Note Left on an Empty Fridge

Did you think words would be
enough? They stopped short
of every bridge

as though they were
an old man, arms draped
across the top of a tumbling

fence, eyes with that longing
look sunsets leave
in the retina’s arbours.

I wanted to touch, consume
the substantial, that meal
in a smoky, crowded café

tucked into a shoreline
of band. I wanted to
walk in the jazz waves

and touch your jazz hands
with a minor persuasive
solo. Did you think

a novel would explain
our convoluted plot? Fantasy
doesn’t solve every unsolvable

problem. We think that way
in today’s world
and we live the lives of clouds.

Catching Up

Lens

the hidden
the hiding
the spotlight
the shadows

a moon skates cloud laneways and vanishes
the way I do into October night (a rustling)

the way I do
and am outside
the lens

click and
yellowed memory
in amber
in noonlight

a moon slumbers on sunset’s crags
and views the housetops and dreamtops

of vision
fragmenting into
an album
and evening

and chardonnay
consumed blind
on linen
snow white

a moon rides the coal chutes of midnight
and crumbles like memories into choice

malleable
affable
ignorant
future



How Religion Fails to Capture Dust

anger at the moment of inception is pyroclastic plasticine
malleable to the gravity of hardening
into tenets and tantamount importance

which butterflies in an August clover field ignore

as their wings unfold against the certainty of night
to catch a setting sun’s last rays and the promise
sunrise exists undefinable and free as a morning breeze



Prejudice on the Multicultural Landscape

And you/having survived
the war to again end all believe
that death is nothing/just bodies blooming
in the landscape of destruction.

Yet I believe there is something
between the birth of star and nova/something
that guides us to a greater walkway
through the gravestones of a unified effort.

Call it the singular entity in a plural
world/the dashes on a highway going
against tectonic troubadours
proclaiming the division between

Acceptance and rejection/that nod to a stranger
on the road you thought you had to yourself.



Direction Quest

could you ever abandon words
where half-formed apples fall
from a drought-mad apple tree

(and it’s only July–it’s only July)

could you ever abandon words
on the doorstep of long works
like unemployed stevedores

(tide moving with each breath of the moon)

could you ever abandon words
to snowstorms in confused December
when snowmen battle an unforgiving sun

(and the heart longs–unfulfilled)

could you ever/ever/ever abandon
the sidewalk your feet walk
to each and every destination

( your words eyes and GPS)



37

what I need is for you to be
with me/to skip
across the cracks between the sun’s
fractured rays on a dusked horizon

to light the night’s soul with jazz
and cripple nightmares when I dream
of flying down the staircases
of all the wars my ancestors fought

I have no immunity against fear/no
immunity against facing
the sun shining upon each and every
action I’ve every annotated

as an act of history/I have no
immunity from time
and its relentless march across
the pages of my ravaged book

of lyrics to everyday music

I have no needs beyond your presence

enough

and again enough



dog days and other events to carry us into the next disaster


lost, a murder of words to the crows
that polka-dot an Amish sky

gold finches have crawled up the rising thermometer
and sandhill cranes test hard Haliburton rocks

though what really matters is Chardonnay the colour of
burnt grass, that flower growing by the deck

time is a sponge soaking up each event
and the sun is a metronome for the music of each moment



Missing

I see you in my fears laughing
as you reach for the sunbeam tripped
by the half-drawn blinds

and erect a cross for you in the woods behind
our house where wildflowers dance

I imagine I encounter you walking with a grin
down the mid-west street of a town
whose name I can’t remember

all things become relative
and an orbit around what I don’t know

I fill this void with imagination
and cry because all things are possible
in a world falling into the spontaneous

release of time into life and death



Sticky Note for 6:30–Thursday in October

the sun is a cripple on the horizon–
peg leg hanging into the lake

and I’ve lost something half-way down
the stairs, about where the wallpaper is missing–

where I put documents concerning my birth
and lost them, lost them forever to a troubadour

who missed his way between villages and recreated
the history of that war to include sacrificed soldiers–

spent opportunities and foreited loves until the myth
of his experiences became the legends of our faiths

don’t expect me to remember anything before
we were together–history begins every day

and dies with sunsets/a falling out/the last glass
of wine/the way our vision is detoured

between the point of time’s execution
and the ripples moving away from what transpired




so tell me how
these dust clouds
form and reform–
call themselves human
after they’re touched
by a drop of rain
and time



The Boat House Restaurant

Singer
guitar and microphone

Song
and all the reasons for writing

Thursday night crumbles
cigarette ashes in failed light

His life is a distraction
work in the morning

Under harsh illumination pressed
from an orange sun

Plucked out of a dancing
sky



Spatial Abstracts

it’s the incomplete line–
unfinished trim above the sink–
pictures hanging 85 degrees
to the beige carpet–
wallpaper missing in a corner
of the family room–
summer and winter clothes copulating
in the hall closet–
images of intent swimming
against the currents of reality–
the hobo-gapped smile of words
homeless in a world of contracts–
this rose opening this morning
against the background of these bricks
which capture the sun’s
incomplete journey to your eyes



The empty streets (weeds attack)
winding down to the receding gum-line
of the lake (rotting pier teeth)
capture the weariness of what we once were.



For C, Who I Will Never Tell Enough

A tip of the past to the last living
memory on Bristol Street. The one
between fat clouds folding themselves
into the horizon’s hamper
and a blanket on watered grass.
Open magazine dedicated to the structure
of Marilyn Monroe’s back.

A quarter for three songs and a nickel
to keep the needle down a crooner’s notes
wrapped in spinning bottles. The last
sunset before the world split and we
volunteered. Oh yes innocence is
quite the ineffectual weapon.

Innocence with head tucked between knees
waiting for ten million mushrooms to grow
into the poetry of their finality.

Now we manage to make it one-on-one knife
or gun our silhouettes drawn by
investigative services. History on the fly.
An incision between the end
and the events which brought us this far.

Forgetting it was always the sun
rising like a line of soldiers to fight
for another memory
another time
another song floating
like fog across the crags of everything we touch.

Everything we grasp with a baby’s unformed hands.



Perspective Between Reality and the Movie

we are dead
pictures of us alive are blooming flowers around
our pine casket

and the sun is setting
again the sun is
a fingerprint on the carbon-copy sky

we are dead
our adventures are retold
around the coffee urn campfire

and we don’t hear
the music continues long into
a snowfall across the footsteps of time

we are dead
and the sun is setting
we are dead

and we don’t hear



Waves

one wave and ‘I love
you Ca’ is washed away

‘rol’ in receding time
means nothing

I meticulously begin agin
a testament to

how we have spent years
in various fashions

and various moods

the sun is wedged
in the eaves

and a grackle sings
to the maple tree

there is no position I can assume
to hop-scotch time

throw my marker in
the circle I could reach

if it were not for
receding events



The Summer of Love

the motorcycle was more broke than run
and I worked on a sub-foundation
moving a pile of dirt
from place to place on Waterloo street

by August I was waking up
on an Innerkip farm
with two Georgians
wrapping my hands around
dew-cold tobacco stalks

I returned to school in September
spent some of my savings
on a white suit straight
from the pages
of a designer’s imagination

I don’t remember going
to Woodstock
I wasn’t there

what I remember
is the crusade crumbling
body bag by body bag dream