Three Poems by Nyla Matuk

Cento: Procrastination

I began, “I began the day staring
into the face of the question of narrative—
was anybody still interested in it, and, if so, why?”

It was a simple question to ask
but had taken me eight days to write—
you’d think it impossible
to construct a sentence two words at a time,
writing two words then taking

the rest of the day off. How grateful I was
to the patient who wandered in, then
sat at the decaying Steinway and banged out
a mangled Moonlight Sonata.

The notebook goes riffling through its colour chart
for rose-flushed stonework
cut clean as these rain-beaded fuschias
or until that notebook, a mental one,

flips round to inquire whitely,
Just what do you think you’re up to?
You’re dead but you still flicker bluish—I’d not

want to jinx anyone by bobbing like you do
right in my eye’s corner, it’s maddening.

Cento: False Consciousness

“Whatever is fitted in any sort
to excite the ideas of pain, and danger,
that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible,”
says Burke, “is a source of the sublime.”

We had arranged to visit the new
Aston Martin works at Bloxham.
The literary stereotype of the sadistic Englishman
endures in the drug excesses
of contemporary aristocrats and as James Bond.

No one is with us, and no one will threaten
to interrupt us out of boredom. No one
will draw my attention to the fact
that an elegy is an encomium
that arrives a lifetime too late.

My scandal, ever since the day my heart
got ahead of my tongue, has been a non-secret.
I can love a thing but turn against it
lest it enslave me.

Love has an expiration date, just like life,
canned food, and medicine. But I would prefer
love to collapse from a cardiac arrest at its peak
of desire and infatuation, like a horse

falling off a mountain into an abyss.
We love the lure of form, and imagination
devotes itself to discerning what is mysterious
and wondrous within.

Cento: Inspiration

Eating away my inborn virtue, Vice
marks me, like yourself, with its barrenness

I do not much like the songs of Edith Piaf, the boulevards
of Baron Haussmann, the furniture of Louis XIV,

the sound of Gertrude Stein, the vainglory of Napoleon
or the conceit of Charles de Gaulle. I distrust, at one level,

people who turn ideas into movements, at another, ideas themselves.
Other girls were led out of the dining room onto the dance floor

and I wasn’t sure if I should flee or stay—something about being
slid around to the heavy music was enjoyable, as if I weren’t

entirely myself anymore. Sails luffing and choral keening
of the shrouds, in descant. The goal of music is silence.

Nyla Matuk is the author of two books of poems and the editor of a poetry anthology, all published with Vehicule Press of Montreal. Her poems have appeared in various magazines in Canada, the US and the UK, including The Poetry Review, PN Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, The Fiddlehead, and The Walrus. Poems have appeared as well in anthologies such as New Poetries VI and Best Canadian Poetry in English. She lives in Montreal. www.nylamatuk.ca