Slow Spring Coming

Dear Ellen E.

you asked for words to fill the cracks
(protect your back) and slide into the booth beside you–
hamburger and fries

I saved some words without definition (am sending
them on) without recollection of what they are
except words--like excess shoes

lost in the closet down that dark hallway where
we never talk. no, never talk.

really, shouldn’t flowers and gray walls be enough?
there is that comfort zone. coal chutes, milk boxes
and socks hopping through foreign mud.

temper-tantrum mantras, a street light burning,
encoded with falling snow, the epistle
of our hands touching on a maple table

just as the sun leaps across. it’s the void which hurts
you, burns words into meaningless stumps.

For Thirty-Seven Years

Fallen branches tied
in a bundle bouncing on my shoulder
and drifting road

to horizon. They’re collected words
for the fireplace. For the times
we discuss the direction

we’re travelling. For the coal chute
accepting coal and keeping
us warm through winters.

It’s the silences which are frigid
Baffin Island in January. Cod navigating
icebergs bouncing off the shells

of negotiations concerning
the kitchen sink. The colour of
the walls between the front door and the back.

The place we’ll go this winter
to escape the cold. Perceptions concerning
the aesthetics of our children.

It has never been a question
of the fire between your lips
and mine. The point where we

said we would. Where we believed.
It has lately been a question
of how high to turn the heat.

I Spoke to you in Jazz

I Spoke to you in Jazz

and that rhythm rushing
waterfall over notes

as though dust motes are trapped
in the chamber of women and men
moving across the aspect
of architecture.

Pick up a cigarette and light it. Blow down
memory’s streams. Ignite cognisance.
Become a wall between the philosophy
of vagrants and the sanctity of St Peter.

Judge. Then leave the crowded room.
A man watches you with a woman’s eyes.

In the infinity of common places,
we reach, touch with open hands.
A symbol should be placed at this exact
location on the road.

Then torn down by the wind, whose wisps
languish like stale relationships,
or fishing lines trolling every aspect of life–
reason in love with the quest for cause.

Ontario March

Slanted Time


In the mispronunciation of events
history is born so far
from the existent world–
a road angling through apartment pines

where men with drooping
bedroom eyes sing you
to sleep into nightmares
of postponed end days–

coal chutes giving way
to laptops and the milk
wagon horse stumbling
from milk-box to milk-box–

forever lost, forever misplaced–
forever horse on the cusp of
an SUV trolling schoolyards
for MBA candidates–

to carry on the faith,
to carry on the markets,
to carry into the future
a scrap of DNA marking us

as people who strived for.

Avian Photography

bird captured by air
branch genuflects to
that moment when wing
becomes noun,

adverb not quite
touching earth, though expecting
to alight in the middle

of conversations concerning
folded sheets waiting for
bodies and heat, the miracle
of fantasies. nothing but

death remains still
in time's eddies.

once upon a time the poet
hid himself in music and rhyme,
afraid to come out, come out,
wherever he was–

message smeared with rhythms,
costume obscuring
the concerned heart–
man without answers,
yet alway trying to give
change a jump-start.

If this were a city, I’d be going in circles around a cul-de-sac


Fractals of song. Notes careen through my space. The ethernet
is draped in fragile voice lace. In the eaves of a guitar
we are separated by chords and fretting over domino doors falling.
A glancing blow. No more. No more. The sun still gives
its love to the spaces between where fable catches the first rays.

40 Weeks*

Door forced–someone dared to use a key.
No electronic trail was left. Or the motion sensor
followed the signature of empty air as though
something dead exited stage left.

Critical alarm–the ice is too warm, the frozen meat
thawing. Not global warming, no, not that–just
global hunger waiting for half-hour lunches,
catered meetings, the stress before a realization
that everything is built on widening cracks.

Duress alarm, pull stations and rabbit holes
through dense walls the colour of old oak, stained pages
of ancient documents, calm in the presence
of too little and ‘no’. After all, real performance erodes profit.


To the computer screen which long ago sucked the last
creative drops out of me, which wandered into
the ethernet, which became a trillion electrons scattered
through the umbilical chord of a million actions
and transactions–beware. One day between a dollar sign
and an em, your mind will wander like rusty railway track
through elm and cedar, maple and birch–across river
and through town and the electrical stops of 0 and 1,
will twitch, reform the universe in a way no logic could–

and you’ll dream.


*In 40 weeks, I'll be sixty and I'm going to retire. No, really.

Pogrom and the Casual Tourist


you walk from the harbour in Oslo—uphill
to the old fort which dominates your view

enter the resistence museum—snap pictures
of pictures of the past and realize Norway
also suffered—and you proceed through dungeons
vast dining rooms—canons pointing south
against the fiord’s expanding lines into darkening clouds

as you snap pictures in a meeting room—moody shots
of stained glass—nooks with statues and white plaster

the sound of boots on wood stairs warns you before
army cadets fill the room and you move to the comfort
of solid walls—realize this is what they’ll die for

three days later over Lofoten's paradise jets break
the sound barrier and for a moment
you speculate about how god's army defends Eden

City and Country Call Each Other Ghosts

Today, first time in quite a while, took the 30D to Tim Horton's and then for a ride into Mennonite land. C read her book and I stopped on back roads, thinking I saw more than just trees, fence lines, bridges across hidden streams. During the winter, so much of what one is tempted to photograph is a matter of shape. How shapes are aligned. How bleached brown grows from snow.

Bit #3

Coming from sheep/cows/dogs
we end up nowhere/yet here
in the city of workers striving for
dreams a capitalist-monger dropped
at the corner of Queen
at the feet of a whore/pimp/pusher
running concrete maze with impunity.

Like love and accessories to
the rhythms of streetcars and cabs
careening the mantra of business practice
down Bay to Front. We were never
trained to think in concrete—not
when clouds dredged days out
of the magic place.

And in the magic we court those words
we learned sitting in a fairy tale—
though here a dollar sign is the signature
for rhythm/for love/for the sun
sliding into second base across
the kitchen table—a smiling alien
signalling to the humour of his situation—

everyman in drag/waiting for dreams
in the Andromeda Galaxy to guide his life.

Twilight Man


Drinking wine while. The temperature falls and.
My skin becomes papyrus. Etched with fables.
False gods. (Snow slides down the funnels of wind and streets)

I have come to see myself. As fractals of.
Binary time. When the switch is on or off. And
a monologue of events is consumed. By opening. And closing doors.

this evening a helicopter crashed in a field between Whistle Bear Road
and Langdon Hall the scene accessible only by snowmobile two
bodies rescued from the carnage which the morning paper will reveal
to me over cereal and coffee a sacrifice to reality as I shed the twenty
thousand homages to fantasy contained in a glass of wine consumed
at the end of another week at the beginning of another year wrapped
in the continuous consumption of events strained through my need
to be deluded and diverted by the Super Bowl parade from the parade
of body bags coming from a helicopter from a fiery crash on the 401
from the believers in freedom shipped back from Afghanistan the nouveau
patriot peacekeepers in a world without peace or secure doors

I have stood in doorways. Forever. The waving man between.
Consumed by masks. Small words navigating. The eddies of
experience. Afraid to. Dance anything. My words have asked me to dance.

Holguin

The Rabbit, Remaining Perfectly Still, Is Not There

Like a stroke. Division between sunshine
pulling itself across the kitchen table.
Hand enclosing the steaming mug
of coffee. The wake behind rippling.
Distorted memory. You always strove
for hidden. Mirror in a fun house.
Nothing believable. Play-dough man.

We do not reveal.

A poem is a thousand meanings. Each true.
It doesn’t matter. Each reality is
manufactured. Like tv’s. Shattered.
Blowing bubbles which float
into shadows. Speak in five languages
at the moment that a word is placed.

I can’t help but write.

And shy away. Tie and jeans. Housecoat.
Leather jacket with obscure colours.
A breath expelled. Inhaled. Mismatched
socks. Hair in endless colours of length.
Back and forth. Words pacing back and forth.
Know me. Know me not. But the faucet
is broken. Leaks words under a cloak
of obscurity.

Write. Delete. Write. Delete.

Avoid touching
or being touched
for more than
the length
of a dangling
meaning
and a twisted
word.

Parking Ticket

I come with words. They’re untrainable.
You know the moment—November sun
sits in your chair and graves
are being back-filled. Pretense
is the funeral. Yet we stare at each other
speechless as though silence is
our polemic. Then we walk away in opposite
directions—forever remembering
what we didn’t say. I have all these words
written down—in a poem this time
though it could as easily have been
my signature on a parking ticket—
parked in a tow-away zone—deduct three points
for not knowing you couldn’t stay.

Eddies and Spider Webs

Eddies and Spider Webs

in the crawl space beside old skates
(ten years of National Geographic)
wine and spider webs age

these stairs have creaked through three children

*

sun bleeds through the neighbour’s mountain ash and
the way I remember you is in eddies

(gravity and sheer stress) that movement travelling
forever yet always there (freight train shattering midnight)

*

spider web tatters dance in October wind

when I open the garage door to be faced
by rain (not suicide bombers and madness)
tap-dancing Fred Astaire and a smile that circles the lamppost

*

spider waltzing back into the cedar as I approach
with my macro lens—I imagine each step as a memory
of what was built and how that hour tasted consumed
in anticipation and existential faith

*

it’s a matter of scale—the Magellanic cloud passing sheered
towards us by gravity—your youth circling through our age—
each part of the web conceived out of the spider—king
of the empty carapace jungle—victim of the gravity of place

Random Drinks and Illusions

before the event
time

and a posse of poses for time—

don’t forget I brought
you flowers
in a jar

shaped like your work station

and you laughed
when I mentioned
they were looking
towards the sun of profit

* * *

can you bend that way—
into the shoal
where you drift the driftwood

collected from conversations
we had

it was a winter day
and you imagined sun—
you imagined earth

opening like the vaults of a pyramid—
the only treasure gone—

spent on a cigarette and gin—
on sand and last breaths

* * *

alleys and roads—alleys and roads
as though

there is no difference between
dead ends and choice

we always know a short-cut
cut out of our experience

I imagine a café in a dead-end court
and musicians playing songs

from somewhere else—always
in the key of my life

* * *

we were on our way
to early farmer’s market

the car just parked on King Street
and the sky opened up

when I glanced that way—
a landing plane—

a shooting star—
a comet falling

into the rising sun
and the dying host

of my shadow

Destination 5

Destination 5

Time is the leaning tower.
Lengthening shadows.

A word—from falling out of a conversation to
history discovering that word’s discarded shell
against a failed friendship/the silence of death
in the deafening bravado and thunder of war.

Time is stretched and released/stretched and released.
Hand between atoms. Hair sliding into the valleys of a pillow.

Costumes and masks. Purpose for clouds/horizon.
Sidewalks in cities when summer is the only gravity
that exists between sunset and sunrise. The sound
of emotion snagged on window-sills and fridge doors.

Time is the vanishing point where roads
and railway tracks become mystery/situation
between two non-existent/incomprehensible points.

Night on Lofoten