Crossing

Here's where they indented the riverbank,

cut away grass and wild roses stitching

the hill together, took sand for concrete,

exchanged Gabriel's Ferry

for Gabriel's Bridge,

flatboat and cable

for sky-blue painted steel.

Here, across the river from Batoche

and what remains of Fish Creek

my brother and I would climb

the bank's cut-open face—

slipping, kicking up sand-spurts—

then scoot down the slope.

Scramble up again, slither and tumble

till feet, hands, clothes were sand-brown.

Something had happened in these hills

but the ferry was gone;

we pronounced Gabriel like an English name;

we saw only later that the bank,

overgrown again with grass

and roses, was not meant to look

like this.

flooded, x

In the garden

On the banks of

The flooded river

They sit in a sea of

Blood red tulips,

Share poems of

Girlhood and

First loves.

Surrounded by Mol's taut

Bodies, every nymph sculpted

With firm tiny tits and legs ready for

The dance, last rays of a rare spring day

Dance for the spring starved women,

Shadowing words like pubic wings

And hymens laid open, un-

Whispered, because

We can     now.

Let us

Swim with Leo's beauties

In the pond in the yellow-tuliped

Lake by the banks of the gushing river

And giggle like we did once

Let us offer up a chorus to

The sun and to love

To yellow and to

To blood-red
blossoms.

Wild West Show

Even the great Sitting Bull joined the circus. Fifty dollars a week from Buffalo Bill turned buckskin and blessed feathers into costume, great battles into show. The glory of Little Big Horn played day after day for Englishmen – skin cool and pale as unfletched chicks – to careful claps of their soft hands.

What choice did he have? White man’s lines penned him like stock, and the buffalo gone. Herds that were once three days long run dry as the hard ground of ’85. No meat, no robes, no flesh for the bones of teepees. No dry shit, even, for a fire.

Maman remembered him, proud outside Legare’s store, speaking for the Sioux driven north to their deaths after Custer’s Last Stand. His people like 4,000 buffalo halted on the lip of a cliff and set up camp. Freezing, teeth falling out or broken on bottles. He stood and demanded to be seen. He was a tall man, too, Maman always said, pinching my chin.

In England, France, Sitting Bull would have been as rare as I am on these city streets. Tearing strangers between recoil and fascination at the wild, baffling work of God.

J.J.

The scrapbooks tell a tale

if you can read it:

his interests, points of pride

displayed in clippings from the Valley News.

Steam tractors, threshing crews

in photo after photo

grainily reproduced in newsprint.

Main Street in 1910. Fire in the old hotel.

Webs of small-town connection: anniversaries,

awards, school choirs, bowling teams.

To anyone but himself a partial tale—

episodes, self-contained, out of sequence

like reminiscences over coffee

at the downtown café.

His link to all these weddings, deaths unclear—

a seemingly unfiltered mass of news

gathered in his all-embracing attention.

Or likely, there was more within his ken

than I could ever guess.

Flinch

Seeing those dry pink sockets
where the eyes once nestled
I flinched at first, thinking the dog
mad, then understanding came
as I held out an unsteady hand
and called “Hey sweetheart.”
How fear nuzzled me then
like an old friend. The owner
rounding the corner in house slippers
and pajamas asked if I knew the dog.
As if he belonged not to him, but to
the whole block. And watching,
I could see that he did. Stopping
to sniff their way home, past that bush,
that young boy playing basketball,
pausing to listen for his human’s shuffle—
the pair of them nearing something larger
than old age or loneliness—
in the spring evening scented
with the first lilacs.




----
This is my last May Day post. Thanks to everyone for spurring me on and for your comments. Apologies I haven't commented as much as I'd hoped. Planning a wedding, even a relaxed one, sure steals a lot of writing time. Have a wonderful summer. Hope to see some of these poems in print in the coming year.

This message was composed with PhatWare WritePad.

