Russell Thornton: THE AESCHYLUS ROCK

Sunday, March 3, 2013

THE AESCHYLUS ROCK

Fresh corpse of a baby gull

splayed against a shore rock.

Feathers, guts, skin case, stain,

the sections of the skeleton

like parts of a pictograph,

neck, skull, eye hole, keel,

ribs, ilium, wing bones, claws,

thing that had not flown long

dropped by an eagle or hawk.

The tide will find it in an hour

and take what is left of it,

but for now the bones manacle

the carcass to the dry rock

while the shore rats run out

of nests to get at it. Sunlight

embraces it. The thief of fire

deep within the rock drinks

and eats it and lives forever.

1 comment:

Chris BanksMarch 7, 2013 at 4:06 PM
Terrific poem Russell! Thanks for sharing it.
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Awards

BC Book Prizes Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize, Finalist, 2004, House Built of Rain

ReLit Award for Poetry, Finalist, 2004, House Built of Rain

Ralph Gustafson Poetry Prize, 2009 (The Fiddlehead Contest), "The Rain Bush"

League of Canadian Poets National Poetry Contest, 2000, First Prize, "The Beginnings of Stars"

Anthologies

Into a Foreign Tongue Goes Our Grief (Bilietto, Greece, 2000)

Vintage 2000 (Ronsdale, 2000)

Event 30-Year Retrospective (Event magazine, 2000)

Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood, 2002)

Thessaloniki: A City in Literature (Metaixmio, Greece, 2002)

In Fine Form: The Anthology of Canadian Form Poetry (Polestar, 2005)

White Ink (Demeter, 2007)

Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry (Mother Tongue, 2008)

Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Wilfrid Laurier University, 2009)

A Verse Map of Vancouver (Anvil, 2009)

Vancouver 125 (subTerrain magazine, 2011)

Global Poetry Anthology -- Montreal International Poetry Prize 2011 (Vehicule, 2012)

Poet to Poet Anthology (Guernica, 2012)

Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope, 2012)

Poems from Planet Earth (Leaf, 2013)

Alive at the Center (Ooligan, US, 2013)

Russell Thornton's books of poetry are The Fifth Window (Thistledown, 2000), A Tunisian Notebook (Seraphim, 2002), House Built of Rain (Harbour, 2003), The Human Shore (Harbour, 2006), and Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain (Harbour, 2013). His poems have appeared in literary magazines across Canada, in several anthologies including Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009) and Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope, 2012), and have twice been featured on Vancouver buses as part of B.C.'s Poetry in Transit. He won the League of Canadian Poets National Contest in 2000 and The Fiddlehead magazine's Ralph Gustafson Prize for poetry in 2009. He lives in North Vancouver, BC.