Baseball Poetry

right field deep
waiting with seagulls
where the big bang occurred

words were born
coalesced into silk
running colours to memory

and we stare forever
into the lunatic face
of communication

Choosing Ancestors


—From the vast annals of world literature,
we choose our ancestors.—
(Stephen Henighan in,
When Words Deny the World)




It was a loveless topography,
concrete containing green blade pools,
sun aging clay with drought—
come out, come out,
the sun is setting, come out.

The dark didn’t rise or set
in the milk box world,
yet everything was better,
except the immigrant dreams.

Dreams went to the old marketplaces,
sat in the old sun, reading rerun news,
saw scrawny villages in clouds
strangled by a flat horizon,
played too familiar pickup stix
political games with emotions.

It was always sandcastle against
wave, neither able to sustain
their structure.

And word scurried like rats—
history’s rats—sentences
hiding in rippling barn day
school days, cheating the milk
from breakfast, tearing
the flesh from ideals
drunk and dead in gutters
attended by pallbearer Queen’s Anne lace,
biting with winter’s teeth,
biting into the facades.

It was the age of shape-shifting
personas, page by page
becoming and receding, to become again—
sandcastle man standing against
a plague of rats, sandcastle man
wavering in the knowledge of hands,
young hands, willing hands.

I’m a man with arthritic hands,
the circles I spin are small, comfortable
circles. I’m a man with arthritic hands,
in pain, I’m a man afraid of storms
on a cold Atlantic, I’m a man afraid of rats,
content to rock in the comfort
of a rhyme, rock and sip iamb.

Dinner dishes on the deck table
are a minor chord, a breeze ignored
and the minutes lengthen
with diminishing wine.

The maple catches a falling sun,
shakes it onto latticework ground,
our eyes are drawn to clouds
drunk with evening blood.

I see jazz, as though this scene
is a score tossed from a window,
in so many riffs and twisted
notes—fractured sense non.

You have a brush, your pallet
filled with colours dancing
a dance of words leaked
from passed memories of love.

And we’re thrown through
the prism, emerging bifurcated.
You whisper how moments unite,
I know them separately.

On the Blue Heron sunset cruise, we saw much of the rugged east coastline of the Bruce Peninsula. Somewhere on top of the escarpment, the Bruce Trail makes its way to Tobermory, as rugged as the escarpment it tacks. 

Drafting with the ferry to Manitoulin Island. It's early morning, the north chanel fog-bound, as though the great Manitou has misted our eyes so that he can pass in peace. The passage is uneventful, South Baymouth revealed finally, as another highway leading deeper into the north. Little Current is north on Highway 6 and still far from Espanola, where Tim Hortons and civilization again return. The land changes somewhere in this region, becomes igneous by the time the tailings of Sudbury are spotted. 

Seagull and Ferrry to Manitoulin 

Crossing to South Baymouth

There’s always one person
leaned over the rail, head
angled toward unheard
streets, their cosy (as small
is often named) bars and
the ferry cleaves on through
indifferent water.

Early morning, the world
is mist, scattered islands
indistinct promises.
This is the beginning
of Ontario north.

Between Tobermory
and South Baymouth, we’re at
the same latitude as
Venice, though everything
is different here—we’re
on the nose of the north
and Venice—ah Venice
is a southern promise
of masks and canals and wine.

Perception—how the mind
dances with overheard
words and ideas, twists
them in the same way
we twist the sheets on a
restless night, awaken
to tell the world we dreamed.