ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Author photo by Curtis Perry
Frances Boyle is a Canadian author. Her most recent poetry collections are Openwork and Limestone (Frontenac House 2022) and Light-carved Passages (Doubleback Books 2024), an open access e-book re-issue of her 2014 debut. She is also the author of Tower, a novella (Fish Gotta Swim Editions 2018), Seeking Shade, an award-winning short story collection (The Porcupine's Quill 2020) and Skin Hunger, a novel (Guernica Editions, forthcoming 2026). Her writing has been awarded The Diana Brebner Prize, the Magpie Poetry Award for Poetry, first and third prizes in The Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and selected for inclusion in the Best Canadian Poetry series. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Fiddlehead, South Dakota Review, The New Quarterly, The Ex-Puritan, and iamb, poetry seen and heard. Raised in Saskatchewan on the Canadian prairies, she has long lived in Ottawa, Ontario, where she now helps run VERSeFest, Ottawa's international poetry festival.
April 2, 2025
Combustion
i.
He lit the fire for me last night,
and a half-dozen candles in lieu
of roses. He brought out china plates,
silver forks, tall candle-sticks.
A silver flash of wine poured
for warmth in our home, our hearth
just for heart-warming. Dance of fire,
slow smolder to reds and black,
the clinkers’ glint, the mad gash of them.
ii.
Melted wax puddled on the wooden
tabletop, a seal to fix some promise
to myself. Thumbprint impressed,
envelope wax-thickened. The fire
warms the wax, the fire consumes
the wax inside candle’s hollowing
core, a clear pool it slurps from.
iii.
Firebird spreads its wings,
— rebirth
a sapphire, a trembling
semiprecious tear, a note
sung so pure it melts the stone.
A placeholder song for the antique
sorrow I finger like a rosary, each
bead winking in the light of the last
candle, fire confined to the wick’s tip.
iv.
Remembering
destruction. Phoenix
rising, the air too thick to breathe.
the gulps, the greedy maw of fire
chomping through wood and lathe,
soft fabric candyfloss to it, furniture
like celery stalks, crunched. A swell
of heat, a shimmer in air as chemicals
off-gas, perfumed with poison. The mirage-
making heat, the alteration of sensation,
rapacious fire. It is hungry, ravenous. A beast
whose appetite must be sated.
v.
Ice in a bucket. A house fire in winter
so anomalous, the firebucket contents
freeze as they are thrown, arc of hoses
turning to ice-bows, precious water
holds a moment in air, then crashes
to slick ground. Is my yielding to flame
like the numbing burn off ice? Will the bite
of cold assume the acrid scent of regret,
taste in my mouth like damp ashy residue?
This poem arose from a long free-write in response to the phrase "The earth is told in fire and ice; and so it is with our hearts". This was given as a prompt for a "Fire and Ice" workshop led by the wonderful Australian poet, Mark Tredinnick, who came to Canada in February 2020, just before the world shut down. I shaped a few of the words and images from the free-write into a short draft for the workshop, which (after multiple revisions) became the poem "Phoenix" in my 2022 collection Openwork and Limestone. But I remained intrigued by the other images and associations I had meandered through in the initial writing, which moved from a real-life event when my partner created a romantic fireside evening, through memories of several disastrous fires that people I knew had experienced. Imagination built up the details, including the link with the firebird. I worked on the poem through several iterations, eventually settling on this form where the multiple parts, I hope, give the poem a kaleidoscope or fractal-like feel.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
