As soon as I am here or there
I’d like to be gone again,
the warm blanket corner of my couch, with the good view
or the cafe down the road or the orchard.
None are immune
until only the place and time inbetween is desirable.
Four thousand kilometers from one place called home
I drive for four days straight to get there
wanting salt shaker clatter and turkey steam, red paper napkins
and the sugar bush shining in her fall red and orange
but a thousand kilometers out I weep in exhaustion
on the side of the road, the lead heaviness of my eyelids
unrepentant.
My passive copilot, the carsick hound
attends to his own problems and is indifferent.
Falling to my knees after crossing the swing bridge boundary line
I could lie on the ground, press my forehead against it
or my lips, feel its power
coming up through my feet and infiltrating my being
and already, I’m ready to turn and drive
back, the road an invitation
to a party I’d be hard pressed to miss.
A Common Motif
Every greeting must eventually
end in a farewell- this is the nature
of these things.
You rushed in like a train full
of passengers vivid with their memories
scrambling to disembark the noise
of you was terrifically quiet
the silent resounding of twenty four years
that echoed and jockeyed for sense.
Trains- once, half asleep, I recall
racing my blue cruiser as fast as
my hot and aching legs would pedal, gasping
at the fall air while a locomotive
raced parallel to me through the sleeping
streets of the ward.
At the river the train trestle goes on where
the road peters out, their convergence
having run its course and bleating a farewell
the train carries on, inexorably forward
while I lie, panting in the gravel
trying to recover my breath.
Coffee money
'sorry' my stupid mouth
blurts its not even
my voice its arrogant and
scared and the coins in my pocket
jingle, warm & merry there
in my denial.
Cry for the dogs left out
on the coldest nights
and walk by even as I say
“sorry, sorry”
I hate this city
sometimes
Grape
Some people may never know
what we have taken for granted;
The chill tightness of a tart grape that
bursts
as we close our eyes against
its flavor.
Gentrification
I've come looking for the living
in blank streets, casualties
to glass and metal and rigid corners,
holding, tight, cottages and hearths
with imperfect shutters and paint peeled doors.
Measure my steps where
my key no longer fits-
already, my passage is being erased
and where once only I looked
now there are many, though
quite blind.
To a train conductor outside Medicine Hat at four in the morning
Startled from your solitude you wave,
reflexive-
your great iron machine cries out a foriegn breath
carried since Halifax and the prairie grass
sways and dreams of being an ocean
in the moment of your passing.
More people, I am sure, have walked on the moon
have plumbed the depths of the sea and known shipwrecks ,
earth receding either way
than have known this peculiar vastness.
Deer interlope in town, browsing
medians and gas station boulevards
insouciantly
where still, there are no people,
just us hurtling into a punched purple sky and waving
now to coyotes pouncing in mice
amongst wheat stalks and swans
who beat their wings and sing
such an alien song.
Emery Road
Today, I drove down Emery Roaf
just for the hell of it.
I had nowhere to be
and the lake was
perfectly blue.
After Rainfall (2)
I live where two rivers converge
where the city radiates outward
in hinky zig-zag streets &
abrupt
Escher staircases &
church bells who toll the hour
a few minutes early.
All rain returns to the rivers
rushing turgid and noisy through storm drains
homecoming as sure as the geese
used to migrate south for the winter.
They have known the river water
as clouds in the sky, bursting
returned with it to the Eramosa.
They have struck dischordant wings, wintry thunder and I wonder
when they ceased flying south.
Walks after rainfall
Where the sidewalk deadended under
cedar boughs, stooped in surprise
rain weary & heavy with it
I baptized you.
It was spur of the moment.
I was surprised, too,
at the cascade when I shook
the needles sunk low enough to grab.
Trees
i’m still struggling with this one. it’s a wip courtesy of mary oliver and her love of nature and her dedication to living a life that inspired poetry.
I am not here for altruism
I am here for money which I toil
through brackish swamp and alder
thicket for in dime
sized increments.
But this land is in me like a sickness
and every seven feet I wish a seedling
luck as I kick it into the ground
and wonder.
Eighty years for you to grow
here in the land that the hard faced activists
who march waving their banners in concrete streets
tell us is dead and barren.
