Some of these poems were previously published in Around You, CV/II, Event, Fiddlehead, Gaillardia, Gasoline Rainbow, Gauntlet, Grain, IS, NeWest ReView, Poetic Licence, Poetry Australia, Quarry, Repository, Salt, Waves.
Other books by Colin Morton:
My forebears were well acquainted with these distances grew close to the prairie knew the wind tide in its grasses the cry of wildfowl deserting the frozen ponds. On the run from another land's quarrels to the periphery of power they arrived on this unpromising plain and began the search for water and a name. The land lay flat in ambush made no response to the advances of the plough until it grew fertile with their blood. Their time was their own here time to grow old and die time aplenty to die without growing old to smother in grain dust as a child or to fall from heat exhaustion into the machinery. They held to the earth like a wife. Today the road spins out beneath the wheels at ninety fenceposts hiss by dry streambeds wind through the fields on either side of the highway embankment until it is swallowed in a tangle of city streets. At home near the outskirts I recall only their horizons rolling back under steel how when the land picked up and blew away they were rescued by their creditors and put to work for wages how they built the road back themselves to the country they fled lined up at the ticket office to enlist in its wars as now we tune in by satellite and the distances dissolve.
When the lead cold moon darkens and dwindles and the feeble sun slips under the mountains heading south dark flocks settle on the shadow groves This night of earth sleep I am pulled by the moon gathering shadows in secret swallowing stars
Less fiercely than river carves banks more subtly than glacier hollows lake you fit my body to yours even now as you turn in sleep this stone to breathing soil
Why whisper? never mind
what the girls say at coffee
let the boss wait but
talk to me now tell me
what's wrong with this poem
with all my love poems
where ice turns rock into soil but
you
remain hidden in the core
a shadow
cast by arrogant metaphor
never the real
person I love.
It looks like there's no way
out for my poem
it simply won't say what I mean
you won't enter it
any more than you fade into me
when you get married
and start signing my name.
You talk a while longer
at your far end of the line
then hand up (to hear your voice
was all I wanted)
and return to your files
but gradually
as the afternoon wears thin
and I sit finishing these lines
you remember a little
and a little more of the person
behind my words
and when you start talking about me
everybody gets bored
_a married woman_ they say
oh yes!
and by the time you get home
you will probably call this
a love poem.
Blindly
knowing flowers bloom
for any passing eye
while roots only
crush tear
take
soil longs
for the fruit
of all this giving.
The dead only
return
black and brittle on the stem
leaves sodden
trodden to mulch
rent
of all
but the longing
of soil.
And deeper dry
and unwashed
what of the jealousy of stone?
She's not crying now warming plates for our dinner and mashing potatoes with milk for her fiance Gerry, my young bride and me Once more she has everything in hand though not long ago she did let go her tears at some thoughtless word of mine and I left her in the kitchen with a hurt I couldn't understand I left her in the kitchen for a decade of lonely family evenings, desolate Saturday mornings with no work to get away to the pent up silences of this house of blame falling in on her a night. She has put all that behind her now Dessert is sweetened with laughter and we do the dishes together enjoying each other's company though Gerry and I are too loud solving all the world's problems. No more crying she tells herself and half believes it thinking Gerry is really on the wagon this time and I go back to my old ways taking her for granted smiling with her not caring to look so close I see into her eyes thinking as usual of myself but twenty-five years from now.
The morning sun
clarifies everything
and I stand with my thumb out
reading the _Gita_
between cars
transCanada east
My mind is untroubled by sorrows
for pleasures I have
no longings
Sun growing hotter
more kids come and
stand thumb out at the side of the road
so i back up
still reading
_All beings follow nature_
By noon I have backed up
five miles
and the highway has turned
fluid steel
semi orange winnibago blue
_Of what use is restraint?_
At last I cross the road
stand with my thumb out
facing east
In a minute
Uncle Wally pulls over
in his farm truck
laughing
to see it's me he has stopped for
and his son Lyle
laughs out loud
now his dad has
someone else to talk to
_Even a wise man
follows nature_
Like a broken leg roughly set bound to a branch then walked on as far as water rested then walked on again over the Superior north shore this car dying on every two mile hill backfires shocking bikers off the road. Ready heave. Hand on the wheel getting up speed jump in swing the door shut throw it in gear we're off again. Finally it's finished wants to just sit pistons steaming points black on the shoulder of the road near a town that boasts it's the coldest place on earth. Nothing to do but thumb to the Sault for parts. It must have been simpler once when your horse broke a leg you shot it.
