Current Issue: Reconciliation
2010-2011
Dangerous Goods
Sean Hill
Praise be unto the alchemical
Canadians for turning HAZARDOUS
MATERIALS into DANGEROUS
GOODS; you drove that day three
years ago, and I sat beside you, thrilled
by the sign. And it was too easy to think
of you while I drove alone last spring
across the country, and the abstraction
"ontology" ambushed me in Dunkirk,
New York at Demitri's Greek Restaurant
as I sat eating alone, and the power plant
loomed outside on Lake Erie. In the gloaming
birds wheeled as the lights came on tragically,
and carve a pumpkin with abstraction all I could
think to do, and the ontology of jack-o-lanterns
came to me, a little comforting—to be
enlightened or to be benighted, and the Prince
of Denmark arrived with Jack, and reminded
me of my Fortenbras-father, a man of action
in our hometown, and me out in the world
contemplating the being of jack-o-lanterns,
which haunts me half a year later as I am
away from you again.