National Poetry Month : Stephen Collis,

give me music

Give me music because

I never could understand it

its direct connection to

that feeling stream

washing ideas right out of me

taking up the mechanisms

of consanguinity rushing

towards last light over the Pacific

and some sea bird there

gliding and catching moonlight

same as struck only dinosaurs

to have survived the last

collapse of intricate order

winging now into night

as the cellos soar and

the possibility of song remains

without words to smother it

Stephen Collis is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Commons (Talonbooks 2008), the BC Book Prize winning On the Material (Talonbooks 2010), Once in Blockadia (Talonbooks 2016) and Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten (Talonbooks 2018). In 2019 he was awarded the Latner Writers’ Trust of Canada Poetry Prize in recognition of his body of work. He lives near Vancouver, on unceded Coast Salish Territory, and teaches poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University.