Hawking and the Rhythm of Waves

Make music to celebrate clouds / assorted footsteps on stairs
subway downtown / wine at sunset

Voices in the market carnival / the rhythm of great stories
and lies / the way a hand constructs

The frequency of visitors and visits / pitch
how the colours are divided / the notes in a rainbow

The manner in which love floods and recedes / creating
solitary crags / the singularity of

sharing our indistinct interpretation of together and time

The day after the funeral

I know this is your wish, but there is no medicine
to stop time. There is no defence against age creeping
along the vines of experience. And experience is
never enough, never enough dike to defend against
the flood of time. I clutch days and memories,
spread the dying leaves of events onto the path
in front of me. I walk across the shells of bodies
which a few, or many years ago, danced with life.

Do we always have to be late arrivals to the party,
or suffer from the memory loss of thinking that
one moment and then the next was so very important?
Life is the past tense, the settling way, the path
we experience as having been walked a day,
or twenty years ago. Life is that maple leaf in October
settling into all the other fallen leaves on
a rural trail. Life is a book marker between infinite plots.

Conversation 1


concrete doesn’t shed leaves
nor lamp poles set across lake and trees

I hold the heart of a door and construct
beginnings and ends by the side I’m on

there are decisions which are corners
and windows display alternatives

there is sunlight on a table where breakfast
crumbs form meaningless patterns

there is coffee and the sugar from regret

I keep the shells of days as souvenirs
on a shelf with books of poetry

there is the internet wormhole escape
and a thousand ideas for the next story

there is January snow to shovel from
the driveway and sidewalk again and again

there are books in the library to sort in an
arcane way like footsteps on the bones of regret

and there is a scattering of time on jimmied history

What Could I Have Done, You Ask

words are embryonic history
genesis on street corners and in alleys –

and how you sit in front of your window
watching chipmunks and chickadees compete
in the snow-banks of the patio
for the seeds you spread (and by running
to the window to chase away squirrels
and back to your seat) in a scene which conforms

to your sense of what is fair in life
and who will and who won’t survive

and how worlds drown in the bile of events

how you are helpless in the face of aggression
yet aggrieve each event you can’t conduct

having learned nothing from the true nature of power
which is to become powerless

you weave and weave words into the wonder of stories
and tell them on every street corner of this room

until their repetition becomes the history of one