Poetry By Ryan Quinn Flanagan ।Canada's influential young poet

I Could Not Find The Sky This Morning

I walk upon the mischievous glass floor,
laughing children in near mimicry,
all the time we spend watching and listening,
fluttering dreams of the basket weaver barged in anchor,
muses brought to market in triple obscurity,
dwelling in rueful shawls bound up in crier's pasquinade,
are you to be kept like songs in a music box?
to be bluffed and fooled and hounded and reworked?
I could not find the sky this morning, though I knew
where it should be, those sinewy arms of the potty-mouthed
docker brought to labour,
plodding weeds that tumble along in bug-gather,
twine and pull for keeper's sake:
for if I am more than my mind,
I cannot be housed with dispirited dweller,
and that is how I dream the vital dream
of sharding joys, by flares from the terrible boundary.
 
Grey Wolf Along Lake Superior 
 
There is an unfathomed distance between us.
The windows opened and portioned off to view.
An egressing wind knocked out of me by sudden charge.
Cans of stores for the coming months.
 
And that feral foulness downwind.
Jaws that could lock like a vise, tearing flesh.
Eating through entrails.
Eyes like a jeweller's prized obsessions. 
 
But it is none of that in the unmoored moment.
Just fleece and a paralysing wonder.
 
As I fix my gaze upon the marvellous beast,
it's roughed fur and springy hind.
A grey wolf along Lake Superior, misted in statuesque
along the shore.  Mirroring the stillness of the lake.
 
Disinterested in such intrusions.  Though I may sit 
and tell you of it now.
 
Romances
 
Romances, you may have but a few;
many are for the many, serve the many,
pungent as lemon juice upon the tongue –
what roaming hands reveal is a lack
of understanding, directionless appetites 
falsely sated, no matter: I am an infidel dweller,
a mountain of many peaks, gone to the cosmonaut wind...
A dueller's pilcher sent to scream at shadows.
To lark away
at the impossible 
graffiti of myself.