Poems

Poems for Saints

39

Oliver Sacks is going to die,

He tells us blithely in the New York Times.

He’s 81. His liver’s shot.

He’s blind in one eye

Though when both worked fine

world shapers

creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups

they remind us of all the possible ways & means

that worlds…

Trillium

the animal in me

is constant.

thirst starts,

hunger answers.

sleep is uncertain,

restless limbs.

in the night,

I hear footsteps.

Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

thing no song sing but in the word

An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google/Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google

écoute

à quoi bon être poète

beau dire

ce mal

semble dans la tête comme

marteau feu enclume clou couteau

ou l’éclat d’une baudroie ou des

aurores boréales

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

Sun Bear

yesterday at the Oakland zoo

I was walking alone for a moment

past the enclosure holding the sun bear

Too Negative

I was a kid other kids’ 

parents gossiped about.

They told their children

what I was: too negative.

I get it. Fair to fear

contagion of bad attitudes,

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

The New Experience

I was ready for a new experience.

All the old ones had burned out.

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside

Wet Market

From youth I was taught that fresh meant alive

until the moment you buy it                                   My mother

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —

This debt we pay to human guile;

from Citizen

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and 

everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your 

glasses to single out what you know is there because 

the many descriptions of being brown

White people tell you to apologize for yourself

through gestures, through small talk, through the ways in

which they ask,                  “Where are you from?” and

Duras (Poverty)

“The link with poverty is there is there in the man's hat, too, for money has got to be brought in, got to be brought in somehow,” M.D., The Lover.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

From Whereas

Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America

opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act

Qawanguq with Fox

I was walking up some stairs in a building

Inside parts of the building were new

but no one lived there anymore

I passed a lucky fox head on the stairs—

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure 

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste 

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally 

On Monsieur’s Departure

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

A Short Story of Falling

It is the story of the falling rain

to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower

to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary

Marshlands

A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,

And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.

The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,

Visit from Mother

You sleep on the floor in my room

in the modelling apartment

I share with eight other girls

You open the fridge

to see what we’re eating

Butter Spray, Diet Coke, Jell-O

Do you think we’re clichés

School for the Deaf

You gasp, awakened by

a bucket of cold water.

A gauzy autumn morning. A drained sunrise.

You shiver, strain to see the house

parent’s fingers whipping & flicking in

i am graffiti

i am writing to tell you

that yes, indeed,

we have noticed

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

the second time

i ask mama

about residential school

she says no

i ask her again

she says no

the third time

i stop listen

to her silence

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

Sonnets from the Portuguese 24

Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,

And let us hear no sound of human strife

Thou Poem

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer?

I do…

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Sonnet XXIX: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

Epitaph

On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred

What on Earth deserves our trust?

Youth and Beauty both are dust.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals