Poems

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

let us suppose

We climb up the rusting ladder, 

Mexican beer forced into waistbands, 

and lie on the cooling roof

count our personal galaxies 

far high LEDs, billboards, dreams. 

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

mcPemmican ^TM1

first you get the grease from canola buffalo

then you find mystery meat

you must package this in

The Boxers

We were combatants from the start. Our dad 

Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten — 

Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius 

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

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.

Ex Libris

I come from the land of

Where You From?

My people dispossessed of their stories

and who have died again and again

in a minstrelsy of afterlives, wakes,

the dead who walk, waiting and

Laurentian Shield

Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,

This land stares at the sun in a huge silence

Endlessly repeating something we cannot…

Song: To Celia

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

While we can, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours forever;

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

Badlands

Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home. 

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,

All beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

Kubla Khan

Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree:

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

Crossing the Bar

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

The Man He Killed

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,

the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,

Packing for the Future: Instructions

Take the thickest socks.

Wherever you're going

you'll have to walk.

There may be water.

There may be stones.

There may be high places

you cannot go without

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,

If —

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, 

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, 

Other

Men prefer an island

With its beginning ended:

Undertones of waves

Trees overbended.

Men prefer a road

Circling, shell-like

Convex and fossiled

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The Cremation of Sam McGee

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

FLOOD

The hallway is an empty

riverbed, smooth and barren.

At three o’clock classroom

doors open like dams.

            Gullies of teens stream

out, to become one

Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)

Constantly risking absurdity

                        …

Death of a Young Son by Drowning

He, who navigated with success

the dangerous river of his own birth

once more set forth

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…

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, 

First Things

This doesn't have to go in order;

that's the first thing.

I looked inside

an egg,

poked and blown

pristine, made clean

by the passing of its own slime. Inside

Spacetime

We Twitter, Tinder, Tumblr through eternity. Loquacious

text messages flit from fingertips, waves of data spill

through our skulls. Every cm² of oxygen overflowing

Come Up From the Fields Father

Come up from the fields father, here’s a letter from our Pete,

And come to the front door mother, here’s a letter from thy dear son.

Lo, ’tis autumn

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?

Dream Jobs

Random Link Clicker.

Royal Bath Taker.

Receiver of Foot Rubs and Praise.

After Apple Picking

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Cocteau Twins

I’ve heard the phrase between you

and me too many times to believe

it to be true, but between me and you