New Year's Resolution

Inspired by my friend Suzanne, who reads poetry on her morning bus ride, and Harvey, who writes a haiku every day, my New Year's resolution was to read more poetry. This should be an easy one, given that I normally read...none.

So I have been discovering poets, as I sit in hospital waiting rooms, where it's hard to get into a novel and the magazines may not be to your taste. (What's the story of how an issue of The Parliamentarian got here?)

This poem is from a sequence called Bone Poems, in Night Field by Don McKay, which received the Governor General's Award for poetry.

Now we know the price of x-ray:
if you want to see your bones you have to
flirt with death a little. Moon-bathe,
Anticipate their liberation from your flesh.

Once upon a time
shoe stores had peepshows that could
melt your skin and show the bones
inside your feet (plenty of room for him to grow there,
ma'am). You looked down zillions, back
into an ocean where a loose
family of fish was
wriggling in blue spooky light.

There are other worlds.
Your dead dog swims in the earth.