Poems

from Sharking of the Birdcage ["the spirit of"]

                   the spirit of

                 your flowers is

         my favourite shelter

The Powwow at the End of the World

I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall   

after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam   

The Lonely Land

Cedar and jagged fir

uplift sharp barbs

against the gray

more treaty lines

1790 → treaty 2, district of Hesse (step into wolf)

province of quebec

“We do herby certify that the following goods were delivered to the

several Nations”

Jacknife/2

Each day, I am apprenticed to the boy

I want to be.

He rifles the ball

and I catch it

or I fumble.

His red head ducks and weaves,

thinking, end zone.

My Grandmother Washes Her Feet in the Sink of the Bathroom at Sears

My grandmother puts her feet in the sink

                  of the bathroom at Sears

to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer,

wudu,

The Dictator’s Message

The Dictator’s Message

O poets

return,

we have swept

your homeland clean

of thorns and splinters

O writers

return,

to make a record of your works

Veronica?

What's it like at the centre of the AGO?

Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed

in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned

just so in the middle of a landscape surrounded by rocks,

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 Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

Insomnia

If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,

bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room

with twelve locks on the door.

Mariah according to my yt mama

when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like

to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies

in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s

she tells me in a so-there tone

Regardless

If I am judged

If I am punished

If I am dismissed

If I am misunderstood

If I am celebrated

If I am envied

If I am competed with

If I am slandered against

If I am seen

If I am soft

My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962

Very loud    a mad frenzy    The wooden

barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)

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These Poems, She Said

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man 

In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever

we were never caught

we partied the southwest, smoked it from L.A. to El Dorado

worked odd jobs between delusions of escape

drunk on the admonitions of parents, parsons & professors

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

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive sea,

The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,

On My Tongue

Bismillah is my first memory.

I became a bird in the Qur’an

at hardly eight years old.

I opened the dark green cover

and revealed the slippery

Closure

On the night we dug up your father’s body

(for reasons I can no longer remember)

we took turns with the shovel

as we passed a bottle of Whyte & Mackay

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

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 

We’ll Not Die in Paris

You forget the lines smells colors and sounds
sight weakens       hearing fades       simple pleasures pass
you lift your face and hands toward your soul
but to high and unreachable summits it soars

Cocteau Twins

I’ve heard the phrase between you

and me too many times to believe

it to be true, but between me and you

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

A Thunderstorm

A moment the wild swallows like a flight

Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,

Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.

From Red Doc

GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /

yes / I do vaguely

/ you never liked

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

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

“Alone”

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were — I have not seen

As others saw — I could not bring

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

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

I Have Something to Tell You

I’ve come to talk to you about shaving cuts

I was waiting across the road

right over there

for the light to turn

and you were on the other side

fumbling with change at the newspaper box

When I was Fair and Young

When I was fair and young, then favor graced me.

Of many was I sought their mistress for to be.

But I did scorn them all and answered them therefore:

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

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,

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Blousy Guitar

Blousy guitar   I don’t want to count the beats   Hey Hey

My pen     I have bed hair in the best way    Daughter

of sunlight and air     and I’m glad you were born

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