25 Lines or Fewer

The Potato Harvest

A high bare field, brown from the plough, and borne

Aslant from sunset; amber wastes of sky

Washing the ridge; a clamour of crows that fly

In from the wide flats where the spent tides mourn

To yon their rocking roosts in pines wind-torn;

A line of grey snake-fence, that zigzags by

Up-Hill

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?

From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place?

A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.

May not the darkness hide it from my face?...

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks...

Day 62

Unless you believe in the eye of the needle

this kind of poverty will never be about material

it won't be about ragged clothing

or mud huts with broken walls

or river blindness

or murram roads

or bad-humoured fields that hoard curses

& promises that there won't be a harvest

this year or next year or ever...

At Melville’s Tomb

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge

The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath

An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,

Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,

The calyx of death’s bounty giving back

A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,

Ae Fond Kiss

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;                                

Ae fareweel, and then forever!

Deep in heart-wrung tears I’ll pledge thee,          

Warring sighs and groans I’ll wage thee.          

Who shall say that Fortune grieves him,   

While the star of hope she leaves him:     

Me, nae cheerfu’ twinkle...

You charm’d me not with that fair face

You charm’d me not with that fair face

Though it was all divine:

To be another’s is the grace,

That makes me wish you mine.

The Gods and Fortune take their part

Who like young monarchs fight;

And boldly dare invade that heart

Song: To Celia

Come, my Celia, let us prove,

While we can, the sports of love;

Time will not be ours forever;

He at length our good will sever.

Spend not then his gifts in vain.

Suns that set may rise again;

But if once we lose this light,

’Tis with us perpetual night.

Why should we defer our joys?

Fame and rumor are but toys...

Under the Answering Sky

I can manage being alone,

can pace out convivial hope

across my managing ground.

Someone might call, later.

What do the dead make of us

that we’d flay ourselves trying

to hear them though they may

sigh at such close loneliness.

I would catch, not my echo,

but their guarantee that this

From The First Water is the Body

2345*.

The river is my sister—I am its daughter.

It is my hands when I drink from it,

my own eye when I am weeping,

and my desire when I ache like a yucca bell

in the night. The river says, Open your mouth to me,

and I will make you more.

Because even a river can be lonely,

            ...

Gitanjali 35

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Mantra of No Return

my mother occupies the passenger seat. my brother and i

                     stick in the back.

   the radio babbles and sings between us. she is estranged, returning

           and we are revenants to a place                 inside a narration contrived

to read like non-fiction, a continuous telling since                                 one

mouth...

COLOURED HOCKEY LEAGUE OF THE MARITIMES

The puck skates in on parted-snow ice.

It's the season’s last game, an encore

to stomach winter’s sliver, to shrug off

the townsfolk stares.

The moonlit night is advanced in years

and highlights frontline winds. Streaming

sky trails squall skeleton trees.

Blades carve the pond.

Their cursive glide...

On Monsieur’s Departure

I grieve and dare not show my discontent,

I love and yet am forced to seem to hate,

I do, yet dare not say I ever meant,

I seem stark mute but inwardly do prate.

I am and not, I freeze and yet am burned,

Since from myself another self I turned.

My care is like my shadow in the sun,

...

Buen Esqueleto

Life is short & I tell this to mis hijas.

Life is short & I show them how to talk

to police without opening the door, how

to leave the social security number blank

on the exam, I tell this to mis hijas.

This world tells them I hate you every day

& I don't keep this from mis hijas

because of the bus driver who kicks...

The Author to Her Book

Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain,

Who after birth didst by my side remain,

Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,

Who thee abroad, expos’d to publick view,

Made thee in raggs, halting to th’ press to trudge,

Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).

At thy return my blushing was not small,

My...

Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand’ring bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

...

Danse Russe

If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees, —

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely.

4 Marked by Claws and Cloudburst...

The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June. 

180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil 

       goodandevil);

single-minded bird (plotting the sky).

                                                                  __

 ...

I've Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered

consider that the fire was want

and the hammers were fists.

I’ve tasted my blood too much

to love what I was born to.

But my mother’s look

was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;

her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:

and I loved her too much to like

how she dragged...

I Lost My Talk

I lost my talk

The talk you took away.

When I was a little girl

At Shubenacadie school.

You snatched it away:

I speak like you

I think like you

I create like you

The scrambled ballad, about my word.

Two ways I talk

Both ways I say,

Your way is more powerful.

