1st Prize Winner

Wind & Water Writing Contest
1st Place Winner, 2019
Genre: Poetry

Sacred place where each thing speaks itself by JC Sulzenko writing as A. Garnett Weiss

I wake up every day not even knowing where the earth is.

I am surrounded by unendurable beauty
and lost in a history to which I am willing to be lost.

In the early afternoon, for the park’s own sake
I wind and unwind
a scene of dancing things
and sunlight and lust and rest and forgetting
the teasing water full of days.

Nothing is solid now. Against the sky, the trees,
always that measureless peace
that is the quiet moment at the slow close of every evening—
the wind delicate as Queen Anne’s lace
women in moist soil and moonlight
bone, and the truth so small, as it crumbles, it swims.

Everything condenses
the paradise in me I mistake for loneliness.

Cento gloss: Sacred place where each thing speaks itself
Title: Don Mckay, “Territoriality”
Line 1: Roo Borson, “At night you can almost see the corona of bodies”
Line 2: Christopher Dewdney, “Untitled”
Line 3: David Donnell, “Lakes”
Line 4: Don Coles, “ Ah! Qu’ils sont pittoresques, les grands jardins manqués”
Line 5: Sharon Thesen, from “Long distance: an octave”
Line 6: Sharon Thesen, “Evocation”
Line 7: Robert Bringhurst, “Leda and the swan”
Line 8: Roo Borson, “Jacaranda”
Line 9: Bronwen Wallace, “Coming through”
Line 10: Don Coles, “Sometimes all over”
Line 11: David Donnell, “Hound”
Line 12: Marilyn Bowering, “Wishing Africa”
Line 13: Christopher Dewdney, “A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, Book 1”
Line 14: Robert Bringhurst, “Demokritos”
Line 15: Susan Musgrave, “Night and fog”
Line 16: Erin Mouré, “Paradiscial Vallejo”