Salvage - Softcover

Michael Crummey is the author of three books of poetry, Arguments with Gravity, winner of the Writer’s Alliance of Newfoundland and Labrador Book Award for Poetry, Hard Light, and, most recently, Salvage. He has also published a book of short stories, Flesh & Blood; two acclaimed, bestselling novels, River Thieves and The Wreckage; and collaborated with photographer Greg Locke on Newfoundland: Journey into a Lost Nation. He lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

HOW HE CARRIED IT

It hovered in the boy’s head pale
as a daylight moon

It lit him up like a field
under a hail of lightning,
it torched the buildings locked
and almost hidden under brush
in the unfenced backyard of his mind

It travelled in his blood like blooms
of silt stirred from a river bottom,
it ticked like a clock toward
some alarm his body
lay awake for,
it made him feel ancient and
unrecoverable and lonely
for his friends

It churned inside him
like the crankshaft of the planet,
darkness endlessly turning
toward a deeper darkness
he had no name for

It settled on him like squatters
claiming farmland lying fallow,
like summer dusk staining
the distant hills blue

A Word about the Poem by Michael Crummey
This one drives my mother crazy. What is the “it” that he carries, she wants to know, but I’m not telling. The “it” is a very particular thing to me, but I was interested in writing a poem that circled and circled the specific without nailing a name to it, which would allow a reader to make their own guess at what lies at the centre. I wanted the poem to have an incantatory feel, letting a progression of images build one upon the other with the hope that by the end something adhered. And I’m honestly not sure if anything does.