Folding Laundry

on the bike expressway slices wind
and clouds three cities away genuflect –

you fold my laundry, contemplate
ironing work shirts, exploring pant creases,
pushing socks into drawer moraines –

trucks drag commerce around the Maypole
of profit as though ribbons and dance
will progress one minute into the next –

there is a religion in folded shirts
a salvation in going to work
after a hearty and healthy breakfast –

when the rain (which has revved dark clouds
all morning) falls the streets become
an obstacle course of occasional pools –

when hell is loosened on asphalt and concrete
the Eden of fresh folded laundry sustains us all

East European Immigrants Outside Tim Hortons, Sunday Morning

each hole in the universe is plugged
with the language of fuck
and I wonder – where are your women –
how are your dishes sorted
in apartment kitchens – spoons arranged
in the graveyard order of burning memories
and why does the sun set so differently
on grass in Canada

though this is morning
and coffee brews inside between
cigarette chains and scandalous conversations
about the recession,
the entropy of unemployment,
Dubcek, Milosevic,
the water fountains in Sarajevo –

King Street closed to create
a new roadscape, a new place
to cruise, so that the distance between
Yugoslavia and Kitchener
can be measured in empty coffee cups,
as addictive as unrealized dreams

Arrival in the Emptiness

you in Afghanistan who remember
only war – you on a dirt road
slicing your life in half – you leaning
against a full train, picture captured
by a photographer from Finland –

don’t think yourself unique, or jewel
in amber, wind-song in downtown
eaves, the last inhalation of dust
before rainfall on rusted rails –
midnight whistle of departure
from port – don’t think yourself
arrival on the plane of yesterday –

the wind which whipped waves
against the breast of Europe,
the wind which unsettled each
carefully constructed agreement –
that wind now is a sullen traveler
on Asian dirt roads, the Indian cone,
Africa waiting for the circle
to be closed – that wind swirls dust
as though trying to recreate

and in recreation, Afghanistan remains,
constant, steps from one IED
to the next – a discussion in old age
homes, where the waltz at meals
is regression to when – time
was delivered in body bags –
one stillborn future after the next

Creating Enemies by Killing Civilians

Again. It doesn’t end.

The country is a comforter,
each stitch responsible for the whole.

The knife severs threads, pieces of the picture
hang like unwatered flowers in July.

That’s the confusion. The greatest fear
and not the greatest hope.

Every road is another colour of blood.
Every house the shell of a dream.

Saviours incite death. In the name of.

In time, no names are remembered.

If the Sun Sets, Then Why Don’t Clouds

Think of this as a child’s
innocent question, when
they’re not thinking of God,
or reproduction, or imagining
an image which drops
out of three o’clock
in the morning dreams,
lies on the bedspread for a moment,
then scuttles onto the floor,
where under-the-bed
monsters spy an easy snack.

It might be a chink
in the armour of a decision
made over cocktails Friday evening,
or Saturday morning evaluation
of thick steaks assembly-line perfect,
under glass, at market,
or the rationale for ignoring
the contents of a mountainous
Saturday afternoon to-do jar.

Perhaps it’s the punch line in
a casual conversation
at the near corner, where
the corner people always argue

(airing life from Adirondack chairs
positioned just inside their two-car
garage, beers at the ready),

for the amusement of walking
dog owners, two dogs pulling
the real world in different
directions, dog barking
as twisted as cohabitating leashes.

More likely, it’s the answer
to a crossword question
Sunday morning, when the paper
arrives, as heavy as
an intercontinental missile –
the kind we were warned about,
were instructed to go
down to the basement before
their arrival, find an exterior wall,
put our heads between upraised knees,
pray perhaps, but more likely
just wait for chance to hit or miss,
for life to keep shining,
or to suddenly set
under a nuclear cloud.

Return

Light years from where I was,
it’s time to go home.

(Not curl into a ball, evaporate
and fall, rain against windows
with an alien view.)

And time to admit that roads are often
blind turns into heavy traffic.

The grid can swallow us, spit us out
sand on sidewalk where industrious ants
have constructed their anti-views.

Time to admit a chair, sunset, the perspective
through maples defines enough

and spectacular vistas into the self
are unnecessary, unwanted and impossible.

Leaving Photos in Obscure Places

A world evolves between
two anchored rocks on sand beach.

(Construct and the (de)construct)

Waves bless permanence in this impermanence,
this seasonal menu from one restaurant.

I think of strobe lights, sectionalized events,
that guess bridging leaps the ocean advances,

or our affairs, between five-thirty and nine
on a summer morning, when the sun staggers

through atmosphere (dull invader) and leaves
a jagged rip, bleeds words which deny

the vanishing footsteps of our progress.

Ghosts And You

Words are condensation on the window
between the maple and my chair -

breakfast dishes form a road from the table
to the sink, moraines on the counter top.

I miss the walks we took for cigarettes,
to the corner store, for fries from the drive-in -

I miss the baby steps and the way September
shed heat, worms in rain, stories with coffee.

I regret first snowfall, leaves clicking polka
in the hedge, the way dreams migrated

south and never returned. I rue twenty thousand
rhymes grown in wine petri dishes,

knocked senseless until they became poems,
anecdotes, lies, the sounds of an accordion

played long past midnight - in immigrant time,
for breakfast, in the milk of gunshots,

dressed in the flesh of uniforms, reciting
the differences between, with falling bomb sentences.

Distance

Now abrades against then.
Sunlight tags clouds, ants on sidewalks,
grass in waves to foundations.

In the sky, fighters flying by
and I run, refugee in a safe country.

My mother remembers skin torn
from bodies, sprayed across her arm,
stranger in another gutter.

You wonder at my moodiness,
it’s hard to explain.

I’m an immigrant in a land
that denies my experiences.
And I’m left to choose.

Is there a right choice, or are all
choices nothing more than denial.

Blood flows differently on different streets.

The Right Side of History:
For Neda Soltan

Evolution is a dividing point.
As is where spilled blood pools.
The right side of rivers receive
sunlight, the left a footnote.

When nothing happens in isolation
and the whole world knows,
death is meaningless
only when night prematurely dawns.

The Visit

I don’t know
where I live, how
will I get home?

Will you take me,
do you know?

How’s Bill, is he
doing well? He’s dead?
When did he die?

My knee hurts,
I hurt it when I fell,
walking across
a curb, there was
ice. I’m worried.

I don’t know where
I live, do you
know? I worked
in Toronto for years.

Did I have children?
How old are they?
They’re too young,
I have to
take care of them,
I worry.

I worry about everything.
Will you take me
home? I’ve forgotten
where I live. Do you
know my children?

I hurt my knee,
I’m worried, I
don’t know. Where I live.

Was I married?
John died, but
I couldn’t go
to the funeral.
I don’t know where.

Do I live
in a nice place?
Will you take me
home? I don’t know
where. I don’t.

Time eats everything.
Do you know where
I live? Will you
take me home?

June and the Sun Sets


Remember what the sun is,
this elongated June evening –
cracked pomegranate, inflamed
silicon, spilled vin de pays,

the predictable result of an often observed event, whose variables can be defined by the components of their composition.

(Composed of atmosphere, transient evaporation/evapotranspiration having reached dew point, refraction through distance and unpredictable emotion.)

Remember aggregates are
a stepping-stone in construction,
the way the pieces do not
predict the whole –

concrete foundations which resist the fetch of events washing against them, wool spun into a thread, frayed ruins which continue to endure into...

but this is another avoidance.
Together, we’ve watched
the sun set – thirty-nine years.
It’s never danced the way we do.

Songs Street Lights Hum

hung above the intersection (Stanley & Yonge), rocking
in June wind (red too long for traffic entering north stage south)

a strip mall on one corner, service station on the other,
advanced green from the burbs to Tim Horton’s

a large sign announces another condo construction,
swimming pool, sauna, games room and security

I think in simple cords, like C, though minor in their strike,
a trill, then full notes changing with tractor-trailer gears

and everyone is shunted through, as though this is
a railway clearing yard – shared concept with fast cars

C will eventually break down and fall into A,
seek a sullen tone, a migrating murder in the sky.

Our Open Wound

is a slow freight train travelling through
the cold air of somewhere.

Word crossings flash red in small towns
with names like, Last Friday, The Unmown Lawn,
Vacation Before New Camera.

Dilapidated warehouses welcome cracked asphalt,
daisies marching to the door behind which are stored
arguments from 1999, love once under moon.

The slow whistle from slow freight
punctuates the occlusion of night between us,
when wine and restaurants won’t heal.

I will come with roses and wait at a station
somewhere on the pyroclastic plains trains inhabit –
tremble on the fault line where so much tumbles

from boxcars, is left unclaimed – a graveyard
in which the tombstones know too much.

Imagination And The Next Moment

We communicate on the almost plain,
herds charging a vanishing point,
because prediction exists in statistics,
not rain moving in from north-west,
felling the deck umbrella, spilling
newly planted annuals into the yard.

Nor is your latest pretense predictable,
that rush into an extended rebuff,
the way reality is coerced into streams
flowing through the peneplain exchange
we walk– a landscape of touch, talk –
troubadour between villages, between life.

If you want, we can go for a walk
through leftover rainbow country,
down the trail where the heron visits,
through the trilliums in spring woods,
across the river’s edge, the gravel pit,
the sunshine ray I don’t understand.

Self Portrait

How harsh and hard my lines
intersect memory, noon sunshine,
ignore those clouds a concern
somewhere in the belly
of experience and summer,
small moments leaking heat,
dust, cracked clay, bleeding
concrete odors spiders exude
in basements, on grass green
and glue for bare feet already turning
gray as though October is
born prescient, always leaves
departing on slow freight trains.

The eyes turned south
are north of destination,
hair longer than social fashion,
mouth open on a word,
tongue turned into verbs,
fingers flexed around
a gesture slipping off
the page of present, past a belt
holding up potential, body half-turned
to poetry, wearing photography,
forever never arriving
at an imagined destination,
the way history arrives in a text –
counterpoint to another version,
another experience, another day added
to the menu, yet never in season.

Moving Pictures


The view is dark
but not without
woodwinds and expectation,

an explanation of character study,
then, when the wings
have been filled with names,

there is panorama
into micro focus,
and we are left awash, almost

drowned in the suddenness
of action,
a confusion of words –

time ticking and terminal,
then running away
in a series of scattered photos.

There isn’t a hand to hold,
not in rain or laughter,
nor is there a place to sleep,

awake, remember and recover
because light is a highway
of this and not that, the place

where I lack this movie’s answers.

After Abstracts


Death leaves,
as well as love.
Feeling abandoned,
time follows.

In the corners
of this room,
a rustling.

I’m riding
my bicycle,
the sun,
in a tu-tu of clouds,
dances the sky

and the moon
which graces
Australia, listens,
learns lyrics
only sung by gypsies

on asphalt bending
into the momentary place
I thought.

A Farewell to Abstracts


Nine this morning,
I sipped coffee
and death walked out.
No look back,
no metal and manufactured
laminates slammed
into a shivering frame.
No, death simply went
and he was gone.

At ten-twelve, love
rose from her place
at the kitchen table.
She ignored me,
the moon remained
in heaven, the air
dividing us refused
to become an ocean
and dishes in the sink
stubbornly huddled
in their grimy coats.
Love followed death
and she was also gone.

At half-past eleven,
I contemplated a lunch
of tuna and lettuce rinds,
heard the whispered pace
of time, neither rapid,
nor slow, in the upstairs
hallway, then descending.
Time ticked and clicked
as he passed my place
in the livingroom.
He briefly glanced
at the blank page
in front of me,
then he was gone.

Alone, I continued
my search for
a word – large enough
to fill an empty page
with poetry – a word
smaller than love,
death, or time, yet
more far-reaching than
the universe of I.

Mind Palpitations After Another


In the valley of city, there are asphalt trees,
direction warbles in the shrubbery of contradictory signs.

Windows are blue pools, which eddy and babble
when opened and closed with the irregularity of care.

The street vendor is a rock, his eyes quartz; radicals
on the dolomite sidewalk when a young girl skips by.

there was a murder / I could mention a name / by tomorrow it will have changed

The Philosophy of Writing

In the end, no matter
how many times
you send out words
cobbled together
in the shape of boomerangs,
none return
and you forever
mourn their absence.

This is the same
desolation you feel
when the music fades,
the drummer stands
and swaggers into the wings.

The audience exits
by the closest door,
deep in conversation
about next week
when the entertainment
will be –
and you are left to linger
in a streetlight circle.

A hesitant wind begins,
trees tango with the moon,
you hear a dog
three blocks away
and no bar is close enough.

You’ve never believed in script writers 

Keep it improvisational,
  is the mantra – wings
through autumn air – that swirl of leaves

our neighbour describes
  when pointing at the maple.
An infestation of clowns has been enticed

to climb in and out of the windows
  of our relationship vehicle –
you plunder their clown greasepaint,

pirouette in their exaggerated footwear,
  mimic their histrionics, speak
slapstick – anything to avoid the heart –

anything to convince the gathered crowd –
  you’re the midway shill for soft landings
onto unforgiving concrete fantasies.

I’m a café umbrella, advertizing beer,
  Toronto skyline, jumbled street lights,
red hand adamant against red light –

taxi avoiding another Saturday night ride check,
  door locks and safe sex,
a salary between nine and five o’clock,

cocoon for our children.  You’re a leaf
  liberated by the dysfunction between
time and how the maple mourns vanished seasons.

Moving On


I’d like to say a few things about the soul
in man, as found on certain streets I’ve walked.

I’d like to confirm my commitment to
the ingress of experience, the egress of
doubt; state that the greatest fear we have is,
once asleep, asleep becomes the solid state.

I’d like to affirm my arms will never reach
across those gulfs I’ve always failed to negotiate,
because my reach is no more than a shadow that
fades just short of racing imagination.

I’d like to make an omelet for breakfast, do
the dishes, straighten the bed, repair the crack
which journeys, unfettered between the bathtub
and the tiles. I’d like to paint the living-room.

All that will mean much more when we’re
prepared to sell this house, than will a poem
taped to the fridge door, bordered by screaming
smiley faces, a ketchup stain and signed,

Don’t forget the mouthwash.

Because the substantial (the corporeal firmament) is validated by light

I think of you, from zygote to senility – as linear and unbroken
history – a woodland walkway defining voyage and destination –
unaltered by external stress – the entire egg, uncracked.

You are a motion picture show, a face and body that flows
from baby fat, through corporate lean, desire, dread and death –
you are a memory, even as events begin to unfold.

I see you twenty years from now, on a cedar bench
by the river’s oxbow, as your light arrives – you wear a scarf
and feed lean birds gathered in frigid November air.

And you are here, across from me, in this café, ordering
croissant and a Turkish coffee – dressed in the skirt
I know so well – it reminds me of wind on hungry sunlight.

On the edges though, you are already gone – the child who in her crib,
gathers night into the mysteries of goodbye – welcomes morning
on the window-sill as the arrival of the first spring phoenix.

I think of you and you are time – midnight train, rainfall waves –
traveller captured in proceeding light – gone yet still arriving.

At The Viet Nam Memorial


forty years later, small truths
are quieter than the wall
where I walk, snap pictures,
attempt to capture essence
in macro – history in photograph

my Californian aunt forwarded an attachment – Dresden
as phoenix, Dresden moving death's stone (my mother
says people jumped into the river and the water burned,
my aunt simply says that she was there and saw it)

my truths aren't large – high school classmate,
American citizen, now soldier,
returned to Canada for a brief visit
before again departing, the summer
of nineteen hundred and seventy
on a tobacco farm with a Georgian
who in November joined the US navy

small truths, few names,
little acreage consumed in Arlington

Portrait of Myself

taken at nine
coffee in cup

a flagon of sunshine and a soupcon of hands –

holding hands holding
the table washes away

cat scurries linoleum with paw-print pixels
lands with aplomb against words and smiles

in the caverns of our understandings
you remain steadfast – in the by-waters
between opposition and argument
you remain dolomite – not easy
but not impossible
so water attests

and I continue the ringmaster of words forever foraging
the itineraries desires manipulate –

a want and am ballad
singer of the impossible songs

1

A poem written on a train travelling from Halifax
to Montreal in nineteen hundred and fifty-two,

as winter leans an elbow
on the tabletop of Canada – that poem
will have soot in its veins and coal for skin.

That poem will sing with the rhythm of small towns
spying from birch forests, crows idle
in steel air and rivers bowed

across the harsh violin of the Canadian shield.
That poem will reach Winnipeg within a week.


2

By the laptop, there is a mouse, card reader and spindle
of fifty DVD’s. I am transfixed
by the new white paper, six hot pixels,

an error message; I fight the compulsion
to play solitaire, isolated

in this cubicle of space, eavesdropping
on the web’s white noise. I cannot envision

a poem journeying as far as
the screen’s dead snow.

H1N1


H1N1 is spread by planes
landing at YVR, YYZ and YUL–
as undeclared vacation souvenirs
packed in the bloodstream,
not in tissue-thin wrapping –
ceramic gods, smuggled Ron,
nouveau pornography – wedged
between soiled underwear.

H1N1 remains undetected by x ray
examinations, dogs and the removal
of uncomfortable travel shoes.
It lacks a passport, it cannot be
described by cross-referencing
existing terrorist profiles
and it is not traceable with
swabs designed to absorb
a hint of explosives residue.

H1N1 treats latex gloves
in the same manner
the German army treated
France’s Maginot Line –
as non-existent resistence.


I recall, via our tour guide,
in two thousand and one,
an historical aside,
translated (from Italian
into English, while travelling
in a van) concerning
the discovery of a cave
filled with human
remains, high in the mountains
of northern Sardinia.
Archeologists determined
that the bodies were not the aftermath
of an unsuccessful conquest campaign;
nor the logical success
of a mass, pathological murderer –
they were instead the victims
of a plague, unceremoniously
gathered and transported
far from human domains.

I imagine graveyards (not caves)
five years from now, with fresh
gravestones dedicated not to a lost love,
an unfortunate twist of history,
but rather to the unfathomable code
of lover H1N1's fatal last kiss.

spring advertises --
so much invested
in one woodland flower

Dresden

after losing her childhood
in Slovakia, would it ever end

she imagined it would,
though she imagined life
in a number of ways

she applied those ways
to Ontario

on the banks of the Grand River
her Nazis cavorted

and when she died
I imagined her walking

down the aisles of Food Basics,
looking for foods she enjoyed

when she was a child in Slovakia

It’s difficult to meet you
in this coffee shop, because
at ten to nine tonight,
on the news between the news,
either you or I will be
dead, body found half in
the Grand River, just where
it intersects the Speed.

Can you consider how
your parents will react,
or mine as well, as they see
your or me splashed across
the vision of our city?

We’re agrarian and Mennonite
and slow progress through
the testicles of higher education.
On King Street, the construction
never ends; an answer is never
found for the malaise of
creeping urban sprawl.

We’re old school and old ways,
going to market every Saturday,
buying sausages and cheese.
And Sunday is family day,
the time to unwind while
winding up into tight bands.

It’s impossible to meet you
in this coffee shop on Monday
morning, when we go our own
ways, when we ignore
the potential of future.

What perseveres is the need for coffee,
the need to extend
our commonalities beyond this
moment, this event,
when we are gathered, not to
honour, but to be alive and live.

Forever beyond the moment.

April 30th, 2009

Now it’s almost May.
The sun sheds warmth
as well as light
and the back yard has been
returned by whatever snow
or winter god held it
hostage for five months.
The grackles have finished
nesting and falling down
the chimney, to be liberated,
as though I’m fishing – hook
and release. And perhaps I am
casting a line and hook
into the returning warm days –
into late evenings, into the eye
of growth and regeneration –
a flat denial that I’m
getting older, slowing down,
anticipating the day when
the world dances by
my chair at a window.

(This is the last day of April and the end of poetry month for this year. I've enjoyed trying to write a poem of some sort every day of this month. A certain level of enthusiasm for writing has returned and I hope to write more consistently and with a greater care for the craft, during the rest of the year.)

Mimic

Words denote events
(or memory) and light is free
to fall from the sun,
glance against window panes,
lovers lounging in café’s
where the Niagara River begins.
Where Niagara falls,
light drools rainbows
which work the American side
without a green card.

I cherish words; play with them
long after their last echoes
have died in alleys;
long after they’ve set sail
on rail lines, in Pullman coaches,
straddled Indian motorcycles,
driven past deserted
drive-in theatres.

I cherish time
and fashion it into
lace necklaces, short stories,
madrigals of conversations,
two drinks by water, a walk
through arboreal forest,
life behind the lens,
sunrise for the mind.

Mermaids in Rain

April unwinds the usual way –
rain today and yesterday’s highs
low, although there is no snow

sitting on the horizon with mermaids,
who comb their hair into clouds,
brush out time fleas – and time does.

I think of flotsam on a beach,
building headlands from the breath
of waves, the reach wind enjoys

down ocean spines – I think of
events, the scree from our tumbling
lives – and during the quiet conversations

mermaids have with wind, I think
imagination holds a greater grip on
us than duty and desire – a greater

need than the ticking time-bomb
which rends the space between
the peace of a solitary tree beside

the ocean and bank accounts,
a house, three children, two pets,
a sport car and Chablis.

Visiting


The conversations are now always variations
on a consistent theme.

You remind me that I was born
in Europe; that you grew up
in Slovakia, near the Danube;
that you enjoyed dancing and village parties,
that before the Germans invaded,
the Jewish shops were all closed on Saturdays
and on Sundays, open through their back doors.

You are still there, though when
the Russian armies liberated through conquest,
the world changed forever,
then forever again when
we arrived in Halifax and boarded
the train, which we travelled on
through night and birch forests until
we disembarked in Kitchener.

You are bitter about your unhappiness
with having had to come to Canada,
with the prejudice against European
refugees so soon after so many didn’t return
and you are bitter that I don’t share your feelings.

I was born in Germany, but I grew up
in Canada and I was educated here as well
and in experience, we are worlds apart.

Sometimes I think of our conversations
as those between two species; those who
ride the waves and those who crawled
onto the beach.

Neither is better, but there is no understanding in differences.

Oracle


the world is over as it begins
(a process of waves and vector to)

the world is transformer and time
in increments of chairs on patios,
in churches, beside busy roads,
stacked in barns, on the fourth deck
of a cruise ship – the world is
there for the audience –

and we all watch and try to unravel the plot

Wine Tour


We are near the terminus of Lake Ontario,
I’ve just stepped out of the shower.
This is a day of touring.

(though what we didn’t know was that)

In Wellington, having finished lunch,
I step out of the restaurant, watch an
EMS fire truck race Main Street,
followed by two pickup trucks.
Volunteer fire department, I think.

We try to leave town, a meat
processing plant is burning down
and our way is detoured. We
stop for a moment, I take pictures
and we find our way
to the next winery.

Returning to where we’re staying,
I mention the fire to someone
serving wine. “Good God”,
she says, “That plant faces the
street where I live.”

Packing


Friday morning,
packing camera gear
and laptop,
preparing for another
weekend away

from / to / walking a mental cusp of almost learning

April warmer than
the snowstorm two weekends
ago, lilacs almost awake,
luggage nervous,
almost in

the back of the car / highway / music / Toronto congestion

I realize there is
a peace that comes
with being a monarch;
the world comes to
you, you don’t have to
chase the world.

Gambling

I start the treadmill, business station on
the small tv, listen to interviews about
what will be – we might just as well consult
a crystal ball, tarot cards, or a Ouija board.

Perhaps one Saturday morning, with April
warming on our fingertips, we could leave
the constant rearrangement of garage world,
stand in the middle of the back yard,

toss prescient straws onto the grass, where
they can be read, like slightly askew pie
charts. We could make vast profits, or, in
the evening, with tea or wine, I could write

a word on the laptop screen – just one word –
and predict the success of the budding poem.

A Man’s Love Song – Midnight


Promising rain, a raspy-tongued
August breeze, swirling city scents,
disturbs the shingles
covering my townhouse flat,
maroons a sliver-sharp scream there
from ocean night below.

I lean across the window sill,
unable to sleep in this heat
and shiver. There’s nothing
to see, the scream’s origin
lives beyond the parking lot lights.

A primal memory uncoils with
the new, yet familiar and I can’t
control the shiver, imagine
a place of twisted ruins
five paces past this night,
where souls keep residence,
where god with work-raw
fingers struggles to reshape,
create and abide.

There, dry bones are rubbed
into dust and stars are given
birth, screaming at the rapacious
lust of the creator – solitary
god – hungry and alone.

I shiver again – is it rape or birth,
this agonized cry washed up
on the dark shore of my earth.


(a very old poem, found in musty files and edited)

Not Captured By My Camera

– yesterday morning
returning upstairs after
time on the treadmill

familiar scratching
in the wood burning
stove pipe leading
to the chimney.

I rushed out
and removed
the cleaning cover.

A grackle stepped out.
There must be

an easier way to
experience resurrection.

God Was Insulted

when you told me there is only one
and one way to look at Him –

never at Wal-Mart, though frequently
spotted purchasing a new shirt and jeans

at Goddessa, ‘for the truly blessed’
in matters of fashion, ethics

or buying arms from America for rebels
who dream of genocide in Africa

He suggested to me, in a lengthy dream,
that he understood the pirates of Somalia

I can’t credit him with any statements,
he has never integrated himself

into the infrastructure of a community

Evening Passes
(a shadeling for Aisha)

The day-long rain abates and the backyard grass
appears much greener. I imagine the lawnmower
in its place in the garage mutter to itself – a sub voce
hope that the deeper green doesn’t mean greater length.

We share a bottle of wine in the livingroom. You read
a book and I try to worry words into a poem. The wine
leaves me too mellow for truths and I concentrate
on the length in its Spanish finish.

I leave you reading and return to my friend laptop,
play solitaire, consider the look of various costumes
of words. I procrastinate, them make a quick decision
and begin stitching together a length of events.

There are no words for political discourse.
Emotions rule the conversation.
And the certainties pile one upon the other,
as snowbanks do – just before the ice age.

The Price of Poetry


For want of a poem,
the dishes are neglected.

For want of clean dishes,
another meal is missed.

For want of a missed meal,
hunger drives me to wine.

For want of a bottle of wine,
I scour the house for money.

For want of money,
I decide to steal goods from you.

For want of salable goods,
I steal you Royal Doultons.

For want of your Royal Doultons,
you call the local police.

The police want a collar
and I am their man.

Because they want a man to accuse,
I am sent to jail.

Because I am sent to jail,
I want a poem with which to explain.

Time is in the oven, baking –
batter of particles of small events –
so many hands on table-tops,
so many smiles quivering on interpretation,
so mixed intents and missing relevants.

Time is on the counter-top cooling,
the way the deck will as the last sun ray
erodes in the lilac bush and crickets
sound the all clear for night – all clear
for the moon to appear.

Time is being consumed with
a ravenous appetite for such delicate fare –
without napkins, without spoons, time
disappears from the plate at our feet
and we have a whispered conversation

in the vibrato tones of funeral homes.

BoatHouse, 2009/04/15

singer-songwriters, guitars,
craft beer and a seat by the stage.
There’s little money to be made
in entertaining on a Wednesday
night in Victoria Park, after
driving straight through from
Thunder Bay. This morning,
Mike tells me that he can’t get
accustomed to our deciduous
forests, as well as our lack of snow.
The new songs he sang last night
were about the north and its
history. I think he’s found his
place in the world. I hardly
remember Germany now and
the argument my mother states,
that I should take a greater
interest in my heritage seems
without merit, as I’ve grown
old in Waterloo County.

F 2.8

A relevance of focus is achieved –
one slat of the neighbour’s long
fence, raptor’s head leering,
rose spread like bed sheets, with
a musky odour of waiting sex,
the sun secreted through morning
mist, wide eye and reflection of
the photographer. Background
details are the churned colours
of a rainbow, hardly heard voices
from the chorus, a confused
mimicry of the sharp point. And
each answer is refracted light
inversed, moving through the
experience prism – bright, directed,
but lacking understanding and depth.

Small Words

In my mind, small words related
to the bits of Kleenex in my jean
pockets, or small change in the
small change pouch. Always there,
sometimes mistakenly washed,
or pulled out in restaurants –
tattered, dark lint adhered to
them. There for times of need;
Kleenex and small words, so that
when the world is once again
unalterably altered, I can stand,
staring, on the sidewalk and say, ‘oh’.

The Accountant’s Complaint

I see no profit in rhyme. There is
no reason to write about a sunset
that is hours spent, or dishes
soaking to thoughts on walking a
road between love and next week’s
rent. We need a bottom line, a
way to manufacture profit, if
even just from words, that poor
man’s investment in the fable
of society. We have to leverage
words into a monetary return, not
emotions concerning spring and
concrete, nor how a door will
open and close. When we sleep
we dream, but we do not sleep
on dreams, nor on the ethereal
silk spun by poets – words constructed
like card houses – for a moment
trapped in the amber of experience.
Nor is a pleasant turn of phrase tax
deductible – no, not even as a
charitable donation to the greater
happiness of the working man
drinking beer at his neighbourhood
pub. Show me a purpose to which
I can apply a mathematical formula,
from which I can slash expenses
and create cost efficiencies –
show me the grounded logic and
balance sheet of your days
organized into the tax year.

The Tourist at Home

We’re there, tourists, sampling
and then we return home
with photographs and memories.
We hold intimate wine gatherings,
haul out the photo albums,
put on the CD’s purchased
in a small shop just off the large square
with church, hotel, benches and pigeons.
We discuss fondly, while driving
to work with our car-pool, of the day,
the inevitable day, when we’ll return
to sip coffee in the quaint café
by the small fountain and lascivious statue.
Then, one morning, with fresh snow deep
across the driveway, news of occurring
crashes on the freeway, we also hear
that in our five-year old memory,
a war has begun, or there was a devastating
fire, or a hurricane destroyed the church, or
an earthquake levelled the hotel
and café. We hurry to view our photos,
to listen to the melancholy music on the CD
and we damn time for not having
the patience to wait for our return.

Missing Person

history in a state of busy construction / you can see
the signs in pieces scattered with various tools / extended
throughout the town / as by the river where a fish
was caught last summer / or at the arena spinning
slowly the way sand might at the narrowest point in
an hourglass / then words pinched off / no longer a story
but rather a book hastily closed because the doorbell
rang / the pot boiled over / the dog ate the newspaper / and
all words of her history went on strike / and everyone
guessed at outcomes / and everyone had their opinion of
the final unrealized creation so rudely abandoned
and stripped of the linear order of a historical work

Sunday Poem

Memories acquire wrinkles,
appear in front of me – a moving
waltz of images – with the will
and sense of destination
carousel horses must have
in October, heavy rain falling,
the beach deserted, trying to
make sense of, a summer fall
of children, parents, lovers
at midnight, seasons
and repeating change.

Raking the Front Yard

after early April snowfall,
temperatures rise to grackles invading
cedars and rooftops

doves were heard this morning,
the window left open a crack overnight

thatch catches north wind,
swirls to the roadway,
this disturbance of six month beige

I build piles, shovel them
into recycling bags,
note the imperfections spring exposes

along with the neighbours
we hardly saw, or when we did,
they were hidden under layers of clothes

each muscle lifting snow, or pushing
a snow-blower down the perception
of a driveway and sidewalk

so like a sculptor, faced by the mass
of unformed granite, imagines
and I, listening to your description, understand

A Walk in Victoria Park

The temperature rises, as does the desire
to get outside and walk.
Drive there first, to the point
of a beginning in Victoria Park.
Loop along the lake’s edge,
over the island, through
a meditation garden, around
the playground of released children.
Leave the park by the trail over
railway tracks and find the trail
which was once a spur line –
named, Iron Horse. Walk
to an agreed on street, turn around,
retrace an uncounted number
of steps. Follow Schneider’s Creek
back into the park, note the herd
of grocery carts trapped
in the creek. Remember yesterday,
a homeless man crossing Ottawa
Street with his world in a cart.
Realize that even the homeless
have their moving days.

The poet writes poems
as still as dishes being dried
in sunlight sneaking between
half-opened blinds.

April has stopped snowing
and groaning grass
glistens beyond the chairs
just placed on the porch.

A religion of faith
in dandelions perseveres
despite dark hands which
pluck the first wild flowers.

These are the hours when
houses explode, release
the spores of summer life
into diminishing snowbanks.

And a crow perched in wind
whistles through trees budding
before gliding into
the lives of nesting robins.

Question Haiku

If the first poem wasn’t
written, would the
second exist to be read?

Language Notes

rain falls

we note how
the language and intonation
of conversations clouds
engage in with wind and birds
progresses through drizzle,
shower and into downpour

just as the sound of your chair,
creaking in this half-deserted
café, speaks with a different
accent when you arrive
and when you leave

and that door to the street,
now closed, can be
opened with the petal syllables
of roses, or the cold thunder
tones of an April deluge

Wednesday Poem

For words, reality is not enough.
Nor is situation rationalized by clauses
ribboned and stretched like DNA strings
in a mad scientist’s lab. Between eyes
and memory, the maze stretches
our constructions, fills them with shadows
of events forever past or future, that wave
crest captured on paper, slipped into
poems and books, debated by witnesses
and the uninvolved alike – until the history
is greater than the event. And more solid.

Wheels In History Class

It was the age of imagination – half-way between
flying cars and the proper shade of shadow
(applied with dull pencils) for oversized tires
on aerodynamic arrows. It was the age of
stripped-down model T’s, a ‘54 Cadillac,
or a Woody with fuel injection and mags.
It was the age of fins of land-locked ships
that sailed a sea of Aqua-Velva signs –
buoys on the gravel shoulders of interstates.
It was the age of imagination and future.

I read today that GM is contemplating
bankruptcy plans. They’ve gone from
the greatest auto manufacturer to an also-ran.
It’s strange to think that the dreamers can
have their dreams knocked-off, the way jeans
are, or designer watches. And faith.

Ranchuelo, Cuba. April 3. (CubaNet) – Yorky la Rosa,
one of the starters for the Villa Clara team
in the Cuban baseball league was dropped
by the team, presumably for political reasons,
according to a resolution handed down
March 27 in Santa Clara.

Sports writer and commentator Normando Hernández
explained over provincial radio station CMHW:
“Our ball players must be partisans of the Revolution,
and they must be unconditionally loyal to Fidel
and Raúl; otherwise Cuban fans, who are
partisans of the Revolution, don't want to see them play.”

La Rosa, a left fielder and designated hitter for
the team, is said to have wanted to remain
on the team, but was dropped on the orders of
José Luis Rabel, lieutenant colonel of the
Department of State Security in charge of sports
at the national level, presumably because
La Rosa had been making arrangements t
o visit his wife who lives in Spain.


And so it is with love...that place between
our loyalties and our desires...
when reality is twisted into knots
we can’t untangle...when mantras
masticate the minutes between
the needs we see set out in front of us...
a line of words inciting meaning.

What is most reflected

In water, on black marble, in the way
a sculptor catches sight in stone eyes,
in columns supporting the fables
history so easily wears in year-light –
reflected fractal never vanishing,
though wind echoes hard some names –
‘Korea, Viet Nam, Normandy
and Baghdad’. There is glory
and there is death and on an early
April afternoon, when cherry blossoms
turn the streets of Washington pink,
even for this foreigner, there is a great
and certain memory that cannot
be forgotten.

This is a mystery

though I think I’ve figured it out,
or at least the part about clouds,
because when I was young, I’d lie
on the neighbour’s uncut backyard
lawn, gaze at them whipped meringue
by polka winds and track rainstorms
take five giant steps through suburban
Waterloo, without saying, ‘May I’.

And doors – they were everywhere,
always needing to be locked, to be
checked and to be guarded against
my friends, to be the line between
a lost universe, that I was taught had
greater relevance than the parade
of events happening to me.

The confused comment about love –
well, that’s always been a component
of my daydreams, to arguments, to raging
against the machine of what it takes
to be the perfect fit for someone else’s
dreams – as though I couldn’t and still
can’t dream anything for myself.

I wrote the poem in the kitchen,
on my laptop, with a glass of wine
beside me, but what I wrote –
those words have been a swirling
parrot of events on my right shoulder
since I was eight or ten.

Border Crossings

between being
Canadian and American –
line in the sand on a windy day –
playing a game of “king of the castle” –
variations of myth-building
and dances at midnight in secure bunkers –
under the moon of laptop glow / radar
screens – streetlights signing
in the opposite corners of cognition
and bifurcating accents drafting
tail-winds of April air – divergent systems
of measurement for landmass and man-mass –
a game of doors and keys – guarded entry
and entry denied

this morning I inquired about your placement
of t-shirts / you said you’d constructed
a new terrain in closets and drawers / I explained
again the intricacies of books on book shelves / how
subject is not superceded by author / nor is my
desk a collection agency when there is doubt

at nine we went for coffee / discussed our next vacation /
even across tightly controlled borders
an amount of free trade remains desirable

History Falls Out of the Pages of Books

There is a place, being commitment,
the way it feels listening to nothing
when there should be a child
gurgling and bubbling and feeling
along the channels of her day –

not the silence of shallow breaths,
the question which hurries between
life and death, flowing through
the gaps of what we can accept
and what we would never wish

on anyone. Our own child, caught
between one breath and the next,
between her first birthday and
a funeral. These are events
captured by a newspaper, crystallized

is a time which flows past us –
lazy river, lazy events.

57 Ford

Blog this – coal rolling
lazy down the maw of
microchip enterprise events
happening in silicon places –
a woman’s face embedded in
the chip of cognisance,
winter white on sun blood.

It’s where we disembark,
travellers of concrete walkways
and doorways, the spits
beyond a setting sun, blood
in the rebellion of grey gutters,
music a moment in another
place we’ve always been.

Constructs continue to crumble
as time does, mendicant to
boxcars on a spur line between
intent and what really happened
in the gap of cradle and fifty-seven
years in the same factory job
making glue for idle daydreams.

Earth Hour, 2009

street lights remain
on, descending flight looking
for airport flashes in star braille

and I listen for oars slipping against the sides
of time – Odysseus searching
the unknown at the point map falls off the world

because there was no entertainer light
and the Aegean murmured Poseidon’s name –
bit player in time’s chorus

Black Widow

She’s a creative artist,
although I’m certain
she’d take umbrage
and deny it. As she’d deny

that reality can be as badly bent
as light gouging a path
through her kitchen window
in summer.

For her, the light strike point
is miles away in an emotion
and a moment.
Because her footsteps never

walked the path
she describes, her voice never
communicated with the voices she
says she heard. Yet she believes

and perhaps the god she denies
told her everything she knows about....
That the rains which
have visited west and south

are now visiting her town
and in the corners of bedrooms,
people are experiencing new
thoughts...rhythms which don’t

conform to the story she weaves –
black widow in a world
that never unfolded her way,
until she crafted the reality

seen from a rocking chair,
by a window,
in a room she doesn’t leave,
because to understand

is to control.
Even so little.

Poetry.
Words.

The way you look
at a field
of tulips sometimes
in June.
Nice arrangement.
Tag it to
an experience.

Walking a forest trail.
Hear water dropping
from a nick-point.
There is a form
created at contact.

And concrete and corners.
Doors. Windows.
A slash of dress
against skin.

The hand reaching
across table.
Through experience.
Through wine.
The hand signing.

And it disintegrates.
Pick-up sticks.
Bodies after the explosion.
An inability to construct.

Because you’re forever
caught in the amber moment
of explosion. And are
more parts than possible.

And there are only
words. The blood
that bleeds
from the shattered soul.

A Big Canadian Welcome

twenty poets were gathered in an antebellum square
    flowerbed by the fountain –
benches by cool stone walls

(a cascade of banks, pharmacies, the general store)

and each poet wrote a poem for the scene
    and for uninquisitive passing clouds –
a child’s smile caught in the memory amber of storefront glass

that feeling just on the periphery of being
a solid handshake with an event – then everyone
moved on to the corner restaurant – wine and lunch

then home again, home again, to wife and children

at 23:00h when the moon was skidding along treetops
and an owl heard the sound of a mouse in flowerbed –

    (a convoy passed the square, transporting body bags,
the soiled clothes of dreams, duty and an empty soul)



it was February, on the 401, somewhere west of Trenton (or did it
begin just outside of Pickering), I began to see people standing
on bridges, looking east

I realized that another body was returning from Afghanistan –
    homage to change in spite of politics –
acknowledgement

outside of Trenton, a young man stood on a concrete guard at the side
of the highway, Canadian flag held in parade position

at the next overpass, the bridge was commandeered by EMS vehicles,
    lights flashing, waiting at the beginning of
the end of the long road home for a Canadian soldier

down the highway of heroes

I want to find something to fill the spaces where echos
play hopscotch with meaning, boomerang off beige walls,
slide under the doors of stunted comprehension –

somewhere far from coffee shops, café’s in which one buys
croissants, drags the emptiness of a pocketful of minutes
to a metal chair near the sidewalk painters and the traffic –

and begins another solitary game of philosophy scrabble,
fitting meaning to pieces of broken calico memory, finding soul
in street numbers and street names, love under a tablecloth –

before another red wave begins to peck away daylight
and night staggers with me, old friend, into the alley of false
godliness, shallow truth, my ears filled with liquid cotton..

Re: Lent

Lent – that time when waves
recede from the headland of rock

and detritus investments in
the mortal means to happiness

ebb from each touch and purchase
on the firmament of daily survival.

We scurry across beaches reduced to
sand and sunbathing environments

the occasional love affairs – sunsets
on sanguine waves suggesting

life in the Bahamas and red wine
on a porch facing true north.

And having forsaken everything
for a fraction of time we can

return like the returning tourist
fresh from the hovels of abstinence

singing the revival of the latest religion
in the church political choir.

I am thy retail life and thou shall have
no other fashion gods before me.

Do this in remembrance of the prosperity
which you dream of and credit to me.

I will sit under the apple tree. I will watch the clouds.
It will be late May and the blossoms on the apple tree
will have been kissed by bees and sundry insects. I will
remember our making love and the importance of
full moons in June. I will reach for a drink and find
the hollow elbows of shadows. I will try to remember
events discarded along the road time uses. I will wallow
in roadside café’s and bars. I will dream technicolor
dreams of automobiles dressed in the fins of ‘57. I will
construct and deconstruct philosophies for five o’clock
in August. I will sing the songs ants and grasshoppers
memorise in childhood. Clouds will be stratospheric
waves. The moon will be a pebble on a beach of stars.
I will be the child who never grows up. I will play
the song of words forever. I will twist events into a
Gordian knot and call it Saturday. I will drink to that.

I will ignore the creaking doors in my mind. So fragile,
that space between a summer breeze and snow. So
soft the absence from the hard spaces of contact with
gravel roads twisted into pain between farms and
farmland. Villages and villagers. The debarkation
point for dreams and an alley where sleep escapes
the sleeper. So hard to take up arms against entropy.
So difficult to change the way light falls on a kitchen
table. So enervating to pick stones from a secluded
beach and call them castle. Give them the importance
of safety. So impossible to bend the straight line of
memory until it remembers not lies, not reality, but
rather potential, that point before, yet still going
forwards, that point where no matter how hard we
want it, there is no choice. The sidewalk has ended
and the road is the next step.

Trips From Freedom

For the tourist, there is no vision on the tour bus,
just streets in linear array and snapshots of a statue,
a door, a window and the floor leading to graves
which have been honoured in ever school book as history.

For the tourist, the tour guide is the history book,
the perception which should, somewhere down the alleys
of time, bring the tourist back to beaches of white sand,
a drink at the swim-up bar, all inclusive, with sunshine.

For the tourist is a moment in a long-run play,
which ignores the bit players selling cigarettes and
chocolate bars at a bus stop – the bit players who are
arrested and mistreated in places the tour bus avoids.

Even totalitarian governments can be painted with
broad strokes in a sympathetic way – as long as the doors
which appear in the tourist’s photo album of time
in paradise – as long as those doors are always locked.

When You Expect and When I Don’t Deliver

Call it fate
though fantasy is more exact.
That tendency to
peer into an unrealized future
and construct an infrastructure
of events.
Then expect the realization of speculation.

Gamble. Buy a lottery ticket. Expend time
on the Ouija board. Pick up stix
and toss then into readable pattern
as though words are never enough.
And waiting out time is too long a time.

The sun setting will never be a surprise.
That cloud positioned just so
will be. Because in the world
of future telling there are no clouds
just events in harsh sunlight.
Noon. There are no shadows
because shadows have their own life.

The world between ‘I thought’ and ‘I know’
that events will unravel to the tune
of ‘this is what I knew would happen’.

As though time has no personality except the one imprinted
on it by the breezes of our passing.

Politics and Love

are inseparable. Just as
I could not imagine anyone
else sharing a bed with you
so I can’t imagine anyone
running this country who’s
not created in the image
of my lover my God. In
loving we’re always two
steps away from losing
everything just as in
politics we’re always two
policies away from being
torn from the soil of our
flesh. Armies come armoured
in tanks and Cupid
carries an Uzi.

Curl

Sunday night in Canada
NASCAR for Los Vegas
clogged in cautions runs late.
Into the Tournament of Hearts
final. The hell with rubber
on asphalt. Give us
elementals – stone and
frozen water. Give us
erratics moved by ice.
And give us a six-pack of Blue.

Fractals

repetition of self
sterile
greater than

the whole
but no progress
just repetition

God might be speaking about His creation

or we are left to ponder genetic by-laws –
extinction for speeding against the grain

Memory and Rage

Justin – time moves. Even
in Montreal.

Somalian immigrants settle
on the rising Canadian shield.

There’s a traffic jam
on the Highway of Heroes.

Ducks are dead in oil sand effluence.
Vancouver/Toronto drown in drug wars.

And you want to honour volunteers.
Perhaps they’re watching

an aging parent die neglected
in a hospital bed at the end

of an unswept hallway. Perhaps
they’re driving downtown

in a GM product. Perhaps they’re
shopping on line for sex dreams

or leaving for Cuba in March.
Perhaps they’re unemployed

and waiting at a food bank.
Selling a house they’ve been in

since their children were born.
Perhaps they’re learning the lyrics

to a new protest song – watch us
watch us watch us watch us.

River Walk Winter

There’s form
in the abstinence
of absence. White space
where the bent branch
for years brushed against
passing river water.
In sheared time.

I wasn’t witness to the cold
moment of severance. Snow
throughout day and night.
Cat o’ nine tails crying – wind
from the American center.
And this river escaping
its banks. Running free.
Revving dangerous ice.

With children, between one day
and today emotional weather
changes. Unseen elements
suddenly strut the boulevard
of parent and child relations. I’m
amazed I don’t recognize
I communicate with fable.
A limb of societal norm
has disappeared.
White space floods relationship.

Between words there is
enough room for a universe
to flicker and find life.
There are streets to walk.
Store fronts to browse. Parks
to explore. There’s time to watch
night descend from
the chariot of sun. There’s time to
find a room above
a bakery. Time to shop
for furniture. Arrange clothes
in the closet. Iron shirts
against the need
of looking for work. Cook
a meagre supper.
There’s time to sleep.
And awaken from restless
white seas.

Between you and I
a universe of words
flourishes. Frail words
in a soil once tilled now
abandoned to weeds
and weak promises.
Emotions in cruise control.
The safety of repetition.
Silverware in its place. Cups
filled with filtered water
and futures fabricated
in China by slave labour.

And all the words fall
into the white hole.
The missing. The corners
of conversations and time
which we could never fill
yet always felt
were so important that
we could not continue without them.

And After 1952?

The repetition of images in a slide-show is
a parade down King Street past the Biltmore
which has morphed into a late-night club
where across the street Diane’s Restaurant
once was, a Friday walk from Waterloo into
Kitchener, for a hamburger and coke, before
walking further to Heintzman’s to listen to
45's straight from the era of rebellion.

Nothing I learned from that era prepared me
for where I am today, on crumbing streets
in a crumbing economic environment –
retiring man, walking away from old buildings
housing dying industries – retiring man
drinking coffee with street people in Tim Horton’s,
watching sunrise creep down city streets
like an invading army of MBA graduates.

My mother sits in her back room (cancer survivor),
watches birds fight for the seeds she spreads
across the deck beyond the family room sliding doors,
tries to control access to food between
raptor squirrels and innocent doves –
pontificates about her memories of Dresden,
the Tatras and DP camps, spins another thread
through what discrimination means when
you are force-fed into an alien culture

and I remember shorelines, waves, that crashing
against rock, the first feel of sand beach
after all the effort to become, to become,
to be a part of the history breathing around me –
person in distress unless I preform AR/CPR
to substantiate that which I’ve pinged off of,
man on the street, giving interviews which
make people laugh because they’re not
the reality they grew up in, or the reality
they could ever follow, the way I follow
forest paths, covered in snow, just waiting
for the first spring flower to bloom.

Knitting and Time


The exact cost of imperfection is this –
nothing is retrievable / the bullet of history
does not reverse direction, nor come
to rest on the calm beach / in the quiet cove.

This is all a matter of mathematics / the way
my father said / after his stroke / that he was
one hundred and ten percent / and we were
left to imagine exactly what that meant.

We had to suspend reality and imagine that
a lessening of capability and potential
was not negative / but rather positive / the result
of roots on an irrational number line.

Nothing was proven / though one could not deny
that there was a certain potential for possibility.

There is also a potential for fraud / for lies
in the arbitrary way we denote west as different
from east / the melting of reason which occurs
fifty steps across the border of conformity.

Or how love becomes the sheer stress between
people / how an inability to be blind is seen
as the malady of not seeing. And so I remain
at a loss for words / for shutting down reason.

In a crucible of change / I continue to observe
and remember / how the world becomes smaller
with age / how windows continually narrow
until the only thing we see is one isolated atom

and that one atom is as powerful as any false god
has ever been in our worlds of personal deceit.

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

The Cradle Which Once Sang is now Silent


I see your face in front of a setting sun,
soft E dissolving into minor sound

like railroad tracks at four in the afternoon when freight trains pass

on their way downtown, to congregate in
the industrial basin by the dry oxbows of a slowing river.
The activity in your eyes

is a flurry of snow, that mellows into Chardonnay,
then a debate about profit by association

and doors swinging open and shut – blinking eyes and a smile curled

into a perfect violin G.

You move your conductor fingers through your hair,
orchestrate a coven of words on the precipice of your lips
and sing an excuse

as you sail untouched through reality air. A world flares and dies.

I pick up consonants and vowels, arrange
and rearrange them into different tonal landscapes

until you might have said almost anything. That’s the way it is with Archeaology –
suppose and suppose again.

I sometimes hear nothing and it’s a beautiful song because I created it.
I sometimes hear the truth

and it becomes twisted into the voices of
ten thousand people in a crowded space. I sometimes shut out everything and watch

the tic in your left eyebrow, the way it falls and rises like tides.
There are times when you can carry me and times when
there is no support.

I sometimes hear a train on overused tracks complain. It transports
our heavy freight to tomorrow’s negotiated events.

Multiculturalism


you didn’t grow up on my street
what the fuck do you know about how
to hide near nightfall or chase
the milk wagon for slivers of discarded
ice when July melts patchwork tar
in subdivision gutters and storms
slide along a slick horizon tearing
rain from cloud udders
or how November leaves rattle
in the graveyards of summer gardens
how winds leak through windows
and how we sat spouting Descartes
and beer after a day in the halls of
academia mixed with rebellion

oh it was future we created over
and over again with such fervour
and such music to a rhythm we’d never
heard before in the triangle of streets
we called the world of growing up
in Canada in Ontario in the region
of farmland and Mennonites in
the world which was never enough
when we could reach through our
radios and televisions into another
aspect of the whole world view

the universe explodes although there
is talk of the coming implosion
that fractal of the image I have
of myself sitting in front of a window
with a diminishing view of sidewalk
and lawn and rain falling gently onto
unraked maple leaves and a smell
of earthworms before the first
cigarette to celebrate another breath
in the world fast leaking out
of the door of life

2009


This morning, over coffee with Winston Smith, I wondered how much wine
it would take to drown the radio, the tv; to liquify words entering my ears.

And how many preachers in the uncertain world of wrong are right. Dear
Winston, dear Julia, dear god who is the keeper of time; I guess the rules.

I assume in linear routes a way between the concrete and what a camera
can capture. An aspect. The deceit of one light while piercing the dark.

Yet without...I have six hundred books of memories hiking the valleys
of my brain. No trail leads to you. No war descends on you, just reports.

The journal of deceit, the travail poets in politics. My mother keeps falling
into the East European war of insane repatriation and recrimination. She

remembers the body-part shrapnel, the justifications, wonders why Saddam
Hussein’s family was crucified. What is the sense of repeating that

history repeats itself. Time is a fractal. Time is a word. Time is
the separation between experience and the newspaper reports of speculation.

Science tells us that the fire touch
we felt in a ‘67 Chevy deep in the woods
was nothing more than near grazing
of the atoms of our fingertips and tongues.

Yet there persists this confusion between
the sun streaming through the kitchen window,
lighting up the obligatory bowl of cereal,
dripping onto the bleak newspaper headlines –

and the inner mind’s perceptions of self,
the way we embrace impossible positions
and postures – how we position ourselves
against the inertial of history’s storyline.

And accept that nothing can ever be approached.

And pack up and move into societal creations.

Mendicants.

Because it is better to have dreamed dreams
than it is to dream the possible positions

we might assume in sunlight and in rain –
in every time we reached out for the impossible touch.

some things end badly and some end well.

some things are discovered ages later as coal or oil.

to be used for the profit of someone and something.

yet at the time it wasn't anything like that.

you see the sun rose on a cool autumn day and the rain which had for days clutched the north horizon froze.

it began to snow.

as we fell asleep we wondered if the snow would ever stop.

or if we would ever again wake up.

age cripples words as though
they track the body slowly easing –
or are a tree bent to almost resting
against the frost-touched ground –
the day the roses in the back
flower bed blacken and die –
as though they’re steaks
on the barbecue too long neglected
because the bottle of Bordeaux
has more finish than a desire to eat –
or the rhythm of our complaints
no longer draws us together like
opposite-poled magnets in
the magnetic field of understanding –
that position we reach when
we each have professed out love
and our need – that poses of
stubborn resistance to gravity between
two bodies moving inexorably
together while dancing to the beat
of separateness – lacking commonalities –
or a reason to share the same
breath of words at one time
and in one place which cannot be
as long as we are two duelling planets

Writing becomes origami zebras,
will not stop rain or falling leaves,
the red crush of descending sky.

Chicken Little lives, Chicken Little lives.

Wide-screen, HD oracles pontificate
zig-zag Wall Street Zeitgeist
in lieu of October baseball.

Immigrants stand outside Tim Horton’s,
smoke and discuss the thread
and needlework of impoverished pasts.

They nod their heads, they smoke and drink double-doubles.

Skateboarders rule the curbs,
an old man stumbles before catching himself
in the middle of twenty backwards steps.

We have money for the theatre; we have
money for the arts.

On stage, we give the man in his wheelchair
a standing ovation. His words and music
have moved us beyond ourselves.

Ten beggars congregate at city hall. A gong sounds.

Our prayers are urgent pleas to the origami gods –
an aging queen, six dead prime ministers.
Anything for a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread.

God is Good at Dying

young, I learned the faith of cycles, how
hop-scotch adhered to rules and a toe
falling onto the sidewalk meant the end
of my turn,

or an unanswered question
in geography class confirmed that I knew
nothing beyond the neighbourhood of
my house, my blanket, my bed

positioned to a rising moon, the tug
of gravity, the riddle of a dark
through which street cleaning machines
wandered on summer nights

evaporated by morning dew and games
in the schoolyard, trips to the corner store,
conversations with ants and squirrels
scaling the corporate jungle trees,

societies withing spiralling aspects
of Kitchener, from Farmer’s Market
to the library, city hall and King Street,
snake eating its commercial self


and I watched it all die to be born again

stock market, house prices, the cost
of almonds compared to dates from
foreign countries, softener salt, razor blades,
retirement or continue working

faith in the market, throwing out floppy disks
of arcane programs, a wealth of
useless Windows © manuals, ten
years of National Geographic, vinyl music

the perfect karmic way to wealth,
good sex, good skin, low blood pressure,
a diet of pornography, ten children,
servant’s quarters about the credit card,

greed on demand and bodies igniting
in twenty thousand renditions of Jonestown,
the unimportance of a mere child, the way
the animal lurks behind a man’s eyes,

fear, fear, fear, greed, greed, greed,
twenty bottles of Bordeaux, one Burgundy,
a yacht, brushed brass appliances,
calamari on a salad bed drizzled with olive oil
to feed the void of bones where god continues to die

When my heart stops – it will be
with the midnight sound
of a freight train crawling west.

Goderich. Then north. Sudbury.

Then west – beyond redtail hawk’s
eyesight into the event horizon
of birch oceans swaying

like wheat sways in Saskatchewan

when storms bump and grind
their way to Ontario. When my
heart stops – time will drop –
icicles in indeterminate March.

The world will be perceived as
a negotiation of revival
for some.

When my heart stops – midnight

will consume the minutes
and hope will fill the empty
spaces between all the words

which once set sail for Byzantium

heavy with the raw oar freight trains
dropped at rail’s terminus –
my life in Canada.

The Stock Market

in the village of paper
fear winds topple the most solid structures

and nothing will ever be enough

I imagine a street person walking Key West street
in rainfall between sunshine and more rain

his backbone supports yacht devoured in sunset
and Chardonnay his song off-key and alien

in the city of Corvette and seaside real estate and fenced
privacy he is the alternative

stockbroker Bukowski yelling at the neighbours who cavort
as though the Morlocks will never collect

a penny a dime a quarter a dollar a get out of reality free card
somewhere on the boardwalk where a hurricane

becomes the landed immigrant changing everything
in a moment when exclusion from the club

doesn’t really matter at all

The Man Who Lost His House to a Hurricane Has Emigrated to the Moon

from water to dust
and in movement away
there is a taste of rust

a feral release
and hunt for home
so far below the sky

a knapsack against footprint and sentence for the memory of

waves and wind lashing
life in ten thousand
pieces of flotsam

until water recedes
the battlefield of known
against unknown

and untenable circumstances of time and place

I look to a future which has failed to exist / somewhere beyond the Magellan cloud / a murmur
of small sighs and birthing cries / a swallow on top of the light above the door / the splintered
tree which once kept leaves / hop-scotch chalk on the cracking sidewalk / ice cream cones / cold
backyard beer / slivers of love wrapped tightly in hands and white sheets / a final warm sigh

and eyes which are
now insensate dust
and leaked potential

I walk the kingdom
of moon and marvel
at how oceans dream

how they become a crusade marching across the infidel face of land

History Lessened

these are the days of
eddies in the wetlands / slow
river meeting ocean / leaves
dancing in the thalwag

like confused mice
maze-bound / a surge
of days pushing events-detritus
into the songs whales sing

far out / where memory
can no longer see / where
the event horizon is
no longer breached / where

the world is a point and
the magician makes
everything vanish
and words are cracked

cobbles on a road
which is really a tin can /
string tied between beginning
and ending / or the point where

the bungee chord has accumulated
as much potential energy
as is possible and reacts /
flinging events back

helter-skelter / word storm / word
speed / you relate your
strobed history / I marvel
at the gaps / you fill them

with the hundred stories
you’ve considered and discarded
until now when the sun is low /
the wind picks up loose

stragglers / a stand of events sways
slowly south and life is
as fragile as the next day / you are
my mother / you are changed /

you are loved