.

After Williams III

For Becky Ellis

so much depends
upon

cherry
tomatoes

beside the fire
croton

on the window
sill


we’ll wait
leaning into

the golden
sunshine

atop
soft kitchen paper

there
ripen and heal

Learning to Walk

Inspired by Samantha

(You can’t help it: Toe strap area
sounds to you just like that little room
where they search folks at airports.) What’s first?

You slip phalanges, metatarsals
under the open-toe band.
The piggies gather, obedient.


(Ankle strap zone sounds like the hottest
BDSM club in town���which fits:
Blisters Deliver Such Misery.)

But you pull it around���medial
malleolus, then the lateral���
how fabulleolus these lovely bits!


What’s last? (You snap in Patroclus’s
tendon into the curving heel cups,
then consider that which you must do.)

You rise, with your weight shifting forward;
you align your hips at a slight tilt;
you can feel your calves, spine, core when


you begin to walk on your own two feet.

Debility Poems: Tim Lander

Tim Lander was a poet, England-born.
He’d studied at ULondon, then came here
in nineteen hundred sixty-four.

In Vancouver, he made chapbooks. Later
he’d found himself in Nanaimo, playing
penny whistle at Krall Plaza.


I don’t know how I have these chapbooks.
I don’t know if I’d ever met him,
but I must have (I think I must have).

Two years ago, he had left us. Last year,
every evening his daughter put an IV
in my arm. I brought sweets for the nurses.


We had laughed and laughed then, as liquid
dripped into my vein with a poc
poc poc.

Call of the Siren (Unfinished)

It is a beautiful day.
It will be beautiful still,
even after I name
what is making me ill.

Around me, for a moment—everywhere—
police cars and ambulatory care
compete for my attention with their blare.


You have raped me, m��ma.
You have raped my mind.
And it took fifteen thousand,
eight hundred ninety-seven

days of dull pain to find all the words for
what you did to me���at first, in fury,
later, out of habit. And nowhere could


I hide from you, when I was
small���a frightened rabbit in
a hidey hole. And���oh,
there was so much to hide!

Your wrath would not be satisfied by just
(or less just) violations of my brain.
You lit the gas and rendered me insane.