North of Reality

2011-10-19T17:57:00.001-07:00

If I’ve imagined dawn Degas

(and oh, the camera will lie
along with me)
dancing to Blues-Ette

and our relationship a warren
in the folds of concrete
draining down from this flat

in trumpet rills that fragment
into voices and a river of words
which congeal in cafés

where we congregate
in a crowd of two
over a cup of coffee or wine

Then I’ve imagined the bond
between your hand motioning
at a passing limousine

and the old woman who tacks
these tables relentlessly
using a tongue we try to ignore

2011-09-14T07:10:00.000-07:00

The View

My chair is twenty slow paces
from the kitchen,
which still leaks
the odour of micro-waved supper.
The journey to the hallway
requires seven steps.
Another six brings me to
the washroom door.
It's been a week since
I last walked the distance
to the entrance.
On my right, the open window
gives me a view of the gardens,
beyond which the parking lot
is almost empty.
Muffled Ravel wafts through
the window screen,
and like black flies,
feasts on my ears.
The book I've read
and I'm reading is cracked open,
a crustacean's carapace.
The stars are snow,
the moon a drift
to the window sill,
the curtains a night
which waits to be drawn.

2011-08-30T18:18:00.000-07:00

Yellowknife

Having gone to Yellowknife, though not
above the tree line and having walked
in Yellowknife on streets bisecting
the now and then and having seen
the scraping of the earth’s carapace
against a sky with clouds, water with
boats and planes two-legged at exactly
the demarcation point between
earth and air, I wonder how anything
can exist there that is not a playing card
flipped down on a table piled with chips,
an open bottle of vodka, a primed rifle,
the promise of an unborn child, chill
northern lights, a hand reaching for
a hand, the winter cold that cauterizes
pain, a desire extended beyond the snow,
into the warmth of a ferocious love.

Arriving

2011-07-20T18:04:00.000-07:00

With money, jet-setting through
fragile clouds and the runway appears,
beacon and umbilical cord
Icarus severed as he ascended.

By car down the spewing artery,
towns truncated in the rear-view,
signs singing the pleasures of,
a cheap motel, a clean bed.

With camera and gray purpose,
recording each step as though
film noir, exaggerated magnitude,
denouement in the middle of

cathartic climax — lost tourist,
reaches for the expectation
and finds a woman who serves
him a glass of wine, baguette,

cheese, smiles with the same
smile as the girl at the meat counter,
Saturday morning, farmer’s market,
the corner of King and Cedar, home.

Canadian Music

2011-07-15T19:03:00.000-07:00

did I mention the northern lights
a walk along dolomite cliffs and
a Massasauga slinking sunrise

just when the refuse trucks begin
picking up on Queen Street
and Lake Ontario shimmers —

did I footnote tainted handguns
crawling into deep pockets
braying against a thousand pasts

like banshees of outdoor patios
and what you hear from someone
at the last spring wedding —

did I include a footnote for taxes
and insert a sip of cottage craft
beer as the sun slips out

and lands on treetops by the river
humming a native song
about native crafts and cigarettes —

did I do all that and retain
what Canada is — a community
of people milling around

And You Said Rename Me

2011-07-14T20:16:00.000-07:00

In this photo you smile, your eyes
wander west where the sun catches
tenements and a river tease. There’s
a hint of heat in the way flags hang
as limp as promises. Out of focus
doors are neither open nor closed.
I drove that day, for the first time,
after you unravelled into
a thousand unresolved revolts
during our journey to Sauble Beach.
It was nothing, just a gesture
of faith in the afterlife of events.

The camera wanders the fields
and footsteps between then
and now, you perched on a rock
almost falling into the Grand River,
you holding our daughter,
you finishing a 10K run, exhausted,
you in Egypt, in front of the Sphinx,
you sitting across from me,
breakfast served, not an event
on the line between the maiden
and the matron unrecorded.

Dust Storm

2011-07-12T18:33:00.001-07:00

Own dust, own wind, own a hand reaching
for a glass of water and voices
eating history at the casual table
beside the casual roadway — observe
one traveler and another pass lost
and seeking direction under an unrelenting
sun — one page in a long novel open
to reveal a plot which is a snippet of
time — a snippet of a man found near
railway tracks watching a receding train
agitate Queen Anne’s Lace, kick up dust.

Listening

2011-06-22T16:41:00.001-07:00

to the heartbeats of

photographs in an album
page by page and

time a bungee cord
we between progress and departure point

inertia and the force of weight placed
upon our shoulders.

Sisyphus eats a cheeseburger
while his children roll away grandchildren
in the curled horizons of turning pages.

I’ll admit to you our first kiss is still a taste in my mouth
and your breath in my ear storm
that disturbs these chaste rainless summer days
without crisis and paint spattered by our random brush.

My eyes and ears are saturated
my tongue tangled in before
my hands wrapped around an image
of two walking down a dirt road.

