Viking Ship Museum, Oslo, Norway 

A Traveller's Apology

How right that
the language of buildings
(though dressed differently from
country to country) is universal.

We recognize a bedroom and the bath—
we enter rooms through doors,
view the countryside through
windows (where a cloud is always
up) and roadways, paths, from
dwelling to dwelling are
unconscious signposts directing us
to an understood destination.

If only language—that glue binding
our minds to our experiences—
were that easy.

Let's converse in the poetry
of doorknobs and blinds—
the way blue paint has peeled
from the windowsill as couplets
(over a division of rhyme)—
how a careless pot has wandered
into the haiku of flour/sigar/
salt and pepper cannisters—
how the piano-key staircase
is frantic with the iambs of laughing children.

The language of a street corner—
in lines and in stores,
at airports and over dinner—
that language is the craft
of time and place—an argument
of cultures—too often so right
at latitude 43 and so wrong
about the 67th.

Lofoten Summer Night 

The Sea, Lofoten 

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The Train

The train is the blues
travelling through back yards
where scabs are exposed.

The train is what we hear
at midnight unable to sleep.

The train is a penny placed
on rusty rails behind
the strip mall and flatened.

The train is that distance between
where we are and where we remember being.

Aspect

in fields of tobacco
I would ride the machine and prime leaves
dreaming about our nights—together—

call it love—or phemones singing the future fantastic—
though anyone else—

would you call it magic—this inability to explain
what seems so simple for a moment

I never imagined you to be smoke and mirrors—
but rather a tenant in a shared building—

you facing east and I facing west as we view
the sun on a horizon forever defining the same land—
even if we can only hold a conversation in north and south

Billy Blood and the Hijackers of Time

At the campfire, he played guitar and sang
until the last beer was drowned.

Against night’s blinds, cigarettes were fireflies
dancing languid cymbal-brush waves.

Wind-scattered cormorants slept as far as Hope Bay;
an owl cut the Milky Way in half.

‘Once upon a time,’ he thought—‘once upon a time in the spider’s
web of politics and guns; high tide, rogue moon—

once upon a time on dusty streets, in raucous café’s
where 60’s hobos waited for the last milk wagon

out of time, searched for Eden in wood-lots,
spaceships and permafrost—once upon a time.’

He walked the path to his car, placed the guitar in the trunk
and wrapped himself in the night’s sentences.

Paragraphs pooled against parking-lot lights. ‘The world is
an airport, each plane departing events.

I need a chair on which to sit, a book to read,
but every book is copyrighted by me.

Planes leave erratically,
ignore every schedule.’

Cruise Night Downtown One 

Cruise Night Downtown Two 

Cruise Night Downtown 3 

Monday Morning, Early Meeting

Monday Morning, Early Meeting

I’ll create a religion this evening
that prays

to how I feel about sunrise

and sidewalks snaking like dead trees
through the horizon’s eaves.

I’ll baptize the events of making bread
evangelize a button and loose thread

fluttering—a tattered flag
in the hallways of a Sunday event.

I’ll move into the temple of my thoughts
into the music of my talk

as the subway car spins through
the apple’s core.

I’ll hear no sounds and see no bodies
only visualize the destination

of my prayers.

Work Poems

The Infrastructure of a Cog

Elemental is the distance between building
A & B this year. Information packets flow—
hard copy business realities.

This is maintained by ‘Timmy’s’ coffee—
suspenders and cigarettes—an atmosphere of 50’s diner.

We could call it resource conservation,
or recycling. That the environmental by-product
is downward mobility coming to rest
at the feet of poverty—that’s immaterial—
information packets flow.

That Small Book Store Beside the Fish Market

This blink—page there, page gone—
and ideas falling off the earth’s mind—
this newspeak of old events—
don’t tell me society doesn’t need
the ridiculous point of view—don’t
tell me there shouldn’t be countries that
fly under the flag of misinterpreting
the shapes in clouds. An unbalanced ship
has never been able to navigate
from New York to Oslo, yet we are asked
to accept one playing-card construction
of words as enough.

Just don’t throw contradicting ideas around.

