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Oliver Sacks is going to die,
He tells us blithely in the New York Times.
He’s 81. His liver’s shot.
He’s blind in one eye
Though when both worked fine
Do you believe in the ghosts of aunties and uncles that drive old sin-
gle-bench pickup trucks spotted with bullet-hole rust, sweetgrass and
— “mu” twenty-eighth part —
On Antiphon Island they lowered
the bar and we bent back. It
wasn't limbo we were in albeit
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
for Alton Sterling, Andrew Loku, Philando Castile, et al.
I wanna live, son. But which son are you?
There where the rivers are made
of moonshine and the lights still wait,
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
(for the Chinese maroons, British Columbia, 1999–2001)
if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to
outlaw you. but Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization
In the empty classroom, at sunrise, a girl
sits on the floor, staring at a glockenspiel.
She’s shredding the cuticles on her left hand
Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
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);
Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid
the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf
might see it all as too hesitant for truth
Your best friend falls in love
and her brain turns to water.
You can watch her lips move,
side a:
1. 18 and Life
her friend takes her to
Queen and King, they rule side by side
in golden thrones above the clouds.
Her giggle and wide eyes remind him
60s pulled us from starvation into government jobs
antiquated Indians in Saskatchewan danced for rain
Manitoba Indian doings were hidden for a jealous
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
Newfoundland is, or was, full of interesting people.
Like Larry, who would make a fool of himself on street corners
for a nickel. There…
This city is beauty
unbreakable and amorous as eyelids,
in the streets, pressed with fierce departures,
For Hetti Corea, 8 years old
‘The Sinhalese are beyond a doubt one of the least musical
…
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
Cedar and jagged fir
uplift sharp barbs
against the gray
It is 2005, just before landfall.
Here I am, a labyrinth, and I am a mess.
I am located at the corner of Waterway
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
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’…
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
And sings the tune without the words —
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink
this pidgin script. I sing with nihilistic witticism,
disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks — impish
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man’s ingratitude;
I lift the Lord on high,
Under the murmuring hemlock boughs, and see
The small birds of the forest lingering by
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens,…
Fair tree! for thy delightful shade
’Tis just that some return be made;
Sure some return is due from me
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Piping down the valleys wild,
Piping songs of pleasant glee,
On a cloud I saw a child,
