Poems

The ABG (Able-Bodied Gaze)

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.

Tide

Would I have seen her?

The tide tugging her gently past

the Comfort Inn; houses, tall and gabled,

Planet Earth

It has to be loved the way a laundress loves her linens,

the way she moves her hands caressing the fine muslins

knowing their warp and woof,

like a lover coaxing, or a mother praising.

71. Song for a Silent Treatment.

I told her, in plain language, how I felt. 

And by that I mean I mumbled a poorly 

paraphrased and…

fluorine

arsenic in calculators, mercury in felt

hats, mad as a poisoned hatter

pyrophoric undercurrent in mundane

We Have No Need For Scientists

We have no need

for scientists to

tell us things

we already

know

like the

sea is

rising

and the

water is

getting warm.

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

K was supposed to come with the key, I was

to wait outside the gate. I arrived on time,

the time we had agreed on and waited, as agreed,

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

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

Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Tractor

More than a storey high and twice that long,

it looks igneous, the Buhler Versatile 2360,

possessed of the ecology of some …

Theme for English B

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you —

Dick Pics

Two dicks, sitting in

my daughter’s inbox,

like men without hats,

waiting for any door

to open. 

*

Sighting a stranger’s penis

used to be rare. Remember raincoats?

Pale Blue Cover

In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.

Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a…

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

Family Tree

    My imaginary brother speaks of our migration and history,
how time pulses like the green water
in the South Saskatchewan that sputters by our home,
success measured in how still he’d lie after wandering

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this'll 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

Spring

When daisies pied and violets blue

And lady-smocks all silver-white

And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

Adam Father

He wakes up naked and drunk as a bear

on sun-fermented garbage.

Hungover and queasy and riled up by

bees.

Nothing going well today, he moans,

life being short and the craft, ah, long.

London

I

some towers are made of cladding

some made of ivory

some burn in the night

some built by slaves

wind rushes through coarse hair

A Glass Tube Ecstasy

a glass tube

for my leg       says Hugo Ball

my hat a cylinder

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —

When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens,…

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

But I’m No One

for M. Maylor

Dear Anne Carson:

My friend read me the poem where your mom

said that the dead walk backwards.

You thought this myth arose from poor translation.

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

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?”

How One Winter Came in the Lake Region

For weeks and weeks the autumn world stood still,

Clothed in the shadow of a smoky haze;

The fields were dead, the wind had lost its will,

Wishing Well

My fist holds as many coins

as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen's effigy;

Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets,

a woman I've never met though I always know

her whereabouts. Each face pressed

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

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,

after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up!

Helen

All Greece hates

the still eyes in the white face,

the lustre as of olives

Villanelle

I dreamed I was reading a villanelle

in front of a crowd. Next to me on the floor

was a large bag of garbage I'd mistakenly

brought with me onto the stage. My own garbage.

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

Notes on Emancipation

I wrote to my mother, but she didn't write back. 

It's not true that you can begin anywhere. 

             I was born in a church. 

Say the Names

— say the names say the names

and listen to yourself

an echo in the mountains

Tulameen     Tulameen

say them like your soul

was listening and overhearing

and you dreamed you dreamed