Karen Solie Poems

Someone's walking toward you, tree to tree, parting leaves
with the barrel of a rifle. There's a scope
on it. He's been watching awhile
through his good eye, you, washing dishes, scouring
...

for Cathy

Snow is falling, snagging its points
on the frayed surfaces. There is lightning
over Lake Ontario, Erie. In the great
...

You're still young. Someone curled an arm around you as you slept,
and upon awaking gently touched your face. The first sound you heard
...

A long lake in a swan-throated bed, longer
than wide by seventy miles. In his loneliness you mistake him
for shade creaking from the poplars, his gait that way,
...

The roads are bad and you miss
your old car, an even-tempered '68 Volvo,
those times jerry-rigged gaskets
and pantyhose fanbelts got you home
...

July 2005

Oligotrophic: of lakes and rivers. The heat
an inanimate slur, a wool gathering, hanging
like a bad suit. Suspended fine particulate
...

The half-ton choked halfway up the boundary road and would not
turn over. He lifted the hood to shorted wire and the night adjacent.
To the south, the town on the old rail spur, a mile closer as the crow flies
than the number two highway, a slog through crown lands of chattering birch
...

Our hammers. Our sticks. This furtive
sporting life. Oh, our gasoline. Clothed
in low-rent autobiographies we slouch toward eviction
like dying brickworks. Outside
...

Jackfish and walleye circle like clouds as he strains
the silt floor of his pool, a lost lure in his lip,
Five of Diamonds, River Runt, Lazy Ike,
or a simple spoon, feeding
...

Yellow-legs ekes lower at nightfall to a stick nest
brambled in the shade-kill, doing for himself, deft

as a badger in a hammock. Mornings, toeing wracked heights
of the cottonwood, he flaps his brown flag above alkaline
...