Poems

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”)

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.

I’ll Teach You Cree

with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki 

your mouth will be the web

catching apihkêsis words,

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

It was in a boardroom

It was in a boardroom

that I witnessed the latest killing

A room filled with knowledgeable

white people

trying to understand

what we offer

shaking their heads

The Trick

Let me be a ''poet of cripples" not

a patient etherized upon a table,

not a brain floating within a body.

In a moment I must be a body

in the place incision produces in a body,

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

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

A Newly Discovered Species of Lizard with Distinctive Triangular Scales

I am Charles Darwin. I eat owlflesh at Cambridge University.

I have discovered something, an entirely new species

with tropical fever in its reptile fingers. I am busy

with taxonomying its most peculiar and three-sided

Men in the Gut

Scrape the inside of sleep the belly wall

tasting like yoghurt cooked broccoli

its emptiness leaving something

on the tongue. Escaping the body

that wants to quit from the inside.

from “Road Shoulders”

power lines held by birds

of prey the hostile expanse above

ditches teeming floral invasive

wayside fleurs

late summer the shoulder sang

holds breeze by

The Dictator’s Message

The Dictator’s Message

O poets

return,

we have swept

your homeland clean

of thorns and splinters

O writers

return,

to make a record of your works

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

The Rights of Woman

Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!

Woman! too long degraded, scorned, oppressed;

O born to rule in partial Law’s despite,                        

Blow, blow, thou winter wind

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,

Thou art not so unkind

As man’s ingratitude;

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,

Give All to Love

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”)

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual

of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of

brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the

Happy Birthday Moon

Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.

Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.

He makes the Moon say something new every night

to his deaf son who slurs his speech.

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Dear Updike

No, nothing much has changed.

A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —

no winged cars to clog the air,

I think I should have loved you presently

I think I should have loved you presently,

And given in earnest words I flung in jest;

And lifted honest eyes for you to see,

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

from Citizen

The rain this morning pours from the gutters and 

everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your 

glasses to single out what you know is there because 

What horror to awake at night

What horror to awake at night

and in the dimness see the light.

            …

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Hotel Centrale, Rotterdam

I am awake between stiff

sheets tonight in room thirty

four, listening to the heat

Rejected Text for a Tourist Brochure

“I saw my land in the morning

and O but she was fair”

- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)

I

Come see my land

Come see my land

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

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Inner Life

Those tweets I sent about Duke Ellington

While my mom was being evicted again

According to what ethics under the sun

Can I possibly have been speaking? A

Kind of private feeling I can’t even place here

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

You charm’d me not with that fair face

You charm’d me not with that fair face

Though it was all divine:

To be another’s is the grace,

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

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

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

Badlands

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

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

Do I view the world as a vale of tears?”

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

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,