Spotlight series #101 : Michael Boughn

Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.

STATEMENT

People are drawn to poetry’s ability to resonate with the ineffable powers of the heartmind and to reflect the soul’s elusive movements. They come to it with a passion for justice, or a song of bittersweer love, or delight in the jouissance of wordplay. I come with all three and an understanding that poetry is a spiritual ordeal through which unprecedented knowledge finds form in the poet’s sounding.

TWO POEMS

The road disappears in fog
rises off the Bay, cold air’s kiss
leaves connections beyond the pale
appearance moonlight insists
on if only to soften otherwise
dour speculation on new status’s
no more need of other’s
operational approval deemed
necessary once though ensuing
stall leaves darkening streets vacant threat
to lurk in unknown corners, as if
this mattered, as if skittering gun
across poem’s asphalt
or colour coded passage
through the Doom door extends
beyond home’s old hunger
for your soul, unredeemed
morphogenetic memory
entangled spell in spite of
sonal weave and crystal
measure’s web, that lattice
or matrix recalls Schrödinger’s
contribution, slicing higher
dimensional phase space
at a point above reality’s
stoney lock reveals starlight
coagulated in each leaf’s life,
this light woven flesh
leaves what weaves
and is woven
jammed up against
Planck’s little number
as inexplicable as, say, life
whose elementary fact rivals any
mystery you’d care to face, even
Schrodinger’s wavy statistics
which leave only Uncertain,
even face-to-face with a bear
in which case Planck may have
little to offer (no pun
intended) when the choice
resembles a vague list on cork
tacked flyer in the Ranger Station
called What to Do in Case of Encounter
though you could measure
the distance to the top of the tree
in Planck length units
not that that would make much
difference what with hot rank
breath on your ass
but statistically speaking,
it’s all up for grabs
till Schrődinger’s wave breaks, teeth
rip into you or not, a concept difficult
for mind to hold and not just
because it’s got no hands and it’s
a wave, but the bear
also woven starlight, focuses
a certain singular attention
tends to dispel fog and even roads
if they’re found to slow
your ascent up the tree

Spiritus Sanctus

“Where’s my God.
Where’s my honey?”

— for David Murray and Kahil El’Zabar

The gathering of leaving hums
electric together’s voltage, sound’s
sea murmurs meaning’s music bound with common leaving in wake of drum’s sudden time adjustment
opens soul
to sun’s pulse as it weaves
its beautiful pathology through minds
caught in sky’s translation of
first beat thinking
what we truly know
so basic no one listens except
in locales of instrumental eruption
of heaven’s disharmonious paean
to the edge where leaving
is breathing, in
spiration, spirit was said to be
from proto Indo-European (s)peis-
“to blow” of course, and a reed
splits aspiration into the sound love
sends to calm rage, heal pain
in vibrational wave rises, inundates
being with more, more breath, more
music, more rhythm, more dance, more
love embraced by breath
stirred the waters
caressed reed shaped word
leaving
is its other name, breathing, in
spired while breath pours, in, out,
systole, diastole, starbeat, cosmic
spirit pulse, and someone puts a reed
in spirit’s flow and that gorgeous stump
of flesh measures sounding’s flood
and the next thing you know
drums, Time’s heart of matter with
tongue modulates knowledge
of summer time’s exquisite rhythms
into dancing flesh, numinous mind
instigations and spirit wail

Michael Boughn: I spent the first 20 years of my life among the orange groves of southern California. In 1966 I moved to Vancouver because of my opposition to the US war against Viet Nam. The border became my home in the ensuing years as I moved back and forth across it, successfully evading a national identity. From 2004–2016 I was a Hockey Dad, driving my goalie daughter from arena to old barn all over Ontario. For the last seven years, Case, a border collie friend of mine, and me, a human, have been learning how to work together to herd sheep.