Poems

Fear of Snakes

The snake can separate itself

from its shadow, move on ribbons of light,

taste the air, the morning and the evening,

Mama

When the horse picked Mama up by the hair

that time, was she scared? 

There is a photograph of her with this horse

in the brown family album. She stands

beside him, thin in the chilly wind

Famous

The river is famous to the fish.

The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling…

How She Read

Oh, how she read this. Girl

Love Armed

Love in Fantastic Triumph sat,

Whilst Bleeding Hearts around him flowed,

For whom Fresh pains he did Create,

Please Write a Poetry Book in Syllabics¹

i want to complicate the term sacred, she told me

to make holy

sacerdotal: priestly

sākris: to make a treaty

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

Family History

Only the beginning is true.

There was an island

and an orphanage

and a boy.

There was a train and a country

to cross.

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

Let Us Be Fireflies

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

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.

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

Sonoma

He totaled his blue truck — 

slowly spun out on an icy bridge, 

rammed it into a guard rail. 

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

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

Self-Portrait in Siem Reap

The French chef says, Try the foie gras, it’s very good.

So I treat myself to the liver of a force-fed goose.

Give it to me on a crostini with black currant!

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

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided

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

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself 

through the tongues of whispering mountains 

the re-arrangement of the universe 

i am graffiti

i am writing to tell you

that yes, indeed,

we have noticed

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

my mother found herself

my mother found herself one late summer

afternoon lying in grass under the wild

yellow plum tree jewelled with sunlight

she was forgotten there in spring picking 

rhubarb for pie & the children home from

Lake Michigan, Scene 3

The bodies are on the beach

And the bodies keep breaking

And the fight is over

But the bodies aren't dead

And the mayor keeps saying      I will bring back the bodies

Bury Me in Arabic

“Morning of goodness to you”

— “Morning of goodnesses”

Or add flowers: “morning of roses”

Always multiply the gift—

“welcome” to “two welcomes”

“a hundred welcomes and kinship and ease”

Aquarium

The fish are drifting calmly in their tank

between the green reeds, lit by a white glow

that passes for the sun. Blindly, the blank

glass that holds them in displays their slow

Fast Commute

The meteorologists are pleading with us

to keep checking back through the storm,

ice pellets making a carpet two, three inches thick,

this pale beach we walk on, this wind that passed

If Stone Dreams

We cannot know this statue, this satyr 

with his head propped on a wineskin; 

we cannot know if he dreams. In fact, 

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Autobiography of My Hungers

     His beard: an avalanche of honey

          an avalanche
 

of  thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
 

Women Do This Every Day

Moon-Gazer

On moonlight night

when moon is bright

Beware, Beware—

Moon-Gazer man

with his throw-back head

and his open legs

gazing, gazing

up at the moon

Moon-Gazer man

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’