We Haven't Had A Poem In A While

SHE'S

an alchemist of "the envious
practice of written speech," and I envy her,
every song an alembic fulminating
with fabulous liquid pewter, the jewelled
plumage of the hummingbird, pure laudanum
of flowing iambs. Those scorpions in their sepulchres
of resin: samphire and the friend-
killing heroin: her pen
brims over like a syringe with
elegies, torch songs, her tongue
like the arc-flame of the refiner
annealing the dead, still-anguished eyes
of a friend, into grace, or the base-
metal of our half-
murdered language:

now rejoined.

Steven Heighton
The Address Book
House of Anansi Press 2004