Finger my machine
Sip it
on the rocks.
It felt that
return, the fell swoop
of my gestures
the bright infected
with my shadows.
My machine does not care
if I spout gibberish
does not correct sense,
only strains to read my fingertip, broken and sometimes, not now,
bleeding through its little canyons.
It recognizes me. The way no one does. No one feels my finger on a hard cold back.
In the movies. A note in lipstick, chocolate, blood. Scraping silently
in defense against something not unlike real love.

Bareback

I was made to mount
a horse without stirrups.
No need of stump or fence rail,
just swung a leg up and over easily
as a man would his wife.

Pointed my nose
to chosen horizon,
let horse sense intention
in twist of spine,
grasp of calves.

Just thought turn or slow
and the horse did
as if its legs were my own.

Grabbed fast to mane,
leaned hard and flew.
Let the pleasure throb of gallop
resound through my bones,
echo from throat:
grunt of familiar thrill.

Never griped about
tetchy mares, spunky yearlings.
Moaned over chapped ass,
balls ridden red-raw.

Riding my only chance
to act captain,
steer my course.

March 7: Thomas

(blind, erasure, with autocorrect)

noble Aquino bit his brothers,
suffered the caresses of his mother
shake him in sin
burning branded creature
concealed ecstasy, a cord, pain
piercing cry, confraternity
gratuitous, tight
philosophy.

knowledge of hidden treasures reserved for those who have flowed.

Drink

Whiskey is flint:
first sip snaps spark,
second catches – my belly
a hunk of dried moss
gnawed by flame.

Tinderbox innards
so hot flesh glows
red between ribs.

No mouth to this long chimney.
Smoke climbs, socks in
mind, memory.

I pour and swallow,
not dousing the blaze
but fanning its fury.

March 8: Duthac

Unlike a side of pork, my body
though just as cured, still,
is not for tearing up to scavengers.

I am the overcooked meat of the English.

I am the spooky mummified cure
for what ails you.

If the bird had been a crow, would it have taken the gold ring,
leaving me saddled
with the pork?
Who knows--crows
have humour
better than yours or mine.

Crows should be in this story.
Streaming from my leathery head, a feather
veil of wiles.

Hair of the pig.
That was it. This man and his golden hangover.
Everything he bought turned to drink, and everything he drank turned to gold.
The eternal cycle
embodied by the golden ring.

This man was a renowned sex addict who,
tied to a fence, dehydrated himself and summoned me telepathically to
pray, also telepathically, also sympathetically,
for his relief. Correction. Actually
he was playing bagpipes in a Dixieland band and got confused.

He made love to a devil named Pete Bog and that was against the law.

My therapist who art in heaven asks me
if I want to get back in the saddle. It's a joke we have
about my tanned hide back there.

This man--where was I?--he enjoyed his "friend," Pete
and regretted it in the morning, wondering
where his full frontal
love had gone. (Did you notice
B and V are side by side?)

Lobotomy Pete is his other name.

That's when he called me in. My name
Is Friday.

I mean Duthac.

He called me
on the wind,
like his kite, a message,
regarding war, like every message worth sending. And on that wind, a very light ("lite") Other White Meat (whole beast of), as a bribe, and a golden ring tied
to the kite end.

I lay them down in the graveyard and said, "Hey, Jude" (that's my therapist's name), take thee this golden pig and slip the vice off the briber's forehead."

And the pig was so dead he did not hear me, but the flies
panicked, but orderly, through the golden ring like
elephants in a Gypsy circus.
They moved like bodily fluid as I prayed there, like single-malt molasses,
reeking of anachronism, looking like barbecued spare ribs.
They looked into all my eyes at once and I knew what they meant.

I am the side of pork.
The side of pork is me.
The golden ring is heaven,
Rolling soundlessly above the thunder
for eternity.

And that is when my body decided.
Never decay.

How can a side of pork thread itself through a golden hoop?
Only angels know.
I followed the ring across the sky
and fed the pig to the birds.

At the hall, naked and smelling of wild beast,
I turned up too late,
offering the ring on a flat palm.

Never mind, he said, my headache's gone.
I remembered my stash of old Tylenol 3s.

