of time and moving water

By Glen Forbes Miller

Reading Glenn Forbes Miller’s poetry shows him to be as versatile a poet as he is a writer of prose, as demonstrated by his two travel books, Dreaming Kathmandu and Dancing at Ghunsa.

The proof is here in this collection, of time and moving water. These are poems that took root and shape by heeding those moments when the emotions s

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burnstown Publishing House
• Release date: Jul 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781772570311

Book preview

5 Leckie Lane

Burnstown, Ontario K0J 1G0

www.burnstownpublishing.com

Copyright © 2015

Glenn Forbes Miller

of time and moving water

ISBN: 978-1-77257-030-4 (PB)

All rights reserved. Except in the case of brief quotations embodied in a critical review and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca.

One Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

Cataloguing data available at

Library and Archives Canada, Cataloguing in Publication (CIP)

Editor: J. Karchmar

Cover and Interior Design: W.D. Clements

Published and Printed in Canada.

of time and

moving water

Glenn Forbes Miller

Contents

Winter

Uncle Cecil

Still on the highway

Yearbook

Calling you

Our ritual love

The space you wish for

Wherever you go

The Devil

Orange dresses

Falling tangles

Morning is the orange of the sky

Story

I have such thoughts of you

In the middle of a life

Birthing

Little rivergod

Such moments

Attending my daughter

The Bookseller

American spell

Springtime ritual

C.C. Writer

If I were a fisher of men

Calling Robert File

The hardest teacher

Pickling beets

A swimmer’s challenge

It is not long the lilacs’ blooming

Elegy for Mary Kathleen Olsen

Absence

In juvie court

Camino de Santiago

White magic

Dreaming Kathmandu

Dreaming Morocco

Killarney

An epiphany missed

The scholar’s call

In memory of Robert Fraser Reid

Once in the mystic

Song for all the jumpers

That night at the Unionville Arms

Searching for images

The hijacker’s last drink

Time Traveller

In the next few moments

The Muktinath Nuns

Each Cuban dreams

You were always our star

Woman washing: Nepal

Dreaming Kanchenjunga

Elegy for John Smart

The days since

There is a woman in Turkey

At the last

there

then there now here

The room

Forever in Volubilus

Making Egyptian history

Memory

Elegy for Kristin Sue Green, née Hanselman, who died recently of unnatural causes

Birthdays in space

About the Author

Winter

(Hog’s Back, Ottawa, 1949)

winter was white earth grey skies

lightness and colour

stripped from the land like skin

summer torn away like flesh

winter exposed like bone

white bare and hard

it was then the water level dropped

deepening the sky

extending the strip of beach at Hog’s Back

exposing the sudden steep drop-off of shoreline

over which waders sometimes stepped and floundered

I remember a gawking circle of bathers

and nude toes protruding from beneath a blanket

I remember the talk about the Shouldice girl

who drowned there and remember wondering why

all the waters of Mooney’s Bay

were not roiling red with all her little blood

I remember air hoses in the yellowy foam

of the catchpools below The Falls

and disembodied diving bell hats

searching for the body of a daredevil boy

defying summer’s dangers

my father and I crunched over drifted snow

from the drop-off to Paul’s Boat House

to watch men cutting blue blocks of ice

to be stored in the sawdust gloom of the boathouse

until the iceman would deliver one

clamped between antique ice tongs

wipe off the sawdust

and heft it then up into our icebox

hard men with country voices—

Hars yur ice, missus.

a season so grim

summer could not banish it entirely.

Uncle Cecil

On Sundays long ago

when I was three or four

we always had a picnic.

Picnics were special then

because Aunt Belle and Uncle Cecil came

in their car (we didn’t have a car)

and Uncle Cecil always brought

Ginger Ale and Crispy Crunch

which he’d hide behind his back

and pretend