Sean Howard is the author of Local Calls (Cape Breton University Press, 2009), Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011), and The Photographer’s Last Picture (Gaspereau Press, 2016). His poetry has been widely published in Canada, as well as the US, UK and elsewhere, and anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English (Tightrope Books, 2011 & 2014).

Read about Sean’s expanded technique on composing lost & found (unmade poems) such as the poem presented here, in a procedure he calls  ‘downlining.’

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shadowgraph 124: to emerge from that wall
(poetry detected in melvin schwartz’s nobel physics lecture, 1988)

i

uncle sam-
izdat. (the u.s.s.
earth.) ‘western’: the

decline of the rest. (‘the
ghostly further’; history’s
perpetual motion…) ‘where

better’? – the dismantled
cruiser in the lab. ‘del-
uged’: the state of the

ark?

 

ii

orpheus: head
strung. (barcode
jailbirds.) the well-

run man. ‘faster
!’; the spread
legs of the

 race

 

iii

silence: holocaust
museum. (‘fine line’, lure
& order…) non-stop elect-

roneering. (wannsee coffee
breaks; ‘solutions discussed
…’) stags – the large hard-

on colliders! ‘residual
lifetimes’; decades,
sometimes, to

go

 

iv

karma-
th. (arma-
geddon: ‘at

home with the
news…’) fus-
ion – body

shop

 

[image: IceCube Neutrino Observatory | Symmetry Magazine]