Poems

The Charge of the Light Brigade

I.

Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

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

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

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

breakup

a girl between two dialects

still a screen and still a searching, learns

the season of breakup

another word for spring

can come before or after

depending on where you grew up

online, back and forth

How to Tell If a Poem Is Trans or Not

Look directly at the crotch

Gently wave away all

thoughts about how

you never cared about crotches of poems

before this poet

Consider the subject

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

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,

asked what has changed

Even staring out the window is changed,

the private peak above it all brought down

with the erosion of the poise between

the viewable and the mused unseen.

Dissolution so nearly changeless as not

Sorting through Documents at Dawn

three crosses appear

on the tv screen

following a

sweep of my hair

that felt like your hand

maybe i dreamt it

but i so badly

Wow! You’ve Changed

You’ve changed.

You used to be so

and now you’re all

like, you’ve transformed

I don’t know how to describe

it’s like

you don’t like canasta anymore

you text IN ALL CAPS

Civility

Civility–died on June 24, 2009, at the

age of 68. Murdered by a stroke whose

paintings were recently featured in a

Homeworld

this is the growing of things birthing of skin

and bone stem     and leaf     this is planet

earth beneath snowlight and desert sand

The Powwow at the End of the World

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam   

Full Metal Oji-Cree

this is the transsensorium

there are indo-robo-women fighting cowboys on the frontier

& winning finally

the premodern is a foundation for the postmodern

wintermute, tessier-ashpool, armitage

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

God the Tea Master

All the weapons we marshal to confront the day

You ask to be left by the door before entering.

The sword in its sheath must lie on the grass,

the quiver and bow hung off a branch.

Poem For Duncan Campbell Scott

Who is this black coat and tie?

Christian severity etched in the lines

he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man

who believes in work and mission. See

how he rises from the red velvet chair,

For My Best Friend

We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war

We were doing so well

           So well we got sleepy

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

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

Wild Strawberries

I'll tell you how it was, what she remembers:

the scent of rhubarb and strawberries in the wild

where she hid and the cries of the murdered,

they do not want to die away. If possible,

juxtaposition with seeds

i thought you were gone / stupid bird / darling worms shifting in the mud / this time i am not so certain / is it kinship or are you gloating? / have i grown bitter with the bees / how they bring the blooms reliably?

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

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

No Coward Soul Is Mine

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven’s glories shine

The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,

lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,

stumbling through tamarack swamps…

Paper People

I like people.

I’d like some paper people.

They’d be purple paper people.

Maybe pop-up purple paper people.

Proper pop-up purple paper people.

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke, 

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena, 

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look 

Chicago

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and…

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

absence. displacement.

absence. displacement.

waiting. then comes rejection.

anger follows. shame makes

the beds

the shadows jostle between

the walls of the scarcely visited cities.

How She Read

Oh, how she read this. Girl

beloved daughter of daughters

I Am

l am

gap tooth black girl

back corner of class

scribbling left-handed

poetry on blank paper

save the school's

curriculum for later

I am

overflowing tales by moonlight

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

I’ve Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

That feeling of my soul getting yanked

I wonder where my soul hides when I’m sick

My heart feels as if it’s getting beat up

Is it because the restless ocean is clumping up?

My heart beats regardless of the pain

Death of a Young Son by Drowning

He, who navigated with success

the dangerous river of his own birth

once more set forth

The New School

Do you remember, Nancy,

when we sat in the Creole restaurant

and glanced up at the television to see students running

with their hands in the air and photographs

of two young men?

The Plot

Won’t let your bad self.

Let go of your old debt.

Tiring of your old self.

Won’t let your made bed.

Let your bad blood let.

Your grown debt get.

A Breakfast for Barbarians

my friends, my sweet barbarians,

there is that hunger which is not for food —

but an eye at the navel turns the appetite