On the bus sleep is the bridge
between separate realities
dual images
run each other through
bus windows
we rest
only while moving
at stops
everyone wakes
_Stay in your seat till
a city appears_
always the same city
Towns collect against the tracks
like papers in a windtrap
rusted out car bottoms
among ditch flowers
At every Greyhound cafe
a radio's going berserk
hallucinating ears in clouds
of cream through tea
Before reboarding
people string themselves out
along the gravel beach
to watch fish roll in
from the dark horizon
washed up on shore:
a case of broken bottles
Pocket knife's best but even a fingernail will do Keep the hole small, scrape out the pulp till the cork fits snug then carefully, repeat carefully pour lick any spills off the fat green flank -- go ahead, spill a bit, that's the best part. Once I poured three bottles of rum into one of these babies mind you it was really juiced we were licking booze off each others' arms -- come to think of it that's the best part but one bottle is plenty to sweeten your weekend just cool her overnight while she sucks up the juice and the lake will be brighter than ever tomorrow -- the sun will be red juicy red. Time was we had no fridge at the lake left the melon instead over night in the spring fed stream -- and really that's best but one summer we left one in the shallows fat and pickled next morning she was gone no sign All Saturday we steamed _Did you take her? Then who?_ till we found on the path to the privy a raccoon black eyes glassy crazy grin on its face and stiff.
they may be called, but I have never grown up still sleep in the foetal position would eat less meat if I did the slaughtering (rather not think of it) On the go, as we all are I have no time nor jaw for wisdom My dentist to spare me the trouble takes pliers to this remember I am brother to bear and wolf For leverage he climbs my chair tugging and sweating while my throat fills up with soggy cotton but the jaw is stubborn _Please_ I say _forget it it's only a tooth_ but the jaw remembers it remembers.
Uncle Ezra
alone on the farm
outlived all
his city children
finally took sick
from going to funerals
he was put to bed
for the good of his illness
they found him dead
on his way out the door
Now here we all are
the youngsters
who hardly knew him
and don't know each other
meeting one time to say goodbye
(but I remember Uncle Ezra
taught me to chop wood
a thing in all my city years
I will never forget)
Now without his ruddy cheeks
in his first new suit
since his wedding day
a bubble of flowers
cartooned over his head
Uncle Ezra
has already slammed the door
on us
and we when the service is over
hurry away to our cars.
_war_
_knees_
_far_
_cease_
The rhymes don't matter now
but I wonder where and
who he was
the day he took out
the _On Active Service_ paper
(in York awaiting orders?
or a smouldering Dutch village?
on one of those long drugged days
in a French hospital?)
to write what he would never say
_Fight for home and you_
Is that what he meant by the wounded look
that is all I saw my father give
his father while he lived?
Weddings _claim_ children
as a sniper claims victims
and when I read
_A Heritage which soldiers bought
For every girl and boy_
I break out in a sweat
see spots and get the shits
In short it's a soldier's life
being the son of a soldier
I am so glad
this was my father's only poem
glad he didn't teach me
to marry or give birth to war
If it left him nothing to teach
all right
I've learned more from his silence
than I could from all
the poems he never wrote.
Drops tossed from an oar move mountains on the surface of the lake You too dip lightly through street faces half seen glances adrift in your wake You paddle a succession of beds in bare rooms observing the silence of mountains.
Tea is steeping in the pot
As in the early days
of radio, chairs huddle round
the electric fire
magazines
make a rainbow on the floor
Leaves skitter down the road
clouds across the sky
Tea is steeping in the pot
When you get up to
put another coin in the meter
the furniture crowds
closer to the fire.
