SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase...
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
Look directly at the crotch
Gently wave away all
thoughts about how
you never cared about crotches of poems
before this poet
Consider the subject
at least in our waking life
most commemoration
doubles as force
since even
the most benign
zodiacal conceptions
are tinged eurocentric
when brown women die
(Falteringly)
Our national bird – for years – was – as A M Klein said –
the rocking chair
I don’t know what our national bird is now – but my totem bird is
Not the music.
It is this other thing
I keep from all of them
that matters, inviolable.
I scratch in my journals,
a mouse rummaging through cupboards,
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,
“I saw my land in the morning
and O but she was fair”
- M.G. Smith, “Jamaica” (1938)
I
Come see my land
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.
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
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
for M. Maylor
Dear Anne Carson:
My friend read me the poem where your mom
said that the dead walk backwards.
You thought this myth arose from poor translation.
I recited to him,
Now as I was young and easy,
and in the cough-afflicted wheeze that was left of my father’s voice,
A work of art is a world of signs, at least to the poet’s
nursery bookshelf sheltered behind the artist’s ear.
I recall each little motto howling its ins and outs
to those of us who might as well be on the moon
Blousy guitar I don’t want to count the beats Hey Hey
My pen I have bed hair in the best way Daughter
of sunlight and air and I’m glad you were born
In my dream my mother comes with me.
We are in the meadows we call
The Flats, walking the dogs.
Walk straight past the water trough,
she says, do not engage the moss.
If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language
Of nerve-matter / dura mater / orbit of the central axis
By a crevice / scattered / venous lacunae / lamina code
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
(a twelve-tone poem)
trite yap show
rosy twit heap
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,
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
Queen and King, they rule side by side
in golden thrones above the clouds.
Her giggle and wide eyes remind him
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
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
These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
Today doves flew from my head
and my hair grew
the longing is gone from my body
Where there’s a wall
there’s a way through a
gate or door. There’s even
Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches
the gap, from which all things emerge. A left
handed…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
Thou poem of lost attention and half try,
do you fear more the inner world or outer?
I do…
Constantly risking absurdity
…
The air smells of rhubarb, occasional
Roses, or first birth of blossoms, a fresh,
Undulant hurt, so body snaps…
So I’m an alcoholic Catholic mother-lover
yet there is no sweetish nectar no fuzzed-peach
thing no song sing but in the word
I too, dislike it: there are things that are important
like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands
from under the clouds where I write the first poem
its brown warmth now that we recognize them
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…
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
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;
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones,
The labor of an age in pilèd stones,
Or that his hallowed relics should be hid
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,
