Lucía M. Polis The Poetry of

The street is dark
and the houses quiet,
supplicant voices
long gone.
The roses stand so still—
time too stands still, irredeemable;
it does not care
to know when
the almond bush blooms. . . .

My neighbour,
he greets me with his
hands; his eyes hold
fondly his dog
(she is silent).
She watches us with great care.
There is no burning bush—
just here, beside our two homes,
a comprehension
      at last. . . .

Nothing
is going to happen tonight.
My flesh
pandiculates.
I can no longer hear
at my back
a treacherous crack
of some tight seam; just here, at dusk I
watch happy boys
drift over the grass,

their eyes
filled with candy and
October dreams.

the poet makes
the poet hard
to live

It is high noon in Baghdad.
To her empty living room,
Cappelbaum quietly hums,

    Sleep Country Ca-na-DA!
    Why buy a mattress
    a—nywhere else? ❇ding❇


When she closes her eyes,
Cappelbaum thinks she can hear
echoes of distant times:

    (Double your pleasure, double your fun—)
    Wait . . . what do you mean
    Barq’s has bite? When she


opens her eyes, she can hear
the zuhr from the muezzins’
duelling calls.

They are loud,
these voices,
and piercingly clear:

    Taste the rainbow!
    Roll up the rim to win!
    It’s the beer out here.

Returning to Granville, the debut poetry collection (inspired by Michael Turner’s Kingsway) that she had self-published in 2005, Lucía M. Polis retraces her steps back to a time when her own life and growth as a poet became entwined with one of Vancouver’s main thoroughfares (and all the places it took her). In reimagining her collection, Lucía invites you to board the number 10 bus at the southern confluence of intersections where Southwest Marine Drive becomes Granville Street; to make stops (and poems) along the way—pausing, diverting, looping back; and to arrive at the waters of Vancouver Harbour, changed.

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It is now half past midnight in
die Eidgenossenschaft.

The birds are sleeping;
the bees are sleeping;
and nobody mourns.

The city drifts
past soft purple clouds.


And here, in The Harbour City,
honk horns; it’s half past three.

The cars are rushing;
they’re so very loud;
they want to be free.


For now, sound asleep in your bed;
’til dawn, neither alive

nor dead; but a third
secret thing, your breath
buffets wrens; turns leaves

in eaves; chases away the clouds;
falls and rises again.

The Devil lives on the margins
of my domain.

At dawn, he sneaks through the brambles
his wizened face
cut up by thorns
                        again.

In the day, while I’m at work,
he snips at my trees,
he pees in the breeze,
he gulps down his beer
                                 then burps.


Honestly, I don’t think that he
means true harm.

I don’t even think he knows what
meaning is to begin with;
he just tends to his shed
                                    of weed

or to his apple trees, or pears.
He just seems not to look
when his pointed tail whips
                                        through the air
singing his grass.


Nor does he hear in the night
the chickadee’s call,

when throaty Cerberus
walks past my house with him,
just barely there
                        at all.

The lanky storytelling man
Rests on his back upon the bed;
Although he seems so sane to one,
He is crazed and nearly dead.

    Nearly dead he hides within,
Susceptible to nervous fray;
While the she-poet calls to him
To leave his shell and come away.

    His storied Roman lips oft fail
To say the gospel to its end,
While the she-poet raises sails
To take away her ailing friend.

    The ’teller, he can never reach
The mast-head on his ship’s main mast;
But stands bewildered, ears enwax’d,
As the she-poet pilots past.

    At adiós, his rasped refrain
Reflects she-poet’s fare-thee-wells,
But each time these two meet again
It in the heart e’er briefer dwells.

    The storyteller’s anguished day
Is passed in work; at morn he runs;
She-poet’s time runs counterways—
At daybreak she turns in at once.

    I saw the ’teller run his course
Descending on Chinookèd valleys.
As blaring drivers damn with force
The name of God, in concrete alleys.

    Water and soap won’t scour his spleen
And he won’t in Peace’s bosom lie,
Amongst the porc’lain he’ll be seen
Standing in fear—ne’er speak nor cry.

    He shall be sat, dressed dark as night,
By hamlet pub’s oak panes at dawn,
While the she-poet waves adieu
Raises her anchor and sails on.