_a man on whom the sun has gone down
E P is dead in Venice
at the fall of the year
sun gold on the bay at dusk
is cold in his eyes
(in a snapshot he leans from a window)
This November
when the palaces are boarded up
San Marco's square almost deserted
when silence fills the courtyards and arcades
from steeple tops the swallows are dispersing
while before his eyes the broad sea darkens
to a vision of a windowless, closed room
_the last American dying the tragedy of Europe_
The last film years old now
still shows him drinking wine
on a Paris sidewalk black wine
that drips down his gnarled scruff of beard
his sunken cheek withdraws
from the camera's touch
the voice scratches like an old record:
_I thought I knew something
I was wrong_
He sleeps now
sleep bitterly awaited
as the gold sky after sunset
is sleeping light
Envoi:
Stay the affairs of commerce one day
sing once again the soul's wonder
though it lies in ruins
that old golden dream
and the weak song does in his throat
_Truth is not untrued by reason of our failing
to fix it on paper_
Welcome to Hellas Ancient & modern ruins 1st & 3rd Sundays free So efficient are we we have a special police force to take care of tourists Better than abracadabra say tourist say it in your best Alabama or New England accent Say it in your own accent tourist and the border police quite ransacking your van and turn you over to the tourist police who take care of you Do you need an A B C or D class hotel? The tourist police speak English with English accents most obliging not at all my cousin owns a D hotel In Hermou Street on the closest to the station of the market streets just under the Acropolis where the sun is hard on the marble ruins of earlier market streets hard as bleach on the sea The hotel's rates are fixed by the tourist police cafe menus and prices are printed by the market police you are the first tourists anywhere protected from gougers and swindlers we are the first country in history so honest we don't even need elections except to register who gets passports and licences The tourist police takes care of you all in the narrow Saturday night streets when the Yankee sailors come ashore wandering in a daze counting the days (the rates in the bordellos are fixed by the market police) The regime's official poster -- phoenix with figure of armed soldier -- is pasted like blood on public walls Why don't we open a t-shirt shop and sell caricatures with the soldier holding a cattle prod to the genitals of the phoenix who has the face of mother Athena? The tourist police will really take care of you if you go around talking like that Hellas bon voyage come again soon Thursday and Friday open till nine Don't wake up the immigrant workers till Munich Dortmund Hamburg or Keln Don't mention what you saw at the people's hospital when you had to be taken to a private room Talk up the vale of Megara Parnassus Corfu and Olympia Exit soldiers at Thessaloniki good night good night Hellas good night
Astern harbour gulls wing in / out cross the sun like clouds dip heads into the westerlies wing high with daybreak tide high in the rigging then call back to sea foam that teases the prow wing high over red tile roofs in the village cove ~ white shining through shadow ~ astern. So from Iceland St. Malo from Aleutian coves dreamers pass populating sea and sky a masthead finds its way through these stars to shore. Now as then gulls dive and soar astern cross the sun while the village dwindles then dips in the waves the sun noses deep in the cold sea's darkening reaches where it cools before the dawn.
I walk the embankment evenings when the sky is sun-swollen the forest hushed, take air among flowering weeds and sand overlooking inland the gallows and the execution pits. It's my only out now time to myself between the cliff face and the sea. Guards wave from their posts as I pass, prisoners wait in doorways smoking, shuffling cards their eyes darker than night. But here the sky is calm as memory the sun scrubs white the shimmering cliffs. Across the gulf I see him. He walks the other shore alone dwelling as I do on the space between. We share the intimate start of discovery yet neither shouts or waves. Each walks on as if still alone. Though he is free he awaits me here when I make my evening getaway. The sight of him frightens me I wish he would save me. As I watch he seems to be moving closer, his eyes on me as if they could kill. When I run back to my post he too turns into his dark country but through night watch I know he is there a sleepless appetite prowling in the dark.
The gravestones can no longer
be read, even now
rain is levelling the names and dates
arches that housed a splendour
of colour and light
fill a rock garden now:
red lichen green moss white flower
Rain hides the city
but for two landmarks
for warring centuries:
the minster and the smokestack
We walk the wall eating Spanish oranges
looking out from sentry posts
at broken brick and stone
lately painted by the local gangs
while under us imperceptibly
the rain is sliding this wall
and two walls beneath it
deeper
Today
behind the kingsofengland choirscreen
the pageant of Gichi Manitou
revived!
Arches of light are dancing
the thunderbird is flying
over Rome's eternally
buried walls
in the eternal flame
of eternal northsea gas
in upraised voices
flying
I
Gold the face
spun gold the headdress
of the grinning lord of death
pendant
round the neck of
the emperor priest
gold inlaid in jade
the god he prays to
II
Like Bacchus out of Asia
the Spaniard rides the sun
in his golden plumage
to the city of mirages
III
Cortes in ancient Darien
refound Homeric Illium
schooners cruised a sea of gold
on a coastline of the sun
IV
Orozco shows him
a mechanical man
whose steel sword rapes
the flaming body
of the goddess America
V
Thus they perished
they were swallowed by the waters
they became fish
they perished
all the mountains perished
1. Midatlantic Prayer
Hardships so many
we have endured for the Lord
the discomfort of the hold we count no hardship
the unruly waves no peril
that carry our bark
far from the shores of persecution
to new life beyond this deadly sea.
To the end of life and beyond we follow Him
though the wind is unceasing
and our fetor torments
the creaking, weeping night.
Though the sea storm devour us
our faith will sustain us
to the peace that passeth
80 acres of wood and meadow
in the land of Tuscarora.
2. Dekaniwidah's Dream
Together we dig up the great tree
throw into the pit all weapons of war
and bury them beneath its trunk
which grows
from the five roots of the people
to reach heaven.
3. The Book of Martyrs
Listen to the partridge cry, that's the savage
watching waiting.
The savage stalks like a fox
fights like a lion then
disappears into the woods like a bird
he will eat your liver before your eyes.
Nights
locked up in our dark houses
we turn
the pages of the Book of Martyrs:
_the crushing with stones_
_the burning at the stake_
_the rack_
Doors see
no arrivals or departures
only comings and goings
doors are shortsighted
always part of a room
You enter
shutting at your back
snowy mountains plunging rivers
anything
it doesn't matter
because you don't look back
Before you
a vision of doors opens
to more rooms more doors
you could go on forever
door to door
hunting
a vision of windows
left behind
Awhile before dawn the train slows and halts
at a clearing in the north shore forest.
Evergreen branches sag, heavy with snow.
At the side of the embankment is a railway shack.
Inside, a kerosene lantern illuminates a mercator world map.
Gold stars trace a path across a broad pink emptiness;
Europe is a tangle of lines.
Two parka'd figures stoop through the snow toward the hut.
Their faces cannot be seen, and before they reach shelter
the train jerks into motion, plunging into the forest again.
The train is part of nothing it passes.
Observes its own time.
Touches only its dream of steel.
A woman in red and white baseball jacket
half sleeps in front of the window where
the moon skips mutely through the branches.
Her baby sleeps across the facing seat.
She lifts her hand to her mouth ~ a red glow ~
then returns her hand to the window.
Smoke rises, curling slowly.
Morning gradually pales the sky.
