Poems

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 

Hindsight

Hindsight- never existed until August

3, 2015.     Someone had painted

over hindsight. But if you paint over

When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

To be a good

ex/current friend for R. To be one last

inspired way to get back at R. To be relationship

advice for L. To be advice

for my mother. To be a more comfortable

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

We Drowned the Land of England in the Waters of the Denendeh

It was clearly understood,

there was no ownership of land,

so clearly does the land, in fact, own me.

My water from the river and my nitrogen,

a buffalo protein.

Sho

Some need some Body

or more to ape sweat

on some site. Bloody

purl or dirty spit

hocked up for to show

who gets eaten. Rig

Body up. Bough bow

to breeze a lazed jig

A Fixed Idea

What torture lurks within a single thought

When grown too constant, and however kind,

However welcome still, the weary mind

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

Between Strangers

Stranger, who can measure the distance between us?

Distance is the rumor of a never-before-seen sea.

Distance the width of a layer of dust.

Maybe we need only strike a match

for my world to flicker in your sky,

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,

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, 

who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the

Cévennes

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,

Index of Themes

Poems about night

and related poems. Paintings

            about night,

sleep, death, and

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

The Wife

Living, I had no might

To make you hear,

Now, in the inmost night,

The Chimney Sweeper: A little black thing among the snow

A little black thing among the snow,

Crying “weep! ‘weep!” in notes of woe!

“Where are thy father and mother? say?”

Glass Hands: A Eulogy on the Anniversary of the Pandemic

Hands pressed to glass

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

absence. displacement.

absence. displacement.

waiting. then comes rejection.

anger follows. shame makes

the beds

the shadows jostle between

the walls of the scarcely visited cities.

Buen Esqueleto

Life is short & I tell this to mis hijas.

Life is short & I show them how to talk

to police without opening the door, how

to leave the social security number blank

on the exam, I tell this to mis hijas.

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

DNA

It is told and retold

of how Kohkum killed a bear with a river rock

an arm like Ronnie Lancaster (that old Saskatchewan 

Roughrider)

she throws with precision

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

Unspeakable Acts in Cars

It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy

To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps

All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue

And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea

A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down

With smell of steaks in passageways.

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town

(with up so floating many bells down)

spring summer autumn winter

I saw a perfect tree today

I saw a perfect tree today

From my cabin bed on a Via Rail train 

Through the North of Ontario

I saw a perfect tree today

It was tall and thin and scraggly and prim

Then I saw another just as perfect

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

Community Garden

There, the bolting black kale,

taller than it has any right to be

and not the twitter troll who asked

if you were on your period.

In the corner, a pile of dead

zucchini leaves, spotted with rot

The Dead

How great unto the living seem the dead!

How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;

How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread

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

If Stone Dreams

We cannot know this statue, this satyr 

with his head propped on a wineskin; 

we cannot know if he dreams. In fact, 

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

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

Scab Maids on Speed

My first job was when I was about 15. I had met a girl named Hope who became my best

friend. Hope and I were flunking math class so we became speed freaks. This honed our

All About My Grandmother

Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother

to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,

beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

I Lost My Talk

I lost my talk

The talk you took away.

When I was a little girl

At Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away:

I speak like you

I think like you

I create like you