Poems

dont worry yr hair

              dont worry yr eyes

         dont worry yr brain man th snow is

On Shakespeare. 1630

What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,

The labor of an age in pilèd stones,

Or that his hallowed relics should be hid

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

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…

Chinese Chimes: Nine Detours of the Yellow River

you are unaware of your obscure sources

but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea

as your final destination

the second time

i ask mama

about residential school

she says no

i ask her again

she says no

the third time

i stop listen

to her silence

World Town

Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names

the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air

in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,

Poems for Saints

Late Prayer

May our weapons be effective feminine inventions that like life.

May we blow up like weeds, and be medicinal and everywhere.

May the disturbed ground be our pharmacy. May the exhausted

On Antiphon Island

— “mu” twenty-eighth part —

    On Antiphon Island they lowered

the bar and we bent back. It

 wasn't limbo we were in albeit

From One and Half of You

Price depends on how the cheongsam

was made, the fabric used.

Gasp. Lift breasts with one hand.

Stuff your body inside.

If you wear this print of peonies

Not Horses

What I adore is not horses, with their modern

domestic life span of 25 years. What I adore

is a bug that lives only one day, especially if

it’s a terrible day, a day of train derailment or

Dinosaur Economics

i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these

ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

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

An English Speaking Doctor Translates the Concerns of his Patient with Google/Un Docteur Anglophone Traduit Les Inquiétudes De Son Patient Avec Google

écoute

à quoi bon être poète

beau dire

ce mal

semble dans la tête comme

marteau feu enclume clou couteau

ou l’éclat d’une baudroie ou des

aurores boréales

The Tree

Fair tree! for thy delightful shade

’Tis just that some return be made;

Sure some return is due from me

The Princess: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

RAINBOW ROCK-CLIMBING CLUB

I’m a gecko on a wall 

that simulates a cliff 

with rainbow grips 

I’ll touch any colour 

that’ll have me 

midway is high enough 

wary of emotional 

Confessions

What is he buzzing in my ears?

“Now that I come to die,

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

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,

From The First Water is the Body

2345*.

The river is my sister—I am its daughter.

It is my hands when I drink from it,

my own eye when I am weeping,

and my desire when I ache like a yucca bell

I Am

l am

gap tooth black girl

back corner of class

scribbling left-handed

poetry on blank paper

save the school's

curriculum for later

I am

Sons of Orion

for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.

I wanna live, son. But which son are you?

   There where the rivers are made

of moonshine and the lights still wait,

Holy Beings

on the day the chief of kâ-awâsis announces they have confirmed 751

bodies in unmarked graves outside the residential “school” in their

community, i google things like:

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

Between the crosses, row on row,

That mark our place; and in the sky

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

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. 

Dear Updike

No, nothing much has changed.

A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —

no winged cars to clog the air,

Plenty

The sky, lit up like a question or

an applause meter, is beautiful

like everything else today: the leaves

niya

Walking with Walt Whitman Through Calgary’s Eastside on a Winter Day

Blue-white afternoon. The Bow river churns and smokes

as the city rumbles, economy chokes and bundled homeless

build cardboard homes in the snow. Yes, Walt, this is the new

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!

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

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

Ah! Why, Because the Dazzling Sun

Ah! why, because the dazzling sun

Restored my earth to joy

Have you departed, every one,

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer's moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

Constellations

There's a general presumption that rhyme is an affair of

two. Most expected are, of course, end-rhymes in formal

structures—ABAB, etc., but even thinking more loosely,

To a Mouse

On Turning up in Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!