oases are island jungles where we huddle round fires waiting for shadows to leap out of the trees In this desert oases are avoided We founder through sand storms driven by wind tide swimming with fossils through drifting dunes When we meet in the shadow of a rock we huddle together in talk create with our voices a world regular as hands and faces solid as resisting flesh
Hungry man drinks at stream
of light from lowering sun
rustle of wings in underbrush
as sage wind through grass
cloud shadows brush pine hill
pheasant's harsh alarm
Heaving to nameless distance
the prairie
tines and glows within
cutbank snakes through hills
to plain/sun/sea
gilding twilight
Scanning inarticulate space
for echo of buffalo thunder
hungry man grieves
translucent
evening is shattered
by silence
is one more idler hanging out for bootleg beer pockets bulging with apples and oranges he looks over your shoulder at the poker table turns up unwanted at the John Wayne movie spoils your aim at horseshoes with his rosy grin keeps you up all hours burning the night away
Week on week I patch
and go on patching fabric
that no longer holds a thread
patch night on day then
pick loose ends and
go on patching
When you arrive you
might see me
all in one piece
but soon
I begin picking
pulling
before your eyes
I fray
Only later in bed or
on the floor
I see
the cloth I needle
is my flesh
(a coalmining ghost town near Banff)
I
This granite staircase
without its proud manor
stands alone between snow peaks
last witness to these
black wounds
inflicted on the mountain
II
Follow this cold stream
down till the current
slackens and
sinks
beneath stone
found again
in a coalpit
exposed to the sun
filling with mud and flowers
III
For fear this black earth
rots on contact
we make love standing
then scramble back to the road
stopping only at the cenotaph
to read the names of the dead
He was always my idea of God himself lines like a calfskin Bible righteously presiding over family Christmas dinners His pious shadow fell across the lives of all his children as they chose their own careers married catholics smoked or in any way transgressed his law. I was there once when he caught my parents drinking at a party and when longhaired and 16 I hitchhiked east alone I learned what people meant who called him North Toronto Wasp. The day he died my father found me working Sunday in a ditch in northern Alberta Hardly a sign of grief passed between us only the look of stern reserve we both inherited from him that despite us outlives him.
She read it Sunday afternoons
in the light of her dining room window
through a magnifying glass that once
in the hands of one of her sons
burned a spot on the cover,
but each night of the week
she rested her eyes on her knitting
while my grandfather read from the family Bible
a full hour before the radio went on,
and for long now, most of my life,
she has felt her way through
this little apartment he moved her to
before he died.
Now the library sends her
cassettes of the Gospels in Modern English
_I've no use for books, the TV
is all I can see any more._
Though meant for more thunderous voices
_APPOINTED TO BE READ IN CHURCHES_
the book's years with her were silent ones,
four pages ruled for family history
are mute.
Only pencilled
numbers on a flyleaf trace
its progress from guineas to dollars
to this rest in her window garden
three flights up in Willowdale.
One scrawled note bequeaths it to her father --
_For Hiram Connell
when Mother is done with it._
Now _Mother_ is done, and the dying
man who wrote is nameless
in his own book,
the granddaughter
has become the grandmother
and passes the book on the me
unmarked, but preserving between its pages
a few fragments:
a daughter's first needlepoint
an _exhortation to obedience_
and, keeping place at Genesis XLIX
_Jacob calleth his sons and blesseth them_
two maple leaves
all red pressed out of them
for two sons in Europe
1945.
Grandmother
lying in your dark drugged night
whose Gospel is that you whisper in sleep?
while I at your table hunt these pages
for a passage into my past --
one verse of Isaiah
underlined in pencil:
_in a little wrath I hid my face awhile
but with everlasting kindness will I
have mercy on thee._
Haiku are snowing gently over cars in the parking lot between the red brick wings of the hospital snowflakes large as scraps of torn paper haiku written on them almost legible on the darkening sky. We are waiting together as you've been waiting nine months now the cat on your lap slowly pushed down from your stomach to your knees by the hidden stranger learning to swim inside you. Tonight our waiting is almost over and outside the window it's snowing haiku that muffle the sound of traffic of the icebound river breaking open.
No family but because
you're more family than I'm used to
I hunt through two bars
hand out till closing time
in the one with the shuffleboard
missing your wit feeling
maybe I don't know you
~ been away a month ~
as I turn up on your doorstep
with a sixpack.
You've just crashlanded
after all night alone
in the bar with the juke box
playing over and over
third-rate romance
low rent rendezvous
till the manager crabbing "This
my bar"
unplugged you and
sent you home white as ashes.
No family brothers anyway
we share the last round
singing another song
sitting face to face
where you might have been
staring out the night
in both chairs.
_Teach the losers,_
the coach says in the staffroom
_and pretty soon you're a loser too_
and when the bell rings
he goes to make winners
out of the kids he calls
_ya bunch a yahoos_
while I meet my special ed. class
at the front door
and we walk down the hill together
the two of us
to the Sunset Lodge to talk to his gramps.
