MATTHEW DOLMAGE

Bracebridge 1974-Toronto 2004   

Not to bother rehearsing             
admission speeches for St Peter;              
just exchange the usual touch    
of biceps and knuckle-brush of noses     
such an original rhetoric of permission  
to come aboard will tickle him   
no end 

And do not be forgetting             
your wheelchair. You might want             
to dust it off and wheel it out     
now and then for old times’ sake             

Imagine:             
               You and FDR     
madly wheelchair surfing,           
catching waves that keep shifting            
into dolphin particles, getting up              
inside the curve of some cresting             
constellation as it begins              
a for-the-fun-of-it plunge            
into God’s unfathomableness    

Imagine some now and always day          
going for a spin, improvising       
jazzy music of the spheres on    
the universe’s bottom-deep B flat            
or, simply for its own sweet sake,            
setting groups of founding equations     
to new harmonics of your own  
     all the while playing chicken 
with Time at the speed of light  

Ian Sowton, February 2004