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    Designated Mourner
    Designated Mourner
    Designated Mourner
    Ebook124 pages52 minutes

    Designated Mourner

    By Catherine Owen

    ()

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    About this ebook

    A moving, lyrical, and original collection from an award-winning poet

    Designated Mourner is a collection of elegies for an unconventional spouse and artistic collaborator, lost to addiction at a young age. These poems keen on the page, tracing tenderness and sorrow while raging against his night. 

    Well crafted and intimate, Designated Mourner engages with a range of forms. It is timely as grief is a misunderstood and often shunned emotion in North American society, as is drug addiction. The poems allow emotion while never losing their aural power.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherECW Press
    Release dateApr 1, 2014
    ISBN9781770905344
    Designated Mourner
    Author

    Catherine Owen

    Catherine Owen, from Vancouver, BC, has published sixteen collections of poetry and prose, including The Wrecks of Eden (Wolsak and Wynn, 2002), Frenzy (Anvil Press, 2009), Designated Mourner and Riven (ECW, 2014 and 2020). Her work has won the Stephan G. Stephansson Prize, been translated into Italian and toured Canada twelve times. She now edits, tutors, and hosts the podcast Ms. Lyric's Poetry Outlaws from Delilah, her 1905 home in Edmonton, AB.

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      Book preview

      Designated Mourner - Catherine Owen

      book

      For Chris Matzigkeit

      (1981–2010)

      When I am dead,

      even then

      I will still love you,

      I will wait in these poems

      ~

      MURIEL RUYKESER

      THE LUNG POEM

      The poem breathes for you some days

      It’s okay

      The poem never says he isn’t, entirely,

      Coming back

      The poem has too many lungs to accept

      Death completely

      The poem, as it sings its dirge, notices

      A poppy

      Opening like a soft heart in the sun

      The poem

      Cannot tell you with finality it’s over

      The poem takes your breaths for you

      Some mornings

      The poem is a lung

      CONSANGUINITAS

      CONSTELLATION (2008)

      How the poem isn’t written

      out of the what’s there,

      the who is,

      the cruelty in this but also

      the sacred remove of you

      with your anxious sea eyes

      nerved touch of flesh

      after seven years

      as if you are still

      new, fragile in your reaching for me,

      miracle-held by us

      beyond all hurt’s unwording chaos

      telling me

      of the perfect 6 a.m. sight —

      Orion, his belt triad in the morning sky, spear

      unkilling as starlight

      and I watch you, in the darkness,

      smiling.

      THANK YOU NOTE

      for how you — serving me coffee in bed, Saturday mornings —

      have endured my ever-moonings, first love, other elusive

      muses, knowing poems are there & are breath.

      for how you’ve never intruded in my journaling, that text of

      solitude, despite its incriminations,

      its dream worlds.

      for how you gaze up at me after one of our simple meals —

      artichoke hearts, olives, rosemary bread — as if my face contains

      all wilderness, all domesticity.

      for how you have shown me toes can be adored, that too-short

      strand of hair you won’t let me cut and for those (o many) small

      of the back kisses.

      BLOOD

      the part about falling on the ice

      I liked —

      my kneecap opening against the slick sheet

      beneath the truck as I —

      clutching the door jamb

      crashed ass-end on the sidewalk rink —

      was the panic in your eyes           mouth O-no-ing

      high-pitched            and the smoke you had just lit

      tipping from your lips into the Big Bubba travel mug

      as you stuck your hand out

      to stop me — the love in this gesture —

      from leaving you further, no further

      than this.

      NINE HOURS AWAY FROM THE SIXTY-SIXTH AVENUE TURNOFF Cariboo Region, BC

      In the truck plastered with Kelowna mud, we leave Blue

      River, head down the seasonal Neapolitan hues of the minor

      highway: ice,

      gravel, rubbed black of asphalt peeled up by the 4x4s & logging

      rigs pulling lengths of frozen forests past the powdered-over

      signs marking

      flooded creeks & trestle bridges, only one sign still fresh — a red

      diamond with the words Accident Scene stamped inside and

      around the corner

      the usual hulk of metal, glass, me staring at the eyes of each

      driver in every car that passes us, asking, is it you my executioner,

      is it you

      my victim, remembering stupid, inconsequential things from

      the trip: overcooked broccoli, too many pairs of socks under the

      tree, the off-key

      incessant carols, nothing I want to be thinking of as I die.

      DOWN JOB’S COVER St. John’s, NL, 2009

      Already you’ve brought yourself here,

      rain and the ships named Jacqueline

      or Cher, all moored in the narrowest

      of harbours, hulls painted with their origins:

      Iqaluit, Ottawa, Alaska.

      There is nowhere else for you to go.

      There is fate and then there are the defeated,

      those who suddenly cast away largesse,

      the too-much beauty of it in the ache

      of their own unworthiness.

      I never wanted this for you but what was

      my small hope so lost in the wake

      of what came before it.

      Every wave hosts its salt gull and the anchors,

      the moorings are far heavier than I’d imagined

      living with you in our fantasized home, the dry,

      bright promises between us always surmounted

      by this trudge to the lacking wharf,

      the collapse of love.

      BEYOND COBEQUID BAY Halifax, NS

      Down the length of the Chévarie

      you point out how the ridge gets older

      & older the farther one walks, trees

      receding into rootlessness, then grass,

      the rocks below becoming gradually

      more deformed, becoming ridges

      that swell with fossilized trunks, caliche

      and decayed foliage dotting their tops,

      oxidization veining stones and all about the sand,

      discarded pods of fish eggs, bladder wrack.

      The cliffs age & age the farther you walk,

      from a mere

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