The Fleece Era

By Joanna Lilley

The Fleece Era is Yukon-based, UK-born Joanna Lilley's first book of poems: a wry and eloquent testament to the intricacies of our various relationships. From the shattered pieces of our environmental puzzles to the labyrinth of family dynamics, Lilley makes these dilemmas come alive. Chillingly sparse, attractively odd and refreshingly frank, The Fleece Era embraces the complexities of human life with an unsettling mix of the sardonic and the compassionate.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brick Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781771313636

Joanna Lilley

Joanna Lilley is an award-winning poet living in Whitehorse. Born in the UK yet always drawn north, Joanna settled in the Yukon 14 years ago where she lives in a log home beside the boreal forest. Endlings is her fifth book and third collection of poetry.

Book preview

THE FLEECE ERA

THE FLEECE ERA

JOANNA LILLEY

BRICK BOOKS

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lilley, Joanna, 1967-, author

The fleece era / Joanna Lilley.

Poems.

ISBN 978-1-926829-89-0 (pbk.)

I. Title.

PS8623.I43F54 2014 C811’.6 C2013-907314-0

Copyright © Joanna Lilley 2014.

We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our publishing program.

The author photo was taken by Marten Berkman.

Design and layout by Cheryl Dipede.

Brick Books

431 Boler Road, Box 20081

London, Ontario N6K 4G6

www.brickbooks.ca

For Glenn, the music to my words

A RIDDLE

OVERHEARD

They could look down

on me from Google Earth

if they had a computer,

watch me kneeing a furrow through snow

I tell them brushes off like powder,

but really I’m waterlogged

by the antifreeze

of neglected parental duty,

the afterbirth of childlessness.

I never hang up first, always wait

for the tremble in my mother’s hand

not replacing the receiver properly

beside her saucer of custard creams,

and I continue to receive:

she’ll see sense, she’ll come back.

I shouted once, I won’t!

my small voice scrambled by her hearing aids,

tinny as if I were a cookie crumb

balancing on the rim,

shouting from the shore

of my mother’s Atlantic teacup.

THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE

My family won’t visit this

faraway place of half-year

winters, centuries of quiet,

where aspen shadows dress

the snow in long blue ribbons.

My family says I’ve run away

from life, couldn’t cope with

being in the thick of it any more.

How do they know

where is the thick, the thin?

Here, between the silent aspens,

is the thick of it.

Spliced by sisters,

pinched between parents:

there’s the thin.

AT THE POST

I enter the post office queue

at the polite end

and hear snow is forecast

even though it’s June.

I’m posting off my passport

for a visa to visit India.

I’ve never been passport-less

in Canada before. If my father’s

heart pushes him downstairs again,

I won’t be able to get back to England.

I’m too old to hear high-pitched

sounds any more, but the drone

of danger has got so loud

I might as well live

next to the airport.

Leaving the post office,

I bend to a tub of pansies

on the sidewalk and sniff

the blood-thin petals

already covered in ice crystals.

STROKE

For the last twenty years

my mother has sat shedding

skin cells for someone else

to vacuum, while she tears people

out of magazines, slides them

into plastic sleeves. She thinks

they’re her children but usually

they’re people everyone knows.

In my dreams, she rips clouds,

drops pieces to the ground.

In my father’s dreams, she talks;

he never tells me what she says.

I stayed late at work again today,

eyes shut, to hear the vacuuming:

it was the only way

my mother could ever wake me.

THROUGH HEATHROW, TERMINAL THREE

She’s so tired, pebbles are wedged

in her mouth. She’d spit them out

but what if they bulleted through

the blurred window into an engine?

She wouldn’t have room for all those deaths,

would never find her mother in that crowd.

The drone of luggage on the conveyor belt

makes her so sleepy, she tucks

the pebbles under her tongue.

On the Tube, her purse and coat float,

her suitcase thuds, heavy