JUDY GAUDET

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Performance Art: All Fall Down

an old house has broken apart 
the two sides leaning together
like the two sides of one face
in a painting by Picasso 

the pride and pleasure that built
and made life good in such a house,
against the pride in possibility
that sent its children far from it 

in the city its heirs admire
the architecture of impossibility,
while the old house in its collapse 
laughs to mimic modernism

the old world legislated
all the angles should be right
the new allows them multiple directions 
wit over utility 

though trees still grow upright 
beside its comic turns
the beach horizontal
beyond the sandy lane

 

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Judy Gaudet was born and lives on Prince Edward Island, where she works as a teacher. She has written poetry for a number of years and has been published in various journals such as Quarry, blueSHIFT, CV2, Windsor Review, and Gaspereau Review. Poems have been anthologized in The Poets of Prince Edward Island, Henry's Creature, Landmarks: An Anthology of New Canadian Poetry of the Land, and A Bountiful Harvest: 15 Years of the Island Literary Awards. Her chapbook Poems, You Say was published by Saturday Morning Chapbooks in 2004 and her book, Her Teeth Are Stones by Acorn Press in 2006.