Karen Solie Poems

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
...

One might understand Turner, you said, in North Atlantic sky
east-southeast from Newfoundland toward Hibernia.
Cloud darker than cloud cast doubt upon muttering, pacing water, even
...

Dinner finished, wine in hand, in a vaguely competitive spirit
of disclosure, we trail Google Earth's invisible pervert
through the streets of our hometowns, but find them shabbier,
or grossly
...

When I learned I could own a piece of The World
I got my chequebook out. Eternal life belongs to those
who live in the present. My wife's bright eye affirmed it.
As do the soothing neutral tones and classic-contemporary
...

Off-season brings rain and new life
to old habits. Whatever it is that we're doing, we can't help
wanting to. Roadside attractions of the great southwest
are nothing without us. The World's Largest animals,
...

More than a storey high and twice that long,
it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,
possessed of the ecology of some hellacious
minor island on which options
...

Two hours on that road, and we saw no one but jackrabbits,
those innocents of plane and direction who seemed compelled
from the middle distance, magnetized to the undercarriage.
All creatures are plagued by dangerous ambiguities
...

Gratitude toward the houseplants, shame
for what they must endure. Of particular concern,
the azalea, flowering like the gestures and cries
of someone off the trail who sees a
...

Look at your past, how it's grown.
You've known it since it was yea high. Still, you,
as you stand now, have never been there. Parts worn out,
renewed, replaced. Though you may bear the same name.
You're like the joke about the axe.
...