Poems

covering

in the broadest conception

of black music, which is the

truest conception of black

music, black music can't be

conceived. a music of covers,

black music covers, and cover

Kay in Summer

Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid

the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf

might see it all as too hesitant for truth

When Winter Comes

Rain at Muchalat, rain at Sooke, 

And rain, they say, from Yale to Skeena, 

And the skid-roads blind, and never a look 

Holy Ghost

We had no paper

then, or we had

no pen, or no words. How

to say it. We had

no voice. No listeners.

Just deaf night

Poem for My Body

No one else rescued me. Not my father

or my brother or, years later, the gentle man

who became my husband. Not my mother

or my best friend or any of the women

who listened to me tell my story

jules

a blunt thunderstorm delivered her

              to the doorstep of her kohkum

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

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

Hanging Fire

I am fourteen

and my skin has betrayed me

the boy I cannot live without

still sucks his thumb

in secret

how come my knees are

always so ashy

what if I die

before morning

La Figlia che Piange

O quam te memorem virgo...

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —

Lean on a garden urn —

Adam Posed

Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,

Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,

Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,

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. 

My Meadow, My Twilight

Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering, 

and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still, 

like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more 

Moment One

I remember my birth

like it was tomorrow, the unholy sensation

Deto(nation)

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

Five Postcards from Jericho

Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of

…

Mrs. Kessler

Mr. Kessler, you know, was in the army,

And he drew six dollars a month as a pension,

And stood on the corner talking politics,

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow

Follow thy fair sun, unhappy shadow,

Though thou be black as night

And she made all of light,

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

people arrived

people arrived from portugal. people arrived from africa. people arrived from

india. people arrived from england. people arrived from china. people

predated arrival. people fled predation. people were arrayed. people populated.

Prose Poem (“The morning coffee.”)

The morning coffee. I’m not sure why I drink it. Maybe it’s the ritual

of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of

brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the

Love (III)

Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back,

Guilty of dust and sin.

But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

Arnauqatikka

                                                                   …

Rondeau

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

My Grandmother’s Love Letters

There are no stars tonight

But those of memory.

Yet how much room for memory there is

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

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

The Novel As Manuscript

An ars poetica

I remember the death, in Russia,

of postage stamps

world shapers

creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups

they remind us of all the possible ways & means

that worlds…

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

You Are Not Going to Come Trillium

But I do come to Trillium. To the Cardiac
Short Stay Unit where you’ve been sent for the second stent, 
where free sanitizer prevents the spread of panic.

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,

Other

Men prefer an island

With its beginning ended:

Undertones of waves

Trees overbended.

Men prefer a road

Circling, shell-like

Convex and fossiled

Catastrophe That Nearly Brought Down a Plane

After late-night Li Bo,

on a plane to Houston, out of sheer intumescence

I begin unravelling a sickness bag—

starting with the wired throat,

then the pleated sides, then bottom.

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. 

We Haven’t Travelled to This Door

We haven’t travelled to this door

    For wealth or mastery,

We come here seeking refuge from

    Misfortune’s misery.

And we have journeyed all this way,

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

Two Guns in the Sky for Daniel Harris

When Daniel Harris stepped out of his car

the policeman was waiting. Gun raised.

I use the past tense though this is irrelevant

in Daniel's language, which is sign.

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:

From Verso 4

I was nine and I stood at the top of the street for no reason except to make the descent of the gentle incline toward my house where I lived with everyone and everything in the world, my sisters and my cousins were with me, we had our bookbags…