 ...

O Captain! My Captain!

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

O the bleeding drops of red,

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And...

area boys

brash talk on sidewalk

brethren to irreverence

short teeth long stories

~

aspirations high

rolling tape decks tweeters six

by nine speakers deep

~

joyride profiles boom

down sto:lo street thump lean ass

out brwrwaa car window

~

 ...

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate...

Mother Church #3

KIN KLETSO/YELLOW HOUSE

CHACO CANYON, SAN JUAN COUNTY, NEW MEXICO

ANASAZI RUINS, AD 1125-1130

For Henri, at 2

You step down into the Flat World

Then ask me to say it, to explain

How our name can mean...

Self-Portrait

He wants to be

a brutal old man,

an aggressive old man,

as dull, as brutal

as the emptiness around him,

He doesn’t want compromise,   

The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,

And truth in every Shepherd’s tongue,

These pretty pleasures might me move,

To live with thee, and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,

When Rivers rage and Rocks grow cold,

And Philomel becometh dumb,

The rest complains of cares...

The Dead

How great unto the living seem the dead!

How sacred, solemn; how heroic grown;

How vast and vague, as they obscurely tread

The shadowy confines of the dim unknown! —

For they have met the monster that we dread,

Have learned the secret not to mortal shown.

E’en as gigantic shadows on the wall

The spirit of the daunted child amaze...

From World of Made and Unmade

In my dream my mother comes with me.

We are in the meadows we call

The Flats, walking the dogs.

Walk straight past the water trough,

she says, do not engage the moss.

Go back to the top of the page,

the dream says, and leave out the suicides.

In my dream I walk and...

One fish, Two fish, Plastics, Dead fish

recycling Dr. Seuss

Some fish are sold for sashimi,

some are sold to canneries,

and some are caught by hungry slaves

to feed what wealthy tourists crave!

Farmed fish, Fish sticks, Frankenfish, Collapse

From the Pacific to the Atlantic,

from the Indian to the Arctic,

from here to...

Sonnet XXIII: Methought I Saw my Late Espoused Saint

Methought I saw my late espoused saint

Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,

Whom Jove’s great son to her glad husband gave,

Rescu’d from death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom wash’d from spot of child-bed taint

Purification in the old Law did save...

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things —

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced — fold, fallow, and plough;

And áll trádes, their gear...

Underworld Lit

XIV

Please print clearly and remember your name.

1) The river of fire, in ancient Greek thanatopography, feeds into the river of _____________.

2) From the river of pain spring two rivers—the river of _____________ and the river of _____________.

3) The river of _____________ runs a separate course entirely,...

Adam Posed

Could our first father, at his toilsome plow,

Thorns in his path, and labor on his brow,

Clothed only in a rude, unpolished skin,

Could he a vain fantastic nymph have seen,

In all her airs, in all her antic graces,

Her various fashions, and more various faces;

How had it posed that skill, which late assigned

Just appellations to...

Homage to the Mineral of the Onion (I)

In the onion, there’s

something of fire. That fire known as

Fog. The onion is the way

fog has of entering the earth.

Into the soil. Through the green leaves of the onion....

The Good-Morrow

I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers’ den?

’Twas so; but this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee.

And now...

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove,

That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,

Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

And we will sit upon the Rocks,

Seeing the Shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow Rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing Madrigals.

And I...

Ode on Solitude

Happy the man, whose wish and care

A few paternal acres bound,

Content to breathe his native air,

In his own ground.

Whose herds with milk, whose fields with bread,

Whose flocks supply him with attire,

Whose trees in summer yield him shade,

Sonnet LV: Not marble, nor the gilded monuments

Not marble nor the gilded monuments

Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,

But you shall shine more bright in these contents

Than unswept stone besmeared with sluttish time.

When wasteful war shall statues overturn,

And broils root out the work of masonry,

Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn

The living...

31

We’re all aware that human hair is dead

Yet we spend thousands taking care of it.

It’s like an endless funeral.

The moment your hair hits air, it’s toast.

It only lives inside the follicle.

That we twist and burn and fry it,

Straighten it and dye it, does not surprise.

What’s it gonna do, spit out your cheap...

Old Ironsides

Ay, tear her tattered ensign down!

Long has it waved on high,

And many an eye has danced to see

That banner in the sky;

Beneath it rung the battle shout,

And burst the cannon’s roar; —

The meteor of the ocean air

Shall sweep the clouds no more!...

