The Aging Parent Brings Guilt


If I could die
sometime before the information age
I wouldn’t have to know

how burnt leaves find deep gutters
in sub-divisions stamped
upon wild topography

before graders, before steam shovels
and boundary lines
the social level directing smoke

from unattended barbecues–

before I remember you
standing between the maple and the pine
staring into the distance

as though the horizon is Slovakia
on a summer evening,
boats negotiating the Danube

chickens in the graveyard
like tarnished memories of where
they’ve been– port to port to port–

wave to wave in the time machine









advocacy

at ten in a narrow room
in the chemical drift of air
from bowels and umbilical chords
we converse about
the care of one patient,
the potential to meet certain
standards and once there
that patient
to be unleashed upon the world
ephemeral/translucent
as though reality can be sloughed
for the greater dream
of a budget balanced
by every minute saved
in hospital ware










A Season Sensed Out of Season

Oh October–
brittle wind slapping the granite faces
of a downtown buried in
the important game of business–
let’s find the reason for shoes
on the beach and mutual funds
in the cribs of babies crying because
it’s too far past feeding time–
let’s find the celebration in leaves
curled down sidewalks, across
railway tracks and into the back yards
of old men with rakes and bad backs–
let’s make money–
let’s allow cold lovers in outdoor cafés
one last hug under an extinguishing sun,
one last kiss with brittle lips
that taste like wine and sex–
let’s feel our words lose their strength
in stingy sentences, in lame gaits
down hallways, through bars,
to the theater, in the aisles of grocery stores,
in churches, in the office;
while we walk to our chair facing
the western neighbourhood
through insensate panes, where a snowflake
drifts for a moment, confused
by whether it’s a fragment
of funeral gown, or genesis.









On the Assumption That Y is my Lover

This is a spontaneous desire
and I’m walking home to nowhere.

During the sunset of words on a plane
spanning pages as though history,

the knife I use to carve has gone mad,
slicing crescent moons from the fingertips

of my memories. I have
nowhere to go, no destination to find.

This is the result of expunging assimilation,
leaving those distinct traces of self

like bread crumbs on a roadway leading
into the abyss of between you and I,

the point where we decide who is
rock and who is wave–

who is wind society and who
is rain, the relationship somewhere

between love and a rotting place.









This Knowledge

everything is exposed by light–
I’ve walked down that trail
beside river and time–
fished the waters of memory
until waterfalls wash away
the lingering odour of life

and light follows me one
breath at a time–across
the savannah of days–
stepladder down the procession
of experience–hidden
acorns on an unbiased field









Songwriter


Know that I can’t sing a right-sided note,
but I wrote the words and that chord,
which hangs like a cloud on the brim
of a deep winter’s day–which flies
like an insane sunbeam down the alley
of the chorus–know that I cried
when I played it with the accompaniment
of a broken voice, which yours has healed.










Speed Bumps


sure, time, the origami memories
you fly thought early morning hours,
crash against these windows,
not those looking into the Danube’s maw

and claw through a million years

life is a fractal forever mimicking
greater things like stars and planets careening
through the void you feel so
dearly as the space between a window

and six squirrels running the hydro lines

time is one moment hop-stepping
after another until I see you walking Chaplin step down
the boulevard with your cane followed by your shadow’s
shadow’s shadow’s shadow forever looking in

to the empty places of disappeared things and events

Generations

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

Random Thoughts While Responding to Alarms

I've never measured my steps
with the exact science of a mathematical sentence

not on these streets so far from where I was born
not having jumped through the hoop of change
so often that there is a blur between coal chutes and ATM's

I was torn from my homeland by circumstance
and given a country and a culture to learn

perhaps I've been in metamorphosis too long
to understand one equation from the next
one foot placed on concrete the other on a dissolving shoreline

just as one arm is placed across your heart
the other giving birth to another verse

today as I sit at the security desk alarms flash
by in ever-changing rhythms disolving to reform again
like this city which renews and grows with cancerous intent

the distance between my workplace and home is measured and set
the distance between my loves is variable and calculated with potential

A Poet Staggers

downtown and words fail away
in the same way the slope in stages negotiates
its route to flood plain awash
in swallows/finches/the stadium
wave into May

this path follows the river/peeks out
at gravestones of meadows become
corn fields becoming subdivisions
with their severe formality to line/function
expanding tax base

I snap photos of mid-metamorphosis/there are
no words/just muddy path/fading
trilliums in tree toes/faux
kame hillocks dotting the ripped
flesh of sprawling gravel pit

we imagine downtown on aging continental ice
shivering winds tracing grey snow
from Whitehorse to Albany/a crowd
of carrier pigeons fingering the downdrafts
of a wordless world

in silence we hike home

Dear C/I Dreamt

last night ice boxes danced down
coal chutes/autumn’s jaws opened to
release/a windfall of leaves and we
somersaulted into a sea of ethereal events

do you remember the CPR rhythm to
resuscitate your laughter on Haliburton
dock/me chasing you into retreating tide
one Nova Scotian summer night

how I cried when L & M were born/
perceived no other joy beyond
the realization unfolded time had paused
a moment/before resuming to morph

I write notes in Sauble sands
this spring day/I have become
a book/pages well-thumbed by experience
and downtrodden hope

I awoke at three wondering if
a beach dreams highlands/hears the faint
conversations of its voice
riding winds falling from

those glacial/urban/pyroclastic heights

The Fiddle

where has the north sea gone
and icebergs negotiating whales and whaling songs

I’m east and I’m west and I’m climbing the rock

there is no reason not to believe Brighton Rock or St. John’s
the love songs of cod in the Arctic Sea

we’ll eat cod tongues as the sun scratches
sharp rocks of Labrador/the waves of Newfoundland

and plays hop-scotch across the mining field of Wales

I am a melody and a memory in amber chords/I am
the tides of St Andrews by the Sea flowing endlessly

to battle the foundation of a newfound country

where has the fiddle gone
and history/the lyrics to its convoluted song

Note to the Hyacinth Lady

The last snow has been
stolen from sere woods
across Lackner Boulevard
where I find trilliums and jack-in-the-pulpits
impatient (and moss slowly eating horizontal
trees limbs). Hyacinths are old
news. Geese protect goslings. Lounge
chairs crowd the deck along with
the cleaned barbecue. Grackles
have returned to reclaim the back
yard cedars. The snow shovel
hangs in the garage. The snow blower is stored
off to the side and last fall’s unfinished
refinishing projects have room
to sprawl where a car has so seldom been parked.
I am one year closer to the hope I can
retire. The kitchen needs a phoenix’s touch
as does the outside of the house. It’s eight
o’clock and the sun has yet to set. What time
is it now in Afghanistan? Today in the Sunday
Sun there was an article about our lost
compatriots. For each death was a picture
of them young on a black and white beach
riding a tricycle or posing for hockey
team photos. My mother will be eighty-eight
this year. I grew up with her stories
of the war in Slovakia. She never forgot
the price of exaggerated dreams nor how
people can be defined not by who or what
they are but by agenda and the need to consume
everything the eye can see. She says
this is history again and again and again. I will
retire this year. The days are warming
and lengthening. The gales of
November will find me prepared.

A Forgotten Conversation We Must Have Had

Mostly meaning is a place-setting of words
while weighty matters occur around
the event of cobbling together a sentence to explain.

(When nothing touches or feels.)

Then we parse back to genesis, congratulate ourselves,
sleuths discovering that need. A poem, a book,
the way a table is slanted to the door just so, just so.

And the wave rises again because all waves are forgotten
once they reach the shivering beach. Only the pebbles
and sand retain a fading memory of having been

at a place and at a time. (For a while, no more than that.)

Interpretation

I no longer believe the language of anything but trees

I no longer believe the language of anything but rocks

I no longer believe what my eyes see/they lie

we can create anything we imagine but the clouds
will not change/the sidewalk still exercises between
squat and steroid buildings/a table by the water hears
the difference in the songs of evapotranspiration
and ice/your voice draws me to you

I will no longer look for snow in summer clouds

I will no longer be influenced by the handcuffs of money

I will no longer regret each moment lost to anything but the plan

The Seasons in Two Rhythms


the sun isn’t dim (by five) on falling
snow and drifts lashed to rising boulevards
(so far north from forgetfulness)

at eight o’clock Kitchener waits
for the sun to set on greening lawns
and the months of despair

we’re again fifteen (or younger still)
and growing to meet the hours becoming
days dancing their memory dance

we can forget that in our bodies October
leaves still fall to be picked up by a restless
wind and that promise of lasting snow

For Those Shadows Beckoning

The poltergeist moves amongst us
pyroclastic as though
rebuilding the past.

A lost insect eating through onion skins
it lacks sea legs. I’ve memories of drinking Coke
on a Georgian Bay beach.

That was before this and what
happened in between. A mountain
has grown from the coarse summer sand.

Such obstacles abound. No voices I have
can scale these realities. Rely on fire
and brimstone. Rely on rain and wind

to return us to the beach. In time.