Poems

Wolf Lake

It was down that road he brought me, still

in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,

but it did feel expected. The way you…

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

Shots Rang Out on My Street Today

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Shots rang out on my street today

Three Black yoots lay dead

shot inna dem head

Visit from Mother

You sleep on the floor in my room

in the modelling apartment

I share with eight other girls

You open the fridge

to see what we’re eating

Butter Spray, Diet Coke, Jell-O

Do you think we’re clichés

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,

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…

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

Chemo Side Effects: Memory

Where is the word I want?

Groping

in the thicket,

4 Marked by Claws and Cloudburst...

The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June. 

180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil 

   …

Hail

Hello from inside

the albatross

with a windproof lighter

Homeworld

this is the growing of things birthing of skin

and bone stem     and leaf     this is planet

earth beneath snowlight and desert sand

From The Titanic: The Iceberg

Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,

It left the fiord for the sea — a host

Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

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…

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

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

1992

This is our welfare half

a duplex with mint green

siding shrugged between

39

Oliver Sacks is going to die,

He tells us blithely in the New York Times.

He’s 81. His liver’s shot.

He’s blind in one eye

Though when both worked fine

Blank Sonnet

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

Undulant hurt, so body snaps…

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,

With the Dying of the Light

I recited to him,

                      Now as I was young and easy,

and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,

On Identity

it’s hard to feel power from my ancestors when i don’t know 

who they are, 

where they come from, 

what their stories are

we share blood

blood shares memory 

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

In Favour of Being Alive

    Twenty-four years ago
I tried to kill myself
but with my usual incompetence
did not manage to.

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…

War

In my body flows the blood of Gallic

Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle

ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.

Leonardo DiCaprio

My ex-boyfriend got measurably more attractive

and all I got was a dad bod.

Leonardo DiCaprio has a dad bod,

and for whatever reason this is reassuring to me.

Leonardo DiCaprio finally won an Oscar

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.

Winter House

My father threw his language overboard,

a bag of kittens, waterlogged mewling:

small hard bodies.

My mother hung on to hers —

Wove the words like lace, an open web

Trillium

the animal in me

is constant.

thirst starts,

hunger answers.

sleep is uncertain,

restless limbs.

in the night,

I hear footsteps.

Low Tide on Grand Pré

The sun goes down, and over all

These barren reaches by the tide

Such unelusive glories fall,

fluorine

arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt

hats, mad as a poisoned hatter

pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane

Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

Sent to the ice after white coats,

rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,

they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,

a good day

it was very sad the day we heard that dad would die but it was

also fun because all my friends came over and we went driving

in the blue Toyota that kelly’s sister terry drove

and i was the center of attention

mcPemmican ^TM1

first you get the grease from canola buffalo

then you find mystery meat

you must package this in

April 30, 2014

Weeds are flattened beneath last year’s tire tracks

others lay burden by the winter’s heavy snow.

The crocuses labor through this thick blanket.

I am sun drained from the bleakness

RAINBOW ROCK-CLIMBING CLUB

I’m a gecko on a wall 

that simulates a cliff 

with rainbow grips 

I’ll touch any colour 

that’ll have me 

midway is high enough 

wary of emotional 

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

These Poems, She Said

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man