To the Ladies

Wife and servant are the same,

But only differ in the name:

For when that fatal knot is tied,

Which nothing, nothing can divide:

When she the word obey has said,

And man by law supreme has made,

Then all that’s kind is laid aside,

And nothing left but state and pride:

Fierce as an Eastern prince he grows,

Badlands

Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.

He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books

you never knew he read. He sat until his eyes strained to know

what the prairie insisted he must see. Once he found a hoodoo,

toppled after centuries of reaching beyond the flattened earth

we all become and remembering that,...

Insomnia

Thin are the night-skirts left behind

By daybreak hours that onward creep,

And thin, alas! the shred of sleep

That wavers with the spirit’s wind:

But in half-dreams that shift and roll

And still remember and forget,

My soul this hour has drawn your soul

Francesca Woodman

                              i

At the heart there is a hollow sun

by which we are constructed and undone

                              ii          

Behind the mirror. Favourite place to hide.

I didn't breathe. They looked so long I died.

Echolalia

Once one gets what one wants

one no longer wants it.

One no longer wants what?

One no longer wants what

one wanted.

-

A man and a woman want a woman and a man

or a man and a woman depending

on the man and the woman.

I Am

I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;

My friends forsake me like a memory lost:

I am the self-consumer of my woes —

They rise and vanish in oblivious host,

Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes

And yet I am, and live — like vapours tossed

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,

Into the living sea...

New Year

         Out of their torments men carved a flower

         which they perched on the high plateaus of their faces

         hunger makes a canopy for them

         an image dissolves in their last tear

         they drank foam rhythmed monsters

         to the point of ferocious horror

In those days

there was an

...

Gayatri

I have a picture of us when we are seven

but we aren’t in it. At the time it was taken

we thought we were. We posed with our wide

grins and best-friends-forever certainty. I angled

the camera to capture us in front of a Christmas tree.

All the sparkling tinsel and dangling silver balls aren’t there.

There...

Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

Save...

Blousy Guitar

Blousy guitar   I don’t want to count the beats   Hey Hey

My pen     I have bed hair in the best way    Daughter

of sunlight and air     and I’m glad you were born

on this day or put another way: that you were

born      Let’s be superstars    Let’s call each other “suckas”

Turn everything into writing      Lord of my Love

and...

Full Moon

My bands of silk and miniver

Momently grew heavier;

The black gauze was beggarly thin;

The ermine muffled mouth and chin;

I could not suck the moonlight in.

Harlequin in lozenges

Of love and hate, I walked in these

Striped and ragged rigmaroles;

Along the pavement my footsoles

...

Holy Sonnets: Death, be not proud

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

...

from Cross River . Pick Lotus

9

How to describe sea

To someone who’s never seen it?

He lives to ninety-nine, he wants it, to see it

To walk on its glass surface, to blow the seven trumpets.

At this joyous moment gigantic angel wings

Write prophecy all over the sky. How can I tell him 

About sea storms, the chocking...

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless...

The Wife

Living, I had no might

To make you hear,

Now, in the inmost night,

I am so near

No whisper, falling light,

Divides us, dear.

Living, I had no claim

On your great hours.

Now the thin candle-flame,

The closing flowers,

Wed summer with my name, —

And these are...

Icicle Glasses

Day thirty-nine

The thing that death gave you —

your face leaks

your face overflows

Your face is the grave of your nose

your face is the grave of your ears

your face is the grave of your face

once again your face overflows uncontrollably

The subzero temperature grows on your face then...

Last Visit

Now I set out across a minefield,

space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over

from a point where every pebble may explode

beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up

behind my body as I gasp for air,

although in this world I’ve never known

either flames or dragons or the fury of war

in these lands where the sky was always calm...

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head...

Mean Drunk Poem

Backward & down into inbetween as Vicki says. Or as Robin teaches

the gap, from which all things emerge. A left

handed compliment. Bats, houses of parliament, giants, stones.

What woman, witness to such Thought, does not feel

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain

I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,

And Mourners to and fro

Kept treading — treading — till it seemed

That Sense was breaking through —

And when they all were seated,      

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And...

The Poet

Out of the deep and the dark,

A sparkling mystery, a shape,

Something perfect,

Comes like the stir of the day:

One whose breath is an odor,

Whose eyes show the road to stars,

The breeze in his face,

The glory of heaven on his back.

He steps like a vision hung in air,

Diffusing the passion of eternity;

...

The Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

As a skate’s...

The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls

The tide rises, the tide falls,

The twilight darkens, the curlew calls;

Along the sea-sands damp and brown

The traveller hastens toward the town,

And the tide rises, the tide falls.

Darkness settles on roofs and walls,

But the sea, the sea in the darkness calls;

The little waves, with their soft, white...

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Wild Nights — Wild Nights!

Were I with thee

Wild Nights should be

Our luxury!

Futile — the Winds —

To a Heart in port —

Done with the Compass —

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden —

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor — Tonight —

In Thee!

it's rank, it cranks you up

it’s rank it cranks you up

crash you’re fracked you suck

shucks you’re wack you be

all you cracked up to be

dead on arrival

overdosed on whatever

excess of hate and love

I sleep alone

if you were there

then please come in

tell me what’s good

think up something

 ...

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Gather ye rose-buds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

The higher he’s a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

And nearer he’...

From Silvija

If you can’t speak / write in a fissured / alter-language

Of nerve-matter / dura mater / orbit of the central axis

By a crevice / scattered / venous lacunae / lamina code

Cambered whisp to a fold / a tremor / (footfall) / rustle

Shudder leaves / whelming the surface / sleep / no and

No / resumed in doubling /...

Song

Go, lovely rose!

Tell her that wastes her time and me,

That now she knows,

When I resemble her to thee,

How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that's young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,

That hadst thou sprung...

Deto(nation)

There’s a joke that ends with — huh?

It’s the bomb saying here is your father.

Now here is your father inside

your lungs. Look how lighter

the earth is — afterward.

To even write father

is to carve a portion of the day

out of a bomb-bright page.

There’s enough...

Unspeakable Acts in Cars

It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy

To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps

All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue

And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea

Are blue also. How our sun must love blue.

We have beachgrass and bull kelp and lion’s mane

And we love them all because we love the sea...

The Last Laugh

‘O Jesus Christ! I’m hit,’ he said; and died.

Whether he vainly cursed, or prayed indeed,

The Bullets chirped — In vain! vain! vain!

Machine-guns chuckled, — Tut-tut! Tut-tut!

And the Big Gun guffawed.

Another sighed, — ‘O Mother, mother! Dad!’

Then smiled, at nothing, childlike, being dead.

...

The Chimney Sweeper: When my mother died I was very young

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry “‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep! ‘weep!”

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved, so I said,

“Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your...

You knock on the door

You knock on the door but nobody answers. Cupping your hands around your face you peer through the side-panel of frosted glass. A kettle is whistling, a woman singing as she sets the table. This is a familiar house. You knock again. Inside, the sounds are festive. Glasses clink and a band starts up. Pressing your ear to the door, you hear the sound of your own laughter. This is the house you...

Barter

Life has loveliness to sell,

All beautiful and splendid things,

Blue waves whitened on a cliff,

Soaring fire that sways and sings,

And children’s faces looking up

Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell,

Music like a curve of gold,

...

On High

There was busy air there, air

seething through the leaves so,

from farther up, the tree-line shone

like a single scintillating polyhedron.

Still, though ravens and wrens flaked off the top,

the woods held, solid as a mall

or a rally or a lake — really anything

at all when seen from a ways. But

we'd...

Flaxman

We deemed the secret lost, the spirit gone,

Which spake in Greek simplicity of thought,

And in the forms of gods and heroes wrought

Eternal beauty from the sculptured stone, —

A higher charm than modern culture won

With all the wealth of metaphysic lore,

Gifted to analyze, dissect, explore.

A many-colored light flows from one sun...

A Thunderstorm

A moment the wild swallows like a flight

Of withered gust-caught leaves, serenely high,

Toss in the windrack up the muttering sky.

The leaves hang still. Above the weird twilight,

The hurrying centres of the storm unite

And spreading with huge trunk and rolling fringe,

Each wheeled upon its own tremendous hinge,

Tower darkening...

Sonnet VII from ‘Sonnets Written in the Orillia Woods’

Our life is like a forest, where the sun

Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;

The full light rarely find us. One by one,

Deep rooted in our souls, there springeth up

Dark groves of human passion, rich in gloom,

At first no bigger than an acorn-cup.

Hope threads the tangled labyrinth, but grieves

Till all our sins...

At the Centre

Today doves flew from my head

and my hair grew

the longing is gone from my body

and I’m filled with peace, perfect peace

No longer shall I speak of electrocuted poets

11. Headwinds

When I began to write, I didn’t know

each of my words would bit by bit remove

things from the world and in return leave blank

spaces. That poems would begin to take

the place of my own homeland, mother, father,

first love, and second youth, and what I write

would fade from this world, trade its solid being

for unstable...

Hip-Hop Ghazal

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,

decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,

inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping ‘tween floorboards,

...

Riprap

Lay down these words

Before your mind like rocks.

             placed solid, by hands   

In choice of place, set

Before the body of the mind

             in space and time:

you aren't going to like what i have to say

before i start i want to say you shouldn’t blame yourself

there’s no point in beating around the bush

there’s something we need to talk about

this is the most difficult thing i’ve ever had to tell anyone

the longer i wait the harder it’s going to be

it’s best if we face this right now

what i’m about to tell you won’t be easy to hear

But I’m No One

for M. Maylor

Dear Anne Carson:

My friend read me the poem where your mom

said that the dead walk backwards.

You thought this myth arose from poor translation.

I can attest to your misapprehension.

My social studies teacher in grade 8, Ms. Rogers,

believed it was customary for the Chinese

to walk...

Tractatus

The sun gave our shoulder blades ulu-shaped burns, and the sun gives nothing to our sort

I sleep now, and furiously

Clouds excreted shadows on the shoreline, and there were no clouds

His body a train ride away, and nearby

There are organs I have never used before, and they are pale from overuse

The sand had turned to pearls in our folds, and that...

From Correspondences

Sometimes we are led through the doorway

by a child, sometimes

by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing

the past, for if there is anything we must change

it is the past. To look back

and see another map.

Love enough to fill

a shoe, a suitcase, a bit of ink,

a painting, a child’s eyes at a chalkboard,...

from Sharking of the Birdcage ["the spirit of"]

                   the spirit of

                 your flowers is

         my favourite shelter

             we were in love is

                           the main

                                thing

      faintest green light in

      tree pulls me forward

whenever life is

beautiful makes

me think of...

Should Lanterns Shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,

Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,

Would wither up, and any boy of love

Look twice before he fell from grace.

The features in their private dark

Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come

And from her lips the added pigments fall,

The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

Cowboy Story

The books sit on the shelf, a row of coma patients

in a ward, a series of selves no longer able to learn

and trapped at the point of injury: the last page.

At the donor clinic I offer my arm to the spigot

of the needle and think, as I see the bag fill

with blood, there goes some of me. But that’s a lie:

as...

My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962

Very loud    a mad frenzy    The wooden

barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)

Left home to join the circus: 15 years old

You enter at the bottom and wind upwards

in spirals    the bike climbing the sides

You enter the barrel on a Peugeot

with automatic tied down handles

Rondeau

Jenny kissed me when we met,

Jumping from the chair she sat in;

Time, you thief, who love to get

Sweets into your list, put that in:

Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,

Say that health and wealth have missed me,

Say I’m growing old, but add,

Jenny kissed me.

I Am the People, the Mob

I am the people — the mob — the crowd — the mass.

Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me?

I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world’s food and clothes.

I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns.

I am the seed...

Dog Boy

ONE

Late at night in Oklahoma, a very small, an extremely small man ran across the road in front of my friend’s car. He does not doubt this is real, though the rest of us do, and it doesn’t bother him. He continues to paint portraits of astonishing trees each day and take long...

Pride

A half-hour.

Thirty minutes.

One thousand eight hundred seconds.

They sat.

Protest is not supposed to be comfortable.

Civil disobedience does not

fit into pristine conformist ideals

of opposition.

 ...

Poor Speaker

I understand you.

I get what you’re trying to say.

What you’re trying to say is you want me to get it.

I get it. You want me

to understand. You want me to know

not the words, but what’s behind them. Got it.

You’re trying to tell me

what you want me to hear. What I

hear is all words, but that’s not...

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

A boat, beneath a sunny sky,

Lingering onward dreamily

In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:

Echoes fade and memories die:

Autumn frosts have slain July.

Pale Blue Cover

In the middle of the night Matt would fly to Vancouver so he could take a walk on the sea wall the next day, then go home.

Wouldnt tell anyone, no telephone call, just run a scene through his peculiar Ontario head, no snow on that beach.

