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    At Lake Scugog: Poems
    At Lake Scugog: Poems
    At Lake Scugog: Poems
    Ebook101 pages1 hour

    At Lake Scugog: Poems

    By Troy Jollimore

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    About this ebook

    This is an eagerly awaited collection of new poems from the author of Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was hailed by the New York Times as a "snappy, entertaining book." A triumphant follow-up to that acclaimed debut, At Lake Scugog demonstrates why the San Francisco Chronicle has called Troy Jollimore "a new and exciting voice in American poetry."


    Jollimore is a professional philosopher, and in witty and profound ways his formally playful poems dramatize philosophical subjects--especially the individual's relation to the larger world, and the permeable, constantly shifting border between "inner" and "outer." For instance, the speaker of "The Solipsist," suspecting that the entire world "lives inside of your skull," wonders "why / God would make ear and eye / to face outward, not in." And Tom Thomson--a character who also appeared in Jollimore’s first book--finds himself journeying like an astronaut through the far reaches of the space that fills his head, an experience that prompts him to ask that a doorbell be installed "on the inside," so that he can warn the world before "intruding on’t."
    ______



    From At Lake Scugog:
    LOBSTERS


    Troy Jollimore
    ?


    tend to cluster in prime numbers, sub-
    oceanic bundles of bug consciousness
    submerged in waking slumber, plunged in pits
    of murk-black water. They have coalesced


    out of the pitch and grime and salt suspended
    within that atmospheric gloom. Their skin
    is colorless below. But when exposed
    to air, they start to radiate bright green,


    then, soon, a siren red that wails: I’m dead.
    The meat inside, though, is as white as teeth,
    or the hard-boiled egg that comes to mind
    when one cracks that crisp shell and digs beneath.


    Caress the toothy claw-edge of its pincer
    and you will know the single, simple thought
    that populates its mind. The lobster trap is elegance
    itself: one moving part: the thing that’s caught.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateMar 14, 2011
    ISBN9781400838233
    At Lake Scugog: Poems
    Author

    Troy Jollimore

    Troy Jollimore is the author of two previous collections of poetry, At Lake Scugog (Princeton) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, the Believer, and other publications. He is a professor of philosophy at California State University, Chico.

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      Book preview

      At Lake Scugog - Troy Jollimore

      Acknowledgments

      I  BURN BAG

      THE SOLIPSIST

      Don’t be misled:

      that sea-song you hear

      when the shell’s at your ear?

      It’s all in your head.

      That primordial tide—

      the slurp and salt-slosh

      of the brain’s briny wash—

      is on the inside.

      Truth be told, the whole place,

      everything that the eye

      can take in, to the sky

      and beyond into space,

      lives inside of your skull.

      When you set your sad head

      down on Procrustes’ bed,

      you lay down the whole

      universe. You recline

      on the pillow: the cosmos

      grows dim. The soft ghost

      in the squishy machine,

      which the world is, retires.

      Someday it will expire.

      Then all will go silent

      and dark. For the moment,

      however, the blackness

      is just temporary.

      The planet you carry

      will shortly swing back

      from the far nether regions.

      And life will continue—

      but only within you.

      Which raises a question

      that comes up again and again,

      as to why

      God would make ear and eye

      to face outward, not in?

      AT LAKE SCUGOG

      1

      Where what I see comes to rest,

      at the edge of the lake,

      against what I think I see

      and, up on the bank, who I am

      maintains an uneasy truce

      with who I fear I am,

      while in the cabin’s shade, the gap between

      the words I said

      and those I remember saying

      is just wide enough to contain

      the remains that remain

      of what I assumed I knew.

      2

      Out in the canoe, the person I thought you were

      gingerly trades spots

      with the person you are

      and what I believe I believe

      sits uncomfortably next to

      what I believe.

      When I promised I will always give

      you what I want you to want,

      you heard, or desired to hear,

      something else. As, over and in the lake,

      the cormorant and its image

      traced paths through the sky.

      REGRET

      I’d like to take back my not saying to you

      those things that, out of politeness, or caution,

      I kept to myself. And, if I may—

      though this might perhaps stretch the rules—I’d like

      to take back your not saying some of the things

      that you never said, like I love you and "Won’t you

      come home with me," or telling me, which

      you in fact never did, perhaps in the newly

      refurbished café at the Vancouver Art

      Gallery as fresh drops of the downpour from which

      we’d sought shelter glinted in your hair like jewels,

      or windshields of cars as seen from a plane

      that has just taken off or is just coming in

      for a landing, when the sun is at just the right angle,

      that try as you might, you could not imagine

      a life without me. The passionate spark

      that would have flared up in your eye as you said this—

      if you had said this—I dream of it often.

      I won’t take those back, those dreams, though I would,

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