Poems

Comfort

11 am. Time to wake up.

Muscles sore, jaw clenched, warm light

scattering dreams of violence across

the bedroom. I've chosen a self

A Hundred and Fifty Pounds

In some, the luggage lies open

like a mouth mid-sentence.

In others, closed zippers grimace:

What would you have brought?

Slippers, a stuffed platypus, a gold watch

Sun Bear

yesterday at the Oakland zoo

I was walking alone for a moment

past the enclosure holding the sun bear

In Favour of Being Alive

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

Common Magic

Your best friend falls in love

and her brain turns to water.

You can watch her lips move,

Kome’s Story

for auntie nagasaki

it's the same story

told again & again

the modulations

& the machinations

the maudlin

From The Titanic: The Iceberg

Calved from a glacier near Godhaven coast,

It left the fiord for the sea — a host

Of white flotillas gathering in its wake,

A Red, Red Rose

O my Luve is like a red, red rose

That’s newly sprung in June;

O my Luve is like the melody

Bliss Point or What Can Best Be Achieved by Cheese

A.k.a.

        the other gold.

                 Now that's the stuff,

Women Do This Every Day

Where There’s a Wall

Where there’s a wall

there’s a way through a

gate or door. There’s even

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

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

My Poem Without Me in It

My poem without me in it—would it be like

my room when I had returned to it

after my mother was done with me.

Under my bed, only the outer

space balls, of dust, only

the asteroids of hair, no bent-legs

Miniver Cheevy

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,

Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;

He wept that he was ever born,

Solitude

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

Fire in the Reeds

One night, fire fell into a reed bed

It burned like love falling onto a soul

As fire’s head warmed to its work

every reed turned into a candle at its own grave

Ideas of Home

              i

Winter has landed; my boot bucks on a stone

surrounded by snow; I swear, I murmur

Oracabessa. “The rock” is what I call home,

Dear Sara

& if you follow these ants

they’ll lead you back to

stone tablets

an older desert

where black bones

once buried are

now words whereI wave to you

at 2:34 am they survived

Walking Both Sides of an Invisible Border

It is never easy

Walking with an invisible border

Separating my left and right foot

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said — “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert.... Near them, on the sand,

Too Negative

I was a kid other kids’ 

parents gossiped about.

They told their children

what I was: too negative.

I get it. Fair to fear

contagion of bad attitudes,

If Stone Dreams

We cannot know this statue, this satyr 

with his head propped on a wineskin; 

we cannot know if he dreams. In fact, 

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

My Papa’s Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Sonnets from the Portuguese 24

Let the world’s sharpness, like a clasping knife,

Shut in upon itself and do no harm

In this close hand of Love, now soft and warm,

And let us hear no sound of human strife

Bad Brown Girl

i can barely speak in my mother tongues stutter

my accent is bad

i hate jalebi

but i like aloo samosa

i'm a bad brown

girl i didn't join the

SAA or the ISA

Let Us Be Fireflies

Let Us Be Fireflies

                          All day we

     practice morse code signals

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.

epistrophe and epistrophy

some ekphrastic evening, this will 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

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

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

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,

All beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

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…

The Bull Moose

Down from the purple mist of trees on the mountain,

lurching through forests of white spruce and cedar,

stumbling through tamarack swamps…

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

My Last Duchess

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Frà Pandolf’s hands

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

at Muskwa’s third eye

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

Letters

I threw away your letters.

Years ago, just like that.

The tight black swirls,

circles and strokes

filling fine sheets —

I would not see them again.

The last items I had left.