Antimatter

Hugh Hazelton is a Montreal-based poet and translator who specializes in the comparison of Canadian and Quebec literatures with those of Latin America, and the work of Latin American writers of Canada. He has written several books of poetry and translates from Spanish, French, and Portuguese into English; his translation of Vétiver (Signature, 2005), a book of poems by Joël Des Rosiers, won the Governor General’s award for French-English translation in 2006, and his book Latinocanadá: A Critical Study of Ten Latin American Writers of Canada (McGill-Queen’s, 2007) received the Best Book award from the Canadian Association of Hispanists. “Antimatter” is the title piece from his poetry collection published by Broken Jaw Press in 2003 (the self-translated Spanish version of the collection was published by Split Quotation/La Cita Trunca in 2009), and is republished here with the author’s permission.

on a quiet afternoon
I’m sitting reading
and when I look up to reflect
a blue glacier suddenly
crashes through the window
sending shelves and tables flying
burying books under tons of ice
that dissolve into warm iridescent turquoise seas
where trilobites float serenely paddling with a hundred legs
the floor gives way and the ground itself becomes molten and burns to ashes
I am standing in space
it is eons until I will be born and eons since I have died
we’re not even here, we’re overlooking the wild sea on the coast of Tasmania
machines are tearing apart the building around me and digesting the fragments
and as I’m being born and as my lungs cease breathing
a vast windstorm vision of the simultaneity of time tears through my skull-encased mind
myriad tiny lines of existence drawn between points on surfaces
that are not planes or spheres or any symbol that a single particle
of the whole could ever imagine
being and not being
are now
nebulae explode and coalesce
and wondering if I can stay in the universal moment
I look back in the garden and see a triceratops grazing on the lettuce
and reach out
to give this poem
to you