Queen Ann’s lace blooms
a hawk and crow draft noon air
which hovers in the creases of cedar rail fence
the demarcation between crop and weed.

Somewhere beyond this window cage
looking onto parking lot
this sound of footsteps in a hallway
where time peels from the walls

I position you with arms folded
eyes unencumbered by the past
a lightening strike on the peneplain
between today and yesterday.

Bitches Brew

2011-05-29T13:49:00.000-07:00

these easy words are concrete
ballads stratified by time
lips in a line extended
into a phrase that ascends
from resurrection to resurrection

calcified and cantankerous keys
screech and shimmy through —

this is a fallow time pool
this is a light in that moment
between on and off
this is a street sign
bent by a left turning horn
this is an open window
during an rainstorm
this is a tip left on
an unsanitary table top
in a five and dime diner
because greater things matter
and the lesser are irritating ghosts —

this is sound which is also heartbeat
and blood flow between the extremities
of feet and hands and ears which hear
time as a chord that escapes
before the next bar begins

untranslatable through the distance
chasing action and reaction
the place on the map which
denotes journey
and ignores arrival as an end

Writing 101

2011-05-20T15:56:00.001-07:00

These are very short times,
very short thoughts —
momentary clarity against
a lifetime of night —
something glimpsed in swirling streetlight
and rain falls, slow concrete
soaks it up, wears it like a medal,
rumbles with the inertia
a blind man must feel just before
each step of faith, each assumption
that the world exists
as a predictable memory
and that the touch which touches
the unexpected is quite normal —
quite visible if only
we can imagine.

2011-05-17T17:17:00.000-07:00

The Perfect Ocean

These waves. Words
words and more
until a shoreline pounces
consumes and spits
meaning into the sun’s face.
And the sun bows
to the many events
unfolding like a rose
in June — for each event
a petal and for each meaning
a land mark of concrete
or cafe or walkway between
bent birch and raised
glasses. For each
emotion a place marker
that remains like
a lighthouse against rocks
and rocky results.
For each moment
others nestling against
and suffocating
until at that nadir
of asphyxiation
we realize a meaning
which could never exist
except when
meaning no longer exists.

We call that love.

2011-05-02T18:06:00.001-07:00

Bob on Woody

I’ll sing songs out of tune
until the next wave breaks
against a concrete pier

and the moon is a door
the door is a window
the window opens slowly

distant meadow air enters
into the urban cocoon
bathed in the light of Chardonnay

on a night when an owl
hovers over its prey
in the light discarded

by two lovers arguing
forever concrete on the corner
of King and Frederick

where the tri-city bus stops
for a moment disgorging
the Saturday crowd

and the homeless parade
forth and back past
all the locked stores

forever not shopping
for designer brands
and bleeding edge gadgets

forever the masses
on a dirt road stretched
from east to west Europe

and it’s near the end
of the war when realignment
is being cleared like rubble

and all the songs which swim
in the winds of memory
are twisted into the knots

of loss and change and impossible metamorphosis.

Baby Boom

2011-04-30T16:08:00.001-07:00

Listening to Dylan
in a dark room, the future
unfolding in the semaphore
of street lights, grackle
defines the sun low,
blowing off a spring day,
and I never crossed Canada,
never left my mind
dangling on a street light,
a hydro line linking
one side of desolation
with the other, never saw
reality through the fog
of smoke and beer, never
strolled the politics
of love and war, never
carried flowers to the altar
of coffee on Yonge Street,
five o’clock, Bay Street
emptying and all the musicians
tuning up for another night
leading into morning,
just before rush hour,
just before the TSX begins
to spin out the fairytale
story of wealth, though Bob
always had another idea
of the meaning of life,
yet it’s so hard, so hard
to leave the present behind
and accept a future of
lyric-driven reality.

Acid Rock Accordion

2011-04-29T15:52:00.000-07:00

this is a note for you / this is text to you / this is Toronto
spring and rain canters / down Queen Street / a robin hugs
black limb reverently / hippies battle beats battle / the
boredom of technology in a coffee shop / honey-glazed

doughnuts sit / settled in smoke sermons to the street / steep
and step into a song / singer at a traffic light stopped / singer
in a bar / singer on / the concrete beach / speaking
in a certain way / about certain things / and this is when
Jimi Hendrix never / owned a guitar / never riffed / with
strings / but owned an accordion in a beat-up case / battled
the polka into an urban wail / turned the gut / the caustic
chords into / the way words break / and convolute and
hum / and swell and cascade B&W montage / a flicker-step
a flicker-thought / a flicker-poem posed / on that cliff
dividing / the next polka wedding song / and the freedom
of an acid mind / lost in the moment of / acid rock accordion

West Montrose After Rain

2011-04-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

River's spilling over its banks,
Canada goose on her nest.

This is a contest between
nature and dams,

the season of drought
and vacationers in boats.