_What was it LIKE gramps
when you were kids?
What was SCHOOL like?_
Each question the boy makes himself
clearer and the teacher
has done nothing but listen
to the old man's stories
of his first threshing crew at 13
and of the day years later
when on a railroad crew
he was overtaken on the bare prairie
by a dirt storm that hailed
darkness over him
and I watch the sunmotes drift past the window
the turning cassette forgotten
like the drone of the furnace
asking myself why
no one else in the staffroom
would touch my job
Later in the classroom
asked to set words on paper
the boy
takes pencil in hand like a pea-shooter
and scrawls
_GaMp Qiut sHooL at 10_
and for a moment I too feel the darkness
sentenced
to pore over the pages of his errors
till his sixteenth birthday
He grins and tells me he is stupid
but I'm not fooled he's smart enough
to know if he makes trouble
the school will let him quit early
I know he's not stupid I've seen
his eyes darken
when he frightens his friends
with the story of the dirt storm
I don't understand why I can't grow plants I'd give my life for my plants why can't I give them life? First the geraniums then the ivy rhododendron and yucca died of too much water or too little I never knew which I'm finally left with one cactus I couldn't kill. Knowing cactus like heat I set it by the stove a year later I notice it's suffocating coated with gas and grease so to clean it I put it with its pot in the dishwasher on the setting for greasy pots That doesn't seem to have worked the cactus looks dead. This is the third time I have phoned the Department of Agriculture but all I get is a recording on the noon market reports.
Frost crackles under foot and my shadow
reels in the headlights of a passing car.
Circuits snap coldly as photographs
burn in my brain
enamel peeling from the smile
black flakes of chemical paper
curl until only the corners are white
two greyish spots in the black
where eyes were.
Another snap
shot in a field last year:
I am in it
by a cairn of rotted posts
I pushed together posing
while my friend took the picture
that burned with him today.
In the dark field I look for the smouldering
ruins of those posts:
a horse
in the snow-covered field
a white horse
is staring at me.
Hypothesis: Education is the only hope
Apparati: 2 poinsettia striplings
1 pot of earth
1 ledger 1 stopwatch 1 gallon water
cultural miscellany
Method: Laid 1st plant across table
and taught it
the miracle of photosynthesis
read it the bill of rights
the joy of growing
then measured its rate of self-improvement
The 2nd poinsettia:
threw the dirt on it
squashed it underfoot
allowed it no exercise
fed it only water
Observations: The latter's growth (in feet per second)
was negligible
but it still holds out
like an obstinate beggar
a large red palm
Meanwhile the educated plant
turned to the colour of ashes
Conclusion: Hypothesis cannot be verified
There remain two possibilities:
a) there is no hope
the schools had better be buried
along with the flags at city hall
(and whatever has turned the colour of ashes)
make a time capsule of it all
and shovel it under
or b) neglect is the only hope
as it was for the Venus
who wore a once-fashionable dress
painted over the stone
from nipples to calf
till centuries of dirt stopping her eyes
revealed the real grain of stone
the beauty the artist spent his craft
in covering
Though John was the stoned one
I played the fool
loping alongside a passing train
the shriek of steel at my ear
reaching for a high iron rung
till on a city curb
I tripped
and rolled under
(the bushes)
thinking good thing
I didn't die just now
John would have really freaked out
She is too young to know how much she knows, he is old enough to know he doesn't. Her arms trace a dome around her heart he calls the house of god, she thinks he's joking. She pays no attention to his advice, and he all things considered does the same.
A rusty hatchet the shrill harmonica
chops at the air but can't split it
shavings of memory scatter on the floor
that sandpaper voices scratches across
a decade's static on the stereo
_the times they are achangin_
a spark
that voice touched off
might have touched off
how many lives what world
but times are still changing
and here lies the lumber
cold and petrified
no fire only dirt in the eyes
and the shoulder of the highway to cry on.
They say in Chile
one man's songs were so loved
he was taken in by police
they cut off his hands so he couldn't play
they cut out his tongue so he couldn't sing
they cut out his heart so no more songs
could disgrace them
but despite them
he still in singing under the breath
of millions on the streetcorners
of his country.
