SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
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
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
The river is famous to the fish.
The loud voice is famous to silence,
which knew it would inherit the earth
before anybody said so.
The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds
After the celebrations,
people, TV channels, telephones,
the year’s recently-corrected digit
finally falls asleep.
Between the final night and the first dawn
a jagged piece of sky
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you —
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
Dad reads aloud. I follow his finger across the page.
Sometimes his finger moves past words, tracing white space.
He makes the Moon say something new every night
to his deaf son who slurs his speech.
’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,
Where China’s gayest art had dyed
The azure flowers that blow;
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.
The way wasps want
your house
to be their house,
so the dead
try & make
your home
My mothers says she has something to tell me,
turns to me from the stove where potatoes
boil and bump in the pot
I stand still to hear, a bundle of forks
in my hand for the table
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,
In the apartment with the orange
shag carpet, is one long table
surrounded by chairs,
only four of them matching,
and cups and pitchers and food, and large,
silver plates for sharing, a pot,
Smoke and ash of November.
A landscape of sediment and char,
lead and gold leaf, mutilated sod
racing on its planetary camber.
On a kitchen table's crude altar
a bowl of radishes is offered
He was a child. He was dead.
He was the shaft of a long-tailed astrapia. He was a forest
of bruise. He wore a door on his face.
He wore the black suit
of his wedding. The square pocket
Heaven
is just a garden, really.
A plot of land where you might reach down
When the burning started in August, because it kept
its own schedule, it could be early without seeming eager.
On Point Reyes there was fire locking antlers with fire
and the fires at Big Sur had so broad a wingspan
Thwack, thwack—
dirt struck with a hoe
makes a good field
for wheat to grow.
Dirt trod on from morning to night
makes a good road
for carts to travel on.
We're drinking coffee in January's
bed. It's raining. The harbour
hammers high at Lake Ontario.
What an inconvenience. The end
times, I mean. Can I unwelcome
the undoing? There's burning beyond
baked, square or round globes formed from the rims of used pickle jarsi don't have milk, use wateri don't have eggs, that's okay, only some people use them anywaysi only have a bit of sugar, that's okay, throw it in
This doesn't have to go in order;
that's the first thing.
I looked inside
an egg,
poked and blown
pristine, made clean
by the passing of its own slime. Inside
Gigantic agenda, this life of ours—
that turned out so different, then after all the same.
We picture ourselves when we close our eyes
in a lift that's counting the years in floors.
Does it matter that the Roman
Empire was still early in its slow
unwinding into never again? Then,
as now, didn't people burst into tears
in front of other people, or in private,
It turns out however that I was deeplyMistaken about the end of the world
On the black wet branches of the linden,
still clinging to the umber leaves of late fall,
two crows land. They say, Stop, and still I want
to make them into something they are not.
& 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
I am held within these claims: that I have kissed unlucky
things, buried pets, eaten sugar-free ice cream, endured a first
blood test, made friends without benefits, and lost them
i as in sow a muskrat tooth back into jawi as in dented pumpkin memoryi as in deflated basketball consciousnessi as in anaphoric internet parrot projection loopi as in holding uterine lining above a toilet bowl
My father’s green Pontiac
in this house
the body of a poem, still warm,
hangs on the nail of the mundane
touched to its core
like a reproach, like proof,
that i was here
and you were here
His beard: an avalanche of honey
an avalanche
of thorns. In a bar too close to the Pacific,
Poems about night
and related poems. Paintings
about night,
sleep, death, and
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
Stone Carrier was my grandfather, my father, my brother, andmy son. He was a good and brave man, and he taught me manythings. He shared some of his memories with me, memories
i know she wants me
by her side in sleep. i do not really ask her to stay,
only imply she is invited. i speak
this is the growing of things birthing of skin
and bone stem and leaf this is planet
earth beneath snowlight and desert sand
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
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
We climb up the rusting ladder,
Mexican beer forced into waistbands,
and lie on the cooling roof
count our personal galaxies
far high LEDs, billboards, dreams.
what a glory feeling it is to sit in the sun by the oceanside
as tulugait and naujait sing circling above
and scrape skins with centuries of arnait guiding my ulu
first you get the grease from canola buffalo
then you find mystery meat
you must package this in
commencing to the place of beginning;
emptying;
in 1959 the South Saskatchewan river was dammed;
forever altering the boundary of Treaty no. 6;
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
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.
Once, I slapped my sister with the back of my hand.
We were so small, but I wanted to know
how it felt: my hand raised high across
the opposite shoulder, slicing down like a trapeze.
What struck me first was the sheer numbers, queers everywhere.
Battalions of sailors and infantry, proud in their uniforms.
Eventually, I made uneasy peace with this equal right.
…
i wanted bitumen to be made of dead dinosaurs. why did i want these
ancient kin to be passively implicated in the fossil fuel industry? it
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:
