Poems

Enigma

Who I am

depends on which side of my skin

you stand on.

In here

it’s all neurons firing

synapses telling stories

blood tracing ancestral histories

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

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

The Man He Killed

“Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

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,

Moon in Khmer

You are light

when the sun is punched out

and darkness reigns.

You are the antidote

to what came before:

black blood, black heart,

hands tied, kneeling before

a ditch of human bones.

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

19

I triage the landscape. The prairies

are numb today and so am I.

I am too thin. Built

like I won't explode on hot

afternoons, a mirror

to the sky. My body is a hurt

where tall grasses grow, where

Wolf Lake

It was down that road he brought me, still

in the trunk of his car. I won’t say it felt right,

but it did feel expected. The way you…

For You Shall Be Called to Account

The ancestors of everyone I’ve let into my body

are gathered in a small room with one window,

no lights. Yes, the room is crowded. Yes, there

are no chairs. Yes, they are talking. Why are we

Internet Safety

My dad taught me to never give out my real name, age,

address, or photos. This seemed obvious to me. My fake

birthday entry was always my crush's birthday plus a

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

From: Incantation: Memory of Water

Tonight, a strand of my great-grandmother’s hair

sashes an amber beer bottle discarded by a tourist.

A white thread of my grandmother’s baptismal robe

is a bangle on a wrist of kelp

Heat

From plains that reel to southward, dim,

The road runs by me white and bare;

Up the steep hill it seems to swim

Call a Spade a Spade

a heart a heart

a diamond a diamond 

a club a club

call it invasion not settlement

call it genocide not colonization

call it theft not establishment 

don't call January 26 Australia Day

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:

Livejournal.com/lonelyradio

We could read your words from anywhere

but you felt like the only soul sitting

in your swivel chair listening to your parents

dream-breathing down the hall while you typed

A Virginal

No, no! Go from me. I have left her lately.

I will not spoil my sheath with lesser brightness,

For my surrounding air hath a new lightness;

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

Dear Death,

Am I a praise poet or a blame poet?

Today I am a blame poet.

 O Death, face it, existence

doesn’t like you.

You can’t sing. You can’t paint.

from Exhibits from the American Water Museum

99.

From an original rock painting in Topock, Arizona, now digitized on a

wall-mounted monitor:

Before this city, the Creator pressed his staff

into the earth, and the earth opened—

Family Reunions

The other people quit their stone fields to come here.

They slip in from nights that even the snow abandons.

They leave ashes in their glasses

Should Lanterns Shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, an any boy of love

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles 

Over a groove. The other slushes chords.

Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,

The muscular one, and bid him whip

In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

Love poem

The woman I love

braids her hair. She’s Eve

and Eve means breathe, to give life,

my wife, from Eva by way

of the Hebrew havah. At dusk

I unlock her hair

Susie Asado

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

    Susie Asado.

Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.

Passing into Storm

Know him for a white man.

He walks sideways into wind

allowing the left of him

to forget what the right

knows as cold. His ears

turn into death what

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.

What Do You Believe In?

Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-

gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and

Perennial

For thirty-one years, my mother tried not to miss her. Every week, 

a little water or the trickle of a few ice cubes

dropped

in black earth. Years back, in the muck of Toronto, April,

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.

Hap

If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

From One and Half of You

Price depends on how the cheongsam

was made, the fabric used.

Gasp. Lift breasts with one hand.

Stuff your body inside.

If you wear this print of peonies

Paying Attention

He is not doing well. She is not

Dear Dolphin

The shaman at Broadway and Main

with a plastic shaker and some sage

says you’re my power animal. Says

we both have big brains, like to chatter.

The Dark Stag

A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,

Leaps down beyond black pines.

Behind — a length of yellow light —

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

A Hymn to God the Father

Wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun,

Which was my sin, though it were done before?

Wilt thou forgive that sin, through which I run,