Shift Worker

I watch my father go. Later,
he returns

to leave again. Always at odd hours.
Perhaps between a bath and a story, or when morning clouds
settle three poles down the road (you know,

that land surrounding the castle and the dragon—that land
noone claims). I watch

my father in constant motion
between meals and the elsewhere which occurs
behind doors/downtown/across the street/at odd

angles to a drill press/tumbling through Sunday
in a shot glass/repairing the sofa/in the snow

of a Motorola black and white tv before
the test pattern mantra of tuned in.

I watch my father, but he never becomes.

Watching a Woman Read Poetry

You’re reading poetry. I can’t imagine you anywhere
but here. Sun sets and clutters the buildings with
music. Yes, colours are music and soft voices and emotions
flung across time’s tapestry like a comforter.
Cuddle up and digest the day turning into memory—
a midnight snack of arguing over cloud lions, peaches,
the direction between one point and the next—straight line,
although a lingering curve is sensuous. You’re reading
poetry. I can’t imagine anything beyond the sound of a drill,
the gasping compressor, how wood swells with changing
weather, dust distributed unevenly with each opening
of the loading dock doors. I know how grain inhales stain
as though it’s putting on a dress, a tux, a pair of socks.
You’re reading poetry in a voice I associate with nursery rooms,
library back corners, a tet-a-tet between two absolute
universes dancing at opposite ends of an opulent room—
a gentle pat on the back in the middle of a rush hour crowd
waiting for the subway—a smile from the woman standing
in the rain—the sound a memory makes when it returns. Forever.

War

the human spirit
lives, nomatter which fence side
it finds itself on

Making a Living out of Poetry

Haiku for the baptism,
sonnet for the wedding—drive-by shotgun words ringing (or)
tires on fresh asphalt delivering to a destination, for a price—
and passing countryside (a promise to revisit) sometime soon.

Bank account battles a rose. Clouds bend to pick up a penny.
Music’s supplied by accordions like reflections in windows
facing the news, guessing at words.

September and a Pen

Three glasses of wine into
the evening,
I tried to say everything in a bursting bubble
of words.

Of course, I was saying nothing, though
the reader thought it poetry.

Yes, there’s room there for interpretations;
that marmalade on toast in the mourning
for what we might have

Woman waiting after the rain, Oslo Harbour 

Oslo Subway arriving 

Neuswanstein in the alps 

Munich in the rain. 

Another One Bites the Rust

This distance between—and lawns, gardens, bungalows—
cars from the first bondo Studebaker to cruise control Corolla—mind tooled
to a metal press, pieces of iron forced into form—this product
of unfinished pieces, snippets of song and walks to corner stores,
down spur lines, this person of Saturday night hockey and haze—
this meat and potatoes political philosopher camping, at the cottage—
this worker, whose soul has been outsourced to Mexico and Taiwan—
it’s Thursday night at the mall and he finishes his Big Mac.

Rust spreads across his face, makes his joints grind as he walks
to the garbage bins with dinner’s waste, tosses them in and continues
down the mall’s south walk—past Sally’s, Tom The Tailor, Bethany’s,
Cinnamon Heaven—this figure fading into the undying twilight
that death by change emits long after the old world has been buried.

seagull landing 

Air Traffic Control

Aviary above white-framed
restaurant windows—
north of arctic circle—
and seagulls circle,
ignore air traffic control—
O'Hare on a summer
holiday weekend.


The Traffic of the Sun

sun circles Atlantic north—
a moment's summer—
then fat cod and snow return

Mail Boat Down a Fjord

Hezbollah/Taliban/Tamil/Rock

Where the driveway has slumped away from the garage’s foundation,
I spray every two weeks. It doesn’t matter; the ants don’t disappear.

Baffin Island Resort and Spa

Following the Consumption of Various Perceptions

I’ve come to believe/in storyland with the eyesight of expectation/I’ve come to
rage/with dusk mind and dusk eyes/

creator of playing-card empires because this is the way the world’s built/this is story/
people shadows and speculative/

DNA constructed from ill-fitting words/those dreams that have lain in the sun/under
a cold moon/those dreams/those dreams/

and I’m a falling tree in the forest of time/listen.

Soldier Search

—To smithereens, ma, to smithereens—

This is the exploding book—
the shredded plot—
alienation from gentle pages
between birth and life’s first trauma.
This is new song—
devo, devo, devolute until
the spine lies crumpled against rock
and elemental metamorphosis.

I stood with a stranger
beside the ruins. He spoke
through a catalogue of family
who lived there before night fire.
The morning after,
embers simmered in the empty shell of foundation.
He recalled the charred
litter of books, family papers—
and incessant north Ontario rain.

This is a play for bodies—
this is a script for how they come
marching home in disarray.
This is a play for two moments
which stand beside each other,
bound to each other as though
they’re lovers in a deserted place
where waves tick-tock restless shore—
this is for the moment they realize
they’ve never touched, nor ever will again.

We drove our bikes west
out of Waterloo—along Erb Street,
beyond the gravel pit.
It was August morning—
still damp from overnight rain—
under a bearable sun. In St Agatha,
we turned, down gravel road,
pedalled breathless until Jeremy asked
a farmer for directions. To the next crossroad,
veer right, about a mile
to rising moraine—there, down
a lane dead-ending in a field planted clover.
It was very quiet, to the point
I imagined the silence sang
in a deep voice. We joined the group
by the single-engine plane wreck
and listened to them decide
how it had all really happened—
and why. Before leaving, we tore a piece
of skin from the wing—
our adventure, our souvenir.

This is from
the country of adjectives—
that effort to describe
something indescribable.
This is for words detailing
displacement and instant rearrangement—
the way the afternoon sun,
stretching across silver bridge—
dripping into flat river—
the way the sun constantly pushes
shadows into drifts against the seagulls
and the cormorants—
how between one look
and the next, the air has dropped
a feather and a feeling
as unceremoniously as any tear.

In the smithereens some mornings are,
I walk the border—that line in the sand
that time has drawn.
This is a place of fog and echoes—
fog and echoes and questions
become stepping-stones
through what has happened.

Last week, I googled the site—
I typed in his name. There were
no hits, yet I remember his last
communication—a letter from Georgia.
The summer of love had just
ended and he was
joining the army after spending
August and September priming
tobacco outside of Drumbo.
He’d worn his Canadian souvenir
to the roller rink
(a fashion torn from the flower-child dream)
and there was a fight.
Inclusion excludes.

I don’t understand how
you can sit there with your crystal ball,
cocksure that tomorrow
at eight in the morning,
at the corner of King and Victoria,
a truck driver will lose
control and his truck will jump
the curb and I—having gone
downtown to take architectural
photos of the old Kaufman plant
in undress between rubber factory
and downtown lofts—and I’ll be
run over and pronounced dead—on the spot.

I don’t understand how
you can predict one fine
in my song, when I’ve spent
a lifetime unable to predict
one stop, one pause, when between
one note and the next,
I’m in a different key,
singing different lyrics
and the dance partner whose steps
I thought I knew
has been replaced by someone
standing in the sunlight
drifting impatiently over
the tick-tock smithereens
of my memories.

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