Behind him were an array of disheveled not-quite virgins.

You're welcome, I said,
waiting for an invitation
that did not come.

This drunk's gift was not pig nor ring nor orgy. It was knowing

I am a side of pork. Time cures
all beasts.

Cut and run

Lingering stink of soggy popcorn, hooch-puke. Brassy panic of elephants, cackled fat lady laughter, like spectres drifting over dirt circles. Press your hand to the rail and you can still feel the circus cars slinking away, the rubes and their thick wallets waiting down the line.

Buggered off in the dark like a Dutch Henry rustle. Wake to an empty field; not one pony left to ride for help. No posse to raise here, anyway.

All that’s left: sequin winking in tattered grass, my name on a worthless cheque. And this thirst – throat parched as my pocket.

Triptych

I.

It must have been

a jail indeed

to make her feel

now so free.

II.

She tried not to grow

so it wouldn't hurt as much

to be different, separate, other.

But one day

not growing hurt more.

III.

So

THIS

is what

it feels like

she marvels

to be myself,

all the time.

Cowboy

Ten minutes before the spectacle, roustabouts – who could be paying men, except for the scent of exotic shit clinging to them – pull caps low over grimy brows, dig rope-raw palms deep into their pockets and begin their subtle herding. Shoulder and elbow, bump and mumble, women and men don’t even notice they’re being funnelled along the midway.

Barkers knot and toss the lariat: long strand of story, perfect arc of mystery, clinch of promise. Tug in audience and hold it rapt. And the whores, after the last show lets out, dig in their spurs, holler as they ride and ride.

Everyone here a cowboy but me.

5:30 am

Still dark out, woken by a woman
sobbing on the sidewalk. What left her
sprawled there – what breakup, or dreaded
phone call? Her voice cracking like ice
against the hull of a ship.

No one leaned out their window
to yell shut up as they do to the drunks.
Reluctant to ask, we didn’t want to
get close enough for sorrow to catch.

Windows were discretely closed,
earplugs donned as she keened
for all of us, for each catastrophe
we’d tastefully swallowed behind closed walls.

Sunday

[Thanks!]

Blown

Bouquet of balloons in the back seat.
You swat, adding fingerprints
to the latex covering drifting fists
of noble gas. In the rearview I get glimpses of road,
your heated cheeks, the cars nudging
the few feet between us
at the lights. I don’t ever expect more
than glimpses. How we both got a mouthful
of crabapple pulp today when all you were after
was a single bloom. How you substituted dandelion
for daisy when the oldest charm
rattled through your head: She loves me,
she loves me NOT. And started shedding yellow.
Lately, you’ve relied on I didn’t mean to...
Which means everything I own shredded,
everything I own fragile. Like a balloon
floating into the front seat, static
electricity
a stranger’s kiss.

For years I'd lie side-saddle, folded tight as a bat, turned away from whichever brother leapt last into bed. But sleep always loosed my grip and legs gave chase, Alfred and Jules trying to outrun one another to the opposite edge until dawn.

Coyotes my only company, those lonely nights. I tried to squeeze the life from my rangy legs, press them back into their source. But nothing could stunt the determination in my bones, the creeping ache that waited until dark to seep up from ankles, rot through shins. Legs aflame, I drowned my howl in the pillow, fought the itch to thrash at hot sheets.

But I wake the same from this made-to-measure mattress, where I lie long and limp as a lifeless whip: surprised I haven’t dreamt these legs I swing over the side.

The wind of Wenhai

The wind of Wenhai
caresses the valley.
A trickle of water
from a fountain sings
of community
and hope.
Craft the image
in conversation
subject to the funhouse
mirror of language
that expands and diminishes.

-Kelly-Anne Riess

half-hearted

We said we would give our whole hearts

but we held some back

for safe-keeping,

for a rainy day

when we might need it

for our Self without the other.

Now that rainy day is here

and it turns out

these tattered lint-covered

fragments of heart

are no use at all

as an umbrella.

So the rain pours

down and in and through

these gaping holes

where no holes

were meant to be.