Eighty years. Maybe-
hopefully
humanity will have blown itself up and my rows of trees
will grow old and their progeny
will take back the earth and heal the scar
where I work.
Not for altruism, but
this land is in me like a sickness
and I hope.
One Hundred Thousand Seconds
Well they demanded one hundred thousand dollars from you although
you’d put in a hundred million seconds to satisfy demands
outside of yourself.
Let’s leave! Anywhere might be ours,
and the man who wasn’t a poet drew maps of the places he loved
while how wrote verse and his toes dangled over the suede
barstools, perfectly serviceable beneath our feet.
We drew escape plans that went unremembered in sobriety
while alone, we both though about leaving
and chose to stay until it was
intolerable.
Truck stops
Our Francophone waitress refills
our mugs with oilslick coffee
rainbow diaphanous like the diesel
fuel on asphalt outside beneath the
eighteen wheelers, idling.
You're not old till you're dead,
she says, sliding the debit machine
across Formica.
Peter
He was a peddler of wonder who gave me kites in summer
concertos and composers and the errant paddling of our
canoe bringing us to a bay where we draw up pike
and have earnest conversations about God.
In lamp light, mellow, we assemble
mystery jigsaw puzzles and he confides he has cut down
his sugar intake to one spoon.
They didn't say how big a spoon;
He winks through bifocals and coats his wheaties
with a soup spoon of brown sugar.
The Mantra
God, for one minute-
I recieve my communion on my waiting tongue, seeking
perforated sheets like a communion wafer-
God for one minute
relieve me of this burden of desire.
Lusting for a more immersive life.
God for one minute
relieve me of this burden; desire
The incessant chant demanding
More;
Bigger
Louder
Faster
Let me just let it happen.
God, for just one minute
One
Let me be free.
God, whom I do not believe in;
'God' as in the cohesive gel of existance
the meaning between the lines
amorphous humor and majesty and coincidence and reason and ridiculousness
the silent knowing of the vast skies-
God relieve me of these humble utterances
My back burner mantra
God relieve me.
Early
An uninhabited hour when bakers rise
leaving their lovers in bed to start the first pots
of coffee and proof their bread
pausing for a cigarette with galaxies
of flour dusted on their aprons.
Inhabiting the strange space between when the world is on
and real and nighttime
the empty stage of dead buildings and quiet dark
hushed in anticipation and false waiting.
Shopping Carts
Shopping carts discarded on lawns
beached like turtles immobile
on their backs in the sand
delineated “bad” neighborhoods in our new city.
We were a thee shopping cart neighborhood
which improved over the years as the city sprawled.
Here was where I learned
not to walk home, alone after dark
or to cross the street if I saw a man
walking alone.
“Do you know that that's called?”
my mother asked, urgently.
“Wary.”
The word repeats itself
every time I see a shopping cart,
sinsiter in a dark alley
or a stranger in my periphery
as I walk home alone at night quickening
my steps until I am almost
Running.
Voyeur
I have driven until I could see stars,
the florid lights of insomniac apartments and neon strips receding
and slept in the backseat of my car,
remembering what is not mine to keep.
Voyeuristically explored one way streets
populated with ghosts not of my own creating
guilty as a snoop in the house of an absent owner
caught rifling through the drawers.
Rebellion
I have seen you imagined in your old age
having surmounted everything in between troubled youth
and trembling hands, the memories of a young man's strength.
When I meet you in these fields again, I know
we will both be young
and fierce, and wild,
having finally cast off this pall of sadness that we've needlessly carried
for so damn long.
So I taught you, with a well-aimed rocks glass
that shattered along with whatever lies
I'd told myself about happiness,
how to spit in their faces
and tell them to fuck off, even as they twisted
the knife deeper.
Happiness don't come free
Remember when you thought it was love
that would move mountains & divide seas!
& when you learned that it was sorrow working behind the tides
your heart wept a monsoon?
The ways of birds
Bird flying with twig in your beak
where are you going this December day?
Who am I to question the ways of birds?
The bird need not concern herself with me
burdened creature of the land, observing.
I understand the sky as I understand the sea
or space or forest, primeval,
a mystery.