A Wallet from Ottawa: "Embroidery of a curve/ away"

At what point does the letter become a parcel?

When it can no longer fit through the mail slot?

Before ATMs, bank building exteriors had built-in mail boxes. What couldn't fit through the mail slot could be entered through a portal below, marked WALLETS.

(But a wallet is what Dad carries in his pocket, and Mom would shush me.)

A rob mclennan wallet arrived yesterday. His latest Touch the Donkey and a chapbook consisting of seven legal-sized pages folded horizontally and bound mostly by a horizontally-folded letter-sized cover, with 1 3/8th" of those pages exposed. Assemblies like this ... irk me, though I can excuse them if they are in the service of the writing. 

The first poem in rob's The Alta Vista Improvements (Ottawa: above/ground press, 2023) is a four-parter called "Quartet for an end of landscape, with farm house." This landscape might be the defeatured referent to the poet's father's farm -- certainly his father's land, if the poet himself were a farmer. But the poet is not a farmer, nor is he Indigenous, so an artist's word, something more ... aestheticized. Like "landscape." Even if we are at the "end" of it.

The image on the cover is a defeatured map of a subdivision, what might become of the poet's father's land(scape), since the poet shows no sign of growing it, while his sister, by virtue of her gender, was never in the picture.

Here's the poem's second section:

2.

A farmer with no sons but one, who chose
a separate path. Embroidery of a curve

away. A daughter thus, invisible. These
tiny changes made to earth.

I have read only the first poem, but will get back to Alta Vista over the course of my ever-shortening life. In the meantime, the book's exposed section will continue its journey, gathering life's dust and spring's "sun-bleach[ed]" light and thus provide a visible difference when compared to what's inside. This difference between what is sheltered and what is exposed could be extrapolated to include a developer's profit margin, or another's depreciating investment. Same might be said of a book in your collection: you'll never know until you've passed. But by then you'll know everything, so what the hell.

From the middle of "4":

Upon his death, pandemic: house is slowly emptied, harvest; strata
of a life well-lived. Disassembled, scattered; donations

and inheritance alike. Is newly occupied

through rental agreements, the shake
of one good hand. Eight decades of tenure, my father's cremated remains;