Parked for Jazz at the Waterloo Uptown Jazz Festival. 

Sunset over barn, Mennonite country. 

Words on Writing

In a poem we always seem
to find ourselves in another country
where our world walks down
an alley past shut doors.

We wonder about doors
and the mysteries behind.

Phone calls come and go, aeroplanes
pass overhead and the pool party
two doors away boisterously continues.

W really have no time for doors, for keys,
or other implements which may secure.

Poets are voyeurs looking in for a moment,
describing and ignoring the lifetime.

Baffin Island Resort and Spa

Whales

balloons treading sunlight/there’s grace
in fluid lines

we’ve come to watch a window close
and shadows pass/how the ocean’s hollow elbow
holds its children/and memory/and memory

it’s too easy to find sacrificed gods
and blood flowing from sunsets

By Water 

Archaeologists look for personal ornaments and art as proof of symbolic thinking

Archaeologists look for personal ornaments and art as proof of symbolic thinking


Wear clouds.
Fly.
Diminish
the importance of
the ground,
the solid anchor—
wear clouds.
Unravel time.
Reassemble events
as a woodpile.
Deny a tree is responsible.
Wear magic.
Express
your feelings for
the side chairs aligned—
like the stars—
in your dining room.
Perceive the persistence
of what is dead
to influence us.
Be charmed by gravestones.
Shed words.
Be silent
and become the novel
you live.
Manufacture your pages
from clouds.
Fly.

Great Blue Heron 

Jazz for Candlelight and Wounds

Jazz for Candlelight and Wounds

Midnight is shadow—waits by the corner where buses
never stop. A dog barks through open window
and half-moon rides bucking clouds. Midnight lights
her slender cigarette, exhales the bones of misspent
love affairs. There’s a mystery in that doorway leading
to the grand piano and amber rye. Gargoyles
dance and chuckle in the lengthening hallway’s angles.
Cicadas sound like gunshots—the alley is
a gaping wound. Breathing trickles in the gutter
and footsteps fill the streetlights. Midnight whistles
a monotone tune—today disappears, another page
is turned. The stranger’s secret will finally be revealed.

Midnight and Hammett are trapped in a sultry duet.
Cue the quartet—Coltrane appreciates this music.

When Shall We Three Meet Again? 

June 10, 2006. Ready to leave. 

Surfacing Into Thursday

The sun’s shining. Yesterday,
it rained.
I’m taking the garbage out—
it’s Thursday.
We need more coffee—
there should be a weekend sale
at Costco.
The paper is late and so
am I.
No time to read emails this
morning.
Life seems so rushed lately,
as though I’m lead-footing it.

If no one touches me at work today,
I’ll survive.
Don’t plague me with your problems,
the fact your life isn’t as perfect
as you tell everyone it is
each and every coffee break.

The Louisiana-humid air hangs;
a coda above
refracted sun. Let
the day unfold with its lines
stolen from a cut-rate porno flick.

I’m driving out of town
and so are they.
We’re the tide,
first trained in the primordial soup
to float, to do the backstroke:
to engineer our survival against
the shore’s wasteland.

Give me my coffee—give me
my morning news. In exchange,
I’ll give you the emptiest eight hours
out of every twenty-four.

Songs From the Corporate Chuck Wagon

Songs From the Corporate Chuck-Wagon

You got to be Cowboy to pony
through today, spurs
to bank book, straight-up in

enterprise’s saddle, to negotiate
tumbleweed Starbucks,
morning’s first cigarette

like abrasive prairie
dust howling down your throat—

you got to be Cowboy, on I 75,
pinched by the herd
(slow-motion stampede into

thunderhead-defined city),
fording market river, lassoing
driftwood profit, thalwag man

of the world, tipping your VISA
Gold hat to each passing merger—

you got to be Cowboy to survive
snow love winters in deep hope foothills,
desperate, camped under frozen

touch forests, living for moments
of tenderness and promises, before
storms of lingering withdrawal—

you got to be Cowboy, forever
stretched toward horizon, to gallop
upward from each training course,

degree in holster, schemes in saddlebag—
straight-shooter of the greenback sage.

How To Get Published

How To Get Published

Lie still, spread your verbs
to examination.

Don’t quiver in the assault
of attacking adverbs.

Be benign to the voices which will never understand
beyond the field of their own vision.

Realize there is not one noun
which will spell ‘world’.

Adjectives are perception
and perception is the tide time deposits

on the beaches of experience,
the rocks beyond which we float.

Be accelerate to floatation devices
delivering you to the beach.

Begin to crawl and never stop.

When the night moved through my room, crystal by crystal

There isn’t one way to bear witness
to the world, or one place to feel its spine
coiled squamata-like
through the lustrous energy of light.

Disassembling alchemist,
I pour between
the beakers of one moment
and the next.

The horizon is a fallow field
accepting the seed of moon,
the trees are shrouds draped over
a paralyzed asphalt river.

I’ll travel blind under this strangle of clouds,
I’ll bury the pieces of myself
in deep woods and I’ll search for them
in the bleak ice after time.

Lips 

Ebydale Woods Jack-In-The-Pulpit

The Fine Art of Maintaining Virginity After Use

long after I looked at the scars—
long after I saw time draped across
this tapestry of skin
as though a snapshot expresses anything—

when the moon was folded over
asphalt and the sighs night releases in August—

in that precise moment the assembly line falters
and everything sails out of windows
into the woods/into the sun’s seine—

then I know that my eyes are
an airbrush for the moment passing
like ants/linear on the linoleum of this place—

I walk the rails/tightrope walker falling
into the never ending sea of possibility and belief

Conversation and Confusion

So what about asphalt,
thin folds of sky draped over
downtown offices,
light laughing into windows,
the distance between the words
and the listener?

So what about this rhythm
consuming any hope,
any time,
the desire to slow down in a field
of blossoming interpretations
uncertain of where the landmines

are placed in such a simple
sentence on such a simple spring day.

Prudham's, Friday Night 

For the Surprises

stretched out on
the flat page—
meaning tanning in

the sun of a dictionary—
open menu—
construct your meal

a consumption of moments
on the piazza—
relive and relive again

the one word which tipped time into
the maelstrom carving a new future
out of the topography of what we share

Welland Canal, Lock Two, Waiting For The Drawbridge 

Welland Canal, Lock Two, passing the drawbridge. 

Red-Winged Blackbird 

Sunrise over Zeller Drive 

In Steckle Woods, the trilliums are blooming. 

---

Moments About

I’m writing poems to the echoes.
Life was here, but caught the eight-fifteen
somewhere. Sat in the day coach listening
to the same sound that opened
the petals of a country. Only sadness remains,
guest unwilling to go home, full
of anecdotes about. And in the rooms
I remember, words are arranged like furniture.
Easy chair for contemplation, coffee table
a wake-me-up call. I’m writing lyrics
for the shadows so they can sing.
A choir standing on the rift between
imagination and the dishes.

Poem as Immigrant

The geomorphology sun creates—
tablecloth
spilled across morning.

Although stitch-worked into
our conversation,
fantasy seems as plain as
the phone bill,
bank statement, or that note left on
the counter
beside the spent dishes still to be resurrected
after last night's corpse,
along with our enervated mood.

(Snuffed candle/closed book/bar clothes in the closet' s furthest corner.)

I drift with dragons
through the ether of purple sun.
After breakfast,
my molar hurts again.
The rose has genuflected to the table—
a dance to come?
The garage should be swept,
our car washed.

Let me stand
on the first leaked strands of today,
as though I'm at the train station,
surveying schedules in
another language,
for destinations that mean nothing,
except a difference from what exists,
from the earth on which
my feet seek to gain a purchase.

Let me empty my knapsack of experience
for security,
watch it disappear
as mist at the foot of buildings,
watch it creep down alleys,
through unlocked doors,
listen to it laugh at jokes and situations
I don't understand—
let me imagine a grey coat,
black shoes, well-worn pants,
a certain gait and an acquired romance
with the mysteries a stranger sees.

Friday Night 1 

Friday Night 2 

Friday Night, 3 

Morning Walk 

Just After Sunrise