THE AIR, THE SKY - Stuart Ross's Annual New Year poem

 Dear friends, family, colleagues —

I hope this note finds you all well. And I hope the New Year brings you all days of joy, moments of comforting reflection, warm memories of those precious to you, and maybe a lovely adventure or two.

Here is my annual New Year Poem. I am grateful for the time you spend reading it.

This mailing is dedicated to the memory of my dearest friend Michael Dennis. Please read his poems.

As always, if you want to be removed from this list, just let me know.

Take care.

xox Stuart


THE AIR, THE SKY

There are creatures in the walls.
We hear them scurry and scratch,
gnaw on the insulation
and maybe the electrical wiring.
At night they write poems
on tiny typewriters
about how they hear creatures
outside the walls. They
hear us using our blenders
and pencil sharpeners and various
other contraptions whose purpose
they could never conceive of
and neither could we if no one
had invented them. Another

thing there is is air. There’s so much
of it. You find it between the leaves
of poplars and in the tunnels of ant hills
and bobbing on top of lakes and rivers.
Let’s go breathe some air. Let’s paint
a picture of it. If you don’t get the angles
just right, it doesn’t judge you. The creatures
In the walls mistake the word “poplar”
for “popular” but the “u” doesn’t judge them.
Everything makes mistakes. I have made
twenty or twenty-one of them. Tom Clark
wrote a book called Air. Page 20 has
“A small / black worker ant / moving

diagonally” and Page 21’s got
“A moon in the blue morning.”
The moon is surrounded by
infinite sky, which we’re
connected to by dollops of air.
Perhaps if I wrote a book called Sky
I’d become more poplar.



Stuart Ross
1 January 2021
Cobourg

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Winner of the 2019 Harbourfront Festival Prize
70 Kippers (w/ Michael Dennis; Proper Tales Press, 2020)
Sos sola una persona (trans. Tomás Downey & Sarah Moses; Socios Fundadores, 2020)
90 Tiny Poems (above/ground press, 2019)
Motel of the Opposable Thumbs (Anvil Press, 2019)
Espesantes (above/ground press, 2018)
Eleven Elleve Alive (w/ Dag T. Straumsvåg & Hugh Thomas; shreeking violet press, 2017)
Pockets (ECW Press, 2017)
Certain Details: The Poetry of Nelson Ball (editor; WLU Press, 2017)
Bad Engine: New & Selected Poems, by Michael Dennis (editor; Anvil Press, 2017)
A Sparrow Came Down Resplendent (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016)
I am on Patreon! @ www.patreon.com/stuartross