Rock Salt Plum Welcomes Madhur Anand

Hot Pink on Grey

Hibiscus,

you make a mockery of severance

on this bloodless battlefield,

casualties in the thousands.

Your females play so well

with their skirts pulled off.

Your males have but bit parts.

A fine stage

for your flowery massacre,

late summer, on the concrete avenues

of Buenos Aires.

Ground bodies

intersecting at random.

We cannot avoid re-stepping upon them.

There's just too much sex on the street.

Hibiscus,

I hope for this gaudy carnage,

you have loved at least once.

This year's fall

may cause infinite separation.

Strange Attractor

Hold an imaginary hand.

One that catches you off guard

from beneath the forest floor.

Handshakes forthcoming as fiddleheads,

an open palm of entangled pine combs,

friendship cast with untouchable skunk cabbage.

Prickly blooms at the fingertips of red maple

entering your flesh

back beneath the surface.

You've become the strange attractor

in a magnetic field

grasping at grass.

You must move or be moved,

because every particle

holds its own ground.

Let go of the ordinary:

handheld calculations

of birth and death rates.

Let it touch you,

this hand-woven theory of grassroots,

sine waves in tree rings.

Act of God

Waiting for the runway to be cleared,

I find this poem about a nun on an airplane:

Even though we don't believe in god we

are more inclined to god's will than engine failure*

In the off chance an airplane crashes

into a bird, god is summoned.

Did this airplane ground a bird,

or a bird this airplane?

Its few hundred reincarnated passenger pigeons,

aviation engineers and what they fear most

(tiny bones and feathers, delicate details,

their tendency to mess up engines),

a woman reading about a poet afraid of dying.

Not like that bird, his death properly pronounced

by our pilot himself, one anonymous soul

transcending machinery, fluttering into future poems.

And not like the nun on the plane

whispering prayers whether cruising or crashing,

while the poem in which she is flying searches everywhere

for a safe landing.

_______________________________________

* lines from the poem entitled: "It is unlucky to be

travelling on the same airplane as a nun" by Helen

Humphreys, The Perils of Geography, Brick Books, 1995.

Madhur is a theoretical ecologist at the University of Guelph and Canada Research Chair in Global Ecological Change. She has authored or co-authored over 30 scientific papers in international journals. Her poetry has appeared in Arbutus and Lichen literary journals and has been presented at workshops at the Banff Centre and the Humber School for Writers. She lives in Guelph, Ontario with her husband, Chris and daughter, Jaya.