Tableau: At the Head of Mixed Company         Welcome-Bienvenue. The table is set and everyone's here. The guest of honor sits at the head of this special "Oh, Canada!" issue of The Centrifugal Eye. And Oh! What a guest—the distinguished Karla Linn Merrifield, editor of Sea Stories, and author of the newly published Godwit: Poems of Canada (FootHills Publishing, September 2007).         While Karla is an American resident and citizen rather than from Canada, it was her elevated admiration of things and places Canadian that convinced me to invite her to guest edit this issue of TCE. The topic was already on the editorial-theme board as a subject I wanted to embrace, long before we began our correspondence discussing a future collaboration. I was able to review Godwit in advance, and decided it was more than fitting that a representative selection from Karla's book be destined for centerpiece of this issue. And so, although nearly all the material presented in the Autumn 2007 TCE was selected and edited by Karla Merrifield, it was I who found delight (and difficulty!) in selecting the Godwit bouquet-sampler of my favorites for our table of contents.         In thanks for Karla's enthusiastic efforts in the "Oh, Canada!" project, for her exacting expectations of quality, and for her valued ideas and opinions which I esteem, it's my honor and pleasure to present to you the following garland of six vibrant and accomplished poems, all of which also appear in Godwit: Poems of Canada, as focal point to our theme.         May you enjoy reading these poems as much as I have. Eve Anthony Hanninen Editor-in-Chief The Centrifugal Eye

"Fate of the Newfoundland Fisheries"

Karla Linn Merrifield - 2007

              Three Pieces of Cod

	I. In the year fourteen ninety-seven Giovanni Caboti landed in this Newe Founde Lande. By mistake is Matthew in service to Henry the Seventh found not India spices, but the greatest take of all: unfathomable amounts of cod to feed England's lower classes with the saltiest protein yet to be cured. It all started five hundred years ago at Cape Bonavista, fishermen first, then merchants & settlers, then skirmishes between those breeds of Englishmen, wars between nations as well. & as those earliest rich fishes saw their first depletions, a people called Beothuk began their more rapid decline into sea mists. II. First, it's cod tongues and cheeks, battered, pan fried fast in golden scrunchions to tempt appetites. It's followed by chowders & stews, or filet, fresh or salt, pan fried, deep fried, creamed, au gratin, baked, or dressed, stuffed in cakes, casseroles, & with brewis. "Put the skillet on, mudder, the boys be comin' in the cove." III. When I bought this place from me father-in-law in 1989, I watched him walk away from Trepassey with a million bucks in his pocket. Two years later comes the moratorium. ‘Tis a one-industry town, yer know, yuh. Closed down yer factory, thousand lost their jobs. Wish I was paid by the hour, added this here restaurant, always somethin.' I'd be a millionaire, too, by now, by golly, eight years out. Only thing good ‘bout it, boys stay in school. Education's the way out, yuh. Me girl's going off to Maine or Toronto, like ‘em all, I suppose. Education, yuh, they be a finishing so's we can export our children like we done yer cod. Three Pieces of Cod is excerpted from Cod Pieces, which first appeared in Midst (by Merrifield, FootHills Publishing).

    Defining Bedrock

	Touch a writer & you should touch bedrock. Turn her over in bed & you find those Permian seas at her very center as well as surprised, odd things growing that only see the light of midday if you dare. There lie words you never heard of, talus & graben of her poems & being. She will make you hunger for moist undersides & petroglyphs. She will urge you with caesuras & gifts of geologic timelessness to grasp all kinds of improbable ineffabilities. You will want nothing more than to cling, cling to her like lichen just to hear her singing a few hushed syllables like watery riffles over spilled stones a few feet below the green. Touch a writer tonight, I dare you to sniff her secret, silent ages of pulse & rhythm. Become a fossil in free verse now, live, almost it would seem, in her hard parsing dream forever.

      Butedale Rite

	When the ice thaws & the first floes leave for their long passage down channel all the ghost salmon return in a spring ritual to the site where white water falls into the cove & shadow of commerce in the red flesh of their brethren falls on their ghostly silver bodies, on all the hollow memories of their lost species. It is a celebration of demise— not theirs—but that of the hungriest ones, those alien creatures with machinery, tin cans, solder, steam, a greedy streak, a killing instinct, shamelessness. The ghost salmon return to the shambles & the silence, to the clean scents of rotting wood & rusting steel, the long, slow fade of human sanctimony. The ghost salmon return & return & return until a new tide turns, bringing again their living kind from the sea to this native place, their place on earth.

    Après Butedale

	Please, let us go back to Butedale, that ass end of civilization, place smaller than small town, really no town at all, few traces left of man's passages through green space. Let us return now to beloved Butedale, its rickety wharfs, wood rot, & not only moss blanketing rooftops, but a spruce tree topping off at six feet tall what was once, once a bustling communal house. Let us all retrace the long sea wakes, swells to Butedale, fantastically recalling, oh, pure isolation, breathing only remnants of humanity's touch upon that bay, water, every thing stirring to be blue & gray. Let us now remember Butedale's calm, its silence among tilting rafters, spring foxgloves taking over detritus metallic, all entities constructed, the feeble manmade dreams that strive to remain, but must, should disappear.

      Butterclam Communion

	Sift through the shards of shells on Whitebeach midden & chances— after a thousand years of tides coming in, flowing out, & currents seething through— you will not find my remains hidden among the several thousand of my brethren. A Kwakiutl boy was my ultimate undoing. My body, well salted, buttery, slid down his hungry throat so swiftly that all I had in my last brief moment of breath was a fleeting memory of a smooth human tongue, though I was pleased to feed his easy spirit. After all, I had lived long among my people in a sturdy clam case bleached pale with age. Along with limpets & snails, cockles & my cousins manilla, littleneck, sand & pea, What was left of me descended to the shore, cracked & fractured, awaiting weathers, seasons. & on a warm, still morning humming with mosquitoes, a crone found one last bit of my near-last trace on earth. With warm fingers she noticed tiny striations, rough course of hard, pearled old skin. Curiosity recovered me & kindness returned me to my ocean. At long last I am freed to the underworld of starfish, salmon fry, a harbor seal's domain. Finally, she held fast a streak of my spirit, drank, & plaited me ever so softly into words, these words. as one small once luscious voice. Butterclam Communion first appeared in Jigsaw.

    Backcountry Road

	Two kit red foxes loped off the roadside into underbrush, heeding their mother's quick yip of warning. They continued on, I imagine, to forage & feed on field mice, oblivious to any idea of being Canadian-born, bred, of residing in Killarney Provincial Park. One day they will stalk & pounce on a Mississauga rattler, dispatch it before it dispatches either of them. That snake is not really an enemy, is the bullying country to the south nor its new enemy Iraq. It is good food; it is almost filling. Come autumn, toward the twins' maturity, foliage will turn yellow-crimson & then they will have no awareness of the geopolitical significance of a maple leaf, only that it falls. It is golden; it cushions the path. The pair lift their well-informed noses, sniffing the onset of winter in the air.

Contemporary Poetry With An Eye Towards Resistance


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