SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
This is our welfare half
a duplex with mint green
siding shrugged between
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
Tune: Rory Dall’s Port
First printed in Johnson’s S.M.M., Vol. 4, 13th August 1792.
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; …
1
an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June.
180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil
…
Who is this black coat and tie?
Christian severity etched in the lines
he draws from his mouth. Clearly a noble man
who believes in work and mission. See
how he rises from the red velvet chair,
I am awake between stiff
sheets tonight in room thirty
four, listening to the heat
Wheat daughter, prisoner of sneaky pigweed, mother
to the five corners of the world and your three hectares,
beak-nosed carpenter’s wife and the potter’s lover,
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
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
Entirely windless, today’s sea; of these waters’ many names
the best seemed “field-of-pearl-leaves,” for it smelled like the air
in the house he built entirely of doors: pink school door,
If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
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
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
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
When I began to write, I didn’t know
each of my words would bit by bit remove
things from the world and in return leave blank
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
At the end of the garden walk
the wind and its satellite wait for me;
their meaning I will not know
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face
little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling
against a dust-storm…
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…
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
ONE
Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’…
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
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,
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
After Li Po
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
Living, I had no might
To make you hear,
Now, in the inmost night,
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
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 tide rises, the tide falls,
The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;
Along the sea-sands damp and brown
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
How great unto the living seem the dead!
How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;
How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread
