we tried everything, even sat by the fire
contemplating the landscape
outside the picture window some professors put in
books lining the walls like graves
as I hear you chopping
every branch and tree from the great birch forests
great beyond grey as the mountain I refuse
to look at because it reminds me
of all I can’t become,
the world has gone hard.
this landscape a bratty truth somebody drew
to remind me I don’t belong.
I never belonged to granite, wild roses, flaming
beads of dogberry that line the memory certain
times of year.
now I ignore it like I do some paintings at the grand museums
where I mostly look instead
at the walls, or the faces of the people lining the paintings, or
the guards looking on, bored, checking the watch
for when art ends—
I want art to end.
I want to not contemplate the world
as representation instead put my hand on
the axe like you do
and cut into it with my own vituperous blade.
I want to taste that breath of wind
and stop angels with my thumb.
I hear you chopping, and I know you
have to stop. I know
we have to leave well enough
alone.
Robin Durnford is the author of four books of poetry. Her new collection, At Beckett’s Grave, is slated for publication with McGill-Queen’s UP in Fall 2025. She lives in Montréal.
Questions and Answers
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to write poetry?
When my father died in 2004. My first ‘published’ poem was the couple of lines that are now etched on his grave. I had always wanted to be a writer, though, and I had always written poems. I just didn’t have any models growing up on the West Coast of Newfoundland—I thought all poets were dead. This is going to sound extremely geeky—and the truth was I was relatively ‘cool’ as a teenager in my very small town—but I distinctly remember my high school English teacher giving us John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and I had an out-of-body experience. Every line made my hair stand on end, but I couldn’t admit this to the other ‘cool’ kids of course. I had to keep this feeling of transcendence a secret for a very long time. After that I went through a period of reading an old Norton Anthology of poetry that was lying around the house cover to cover, every now and then pausing to read one of the poems aloud into a hairbrush as if I were a rock star. Very cool indeed! And then, just as I was coming into myself as a young journalist in St. John’s, I finally came across a ‘real poet’ in a row house in downtown St. John’s—Agnes Walsh. She was my next-door neighbour, and I would gaze, voyeuristically, as this real live poet sang out to her kids to come for supper and hung clothes on the line in the fog.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
“by the fire” is a flicker of regret. I was leaving home. Again. I had returned to the island seven years before to raise my son. We were living in a professor’s house, filled with bookshelves and windows framing a beautiful view of the Bay of Islands on the West Coast. It was all I had ever wanted and dreamed of. Yet it came with a slow agonizing realization. We couldn’t make a go of it on the island. After that the views kind of curdled, and I had to look away. I felt betrayed, even by the landscape. It was also a time when my partner and I realized that, for all that we both grew up in the country, the country wasn’t for us. We had spent so many years living in cities with our heads in books that we forgot we didn’t have any of the practical skills—like chopping wood properly—that one needs to really thrive in such a wild place. It was painful to realize that I didn’t belong in that world anymore—I had wanted so badly to be a rural person—but it turns out that I’m much more comfortable in the urban chaos of Montreal. Sometimes I’m not even sure why. And for all that a friend says this poem is about Plato. Go figure!