Poems

New Year’s

If you want to travel run

around the neighbourhood with an empty

suitcase in hand. At least once, full circle.

Wear yellow underwear

for the 31st, lest fortune oversee your cup

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

How Prayer Works

Tucked away in our tiny bedroom so near each other

the edge of my prayer rug covered the edge of his, my

brother and I prayed. We were 18 and 11 maybe, or 19

and 12. He was back from college where he built his own

Hymn of Worldwide Responsibility

I proclaim the brotherhood of natural, strong, sacred people.

A bond of incandescence, a bond of blazing lightning, bright labor, 

the mind and soul of the planet, we are, like you,

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

1992

This is our welfare half

a duplex with mint green

siding shrugged between

From Summer Grass

The willows are thinking again about thickness,

slowness, lizard skin on hot rock,

and day by day this imaging transforms them

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

Jesse’s Farm

We’re driving and the radio says mass marine extinctions within a

generation. No silence, no sirens — an unflustered inflection, then

stock markets, cryptic as Latin mass. I force myself: the interval

The New Experience

I was ready for a new experience.

All the old ones had burned out.

They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside

The Cactus

You sit in the forgotten bone-dry hills

surrounded by sand and sagebrush

above Buffalo Pound Lake.

A day and a night, and then

three more days and nights.

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,

Please Write a Poetry Book in Syllabics¹

i want to complicate the term sacred, she told me

to make holy

sacerdotal: priestly

sākris: to make a treaty

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some …

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,

Family History

Only the beginning is true.

There was an island

and an orphanage

and a boy.

There was a train and a country

to cross.

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

Conversion

sam says you can’t name your book good boys without a dog

but sam doesn’t know that i am the dog

i am the ultimate mutt and i am telling him this story

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

Guanahani, 11

like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands

from under the clouds where I write the first poem

its brown warmth now that we recognize them

confirmation bias

at least in our waking life

most commemoration

doubles as force

since even

the most benign

zodiacal conceptions

are tinged eurocentric

when brown women die

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

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

Villanelle

I dreamed I was reading a villanelle

in front of a crowd. Next to me on the floor

was a large bag of garbage I'd mistakenly

brought with me onto the stage. My own garbage.

Low Tide on Grand Pré

The sun goes down, and over all

These barren reaches by the tide

Such unelusive glories fall,

How to Triumph Like a Girl

I like the lady horses best,

how they make it all look easy,

like running 40 miles per hour

is as fun as taking a nap, or grass.

I like their lady horse swagger,

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

Bike-Twister

Place a foot upon a pedal,

Put your pedal-pushers on;

To the pedal pin a paddle,

Paddle-pedal push upon.

Place the paddle-pedal-cycle

On a puddle in the park;

Epitaph

On her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church where her body also lies interred

What on Earth deserves our trust?

Youth and Beauty both are dust.

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…

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,

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

Lima Limón :: Madurez

I wear a peineta & pin a mantilla to my hair

I want to be Conchita Piquer warning women

about becoming lemons. The goal: tener alguien

quien me quiera. I want to be my mother singing me

Too Negative

I was a kid other kids’ 

parents gossiped about.

They told their children

what I was: too negative.

I get it. Fair to fear

contagion of bad attitudes,

From Titian Air Vent

A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s

nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.

I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs

to those of us who might as well be on the moon

The Ayes Have It

When I think of Trayvon Martin, I think of Emmett Till,

             when I think of Emmett Till, I think of young, black men in the South,

Light Shining out of Darkness

God moves in a mysterious way,

His wonders to perform;

He plants his footsteps in the sea,

Praying Herd: For Safe Journey

Draw a line through our scattered bodies. The pattern of fallen calves in this meadow will mirror

the constellation above. Look up. We whip our tails to a silent song:

The Raincoat

When the doctor suggested surgery

and a brace for all my youngest years,

my parents scrambled to take me

to massage therapy, deep tissue work,

osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine

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

The Young Poets of Winnipeg

scurried around a classroom papered with poems.

Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...

they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage

to read their work, blessed their teacher who