poemimage

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.