ditch,

Geoffrey Hlibchuk recently graduated from SUNY Buffalo where he studied poetics, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. His work has appeared in PRICIPICe, Queen Street Quarterly, and Shift and Switch: New Canadian Poetry; and critical articles have recently been published in Studies in Canadian Literature, and Open Letter. His new collection of poems—Variations on Hölderlin—recently won the 2008 Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry and is forthcoming from Snare Books in Fall 2008.

Fulgurite Valley

Surprisingly cold

as if a vacuum tube with ultimately

no space to hold anything but the nothing it contains

(an echo of fossilized electrons)

a path of thunder has swept up this beach into a series of mirrors.

We can note the following effects:

All this electricity 

has traced the shape of

a haemorrhage of chrome

and shepherded the sand into a

scare-quote of glass.

And all the cascade ranges

melted into

a clear ribbon of lightning:

The Clara bow.