Poems

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 Practical Mom

can go to Bible study every Sunday

and swear she’s still not convinced,

but she likes to be around people who are.

We have the same conversation

every few years — I’ll ask her if she stops

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

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

Bicycle Eclogue

   That red bicycle left in an alley near the Ponte Vecchio,
I claim; I claim its elongated shadow, ship crested on
stacked crates; I claim the sour-mouth Arno and the stone
arch bending sunlight on vanished medieval fairs;

God the Tea Master

All the weapons we marshal to confront the day

You ask to be left by the door before entering.

The sword in its sheath must lie on the grass,

the quiver and bow hung off a branch.

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

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

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

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, 

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Call a Spade a Spade

a heart a heart

a diamond a diamond 

a club a club

call it invasion not settlement

call it genocide not colonization

call it theft not establishment 

don't call January 26 Australia Day

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

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

TREATY 8

queen of great britain and ireland, by her commissioners the

honourable david laird, of winnipeg, manitoba, indian com

When I Become You

I'd like to close the distance between us:

where you end, where I begin,

but your skin stops me,

I can't find my way in.

If I could, I'd press every bit of me

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this will be both criticism and poetry and 

failing that fall somewhere that seems like in between. this both/

and and/ or neither/ nor machine comes in having been touched

Image-Nation 21 (territory

wandering to the other, wandering

the spiritual realities, skilled in all

ways of contending, he did not search

Vancouver Lights

About me the night        moonless           wimples the mountains

wraps ocean      land    …

Wild Strawberries

I'll tell you how it was, what she remembers:

the scent of rhubarb and strawberries in the wild

where she hid and the cries of the murdered,

they do not want to die away. If possible,

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Bliss Point or What Can Best Be Achieved by Cheese

A.k.a.

        the other gold.

                 Now that's the stuff,

Windrim

To Windrim or sycamore

           rustle cicada or bark and to Wayne

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

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 the Ladies

Wife and servant are the same,

But only differ in the name:

For when that fatal knot is tied,

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

Père Lalement

I lift the Lord on high,

Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see

The small birds of the forest lingering by

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,

Clouds

                                     My father’s green Pontiac

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

from Exhibits from the American Water Museum

99.

From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a

wall-mounted monitor:

Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff

into the earth, and the earth opened—

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

Men in the Gut

Scrape the inside of sleep the belly wall

tasting like yoghurt cooked broccoli

its emptiness leaving something

on the tongue. Escaping the body

that wants to quit from the inside.

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

In Exile I Draw the Tower Card

           Spruce, inadequate, and alien

            I stood at the side of the road

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,