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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
We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
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,
The rain this morning pours from the gutters and
everywhere else it is lost in the trees. You need your
glasses to single out what you know is there because
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds can be born
Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of
stone, age old, my burnished and bruised, hair lingering, hand
caked, spongy as November, my dear Relentless, my dear Aging,
Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.
He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books
you never knew he read. He sat until his eyes strained to know
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
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
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,
Here at Woodlands, Moriah,
these thirty-five years later,
still I could smell her fear.
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
I have not lingered in European monasteries
and discovered among the tall grasses tombs of knights
who fell as beautifully as their ballads tell;
When I put my finger to the hole they’ve cut for a dimmer switch
in a wall of plaster stiffened with horsehair
it seems I’ve scratched a two-hundred-year-old itch
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
wandering to the other, wandering
the spiritual realities, skilled in all
ways of contending, he did not search
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that encompass none. There are feelings
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do not love the self less than the others,
Sent to the ice after white coats,
rough outfit slung on coiled rope belts,
they stooped to the slaughter: gaffed pups,
The sky, lit up like a question or
an applause meter, is beautiful
like everything else today: the leaves
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
About me the night moonless wimples the mountains
wraps ocean land air and…
1
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fears
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’t bother him.
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
beyond all this fiddle.
…
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.
Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a scene through his peculiar Ontario head, no snow on that…
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone;
For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,
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,
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
The train has stopped for no apparent reason
In the wilds;
A frozen lake is level and fretted over
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
The full light rarely find us. One by one,
I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.
Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?
I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.