Poems

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

I've Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

On Antiphon Island

— “mu” twenty-eighth part —

    On Antiphon Island they lowered

the bar and we bent back. It

 wasn't limbo we were in albeit

When I consider how my light is spent

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

To Althea, from Prison

When Love with unconfinèd wings

Hovers within my Gates,

And my divine Althea brings

What horror to awake at night

What horror to awake at night

and in the dimness see the light.

               Time is white

susiya

Ramadan

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,

and have to choose between the starving month’s

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,

feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

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She Walks in Beauty

She walks in beauty, like the night

Of cloudless climes and starry skies;

And all that’s best of dark and bright

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

On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

From thirsty

This city is beauty

unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,

in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,

From One and Half of You

Price depends on how the cheongsam

was made, the fabric used.

Gasp. Lift breasts with one hand.

Stuff your body inside.

If you wear this print of peonies

Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary's Eastside on a Winter Day

Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes

as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless

build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new

Dog Boy

ONE

Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Wrk

this job hates me

             this job wouldn’t make me feel so shitty if it didn’t

i’m nothing but nice to this job

but when this job is done with me it always sneaks out while

i’m still sleeping

The World Is Too Much With Us

The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —

Little we see in Nature that is ours;

St John’s Burns Down for the Umpteenth Time

Let’s say the fix was in. Let’s say history,
Being human and thus short on ideas,
Made change from an old bag of tricks. Say this

Day 62

Unless you believe in the eye of the needle

this kind of poverty will never be about material

it won't be about ragged clothing

or mud huts with broken walls

or river blindness

sturgeon

i twist and gasp

open and close my mouth

searching for air

whenever a sturgeon is caught in the rainy river

i know

the feel of strange hands touching my body

the struggle

Day 62

Unless you believe in the eye of the needle

this kind of poverty will never be about material

it won't be about ragged clothing

or mud huts with broken walls

or river blindness

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

A boat, beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July —

Nocturne for a Moving Train

The trees I’ve glimpsed from the window

of a night train were

the saddest trees.

They seemed about to speak,

then—

             vanished like soldiers.

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries

I have not lingered in European monasteries

and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights

who fell as beautifully as their ballads…

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,

the wood thrush calls to the monks,

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

Two Words: A Wedding

There are things you have words for, things you do not

have words for. There are words that encompass all your

feelings & words that…

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?

it's rank, it cranks you up

it’s rank it cranks you up

crash you’re fracked you suck

shucks you’re wack you be

all you cracked up to be

dead on arrival

overdosed on whatever

excess of hate and love

from “Road Shoulders”

power lines held by birds

of prey the hostile expanse above

ditches teeming floral invasive

wayside fleurs

late summer the shoulder sang

holds breeze by

Lake Baptiste Ungenders Me

upon contact / head first /

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

from “Road Shoulders”

power lines held by birds

of prey the hostile expanse above

ditches teeming floral invasive

wayside fleurs

late summer the shoulder sang

holds breeze by