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***
New Collection ***
Nancy Mattson - Independent on Sunday - Jan
14th
A poem selected from Nancy's new collection,
Writing with
Mercury, will
be published in 'The Independent on Sunday' on Sunday January
14, 2007.
in
collection Writing with Mercury, 2006,
Flambard
Press, ISBN 1-873226-6-1
Writing with Mercury
Eyes
upon me, though I cannot see
them
or my own,
the
mirror black
on
the wrong side.
I
have been called by so many
names
I do not know
which
to inscribe
at
the top of the sheet.
Dip
the pen into open ink—
no,
it’s a thumb-bowl of mercury,
bureaucracy’s
joke,
movable
blob of a mirror.
I
remember childhood warnings:
don’t
keep looking at it or your face will melt,
don’t
breathe it or you’ll lose your hair,
don’t
touch it or your fingerprints will fade.
Pressed
between thumb and forefinger
mercury
skims across the page:
silverfish
escaping from a torch,
twenty-six
seductive drops of toxin.
Write
with mercury?
May
as well try to round up
minnows
in a paper sieve
to
make a wall-eyed pike.
Maybe
I could use this pen as a needle,
thread
quicksilver into a necklace;
maybe
I could furl this paper to a point,
pour
blood and silver in a glass tube.
Mercury
freezes at minus forty,
where
Celsius and Fahrenheit meet.
All
I need is Canada in January
and
ice can be my medium, my weapon.
All
I have is London in gray rain
that
never freezes hard enough to matter.
Nancy Mattson
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