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Videos of Frances Boyle
Frances Boyle
Frances Boyle’s poetry and fiction has appeared in The New Quarterly, Vallum, CV2, Prairie Fire, Fiddlehead, Room, Ottawater, Freefall, Moonset and elsewhere, including anthologies on subjects from Hitchcock to form poetry to mother/daughter relationships. Awards she’s received, in addition to Tree Press’s chapbook prize, include Arc’s Diana Brebner Prize, and This Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt for poetry (with third place for fiction in the same year). She serves on Arc Poetry Magazine’s editorial board. Happily making her home in Ottawa for many years, Frances maintains a yearning for both the prairies and the west coast.
From Frances Boyle
Focal distance
Why would I seek out static silence
when a stillness of lightly wrinkled water
stretches, touches faster ruffles offshore?
My hat upturned is a basket for beach glass,
pebbles dropped in for future fingering.
Dragonfly a blue neon stripe on sand
invisible wings, pebble eyes.
Scent promises taste. Silence blurs, heat-
shimmers mansions just out of reach. At twenty
I wore perfume that smelled like plums, loved
the thought of me that luscious. The still point
needs no volition, requires no trying.
Waves lap-chopping against the dock, doppler
of half-heard highway hum, and breeze’s
finger-touch become a tumble, lenses
spinning to focus. Stillness, the focal point.
Brief clarity before motion and sound,
thought and speech, press in, crisp-edged
strange, silhouetted against the new light.
