Poems

Turtle Island Poem Number Fourteen

once i left turtle island and i

rejoined la and doubleU and see

to savai‘i on a hunting trip

on the fairy from upolu

la picked up a day trick

blew him during lunch

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

Deto(nation)

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

We Drowned the Land of England in the Waters of the Denendeh

It was clearly understood,

there was no ownership of land,

so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.

My water from the river and my nitrogen,

a buffalo protein.

Harmony with all of you

the task given to me when all

the ice had melted was to

welcome the sky people to

the river and to show them

how to fish and how to

build a fire to warm

themselves.

I moved on and came across

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 Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

Moon in Khmer

You are light

when the sun is punched out

and darkness reigns.

You are the antidote

to what came before:

black blood, black heart,

hands tied, kneeling before

a ditch of human bones.

Top

After learning “me” and “I”

but well before my father learns

a restraining order's

between him and our home,

we share some good times.

Remember the back of his bicycle.

niya

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”

The Fish

wade

through black jade.

   Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

Plenty

The sky, lit up like a question or

an applause meter, is beautiful

like everything else today: the leaves

Praying Herd: For Safe Journey

Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror

the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:

My Last Duchess

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

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,

When I Become You

I'd like to close the distance between us:

where you end, where I begin,

but your skin stops me,

I can't find my way in.

If I could, I'd press every bit of me

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

World Town

Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names

the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air

in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple…

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

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

from Cross River . Pick Lotus

9

How to describe sea

To someone who’s never seen it?

He lives to ninety-nine, he wants it, to see it

To walk on its glass surface, to blow the seven trumpets.

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,

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,

Family Tree

    My imaginary brother speaks of our migration and history,
how time pulses like the green water
in the South Saskatchewan that sputters by our home,
success measured in how still he’d lie after wandering

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

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

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.

The Dark Stag

A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,

Leaps down beyond black pines.

Behind — a length of yellow light —

Porphyria’s Lover

The rain set early in to-night,

The sullen wind was soon awake,

It tore the elm-tops down for spite,

Not Horses

What I adore is not horses, with their modern

domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore

is a bug that lives only one day, especially if

it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.

One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish

recycling Dr. Seuss

Some fish are sold for sashimi,

some are sold to canneries,

and some are caught by hungry slaves

to feed what wealthy tourists crave!

Dear Sara

& if you follow these ants

they’ll lead you back to

stone tablets

an older desert

where black bones

once buried are

now words whereI wave to you

at 2:34 am they survived