Maleea Acker, Hesitating once to feel glory

 

LOVE

It is likely that my father and my dog
will die the same year. They are both 

in their retirement. They complain.
They smile. They look as if 

they wish there were something
more they could do for me. 

The universe of tinnitus presses in
like the swell of a drama. 

I’m not mad, I say to my ex-love.
I’m not going to be mad anymore. 

I’m lying in this bed. My father is
by the sea, worrying. My dog, 

her back to me, hangs her muzzle
off the edge, out into the space 

between comfort
and the hundred-year-old floor. 

She sighs when I touch her
and does not move closer.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but Victoria-based poet Maleea Acker’s [see her 2009 ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] third full-length poetry collection, following The Reflecting Pool (Pedlar Press, 2009) and Air-Proof Green (Pedlar Press, 2012), is Hesitating once to feel glory (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2022). Perhaps it was simply the Covid-era, when all our attentions were scattered. Perhaps it is simply the quiet, modest way these observational wisdoms rest on the page. As the poem “HOVERCRAFT” begins, writing: “The trouble with introspection / is it keeps changing its mind. / Most of the time I sit on a precipice // of memory built somewhat like / a camping matterss. The dust-mote floor / an inch away, the wires above blanketed // like a Cuban mezzanine; it’s hard / to find a supportive position.”

Set as an assemblage of first-person meditative lyrics as a single, book-length suite, there is a striking intelligence across such lovely detail, lovely intimacy. “There was the clink of bottles // before the world began / and so its sound still / makes us melancholy / the way ice can,” she writes, as part of the book’s title poem, “booming // on a river in spring / or tilling a glass in a woman’s hand.” Across thirty-one short poems, Acker provides such a lovely series of small moments that build and accumulate through sharp observation into something else, something larger. “I turn the corner. A car dealership,” she writes, as part  of the two-page “TACOS,” “a man / behind glass adding numbers / in a store full of fans.” A bit further along, writing specifically to her poem’s subject, offering: “I am a compass needle swinging / yes to everything. / It is important to hold / their greasy, hot circles properly. / Three, or better, two fingers. Approach / from the side.” There is such quiet, deep resonances that run through these poems, elements subtle enough they nearly slip by, catching perhaps on one’s sleeve.