Poems

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

All things within this fading world hath end,

Adversity doth still our joyes attend;

No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,

How to Tell If a Poem Is Trans or Not

Look directly at the crotch

Gently wave away all

thoughts about how

you never cared about crotches of poems

before this poet

Consider the subject

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid…

Self-Portrait

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

monday thaw

On TV it looked like a high-speed photo of a milk drop

the dying leader of the Pana Wave laboratory cult smack in the

centre.

Acres of white cloth streamered his followers, who

A Breakfast for Barbarians

my friends, my sweet barbarians,

there is that hunger which is not for food —

but an eye at the navel turns the appetite

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

Newfoundland Sealing Disaster

Sent to the ice after white coats,

rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,

they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,

Poem of Failed Amends (Amor fati)

I’ve put the oats in a jar,

with yogourt and seeds,

left it in the fridge

overnight. The fruit on top

will thaw, dripping

sweetness

into the rest.

I want to remember

I’ve done this

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

In Favour of Being Alive

    Twenty-four years ago
I tried to kill myself
but with my usual incompetence
did not manage to.

Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice

So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover

yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach

thing no song sing but in the word

39

Oliver Sacks is going to die,

He tells us blithely in the New York Times.

He’s 81. His liver’s shot.

He’s blind in one eye

Though when both worked fine

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long.

Behind the warped door that sticks,

the wood thrush calls to the monks,

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,

We Are Surprised

Now, we take the moon

into the middle of our brains

so we look like roadside stray cats

with bright flashlight-white eyes

in our faces, but no real ideas

of when or where to run.

From Injun

a)

he played injun in gods country

where boys proved themselves clean

dumb beasts who could cut fire

out of the whitest sand

he played english across the trail

Blank Sonnet

      The air smells of rhubarb, occasional

Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,

Undulant hurt, so body snaps…

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,

Re: Happiness, in pursuit thereof

            It is 2005, just before landfall.

Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.

the many descriptions of being brown

White people tell you to apologize for yourself

through gestures, through small talk, through the ways in

which they ask,                  “Where are you from?” and

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;

Vancouver Lights

About me the night        moonless           wimples the mountains

wraps ocean      land    …

On the Boundaries of Treaty No. 6

commencing to the place of beginning;

emptying;

in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;

forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;

Shots Rang Out on My Street Today

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Boyakka! Boyakka! Boyakka!

Shots rang out on my street today

Three Black yoots lay dead

shot inna dem head

Modestine

We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James, 

who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the

Cévennes

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

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

it’s rank, it cranks you up

it’s rank it cranks you up

crash you’re fracked you suck

shucks you’re wack you be

all you cracked up to be

dead on arrival

overdosed on whatever

excess of hate and love

I Am

I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes —

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…

The Cremation of Sam McGee

There are strange things done in the midnight sun

By the men who moil for gold;

The Arctic trails have their secret tales

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…

My sister cries the sea

My sister is crying and crying

her tears grow to salt stormy showers

to rain and to rapids and rivers

they run to the sea to the sea.

My sister sobs softly she knows

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

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

from “Road Shoulders”

power lines held by birds

of prey the hostile expanse above

ditches teeming floral invasive

wayside fleurs

late summer the shoulder sang

holds breeze by

Self-Portrait in Siem Reap

The French chef says, Try the foie gras, it’s very good.

So I treat myself to the liver of a force-fed goose.

Give it to me on a crostini with black currant!

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

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