Tuesday poem #464 : Matt Robinson : YARDWORK

 

 

 

The low rock wall’s a Sunday’s cobbled, rough analog

for the job of a lyric. Another poor, dirty trick of jagged
edges sat & fit & begat & knit together against
impending weather, its elements; those assumptions
& tectonic shifts. This is all a tenuous gift. Being left
sweaty & strained against the effort of it. But it’ll all go
to shit. Your back grunts with the stoney transit
from there to here & here to there, the air thick
in your lungs as things work themselves into something
akin to a semblance of line, makeshift. Both hands filthy;
knuckles skinned just a bit. There’s a benign spilling
of blood, or whatever muddy suspension of dirt
& leaked sweat oils the slick rift of your skin. Of course,
everything must first start if it’s meant to end. Even
stones, orchestrated; a pointless attempt to rend, to begin
again, to impose an order on unoffending nature & its eventual
upending, or mending, to when it reverts to whatever
it is it intends for itself.

 

 

 

 

Matt Robinson’s new poetry collection Tangled & Cleft, his sixth, was released by Gaspereau Press in Fall 2021. Other recent publications include Sometimes It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau Press, 2016) and the chapbooks Against (Gaspereau, Press, 2018) and a fist made and then unmade (Gaspereau Press, 2013). He lives in Halifax, NS, with his family, and plays a fair bit of beer league hockey.

the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan