Silver

By Michael Fraser

This poem originally appeared on She Said Notes.

I should be happier than I am now.
Tomorrow, my son will exit the cornucopia’s
rim and furnish scant lungs. The baby’s
cry, and the by-product of leaves. Here inside
Mitzi’s Sister, the music has changed. How the
branches on my face have widened is noticeable.
My generation has mined its time. That letter “X”,
bookending our collective name, has lost its function,
buried all meaning. Why am I thinking of insomnia
and bills now, the selfishness of dragging tender
eyes into this world at my grizzled age. Still, even
without the economy, the mortgage will remain
seated for years. Look at the salt and pepper
landscape all around Sorauren. We are old parents
pushing strollers up and down Roncesvalles,
epilogues of a shadowed cohort.

Michael Fraser is a graduate of York University and the University of Toronto. He has been published in anthologies and journals nationally and internationally including: Paris Atlantic, Arc, and The Caribbean Writer. His manuscript, The Serenity of Stone, won the 2007 Canadian Aid Literary Award Contest and was published by Bookland Press in 2008. He won Arc’s 2012 Reader’s Choice Poem of the Year. He was also published in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2013. He won Freefall’s 2014 and 2015 Poetry Contests. His latest book is To Greet Yourself Arriving (Tightrope Books, 2016). He is the creator and former-director of the Plasticine Poetry Series in Toronto.