Extracts

“Aunt Dot stood upon the stone threshold and pointed out landmarks. She recalled how my grandfather, John Claude, plowed one field with a team of horses, and how my grandmother, born Ora Zook, of resolute Pennsylvania-Dutch stock, plowed the other. Glancing down, I saw broken fragments of Delft china glinting in the grass, reminders of my grandmother’s vanished kitchen. Father recalled the night the house burned to the ground, when mice, chewing on matches, set the place on fire. It was he who first woke to sound the alarm. How do you get eight kids out of a burning shack? Grandfather picked up my uncle Walter, then a toddler, and simply threw him out through the front window, glass and all. As they recalled that night, I looked down and saw, shining among the sage, pieces of broken, melted glass, coloured with time.”
—from “Where the Deer and
 Antelope Play” by Sid Marty

“I went under the

     earth and the river

gave me a rag, a leg bone to hold.

We looked into one another’s

face. Don’t say I’m here.

I am feverish with grass.

A dark in things, in wild rose,

        a stalk, a line coming out of the

        mouth and

curving, is weight, privacy, sleep,

           a cache of fat

the seeable thing sucks on, turns to and

     lives with.”
—from “Slow World” by Tim Lilburn