Poems

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.

Through Time and Bitter Distance

Unknown to you, I walk the cheerless shore.

The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine

May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war,

Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine,

Blow, blow, thou winter wind

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude;

Coffee

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

Mother Church #3

KIN KLETSO/YELLOW HOUSE

CHACO CANYON, SAN JUAN COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

ANASAZI RUINS, AD 1125-1130

For Henri, at 2

I Lost My Talk

I lost my talk

The talk you took away.

When I was a little girl

At Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away:

I speak like you

I think like you

I create like you

The Ayes Have It

When I think of Trayvon Martin, I think of Emmett Till,

             when I think of Emmett Till, I think of young, black men in the South,

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…

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;

No keys and ledgers were my heritage;

Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates…

Life in a Love

Escape me?

Never —

Beloved!

On Food/Bannock

baked, square or round globes formed from the rims of used pickle jars
i don't have milk, use water
i don't have eggs, that's okay, only some people use them anyways
i only have a bit of sugar, that's okay, throw it in

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes

Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!

How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!

For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,

Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun

Ah! why, because the dazzling sun

Restored my earth to joy

Have you departed, every one,

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens,…

Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Tractatus

The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort

I sleep now, and furiously

Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds

Veronica?

What's it like at the centre of the AGO?

Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed

in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned

just so in the middle of a landscape surrounded by rocks,

confirmation bias

at least in our waking life

most commemoration

doubles as force

since even

the most benign

zodiacal conceptions

are tinged eurocentric

when brown women die

Blousy Guitar

Blousy guitar   I don’t want to count the beats   Hey Hey

My pen     I have bed hair in the best way    Daughter

of sunlight and air     and I’m glad you were born

A Short Story of Falling

It is the story of the falling rain

to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower

to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary

31

We’re all aware that human hair is dead

Yet we spend thousands taking care of it.

It’s like an endless funeral.

The moment your hair hits air, it’s toast.

It only lives inside the follicle.

A Glass Tube Ecstasy

a glass tube

for my leg       says Hugo Ball

my hat a cylinder

The Potato Harvest

A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne

Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky

Washing the ridge; a clamour…

400: Coming Home

You are still on the highway and the great light of

noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled

shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of

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.

True Value

The sky was never my court date.

If I died once. If I left the body.

Habeas corpus.

This is not my grave.

The value in a dead woman

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs 

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 

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

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.

Blank Sonnet

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

Undulant hurt, so body snaps…

On Seeing a Photograph of My Mother at St. Joseph Residential School for Girls

A black and white picture

The sun is shining through a window behind you

Your hair black short Your small brown hands folded neatly on a tiny wooden desk

Opus 75, Sestina in B-flat for the Glockenspiel

In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl

sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.

She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand

#BLESSED

Sunbeams aren’t something I notice.

Mostly it’s my own breasts, bobbing with effort

like I’m a man writing the story of a woman

and the way her nipples strain politely

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

All things within this fading world hath end,

Adversity doth still our joyes attend;

No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,

Autobiography of My Hungers

     His beard: an avalanche of honey

              an avalanche
 

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

My Meadow, My Twilight

Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering, 

and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still, 

like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more 

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.