Poems

Badlands

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

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books 

Money

Coin Exhibit, British Museum.

Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,

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

Portrait of Alice with Elvis

Queen and King, they rule side by side

in golden thrones above the clouds.

Her giggle and wide eyes remind him

From Red Doc

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

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 

Saskatchewan Indians Were Dancing

60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs

antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain

Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous

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”)

11. Headwinds

When I began to write, I didn’t know

each of my words would bit by bit remove

things from the world and in return leave blank

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 

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

Equinox Ritual with Ravens & Pines

— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —

     & the shadow kept arriving in segments, 

    cold currents pushed minerals

The Cold Green Element

At the end of the garden walk

the wind and its satellite wait for me;

their meaning I will not know

Let the Ponies Out

oh papa, to have you drift up, some part of you drift up through

water through

fresh water into the teal plate of sky soaking foothills, papa,

the knowing

the re-invention of oneself 

through the tongues of whispering mountains 

the re-arrangement of the universe 

Salmon Courage

Here at Woodlands, Moriah, 

these thirty-five years later, 

still I could smell her fear. 

Sometimes I Find Myself Weeping at the Oddest Moment

sometimes I find myself

weeping

at the oddest moment

Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River

you are unaware of your obscure sources

but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea

as your final destination

Interesting People of Newfoundland

Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.

Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners

for a nickel. There…

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

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,

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,

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, 

It Couldn’t Be Done

Somebody said that it couldn’t be done

But he with a chuckle replied

That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke, 

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena, 

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look 

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.

War

In my body flows the blood of Gallic

Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle

ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.

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 

What horror to awake at night

What horror to awake at night

and in the dimness see the light.

            …

Self-Portrait

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

Hall of Mirrors

To Kristin Lems

We miss something now

as we think about it

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

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,

The Lonely Land

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

Heirloom

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;

No keys and ledgers were my heritage;

Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates…

“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…

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

fluorine

arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt

hats, mad as a poisoned hatter

pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane

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…