SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
The use of vivid visual images.
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
When I began to write, I didn’t know
each of my words would bit by bit remove
things from the world and in return leave blank
The trick to building houses was making sure
they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste
was growing more sophisticated and occasionally
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through
water through
fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,
the re-invention of oneself
through the tongues of whispering mountains
the re-arrangement of the universe
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke,
And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena,
And the skid-roads blind, and never a look
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,
It left the fiord for the sea — a host
Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid…
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,
lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,
stumbling through tamarack swamps…
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
The air smells of rhubarb, occasional
Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,
Undulant hurt, so body snaps…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
The willows are thinking again about thickness,
slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,
and day by day this imaging transforms them
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land …
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
…
like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,
And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.
Lo, ’tis autumn
A march in the ranks hard-prest, and the road unknown,
A route through a heavy wood with muffled steps in the darkness,
Our army foil’d with loss severe, and the sullen remnant retreating,
When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
The train has stopped for no apparent reason
In the wilds;
A frozen lake is level and fretted over
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and…
“Oh where are you going with your love-locks flowing
On the west wind blowing along this valley track?”
“The downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye,
Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne
Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky
Washing the ridge; a clamour…
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
