Poems

When I consider how my light is spent

When I consider how my light is spent,

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one Talent which is death to hide

January, 1795

Pavement slipp’ry, people sneezing,

Lords in ermine, beggars freezing;

Titled gluttons dainties carving,

To Althea, from Prison

When Love with unconfinèd wings

Hovers within my Gates,

And my divine Althea brings

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Ella Josephine Campbell

Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.

Cords of her hands like spruce roots.

Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch

with little more than the child inside her,

landed in a small shack flanked by

The Lammergeier Daughter

That night, I opened your wardrobe and found

a trophy of vultures, their necks pierced

by hanger hooks. I saw at once

that you hunted everything I loved —

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

New Year

         Out of their torments men carved a flower

         which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces

Break of Day

’Tis true, ’tis day, what though it be?

O wilt thou therefore rise from me?

Why should we rise because ’tis light?

Ideas of Home

              i

Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone

surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur

Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,

breakup

a girl between two dialects

still a screen and still a searching, learns

the season of breakup

another word for spring

can come before or after

depending on where you grew up

online, back and forth

The Tyger

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Life in a Love

Escape me?

Never —

Beloved!

in this house

in this house

the body of a poem, still warm,

hangs on the nail of the mundane

touched to its core

like a reproach, like proof,

that i was here

and you were here

Planet Earth

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

knowing their warp and woof,

like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.

From Red Doc

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

my mother found herself

my mother found herself one late summer

afternoon lying in grass under the wild

yellow plum tree jewelled with sunlight

she was forgotten there in spring picking 

rhubarb for pie & the children home from

Moon in Khmer

You are light

when the sun is punched out

and darkness reigns.

You are the antidote

to what came before:

black blood, black heart,

hands tied, kneeling before

a ditch of human bones.

Sharing

Nouf is proof God does not want me to die     a horse-girl with horse-hair who loves even the flies will not swat them    carries them outside with a glass-and-paper trap she brims with glee …

Give All to Love

Give all to love;

Obey thy heart;

Friends, kindred, days,

Index of Themes

Poems about night

and related poems. Paintings

            about night,

sleep, death, and

You can’t be an NDN person in today’s world

You can't be an NDN person in today's world

and write a nature poem. I swore to myself I would never write a nature

poem. Let's be clear, I hate nature — hate its guts

A Fixed Idea

What torture lurks within a single thought

When grown too constant, and however kind,

However welcome still, the weary mind

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

Where did the handsome beloved go?

Where did the handsome beloved go?

I wonder, where did that tall, shapely cypress tree go?

He spread his light among us like a candle.

Where did he go? So strange, where did he go without me?

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

Tide

Would I have seen her?

The tide tugging her gently past

the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,

Heat

From plains that reel to southward, dim,

The road runs by me white and bare;

Up the steep hill it seems to swim

Claim Laid

This is a prayer for the dead and dying - 

and those that may never know a life on the outside

I hope your sins don’t meet you at your grave - 

Mama

When the horse picked Mama up by the hair

that time, was she scared? 

There is a photograph of her with this horse

in the brown family album. She stands

beside him, thin in the chilly wind

Dear Dolphin

The shaman at Broadway and Main

with a plastic shaker and some sage

says you’re my power animal. Says

we both have big brains, like to chatter.

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…

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

On Seeing a Photograph of My Mother at St. Joseph Residential School for Girls

A black and white picture

The sun is shining through a window behind you

Your hair black short Your small brown hands folded neatly on a tiny wooden desk

Full Metal Oji-Cree

this is the transsensorium

there are indo-robo-women fighting cowboys on the frontier

& winning finally

the premodern is a foundation for the postmodern

wintermute, tessier-ashpool, armitage

From World of Made and Unmade

In my dream my mother comes with me.

We are in the meadows we call

The Flats, walking the dogs.

Walk straight past the water trough,

she says, do not engage the moss.

Ae Fond Kiss

Tune: Rory Dall’s Port

First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;                          …

From Silvija

If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language

Of nerve-matter / dura mater / orbit of the central axis

By a crevice / scattered / venous lacunae / lamina code