The World Screened by John Oughton
The world through your window
is screened into rows of tiny cubes
that means we can remake
the world by shifting them
a pure pane of sky shines
from the pine’s arthritic roots
the library is strewn along the walk
which itself winds over
branches, bedrooms. Shadows of things start
elsewhere and cross where they might be cloud
the pedestrian’s two left eyes
regard the sun strolling on her leash
as they move cube by cube over the clear blue lawn
her heart is (not is like) a bird
The World Screened was previously published in Time Slip (Guernica Editions, 2010). John Oughton is a Toronto poet with five books published, and a professor at Centennial College.
I wanted to capture the sense of real/unreal within this poem’s surrealism. The piano motif relates to background music, or a composition, in which the poem seems to move… I juxtaposed pictorial elements playing off the poem’s (in part) bright, Miro-like mood as well as the more subtly expressed romantic, melancholy yearnings.
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