No one can imagine Matt teaching religion at...

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings...

Ella Josephine Campbell

Slim, slight. Sinew and bird bones.

Cords of her hands like spruce roots.

Came from Ship Cove to Crow Gulch

with little more than the child inside her,

landed in a small shack flanked by

an outhouse, train tracks. Made it work,

had to. No surviving a place like this

without some acceptance, some yield

to the...

I think I should have loved you presently

I think I should have loved you presently,

And given in earnest words I flung in jest;

And lifted honest eyes for you to see,

And caught your hand against my cheek and breast;

And all my pretty follies flung aside

That won you to me, and beneath your gaze,

Naked of reticence and shorn of pride,

Spread like a chart my little...

Grief

I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;

That only men incredulous of despair,

Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air

Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access

Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,

In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare

Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare

Of the absolute heavens. Deep-...

Eight

The trick to building houses was making sure

they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste

was growing more sophisticated and occasionally

its appetite was unwieldy. It ate boats and children,

the occasional shoe. Pants. A diamond ring.

Hammers. It ate promises and rants. It snatched up

names like...

The Maldive Shark

About the Shark, phlegmatical one,

Pale sot of the Maldive sea,

The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,

How alert in attendance be.

From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw

They have nothing of harm to dread,

But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank

Or before his Gorgonian head;

Or lurk...

Wishing Well

My fist holds as many coins

as I can carry. All are stamped with the Queen's effigy;

Elizabeth, D.G. Regina, the resident of pockets,

a woman I've never met though I always know

her whereabouts. Each face pressed

into another person's palm before mine.

The stink of sweat and metal. The waste of it.

I wish for a return...

Beat! Beat! Drums!

Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!

Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,

Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,

Into the school where the scholar is studying;

Leave not the bridegroom quiet — no happiness must he have now with his bride,

Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or...

Boy Remembers in the Field

What if the sun comes out

And the new furrows do not look smeared?

This is April, and the sumach candles

Have guttered long ago.

The crows in the twisted apple limbs

Are as moveless and dark.

Drops on the wires, cold cheeks,

The mist, the long snorts, silence…

The horses will steam when...

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a...

Smooth Horizon of the Verb Love

1

an urban image from the eighties

when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur

and at the back of the room

women wrapped their arms around

nights of ink and dawn

2

calendar of murmurs

vague caresses about the planet and its water

we could have...

Poem for My Body

No one else rescued me. Not my father

or my brother or, years later, the gentle man

who became my husband. Not my mother

or my best friend or any of the women

who listened to me tell my story

and told me their own stories as we drank

cups of hot chocolate in cafés in Vancouver

while outside the rain poured and fallen leaves

Veronica?

What's it like at the centre of the AGO?

Hmm. Imagine being coloured, drawn, and placed

in a wooden frame, another hung woman, positioned

just so in the middle of a landscape surrounded by rocks,

lakes, mountains, and trees, MacDonald to your right,

Carmichael to your left.  Imagine being forced to look,

 ...

When I Have Fears That I May Cease To Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,

Before high-pilèd books, in charactery,

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain;

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face,

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,

And think that I may never...

A Dream Within a Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Sonnet XVIII: Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing...

In That Other Fantasy Where We Live Forever

we were never caught

we partied the southwest, smoked it from L.A. to El Dorado

worked odd jobs between delusions of escape

drunk on the admonitions of parents, parsons & professors

driving faster than the road or law allowed

our high-pitched laughter was young, heartless &

               disrespected

authority...

Two Hours on the Train

During two hours on the train

I rerun the film of my life

Two minutes per year on average

Half an hour for childhood

Another half-hour for prison

Love, books, wandering

take up the rest

the hand of my companion

gradually melts into mine

and her head on my shoulder

is as light as a dove

When we...

Guanahani, 11

like the beginnings — o odales o adagios — of islands

from under the clouds where I write the first poem

its brown warmth now that we recognize them

The House on the Hill

They are all gone away,

The House is shut and still,

There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray

The winds blow bleak and shrill;

They are all gone away.

Nor is there one today

To speak them good or ill:

The Swimmer’s Moment

For everyone

The swimmer’s moment at the whirlpool comes,

But many at that moment will not say

‘This is the whirlpool, then.’

By their refusal they are saved

From the black pit, and also from contesting

The deadly rapids, and emerging in

The mysterious, and more ample, further waters.

And so their bland-blank faces turn...