When It Cracked Open

on a book rack in the Panama City railway station
in a cardboard box on Cook Street
on the porch at Mt. Newton, the Major’s whisperer
in the potato stalls of Pasto
at Granny Soot, its floor slipping into the sea
in the surge of a tumultuous River Eden
in a union hall
on a faceless, fatherless bluff
in the new uniform, so utterly unprepared
in the hundred alleys of Chengdu, on the thirty-six hills of Mount Song, at the Needle Sharpening
Brook
in A, imploring heaven
on a swollen reef, the quivering coxswain
on a ladle, a wooden spoon with a heel
on the pyres of Jesuit insurgents
in the nibbled wrists of Bishop Laval
on the gun deck of Qu’Appelle,
on the lisping potsherds of Monte Alban
in a Halifax blizzard
in incendiary sun
in the phone book
in the salt weather of sorrow
on the star-wheel of a caraway disk
under the missile range
on the rue des Beaux-Arts: « C’est la poèsie! »
on the Richelieu, with a black armband, weeping
in the antic camiones de basura
their infallible encantamientos
on the cobbles beneath Kit Smart’s knees
in six hundred and sixty-eight dire words
on a wharf like a nightstick
near a truck jammed with reeking bait
on the recovery ward: ten men, ninety-five toes
having lost way, taking on water
in blackberries, in September sun
in the name that is itself the thing
at eye-level, a welkin-blue wing
in the hail of spitballs that morning when Eddie Donaldson, without trouser clips, rose up
to sing, in a suit like Breton’s
“Aux armes, citoyens...”

in the red notebook
in the pale hub of dawn
Eddie Donaldson, j’écris ton nom.