from Glossary of Musical Terms
Tablature
Architectural, melted. Limbs. Delectable light. An internal sea, the weighted fresh. Suffering is not economy, economy so rarely brief. Staccato puffs, the sound a breath makes. Lightness, heat. Outgrowing envelopes, soprano. The glassy edge. We tear the page in half. Roman blinds, the ottoman.
Relative major, minor. The baby, earlier. I was sent by Nancy Drew.
The Key of N, Aria
Wretched, mother. Sings. Expelled, a clear space. Subdural. A fiery exclaim. Salvage. Let me, carnivalesque. Key of spirits, one foot swoon. You wonder, outlook. Tissue, graft. Make your mouth a fingers pinch.
We lift up, lift. Decline, vermillion. Breath. Apparent, heirs.
Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of more than twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, and was long-listed for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012. His most recent titles are the poetry collections Songs for little sleep (Obvious Epiphanies, 2012) and grief notes: (BlazeVOX [books], 2012), and a second novel, missing persons (2009). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books, The Garneau Review, seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com