Mcclelland & Stewart, Belletristik, Salvage (Englisch, Michael Crummey, 2002)

HOW HE CARRIED IT It hovered in the boy’ s head pale as a daylight moon It lit him up like a field under a hail of lightning, it torched the buildings locked and almost hidden under brush in the unfenced backyard of his mind It travelled in his blood like blooms of silt stirred from a river bottom, it ticked like a clock toward some alarm his body lay awake for, it made him feel ancient and unrecoverable and lonely for his friends It churned inside him like the crankshaft of the planet, darkness endlessly turning toward a deeper darkness he had no name for It settled on him like squatters claiming farmland lying fallow, like summer dusk staining the distant hills blue A Word about the Poem by Michael Crummey This one drives my mother crazy. What is the “ it” that he carries, she wants to know, but I’ m not telling. The “ it” is a very particular thing to me, but I was interested in writing a poem that circled and circled the specific without nailing a name to it, which would allow a reader to make their own guess at what lies at the centre. I wanted the poem to have an incantatory feel, letting a progression of images build one upon the other with the hope that by the end something adhered. And I’ m honestly not sure if anything does.