SATURDAY MORNING, JANUARY

 

Matt Robinson

 

 

 

Post-storm, the new year’s sun—a soft heat
through the window—toasts the squint
lost sleep of your brow. The dog again, somehow,
sigh-purrlicued behind & against you, a warm
hint, in the near permanent dell—the sunk
weave—of your chair’s cushion’s fur-fetid
funk. She’s all belly & organic heave, a sigh-
manic white noise: a whole mood on huffy junket.         
Poised to gulp more of too sweet morning
coffee, there’s then that moment when Saturday’s
soundscape crescendoes & goes all-at-once,
twice, askew. A spin cycle’s engaged with a click;
Fortnite’s first-personing echoes anew, joy-
sticked down the stairs; your wife’s thumping
a far room’s desk into being, moving chairs
& spare parts. The dog starts & then settles,
a kettle on the verge of calling the day’s pot’s
matted black, but then doesn’t, having thought
better (not at all?) of that smack-talking
gambit.           You think you’d be fine, if—
you suppose—you ended right here, right
now: with this sun’s simple heat, this
dog’s metered breath, a family’s indiscreet
shifting through inane tasks & routines
on this fine, bright, early day. But you want
all the more now to stay: stay & curse
the icy idea of death, of being a stupid guest,
a minor character, in the crude whimsical acts
of your body’s dumb play; fear mostly the way
you’ll at some point never know—the hows,
the whens & the whos; future’s splay—of
what’s just now, right now, again now, again
now, become dear—become clear, post-storm,
in the new year’s soft heat.

 

 

 

 

Matt Robinson has published six full-length poetry collections, including Tangled & Cleft (Gaspereau, 2021) and Some Nights It’s Entertainment; Some Other Nights Just Work (Gaspereau, 2016), in addition to numerous chapbooks. He has won the Grain Prose Poetry Prize, the Petra Kenney Award, and The Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, among others. He is on the editorial board of The Fiddlehead and he plays a fair bit a beer league hockey. He lives in Kjipuktuk (Halifax, NS, Canada).