Alien Freight - Stewart Cole (Anstruther Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Alien Freight.  Stewart Cole.  Anstruther Press.  Toronto, Ontario.  2017.

Stewart Cole's Alien Freight is Today's book of poetry's third book of the new year and it is a slightly different and difficult cargo.  Not for the reader, no, that's all pleasure -- it's Cole in his elegant laments.  In Cole world the need for change is being addressed, we don't always know what change will bring, but as Cannonball Adderley said, "Mercy, mercy me."

This short chappy has Cole "deluded raw" with prognosticators, mortified at his own imminent murder at the hands of a child he does not know, ending fashion, musing on the ambiguity of airport controllers and conversing about the sixth bell, the executioner's death knell, the Doom Bell.  And there's more.

What struck Today's book of poetry about Alien Freight was the palpable tension under the surface of Cole's very precise language.

Patricide

I am being followed by a child

This is a new kind of fear

The afternoon sprawls like a dog on its side

Adrift in oblivion

The sky is like a sheet of rock fired to the blue verge of combustion

The street a blotchwork of modest border gardens

Cropped walkways and flagpoles

Decked for summer's next rah-rah-liday

Everycolored front doors radiating

Tacit no thank yous

Is this place still pre-apocalyptic?

Am I really among the unplagued?

Other than the inexorable dot

Tracking me up the sidewalk at a steadily shrinking distance

Now swollen to a splotch

This scene lacks a fellow presence

Even the hazy humanoid shape

Of a faceless hose-wielder three lawns down

Or an umbral blur nursing a High Life deep in a stoop

Would lend me a clue

I am not wandering the solitary void

But without such neighbors I'm left to wonder

What if all the uncaught murderers are children

Because we just avoid looking there

Afraid the truth will stab us in the eyes

Oedipus-style

Or what if that kid behind me

Is ageing and growing the closer he gets

Oh yes he has bridged the distance by half already

Become a teenager and suddenly

I am old enough to be rebelled against

My genes have lost their modishness

Legs gone columnar

At this pace he will overtake me within not years but instants

Even now his lengthening arms

Could loop a garrotte around my throat if he chose

Outgrown shoelaces or catgut rent from a neighborhood stray

Some umbilical surrogate

But no he does not choose my death

He seems to want little more than to know I'm behind him

And there he goes like bony wind

Just as old as moments ago I was young

I look back hoping to glimpse

My little doomster

Who wasn't trailing me after all

Only briefly laying string along the same spell of asphalt

From his fuller spool

⃝⃝⃝

Cole's poetry has that crisp clean white sheet smell of spring and the first open windows because his language is so precise and dare I say proper.  But the counterpoint to Stewart Cole's explicit and careful diction are the ideas that fuel these poems.

Alien Freight is one of those books where first glance says that the water is tranquil and calm -- but as soon as you test the water you know, the reader realizes that there are eddies and undertoads lurking just below the surface.

Minding the Gaps

Glimpsing London's suburbs

Through gaps in a blue of hedgerows

I forbid myself to wonder

At least for longer than a leaf's breadth

What out there that might touch me is smudged out

This train is serpentine

A land eel furling with androidal ease

The ocular panels along its sides

Of which I am only one of many retinae

Perceiving only world-melt

I am ostensibly going to Exeter

But just now it's easy to slip

Into who knows

Adventure like abduction

Without the black hood

I can see and yet the sight is happening

Housing estates livestock a ruined abbey greening

Digested by the ancient hills

The grander-scheme import of which

You will forget

So drink

As the fanged stoat from the rabbit's nape

As though from a flagon of river water

Shaken with ancestral ask

As if it isn't knowledge you see

But some osmotic soul-food

To be filled up with blurs

That might later resolve themselves

Into memories

To return to where you really live

With changes in your blood

⃝⃝⃝

Our morning read was somewhat truncated this morning.  There were a few no-shows among the minions this morning. -39C (with windchill) so a few people were running late and starting slow.  Stragglers are still arriving.

Stuart Cole's Alien Freight might suggest he has little faith in our ability to right the ship, and then ship righted, not to drive the fucker right on to the rocks.  Cole sounds polite and proper but he has the heart of an anarchist.

Henceforth All Flags

Will fly at half-mast

Awaiting the miraculous

A lasting tribute

To the aching truth

We all possess within us

Like phosphorescence in a daylit sea

Dormant until nightfall

There dwell among us those

Who usurp the name of Optimists

Who want to simply cut

All flagpoles in half

And fly our banners at lowered summits

Heed them not

These kissers of ceilings

Whose cult of shrunken hope

Would suspend us in a choiceless chrysalis

Leaving forever unhoisted

The white flag of the Faceless

Which one day will wing to that barren pole-top

And bliss us collectively out

With its final I give up

⃝⃝⃝

Alien Freight is a short and tasty treat.  Today's book of poetry will be looking forward to Stewart Cole's next.

Stewart Cole

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stewart Cole is the author of Question in Bed (Goose Lane, 2012).  A Canadian expatriate, he lives in Wisconsin, where he teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

anstrutherpress.com

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