Poems

Five Postcards from Jericho

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of

…

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

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.

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure 

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste 

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally 

A Thunderstorm

A moment the wild swallows like a flight

Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,

Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.

Mean Drunk Poem

Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches

the gap, from which all things emerge. A left

handed…

On High

There was busy air there, air

seething through the leaves so,

from farther up, the tree-line shone

like a single scintillating polyhedron.

Still, though ravens and wrens flaked off the top,

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.

Badlands

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

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

Jacknife/2

Each day, I am apprenticed to the boy

I want to be.

He rifles the ball

and I catch it

or I fumble.

His red head ducks and weaves,

thinking, end zone.

Chemo Side Effects: Memory

Where is the word I want?

Groping

in the thicket,

Low Tide on Grand Pré

The sun goes down, and over all

These barren reaches by the tide

Such unelusive glories fall,

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

Wishing Well

My fist holds as many coins

as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen's effigy;

Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets,

a woman I've never met though I always know

“Breathe dust…”

Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face

little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling

against a dust-storm…

Mariah according to my yt mama

when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like

to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies

in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s

she tells me in a so-there tone

niya

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself 

through the tongues of whispering mountains 

the re-arrangement of the universe 

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.

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…

more treaty lines

1790 → treaty 2, district of Hesse (step into wolf)

province of quebec

“We do herby certify that the following goods were delivered to the

several Nations”

The Cinnamon Peeler

 If I were a cinnamon peeler

 I would ride your bed

 and leave the yellow bark dust

Illegalese: Floodgate Dub

(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)

if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to

outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization

Unspeakable Acts in Cars

It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy

To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps

All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue

And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea

En Route

The train has stopped for no apparent reason

In the wilds;

A frozen lake is level and fretted over

They are hostile nations

1

In view of the fading animals

the proliferation of sewers and fears   

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

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

Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

Sent to the ice after white coats,

rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,

they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,

Not the Music

Not the music.

It is this other thing

I keep from all of them

that matters, inviolable.

I scratch in my journals,

a mouse rummaging through cupboards,

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,

Love is a Moontime Teaching

love is a moontime teaching

is your kookum’s crooked smile when you pick up the phone

is another word for body

body is another word for campfire smoke

campfire smoke is the smell he leaves behind in your bed sheets

I’ve Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962

Very loud    a mad frenzy    The wooden

barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)

Filament

Always that spectral fragment. Filament of line cast back there.

Where open-mouthed fish rise to gulp down shiny lures.

I sang once in an auditorium to almost empty rows.

Enigma

Who I am

depends on which side of my skin

you stand on.

In here

it’s all neurons firing

synapses telling stories

blood tracing ancestral histories

races blending in veins

bhater mondo

my mother used to make little rice balls

for me. she steamed and clattered about the 

cramped mustard kitchen, filling a pot with 

water, swelling and salting and songing

Current

The sludge-slow flow of the visible current

opens a path we can’t continue, tugs

at what no hand can pull along.

It’s how even water loses memory,

travels a direction it cannot find,

you aren’t going to like what i have to say

before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself

there’s no point in beating around the bush

there’s something we need to talk about

this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone