Saying Things

The voice reading poetry,
as though pouring
a cup of tea at three
on a Jamaican afternoon,
will never describe death

completely – departure by
and arrival to – as though
tombs are worm holes
and a calm subway voice
during rush hour Friday

is more truthful than
grave-side hysteria.

The voice dying poetry
in a sinkhole in
Afghanistan, one step
away from an IED, one
thought from love

in a Winnipeg condo –
when the sun waltzes with
the million perceptions
of a world held in the shell
of a black walnut –

that world fades as well
as the setting maple tree sun.

Perception And Boulders

In seven years, they say,
every cell in your body
will have been replaced.

You’ll be the new man,
a fresh body with which
to tackle another sunrise.

I wonder, then where
memories are stored –
down what wormhole
they hide, ferment and
conspire – to bound out

at the most inopportune
times, like demented ghosts,
because after sixty years,
I am a child again
in the iris of my mother’s

fading comprehension and sight.

Timely Thoughts

Time is linear, time bends.
Time curls around itself
and like comfort food,
time is the embers you watch
at eleven o’clock
on a Friday night, wine glass
empty – as empty as –
well, your life just then,
a sticky note left
on a gravestone where you
buried the last one hundred dreams
when time experienced
a performance malfunction.

Accordion Bridge

I take the accordion out of
its case at midnight.
This is the basement
with cool August humidity.
Exams are in front of me,
open books a surround.

The first notes are from
Germany, the next from a
brothel in Spain. A riff from
a night club in
London follows, then ten
pages from a novel about rain.

I play six songs I remember,
as though they’re fairy tales
heard when I was five –
sitting with my mother
in the living-room,
listening to the radio.

I’m alive, I mumble to concrete,
I’m learning about
Hamlet and the spell
he was under when he killed
his uncle – to the rhythm
of gypsies around fires from hell..

Acid rock on the accordion
begets a thirst for beer,
for dances under starlight,
for dances to the dying muse
of polkas, weddings in white
and children from desire.

I play music at one
in the morning when
the street cleaner comes
roaring down the asphalt
like an alien invader,
or the sound of rockets

and guns at Dunkirk
in the early evening
when the sky bleeds
and bodies congregate
before liberation, before
western migration into hell.

I play the accordion – notes
footsteps in
New York, Toronto,
London, Paris
and Berlin – and hope
everywhere the sound lives.

The Taxable Free

The art of creating
nothing is free –
holes in iambs,
moles on lithographs,
a tendency to use
concrete and asphalt
when mapping the soul.

And in academic rooms, argument –
as thought that will describe purgatory and heaven.

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.