Jane Munro’s sixth poetry collection is Blue Sonoma (Brick Books, 2014). Her previous books include Active Pass (Pedlar Press, 2010), Point No Point (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books, 1995). Her work has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Macmillan Prize for Poetry, been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award, and is included in The Best Canadian Poetry 2013. She is a member of the collaborative group Yoko’s Dogs (http://yokosdogs.com/) whose first book, Whisk, was published by Pedlar Press in 2013. She lives in Vancouver.

In a small boat off Port Renfrew

a woman trolling for halibut
caught the moon.

It was pale and pocked.

It lengthened from disc to oval to flat fish
as she lifted it. The rod bowed.

When the rod’s tip touched the water’s surface
the moon sprang from the waves

streaming foam, and soared overhead.

The woman fell on her back –

winded, wordless – rocking as the boat rocked.
The moon hung above her

huge and closer than a star.

It had grown on a tongue of silt

at the river’s mouth, dark-side-down
resting on its mind-reading side,
then slid to deep waters.

Staring up at it, the woman knew it knew.