A former college English teacher, Roy Geiger has reviewed fiction and poetry in numerous publications and volunteered on the board of several long-standing reading series, including Antler River Poetry in London. His short fiction and poems have been anthologized and published in Grain, The Antigonish Review, The /tƐmz/ Review, and The Ekphrastic Review.
“Some years back I saw a display of Edward Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking series at The Rooms in St. John’s, where there was also a recently made dory on display, also mentioned in the poem. These stunning large photographs all together made a powerful, aesthetically-moving presentation of dubious environmental practices, an apparent contradiction that prompted the poem.”
cut apart piece by piece as though it were all a mistake a misunderstanding
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massive hulks on tidal flats confused as locked-up transformers like implacable extrusions from beneath the crust if you were captain would you coast in at high tide trust gravity and rust tally another passing as you disembark and retreat with the tide look ahead to next time
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forms and volumes of ships stripped section by section colossal in their strangeness as if such weight could float past the ocean of imagination
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in St John’s I saw a dory built to show close at hand the sturdy cunning of these craft you wonder at the hard strength to take it out to sea which even if quiet would place across straining shoulders the remorseless hand of threat I was told no one knows how to make these anymore that knowledge once everyday in life around the shore has been lost but if a boat can float on shore this was the one
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a dream you keep having but do not want that every time slips away when you try to set down in words its lineaments
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and so there is an end to all ships if not the myths on which they float as if the figure Odysseus has metamorphosed with uncountable frequency into the craft which carried him through the trials he met and chose to face across the known world and its surrounding seas a final stall on an open shore familiar yet unsought a vessel of random commercial wandering exhausted replaced by another over and over
when we bathe in the grand sweep of story will we ask what consequences did he cause unknowingly what consequences did he know and ignore the guy with torn shoes and a cutting torch burning up when waste oil in the hold bursts into flame the poisons that leach onto the beach and into the wide wide sea
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scale stuns with uncanny beauty overwhelms the individual so think long term let every cry of pain become part of the geological record assume the record matters
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if I am old I do not require labourers for disassembling I’ve seen enough to know that though it seems done to you in the end in spite of everything you do it yourself
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Surrounded by items trucked off such ships, at home in the city I visit the local Environmentally Sensitive Area—that is, what passes for woods—on a mild winter night after heavy snow The full moon hides behind dense low cloud A Screech Owl calls from the swampy corner I slog through snow to the edge of the woods, stand on a ridge looking over what passes for grassland—that is, a reclaimed dump—a scene made for a large format camera In the light of the hiding moon, fresh snow crystals everywhere below glint in seed heads of tall grass and elicit the not really plausible thought of a Snowy Owl Along the frozen stream at the bottom of the field, three deer rest on the white ground Absolutely still, they stare at me, ears up and turned like lovely elongated parabolic antennae Eye to eye, faintest signs of intentions pulled out and scrutinized, I am sized up and judged We will never know each other I finish scanning the field, the clump of tall deciduous trees frequented by raptors, and those trees near the bottom of the path before the parking lot and road Sensing no threat, the deer rise up without haste and lope towards brush by the far rail tracks
as if to say whatever you always bring trouble one way or another
