MFA Candidate

sweep sere articles blowing
down sentence streets

bag experience and recycle
in alleys and cafe’s

become a colony of sentences
on eroding isthmus

extemporise the vanity of white
cuddling phallic black print

memorize the addresses
of experience and denial

the wind in time will blow
everything into a confusion

In the Hatchway of Probable Impossibilities

Time stops / BEgins stitched and RAGged
wobbly-HIStoried / DAYs weaned from
EXpecation /a bullet / a bomb / a ROAD
a ship and ocean / WHEN ocean still was
separation / Respite / and road was DEStination.

I mumble AUTumn flowers / the DESicration

Between coffee and a half-CENtury of desperaTION.

Can you NOT ImaGINE that your ISOlation was
as much an ABANdonment of me as it was
you / young GIRl / losing the world / Mountains
and SKY / not consoled / argumentative
in the broken TIME machine.

After the War

the bleeding never stops –
slow leak soaks through generations

one shot and death, change
creeping from the shadows of possibly

metamorphosis is a terrible gamble,
more often failure than wild success

she wasn’t there – on the corner
where buses exhale harsh air
and concrete waves break against steel
under an apostrophe of time –

but you were, print dress,
fresh smile, a jazz of motion

it’s still enough

Random Sunday Evening Thoughts


Freedom is not control,
but rather not needing it.

I am free
in September rain,

in how it slides
down asleep grass.

Asphalt is an expression
without speed limits,

without shoulders and fences
where the horizon falls.

I am free in sight
along the strong lines

of an idea opening petals,
thought sustaining imagination.

Consequence

after conversations concerning,
as hands cradle coffee cups --

in the crevices between
voices a physical presence

dripped from the cores of stories
which seldom evolve beyond --

in the years history accompanied
us through, as though a camera,

We, historical librarians cataloged
and the waves we witnessed

caressing and careening
the Tobermory coasts between

harbors became metaphor
for change freed from entropy

and our loves were chipped smooth
by wind, by waves, until they became ice

point between parent and child
is lava crumble,
wind across memory loss

I am maple tree
bent into July’s demise,
dense rain, disturbed wind

Adoption

Construct of the wordless poem –
emotion and sound – accordion
quietly played after midnight
in cool, humid basement,
concrete walls still leeching odours –
1959 Ontario summer

everything different –
not today when my bladder
wakes me and it’s almost three.

There are no thoughts
of death, though death
often watches me sleep,
then wanders away,
dances through street lights,
gives the finger to the moon,
deconstructs my memories,
which have exceeded
their best before dates.

But this is poem,
unsubstantiated by fact,
deconstructed by time,
left wandering by deserted harbor,
waif of the greater saga,
orphan to the beginning,
though middle and end
continue the debate
over ownership in the court
of where to belong.

Birth Marks

What do I owe the past.
I barely remember landfall in Halifax,
train ride through Quebec cedars,
arrival in Kitchener.

Family was a hint of somewhere else,
three slabs of history on a plate of Slovakia,
the Ukraine and Germany. The sun
glances off stories of when and where.

This week at work, I watched a woman
walk past the security hut, tattoo bright
on her left shoulder blade. It was
a blue butterfly, entangled in flowers.

I imagined her making a statement,
how she was unique – to the point where,
were she found dead in a Toronto
alley, her identity would be sealed

by that blue tattoo. My father once
attended an engagement party for
a very good friend of mine, my mother
away, visiting European relatives

and he told everyone who asked,
that the tattoo on his left hand,
the hand that stretched out naturally
in greeting, that the tattoo was

his mother’s name. He smiled as
everyone looked and passed comments
about the depths of his love for his
mother, the East Worker who, having

abandoned his home in the arms of the invaders,
never returned, though my mother says
he cried for a very long time when he
received the letter about my grandfather’s death.

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.