And still the cutting voice
whittles away at time singing
spare change on the sidewalk
outside the labour exchange
spare change but there it is
there is no blood on the album
who told you you'd get what you asked for
who told you you wanted nothing more?
for Irina Ginzburg
"USA has political prisoners in its thousands but
USSR has political prisoners in its tens of thousands"
- Andrew Young
Irina Ginzburg has only one
husband
one voice to cry out
for him
not one chance
to defend him.
Locked out of the courtroom now
for using her one
voice
refusing his accusers one
respect
she is discarded like so much
refuse.
She walks unseeing
past the Western reporters
opening her umbrella
in front of her face
unable to hide
her dry spectacled
hopeless eyes
from the camera.
One political prisoner
in one court
one wife one mother
in the slow
endless rain
walking away
into the photograph
that arrives next day
on my doorstep
in Edmonton, Alberta
drenched with rain.
The pink ladies and couriair
cars prowl seventh avenue
between open pits and cable spools
THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING SIDEWALK!
On this corner
frog-throated boys used to sing
CALGARY HERALD PAPER
LATE CITY EDITION
HERALD PAPER
and give change from their aprons with sharp-eyed
fingers
where today
an acre of glass encases
a twelve-month garden
frequented by popcorn bags and exotic birds
I can't hear from the street,
and drill bits
all sizes
sexy and primitive:
office ornaments
paper weights
garden fountains
drill bits
drill bits have balls
THIS IS A HARDHAT AREA
NO HELP NEEDED
Across from this sign I stand a half hour
to see how many Ontario dropouts
come looking for employment:
no one
loiters around the jobsite,
everyone hurries by
carrying briefcases, money sacks, takeout food
No one walks by as if they had the day off
No one is retired or too young to work
Even I can't stand here idle, I take notes
I tell myself, must be a working writer
must take notes wherever I go,
then I'll find out
where the sidewalks went.
(after Yeats)
Outside
she had no patience for what the day brought
no so much
emptiness she devours
sweet numbing healing peace
Inside patience is easy
when she is not being tortured
when the sun even shines
unbarred and unwired
She sits at her cell window so still
a bold gull flies down
and stabs her cheek
There is little blood
and she barely feels it
so glad to be
left alone
one day
line up all the empty bottles the long-necked beer bottles from the antique stores the wine bottles and pop bottles left on beaches steam off the labels and line the bottles up, the green ones with the brown black yellow and clear ones line up the beer bottles whose labels have been torn off by neurotic fingers and the bottles sent back by the breweries because they have cockroaches or dead mice at the bottom line up the bottles afloat on all the seas, those with messages in them and those without any and the bottles with methyl hydrate-soaked cotton in them used by schoolkids for killing insects line up the bottle that killed Malcolm Lowry with the bottle that killed Dylan Thomas and the bottles that killed all the drunken poets nobody's heard of and the poets who spoke all their lines into their bottles and all of Purdy's crocuses that weren't smashed on frozen roadsides when thrown from car windows line up the bottles of dark glass we look through darkly when we want to see the ghosts of our former selves and the bottles Dr. Jekyll drank from, and all the Dr. Jekylls whether on the stage, in movies or on television and the bottles of rubbing alcohol and aftershave and nail polish remover people only drink from in dark alleys line up the embalming fluid bottles someone was saving to build a glass house some day and the bottles of nerve gas saved up for the war nobody wants and the bottles of toxic gas cruising the streets disguised as trucks and the pill bottles, the billions of pill bottles emptied each year, and billions that sit half-empty for years on medicine shelves line up the empty bottles sent back by hospitals for refills line up all the empty bottles the party's over
Out of cracks in the pavement
the green comes
menacing
all smooth surfaces
rooting
under the cities
suckering out
all over the suburbs
Year by year
the green comes
with flowers
coming and coming
all over themselves
dying
fragrantly
into the sulphurous air
green then
ripe then
rotting
then green again
sprouting
out of putty
climbing
the silent steel towers
clinging
to petrochemical soils
greening
with a mould green perhaps
but green
fibrillating
everywhere
eating
our skeletons inside out
turning
each one of us
green
He's a strange bird
who deserts his nest
twice in one year.
