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    The Broken Face
    The Broken Face
    The Broken Face
    Ebook110 pages1 hour

    The Broken Face

    By Russell Thornton

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    About this ebook

    The poems in The Broken Face explore a sacramental, imaginative vision within contexts of crime, perception, memory and love. In this collection, Russell Thornton returns to the vital themes of intimacy and family, loss, fear and hope, bringing to each poem the essential quality of a myth or incantation. Reverent and revealing, within those familiar relationships he ushers in a connection with something transcendent: “A man has come floundering late in the night / to stand alone at the shore of a sleeping infant’s face.”

    The poems capture life at the periphery, whether describing homelessness or incarceration, or even the universal experiences of aging and mortality, love and fear of love, all of which bring the speaker into a detached yet energized state of watching and waiting: “the door that was my grandfather into our passing lives / will arrive at a house where each of us is his own door / that opens on our first selves, fundamental together.”

    With intense lyricism, Thornton displays a mastery of craft so complete as to be nearly invisible. While stunningly beautiful, his imagery is also in such complete service to the deeper emotional resonance of each poem that it feels inevitable, and contributes to making the collection deeply moving.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarbour Publishing
    Release dateSep 8, 2018
    ISBN9781550178456
    The Broken Face
    Author

    Russell Thornton

    Russell Thornton’s The Hundred Lives (Quattro Books, 2014) was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His Birds, Metals, Stones & Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2013) was shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Raymond Souster Award and the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. His other titles include The Fifth Window (Thistledown Press, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim Editions, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour Publishing, 2002; shortlisted for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize and the ReLit Award for poetry), The Human Shore and The Broken Face (Harbour Publishing, 2006 and 2018). Thornton’s poetry has appeared in several anthologies and as part of BC’s Poetry in Transit. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.

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      Book preview

      The Broken Face - Russell Thornton

      I

      Scales

      He is seven pounds, four ounces,

      and cries alone on the steel base plate.

      The argument for the prosecution—his pulse.

      The argument for the defence—his pulse.

      Screaming

      A young son waking terrified, shrieking in the summer night heat wave.

      The fearful neighbour hears him and calls the police.

      I am not his father. I was lost and was led here through an instant.

      I do not know where I come from. I do not know this room. I am here with a child

      whose tears blur and brighten his staring eyes. I try to comfort him,

      and he flails at me and fights me off. I see he is stranded here,

      carrying with him nothing he understands, and it includes me.

      He is an unknown carrier of unknown me, and has the face of a small wild animal.

      You who do not know me, you who have put me here,

      with no place to go back to or escape to, please take me up into your arms.

      I know coolness will come only at the hour before dawn. Then just within the skull

      of the baby will come the rippling of light. The window will hold the first full flames.

      The old energy immense and hidden within the atom

      will have dreamt a bonfire on a cold beach of space. The sun will arrive and circle

      through the piled-high discarded furniture of the world in search of shelter

      and rise and be the fire of the day with no address but a crib and a cry.

      A Man on Death Row

      Stone tablets smashed then re-carved every second in his eyes,

      he shuffles down the corridor with his ankle shackles ringing.

      He knows the contraction that stays and hardens into bars.

      And how a brief kiss within a nucleus fastens the nothing to the nothing.

      He knows from memory the deep fires of morning. They touch him completely.

      And how the sun is straitjacketed in its life in his cells.

      He knows the expansion that stays and opens on an endless

      wedding—

      the father gives away the bride at the end of every ray of light.

      Enormous levered energies—those of the distant hydro dam

      sending the voice of God rushing into his system like the sounds of all the rivers

      flowing with ceremony and heard by a single human being as by a

      multitude—

      concentrate electricity and the sudden black ash of his Adam’s apple,

      thrill his windpipe. The immortal audience sees there the beauty

      of his sentence. Odysseus is lashed to his mast, near insane in ecstasy. Christ

      is fixed to the wood, the riven wrists and feet the narrowings

      of hourglasses turning over and over again catching the warm blood.

      At the appointed time he offers his charred heart, his hooded head and meat.

      Whatever words he has uttered here, they are the vow that saves the law.

      Open

      Everywhere: Open, Open. Stores, banks. Stores, banks.

      Gas stations. Open, Open Later, Open.

      For as long as I can remember, I have thought about stealing.

      Once I scoped out and robbed the Number Five Orange.

      The storage cellar had a steel hatch at ground level

      with an easily removable commercial padlock.

      I shimmied down through the small square opening

      and with the city police station a block away,

      in perfect calm I hoisted cases of beer to an accomplice.

      In the weeks after, I got drunk many times for free.

      My most professionally carried out act of crime gone unnoticed,

      I could not help it, I gave in, I told

      people—

      drinking at the St. Alice in North Van,

      bragging about the great cache in my car,

      I ended up on the Capilano Reserve,

      and I and two old school friends shared the last of the Labatt.

      Out in the river in the dark, we gaffed coho,

      laughing as we arrested pilgrim after silver pilgrim

      beginning its ascent to the top of the canyon to spawn and die.

      The tide was coming in, sea and river water

      moving together, wrapping around me

      where I stood in pants and shoes swaying, tottering. We gaffed.

      We chucked salmon into the now-empty trunk.

      I would take it home and eat it. They would take it home

      and eat it, or sell it. We gaffed. The oncoming wild eyes

      of the fish staring straight into the first rays of the late summer sun.

      The angled mouths of the fish, the

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