Poems

diaspora babies

diaspora babies, we

are born of pregnant pauses/spilled

from unwanted wombs/squalling invisible-ink poems/written in the margins

of a map of a place

called No Homeland

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

The Cactus

You sit in the forgotten bone-dry hills

surrounded by sand and sagebrush

above Buffalo Pound Lake.

A day and a night, and then

three more days and nights.

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

Heaven

Heaven   

           is just a garden, really. 

A plot of land where you might reach down 

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

In Favour of Being Alive

    Twenty-four years ago
I tried to kill myself
but with my usual incompetence
did not manage to.

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

The Lonely Land

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

From the Window of My Home-Town Hotel

On the lee slope of the small coastal mountain

which conceals the sun the first hour after its rising,

in the dry, steep ravines, the live

mist of the heat is seething like dust

left over from an earlier world.

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

from Quit Dying to Die

   When the doctors burrowed into my body, they unearthed a slew of tumours. Growths speckled across lungs and kidneys.

Let’s Not Get It Together

The world has become corrupted

from our hearts

to the way our gods love us

as if they know they’re already dying

and they’re determined to drag us down with them

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”

I Carried My Father Across the Sea

He was a child. He was dead.

He was the shaft of a long-tailed astrapia. He was a forest

of bruise. He wore a door on his face.

He wore the black suit

of his wedding. The square pocket

Sturgeon

Jackfish and walleye circle like clouds as he strains

the silt floor of his pool, a lost lure in his lip,

Rondeau

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

Fire Watch

Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.”

Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand,

The Pulley

When God at first made man,

Having a glass of blessings standing by,

“Let us,” said he, “pour on him all we can.

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

I saw a perfect tree today

I saw a perfect tree today

From my cabin bed on a Via Rail train 

Through the North of Ontario

I saw a perfect tree today

It was tall and thin and scraggly and prim

Then I saw another just as perfect

After Betty Goodwin’s The Memory of the Body (1993)

As Whitman sang the body electric

Goodwin sings the body forested:

dense stand of dark-trunked saplings

illumined by a blood-streaked sky,

ominous forest where

abandoned children wander

Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.

The end of the road is so far ahead

it is already behind us.

Don’t worry. Your father is only your father

until one of you forgets. Like how the spine

won’t remember its wings

March on Washington, 1993

What struck me first was the sheer numbers, queers everywhere.

Battalions of sailors and infantry, proud in their uniforms.

Eventually, I made uneasy peace with this equal right.

Claim Laid

This is a prayer for the dead and dying - 

and those that may never know a life on the outside

I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave - 

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and…

The Trick

Let me be a ''poet of cripples" not

a patient etherized upon a table,

not a brain floating within a body.

In a moment I must be a body

in the place incision produces in a body,

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid,…

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself 

through the tongues of whispering mountains 

the re-arrangement of the universe 

CV

A ruthless catalog of sorrows:

years in front of the screen, diplomas before jobs,

and languages—all that torture—now ranged under Languages.

Where are all the wasted days? And the nights

Question:

What do they think about you,

the people who pass you on the street?

What would you like them to see?

They see the druggie, the whore, the junkie.

We Are Surprised

Now, we take the moon

into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats

with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas

of when or where to run.

DNA

It is told and retold

of how Kohkum killed a bear with a river rock

an arm like Ronnie Lancaster (that old Saskatchewan 

Roughrider)

she throws with precision

TREATY 8

queen of great britain and ireland, by her commissioners the

honourable david laird, of winnipeg, manitoba, indian com

Red Pheasant / Man In Black

i’m gonna walk right out of hell

i ain’t trying to hurt no one

well there might be someone special,

but by now they’re dead and gone

there’s a line of black smoke rising

you can hear the woman screaming