Poems

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs 

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow; 

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice, 

Children Listen

                         It turns out however that I was deeply
Mistaken about the end of the world

Black Sheroes

My Black heroes don’t drop names like Fendi Gucci Prada

My Black sheroes rock afros like Angela Davis and Assata

But my sheroes are more than a trend and they’re bigger than a hairstyle

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

covering

in the broadest conception

of black music, which is the

truest conception of black

music, black music can't be

conceived. a music of covers,

black music covers, and cover

Let Us Be Fireflies

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals

A Psalm of Life

What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

Verso 3.1

At first there's no lake in the city, at first there are only

elevators, at first there are only constricting office desks;

there are small apartments and hamburger joints and

Break, Break, Break

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

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.

They Flee From Me

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

My Poem Without Me in It

My poem without me in it—would it be like

my room when I had returned to it

after my mother was done with me.

Under my bed, only the outer

space balls, of dust, only

the asteroids of hair, no bent-legs

Lake Michigan, Scene 3

The bodies are on the beach

And the bodies keep breaking

And the fight is over

But the bodies aren't dead

And the mayor keeps saying      I will bring back the bodies

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 Thin Plea

(Falteringly)

Our national bird ­– for years – was – as A M Klein said –

the rocking chair

I don’t know what our national bird is now – but my totem bird is

Wind, Water, Stone

for Roger Caillois

Water hollows stone,

wind scatters water,

stone stops the wind.

Water, wind, stone.

Wind carves stone,

stone's a cup of water,

What the Queer Community Should Have Told Us

1. you are perfect

& also flawed

2. you are allowed to make mistakes

& you must be accountable for them

3. accountability is not a price you pay in blood

for being human

Nuisance

Only the thickness of log

and triple-paned glass

between my children and

the open maw

of a bear.

I slip warm chocolate chip

cookies from the pan

The Dead

How great unto the living seem the dead!

How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;

How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread

Hall of Mirrors

To Kristin Lems

We miss something now

as we think about it

Annabel Lee

It was many and many a year ago,

In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

Question:

What do they think about you,

the people who pass you on the street?

What would you like them to see?

They see the druggie, the whore, the junkie.

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,

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 Clouds are Buffalo Limping Towards Jesus

"weeping                 blooms

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Current

The sludge-slow flow of the visible current

opens a path we can’t continue, tugs

at what no hand can pull along.

It’s how even water loses memory,

travels a direction it cannot find,

From Red Doc

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

First Time Smudge

It takes eight matches, a burnt thumb, and a quick Google search

to light the sweetgrass braid Mom scored for me from an elder

at work. Always use matches, she said. Spirit likes matches. 

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,

Journey of the Magi

“A cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

On the Last Day

I left the protection 

of my plan & my 

thinking. I let my self

go. Is this the hope I

thought. Light fled.

We have a world

to lose I thought.

Summer fled. The

Two Words: A Wedding

There are things you have words for, things you do not

have words for. There are words that encompass all your

feelings & words that…

Channel Firing

That night your great guns, unawares,

Shook all our coffins as we lay,

And broke the chancel window-squares,

What Do You Believe In?

Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-

gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and

from Cross River . Pick Lotus

9

How to describe sea

To someone who’s never seen it?

He lives to ninety-nine, he wants it, to see it

To walk on its glass surface, to blow the seven trumpets.

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, 

To an Athlete Dying Young

The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

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

The Snow-Storm

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,

Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,

Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air