David O’Meara

Crab Apple

The crab apple tree
sieved the wind
around the field’s edge, spikey-dense,

fruit acidic and rarely picked,
binocular-distant on the skyline. The quiet
there. Only a ground-level scurry

of something like brushes on a snare drum.
Is that the place I found the larva,
its raw thorax gleaming mid-

moult, prolegs collapsed to a slather
of grey nubs?
We’d unwound its twill

of gauze and bandages
and exposed an Oz behind
moist curtains, termination shimmering

in the ruined cocoon.
We didn’t mean to hurt a thing, yet
wrought our damage. We tossed it

in the flattened grass
near burdock flowers
and a twisted elbow of the creek.

 

The Perseids

Best chance to view them is late,
away from the city’s glow, in a field.
You should throw a blanket on the grass.
Lie flat. The night is weird.

It’s August. Some chunks of dust
once knocked into a sphere will plunge
and tug a shawl of debris on its perennial
headlong pedal. Distance is strange.

The river agrees. And boils and ravels.
We wonder where it hopes to be.

 

Mitya at Kolok

“What am I? And where am I? And why am I here?”
LEO TOLSTOY, Anna Karenina

I was made of fog and grass.

In the mowed field,
an old man
shaved a hoop.
Someone crunched
a cucumber. Hives
lined a wattle fence,
lashed to stakes
with bast.
In a bowl of amber
honey, a helpless
bee squirmed
in the heavy goo,
but Sergei Ivanovich,
plucking it out
with a blunt knife
onto an aspen leaf,
saved its life.

I squirmed in the carriage
near a green umbrella.
I held time behind
my eyelid, with only
a mote for scale.
While you talked
of politics, newspapers,
and war, the wind
was explaining my skin
to me. While you
wrestled with the question
of God, clouds
uncoiled like dark
wet cables
and the oak
was split by lightning.

And I was made of nettles and rain.

 

Rockwood

You crossed three fields,
sewn with spring mud, glooped
in the ditch bends.

Driftwood fences
ribboned fallow humps,
cattle hair

fixed to their grabby knots.
He liked to tell the story
of how he rose

at five each weekday,
trudged uphill
to the one-room schoolhouse

where he lit
the stove, stoked
its grey cast-iron

to warm the room
for other children
when they took

their seats. For this,
they paid a token wage
which he saved

to buy the bicycle
a friend soon
mangled in a ditch.

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David O’Meara is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Masses On Radar (Coach House Books, 2021), recipient of the Archibald Lampman Award and the Ottawa Book Award. His novel, Chandelier, is published by Nightwood Editions (2024). He is the current Poet Laureate (Anglophone) of the City of Ottawa, Canada.