Wilderness is not a time,
but rather a place.

2011-04-27T18:33:00.000-07:00

New Year, Detritus

leaves refuse to be
blown away
as do memories
and the way I continue
to return to
all the known paths —

reruns, reruns
and nothing changes
even though the weight
of our passage destroys —

in every new flavor
a taste of the past

Dear M

2011-04-26T18:02:00.001-07:00

you wonder who I am —
well, I’m mostly music
with wine — and time
is a cravat for informal
occasions, such as

this, when you phone
late at night, catch
me by surprise,
and I imagine you

asleep and wishing for
tomorrow to fracture
your reality just a little bit
and you ask

for his number so you can
talk to him, as though
he isn’t dead —

for three years now,
and we went on
when you remained —

loyal, innocent, dropping
the leaves of your life
as though it is December
and a storm
with snow is moving
across the texture
of our descent.

Return Home?

2011-04-26T16:45:00.001-07:00

On the way to work,
I drive down a street where I lived,
when I was an initiate Canadian.
The house in question sits
beside a spur-line connecting
Kitchener and Waterloo.

I recall walking those rails
on the way to downtown Kitchener
and it was a surprisingly hot
December day, my twelfth birthday.

Five of us were off to see a movie.
We placed pennies on the track,
waited for a train to turn them
into thin copper sheets.

There is inertia in the movement
of boxcars supplying commerce
and time is impossible to stop,
turning reality into shivers
of what once occurred.

Like the slope across the road
from that early home,
where I tobogganed the winter
of 1953. It was an Alpine slope,
today just a dip, easily negotiated
by a good Sears lawnmower.

It Began to Rain

2011-04-25T17:35:00.000-07:00

And it was hell at work,
the kind of day when everyone
separates into a thousand
parts of maggots racing

And I consumed too many
minutes, too many faces,
too many contractor names,
too much ink keeping records

Things drifted and shifted
into new shapes without
permanence and then it was
time to go home

The car began with a start
and I shed skins for skins

Wash Day

2011-04-24T13:49:00.001-07:00

described as ramp
though I imagine washboard —
Upper Beamer Falls
is fat with spring run-off

it’s a scramble down
muddy slope to dolomite,
then hop-scotch to
the water’s edge

a slow shutter speed
transforms the flow
into thick, lazy milk
and doesn’t record what

I touched — something
to bring on this leprosy
infecting my hands —
this immune system malaise

Crow

2011-04-24T13:36:00.000-07:00

and highway carrion,
the wayward fields,
shadow against snow,
raucous dawn revile,
ebony in the furthest
outreach of faith,
as when rusted nails
fall from crosses
and rain rails against
the resurrection of soul —

a murder passes over

Election, Plus One Week

2011-04-22T14:04:00.000-07:00

rain creases
Spring and footnotes
how the state changes

(autocracy, democracy, a despotism of desire and free will
stuffed into a trunk, transported to —
the gun-free constitution of fists and knives, drill-presses,
unions, assembly lines, beds in a brothel, theatre
at the corner between red lights, music from a shoe box,
guns in the hands of the army)

how the state is
bifurcation to the n degree,
something to vote for,
to disagree about,
to stalemate
with the desires of those
who have a special interest

Stories From Yesterday

2011-04-22T13:47:00.001-07:00

History is funny this way. Memory
changes from caterpillar to butterfly,
the way we have been taught
to imagine it, but history might
just as well reverse and from flight,
digress to crawl along the borders
of a leaf. Explosion, implosion —
there is no GPS to guide us
through life and it’s just too easy
to think the descending road
is ascending to the next crest.

Inspiration

2011-04-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

With wine,
everything is a poem,
loose emotions felt.

Words shed morality,
dance naked,
slap the silent air,
the space between.

And every comma
is performance,
a monumental event.

Though I spin
in the maelstrom,
voyager between
the unrepentant seas
of pronoun,
verb and tense.

Evening Rain, Family Visiting

2011-04-19T18:38:00.001-07:00

Old photos are stepping-stones
through conversation, what is lost,
what has been woven into myth —
where each angle has a different outcome,
a different destination reached —
and the room is filled with liars of the truth.

Adrift

2011-04-18T17:58:00.000-07:00

The sound of separation is silence,
as though two black holes are slowly
moving in unpredictable directions,
all activity, all voices sucked inward
through kinetic arms and legs,
through smoke signals, through
post-it notes, through emails and
phone calls — all sucked inward
to form a cold, ebony egg which
resists all attempts to crack it open.

Weather Report

2011-04-17T13:30:00.001-07:00

Snow on April 17. Won’t stop falling.
The white world has returned.

Clicking through on-line photos
of tornado damage along the east
American coast. Devastation.

It’s more pleasant to think of hot
and dry summers when grapes
grow small and concentrated
producing great vintages.

So much unharnessed power
like an argument just before
midnight —fury blowing
across the skins of our lives.