Peter Donnelly
- Pamenar Press
- Aug 31
- 2 min read
Peter Donnelly’s first collection, Photons, was published by Appello Press in 2014. His second collection, Money Is a Kind of Poetry, was published by Smokestack Books in 2019, and he is (slowly) working on a third collection. He is furthermore the author of Consolidated Ontario Estates Statutes and Regulations 2023 (Thomson Reuters, Carswell, 2022).
X: @Peatstweets
SUVs and Standing Stones: A Suburban Night and Day
La bise se rue à travers.
Les buissons tout noirs et tout verts
— Paul Verlaine
The renderings of suburbia.
The disturbing nocturnal
life of its leaves –
the ghostly shiver
and flutter
in the sickly-yellow of streetlight –
a colour
that can at this witching hour
inundates
and saturates
the palette.
The disturbed capture
of a windy nightscape:
mottlings and blotchings
of black in dark-greens –
shifting blottings of Rorschach tests
expose the murkiness in the beholder.
They shape-shift under
The whipped pressures of gusts –
this being the underbellies of trees.
Like distressed hydras
they hiss
and thrash in night-wind
and the white noise of this dark wind
rushes a humid silence
following a pause between
coups de vent.
SUVs and EVs
lurk and hulk
in this suburban night,
disguised and silent;
they’ve the big-bodied weight
and bulk of standing stones;
they’ve the smoothness
and sleekness of iPhones.
Their skin under streetlight
seemed nearly liquified,
but their bodies
are impassive,
and almost massive.
Within gated driveways,
along an avenue lined with sycamore,
they form a nocturnal brood;
and in the dark glint of
such an SUV’s window
a liquid-black
gazes back
into the viewer –
an overlap and interplay of subject and object.
II. Day
In the diurnal,
the light is quicksilver
and hyper-real.
Under the low-level insanity
engendered by heat stress
sudden dry wind
like the insidious
hydra-hiss
is once again vicious.
As if it could crack and then
split,
asphalt
shimmers and sizzles.
Farther out, it subsumes
into the aquaplaning-mirage of
heat-haze.
The pulsating rays.
The silent beat
of concentrated heat
seems to slow-fizzle
and -frazzle thought.
In the stagnant swelter of suburbia,
it feels biblical – like a death in the desert.
Something in the prettiness is suppressed.
Something in the suburban remains unaddressed.
Something discreetly active amongst the
neatnesses; the verdancies.
Lawns and sycamores;
the tick and spit
of a sprinkler.
An immaculate order:
suburban dream and vision.
The blank-white shine of windscreen
under direct sun
is an expression of a consciousness
devoid
of content – frozen somewhat outside
time and thought –
an epiphanic,
photonic
plash
which in a moment has passed.
In glacial tinct
and tint
in the white
light of sun is
pure platinum
in its sheen and gleam –
it blindingly glitters off
the hardness of reinforced glass
and metal.
These big beasts of automobiles
are monuments
absorbing the oppressive, obsessive heat:
The sun in fissioning this heat
has its range and oversight
over dolmens,
ruins, cairns.
Its beams cut through
the gloom of tombs,
passage graves, expose
the divisional distances between standing stones.
The tarmacadam is baking.
The earth is baking.
The metal withstands and expands:
the neighbourhood a crucible.
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