Divide and Rule Read online

my giant footsteps flattening by night

  a planet you know perfectly well is round,

  though we don’t speak merely from experience.

  My consolation: neither does thunder,

  worshipped, like me, in free-trade zones

  demanding my axes, and supplying lumber

  on black markets while I sack psittacine

  castles in air, in mid-air become

  an archaeologist pocketing less than thieves

  from whom I buy back my discoveries,

  all forgiven. The future is either

  in running out of space or insisting

  it stand still on your calvary float

  for yet another tickertape parade,

  a nest resembling a crown of thorns,

  and a first drop of water a second.

  From my vantage on our bustling shore,

  a drop vanishes – not so the ocean.

  CLOAK AND DAGGER

  Decades of cloak and dagger have changed

  our manumitted colony’s dress code –

  I promised we’d meet the natives halfway,

  while making myself completely at home,

  etching self-portraits as a fifth column

  the viewer’s cordially invited to join.

  If there weren’t persons inside me I’m not,

  who’d suffer terror I’m busy enjoying?

  Prepare a list. How quickly he’s grown,

  the ex-blastocyst ensconced in power.

  I became somebody ghosting his blow-

  by-blow memoir from cover to cover,

  throw his weight around, unconcerned

  he’s looking askance at us; we’re aesthetes,

  prefer our pure forms to their content served

  up as live game, after all, not raw meat,

  share with a first tribe a second’s illusions

  about assorted assets it may claim

  for its encampment from the universe,

  then wait: they’ll squabble over our telescopes.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Early versions of ‘The Good Reason,’ ‘Contractors,’ ‘Exact Change,’ ‘Over the Rainbow’ and ‘Margin of Error’ appeared in Perihelion.

  ‘The Picture of Concentration,’ ‘Atheling,’ ‘Waterboarding’ and ‘Not So the Ocean’ appeared in This Magazine.

  I am grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for its support.

  I thank my editor, Kevin Connolly, and the book’s designer, Alana Wilcox, for their excellent work. Thanks also to Evan Munday, Leigh Nash, Simon Lewsen and everyone at Coach House.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Walid Bitar was born in Beirut in 1961 and immigrated to Canada in 1969. His previous poetry collections are Maps with Moving Parts (Brick Books, 1988), 2 Guys on Holy Land (Wesleyan University Press, 1993), Bastardi Puri (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2005) and The Empire’s Missing Links (­Véhicule Press/Signal Editions, 2008). He lives in Toronto.

  Typeset in Freight and Freight Sans.

  Printed in February 2012 at the old Coach House on bpNichol Lane in Toronto, Ontario, on Zephyr Antique Laid paper, which was manufactured, acid-free, in Saint-Jérôme, Quebec, from second-growth forests. This book was printed with vegetable-based ink on a 1965 Heidelberg kord offset litho press. Its pages were folded on a Baumfolder, gathered by hand, bound on a Sulby Auto-Minabinda and trimmed on a Polar single-knife cutter.

  Edited by Kevin Connolly

  Designed by Alana Wilcox

  Coach House Books

  80 bpNichol Lane

  Toronto ON M5S 3J4

  Canada

  416 979 2217

  800 367 6360

  [email protected]

  www.chbooks.com