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    Exculpatory Lilies: Poems
    Exculpatory Lilies: Poems
    Exculpatory Lilies: Poems
    Ebook121 pages54 minutes

    Exculpatory Lilies: Poems

    By Susan Musgrave

    ()

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    About this ebook

    2023 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry Finalist
    2023 Griffin Poetry Prize Finalist
    A Globe and Mail Top 100 Book
    2022 Walcott Prize Shortlist

    From the award-winning poet known for her bracing honesty and sharp yet compassionate gaze, here is a new collection of poems that explore life, marriage, addiction, death, and heart-wrenching grief.

    If grief is the willingness to be claimed by a story bigger than ourselves, Susan Musgrave writes, “in that / tender wavering, I let grief in.” 

    "Writing about grief or tragedy is tricky. Hard to meet it at a heart-level without being effusive; hard to meet it at a brain-level without being cold. Hard not to make it about ourselves. Hard to meet it at a visceral level because it can take us out at the knees," wrote author Carrie Mac, responding to the death of Musgrave’s partner, Stephen Reid, in 2018. Following this traumatic loss, in September 2021 their daughter, Sophie, died of an accidental overdose after a twenty-year struggle with addiction.

    But to say this is a collection solely about grief would be to miss the whole nature of Musgrave’s voice and sensibility. Wit is one counterpoint; the natural world is another. The poems share a landscape whose creatures, minutely observed, wild and tame—the winged ones most of all—dance attendance on the helplessness of our brief and mystifying human lives. Throughout Exculpatory Lilies, Musgrave’s alertness to even the most desolate places makes her personal sorrows astonishingly potent; and her scrutiny of language, and emotions, makes shot silk out of sackcloth and ashes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMcClelland & Stewart
    Release dateSep 6, 2022
    ISBN9780771099304
    Exculpatory Lilies: Poems
    Author

    Susan Musgrave

    Susan Musgrave has been nominated for and has received awards in five different categories of writing — poetry, fiction, nonfiction, personal essay, children's writing — and for her work as an editor. She has published many books, including Love You More, More Blueberries and Kiss, Tickle, Cuddle, Hug. Susan lives on Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, and teaches poetry in the Optional Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of British Columbia.

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      Book preview

      Exculpatory Lilies - Susan Musgrave

      PART ONE

      THE AIR OF ELSEWHERE

      WATER,

      Fog Point (vodka) was made with water harvested from San Francisco fog.

      — Gregg Hurwitz, Out of the Dark

      Sloshed on fog, that’s how I’d like to go, drunk

      on immortality like something from a poem

      by Emily Dickinson, whose last words

      were, I must go in, the fog is rising. Wouldn’t I love

      to whisper something so specific when I succumb,

      then sip fog with Emily in the afterlife, the two of us

      on a storm beach cold with rain and sea-fret

      passing the bottle, kibitzing about inconsistent use

      of capitalization and our leisurely flowering

      of consciousness, the awful letting go.

      Emily wrote, Water, is taught by thirst.

      and I’ve always wanted to know, not why

      the thirst, but why the comma? I might ask her

      if I can see my way clear: fog has a way

      of spreading its winding-sheet, obliterating

      our life’s words, complaint of rock against wave,

      wave against shore. Words that rain, cruel words,

      or kind, like the last words spoken to Jesus by a thief.

      Words that weigh, like beached whales who smother

      themselves under the greasy freight of their bodies; how

      quickly we utter our final words and fail

      to recognize them as our own.

      A BEAK FULL OF WATER

      A hummingbird…the one who put out a forest fire,

      one beak full of water at a time.

      —Terry Tempest Williams, When Women Were Birds

      I saw a wilderness on fire, birds falling in flames:

      where was the do-good hummingbird then,

      a question you might ask. She may have had

      other fires to fight, trailing the night behind her

      like a black sheet in her beak, over the boreal forests

      of Siberia, on to the Similkameen. When she dips

      to fill her beak in the Atlantic, the sea tastes

      of the history of grief, and flying back through centuries

      her head feels heavier than a Russian doll’s—

      six skulls, each one smaller than the last, nesting

      inside one another, crying water, water,

      in a language older than words.

      WITHOUT WATER

      (i)

      a dying man reaches for the font of holy water

      only to find that it’s dry

      —Joanne O’Leary

      I cup water in my hands and it disappears before

      my fingers reach my lips—no surprise, no mysteries there.

      You told me, even our unshed tears can be holy.

      How beloved you were, and now, gone.

      I went days without water after your body betrayed you,

      to see if mine would live, then buried you in the family earth

      wearing only the gold band you wore in every photograph

      taken since we’d wed. You swore your life had never been

      more than a long preparation for the leaving of it; how could I

      have saved you, so. What is left now, that I honour you as dust?

      Even if the font is dry, you said, drink!

      THE COLOUR OF WATER

      (ii)

      the glow of the rising moon was yellow like the colour of water would be

      if wedding rings were washed in it and the gold soaked off.

      —Charlie Smith, Cheap Ticket to Heaven

      I wash my hands in the river when the moon is new; the old

      gold of my wedding band like a lure, everything that breathes

      is drawn to it. The way you were once drawn.

      I wash my hands, but how can I wash my heart?

      When you left I took the ring from my finger and hurled it

      at the moon’s reflection, one night when the wild dogs

      were for once silent but the grieving moon—I could see

      our wedding portrait in her face—howled. The river turned

      gold as it flowed towards the sea. You touched me like waves,

      like rain, like morning dew, like no one.

      I have the yellow eyes of my ancestors; from them

      I inherited the moment the leaves turn flaxen in autumn,

      and the devotion I have to winter when I become

      the amber colour of water, waiting for you to drink me.

      Just say the word—water. Say it again so I’ll know

      how much I meant to you, once. Say it again. Say

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