He is happy
to be arriving
happy soon after
to leave.
Wherever he is
it's not right!
and he's off
somewhere
anywhere
away
on a ribbon of tail lights
in low orbit
strung out
like radio
at the far end
of the band.
Smells accumulate in corners year by year:
of mildew in the cupboards,
ash in the woodstove downstairs,
dust and cobwebs over all the hoarded jars
and hardwood and moulding in the rafters,
the cool smell of water dripping on wood.
Moving into this house no one has moved out of
we hardly possess it, merely add our trunks and boxes
to the accumulation in the basement,
jam them in around the unused moving crate,
between heaps of lumber, on shelves
of bottles jars and tins,
my tools go onto the workbench and get lost
amid curtain rods pipe sections twists of wire
tile grout slug bait lawn seed screws and
nails, tobacco tins of nails.
On the wall where it must have hung since 1954,
a _Saturday Evening Post_ cover:
the bright-eyed husband works at a bench like this
while upstairs in her negligee the young wife
sits in her blue bedroom
gazing out the window at the moon
as _she_ might have watched from her blue bedroom,
the widow who haunted this house
after the builder's death, the woman
who brought sweet smells to the pantry
and left handwritten Swedish recipes in the drawers,
who saved his long-necked beer bottles
and his newspapers from the war,
who kept up the garden as he began it:
crocus tulip daffodil rhododendron
iris raspberry rose,
who left
her trowel and gardening glove beneath a raspberry cane.
And locks accumulated in the years she was alone,
one of the last Liberal voters in British Columbia:
a lock and two bolts on the back door,
two locked doors in front,
and more bolts on the basement door,
each room can be closed to all others,
and here in the short hallway
she could sit with closed doors all around her
and cry to the ceiling far away.
Sun shines on the kitchen table
enervates the rising coffee steam,
and lazy man plugs in to the morning
news, because the paper isn't
news any more.
Some days
stories break hour to hour so
I feel I'm accomplishing something
whenever I tune in,
I'm there
when the spaceship touches down
when the murderer chooses death
with wet lips.
With this knowledge
I hope to make a better soup for lunch
but before sitting down
instead of grace
I need to know whether to despair
of earthly treasures, or if
I may breathe easier awhile,
chewing place names in the strait of Hormuz
with my zucchini.
At a rate proportional to their distance the stars
are moving out, away, apart.
From any point it appears the same, apart, away.
Every self is the centre.
Distant stars are vacating so rapidly their light
has stretched and turned red.
In fact their distance is measured in redness.
This explosion of stars appears only to the spectroscope
as memory, long, long past.
Only by dropping apples and listening to streetcars pass
do we know they have survived their ancient images.
The physics hasn't changed.
The stars are there but, like memory, millions of light years
farther than they seem.
The red shift is visible on this planet,
though only to the human eye.
Faster, fastest, everyone moves apart.
Having left you at the airport and driven as far as the bridge,
I look back and see only the starless city sky, bathed in red.
(for my son)
At last the storm is passing, or pausing
to restore itself over the gulf, clouds heave
a redolent breath on the rooftops,
and behind the closed door your howls
have ended,
sleep
washes anger and fear from your face.
I stand over your bed twenty years
from an understanding with you,
knowing we may not have those years,
or if we do, today
will be dream time then to both of us,
become other people, translated
into foreign lives.
You won't remember this day, and I
might say nothing happened:
we made it through the hours at home
on the bus and on
the hate/love rollercoaster ride of being five,
I listened to the news at lunch, dreading
to be out of touch another hour,
we put together your jigsaw puzzles
to show you had all the pieces,
you did a lot for yourself, did without
even me in the end,
as you will have to
some day we can't imagine.
The sky is impatient, tugged and tossed
in a mist of last roses,
and above the rain
satellites plough silent cameras through
what is left of the twentieth century,
almost everywhere on earth it is tomorrow.
-Vancouver, November 1980