Geomantic riposte: 'Kill-site'

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan, Timothy Walter (Tim) Lilburn is the author of nine books of poetry, including writing that garnered two Governor General’s Award nominations. Lilburn's work has also received the Canadian Authors Association Award, the Saskatchewan Book of the Year Award, and the Saskatchewan Nonfiction Award. Lilburn is the editor of, and a contributor to, two influential essay collections on poetics, Poetry and Knowing and Thinking and Singing: Poetry and the Practice of Philosophy. Lilburn’s poetry collections, in particular the Governor General's Award winning Kill-site, often usher the reader along lyrical lines into familiar yet estranged locales of contemplation and mystery – what may be imagined to be Tritogeneian landscapes where the armchair reader is not necessarily autochthonous and must quickly scrabble for what letters he or she has for a modicum of comprehension ... but the continual promise of aurora borealis is well worth it.

Kill-site by Tim Lilburn (McClelland & Stewart, 2003, page 21)

Leave ontology behind.

Leave goodness behind, said Socrates.

Take the drinkable pelican wave further into your mouth.

Until the blue desire appears standing on its feathered, python

tail, and you are speaking with it at a distance and cannot hear what

is being said, though this is soaking your beard and the skin of your face,

though a red tent, well-hipped, lowers itself over the talk,

and there are drownings going on, intimate to you, in the mouth

                                                                                    in front of you.

Geomantic Riposte: Forms

At the edge of ever developing development

where environmental reserve begins or ends

without shadows of one of your talks upon wall

of rabbit-cave,     I am lonely as a living sky     lonely

as the first man       crawling

                                into one of your forms,      panting 

stages of the musical erotic from early Kierkegaard

but that flash (flask?) of hemlock would only devolve

to a lower level of government, maybe more Bataille

snuff-fantasy in bird-

                                      head scratched on tiny Lascaux

where instruction comes from vibrations in melting

landscape

                    You know, they told me, Heraclitus

                       that the mountains are in the way