Name
what would speak for you
before
you, hanging left by your side.
Lists
of swords’ names split fiction
from
myth. No one knows them
in
person, only in story so old
it’s
evergreen.
I
call my ring Ovoid. O oval void.
A
solid surface curves at the cut
infinity
prism of conflict-free rock.
My
foil swerves from gold to sword
to
word.
I’m
the finger puppet; this token makes
its
point with no help of mine.
Remember,
I’m the leather scabbard
and
it’s always drawn, its true edge
raised,
long throated. The only way
to
bear it is to wear it.
Dale Tracy is the author of the chapbook Celebration Machine (Proper Tales Press, 2018), the four-poem
chapoem What It Satisfies (Puddles of
Sky Press, 2016), and the monograph With the Witnesses: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience (McGill-Queen’s, 2017). A further chapbook, The Mystery of Ornament, is
imminently-forthcoming with above/ground press. She teaches in the Department of English, Culture, and Communication and is currently the associate chair of the Writing Centre at the Royal Military College of Canada.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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