Impossibility of Flight

"Brute force rather than aerodynamic efficiency is the key to bumblebee flight, Oxford University scientists have discovered." -website "Phys.Org"

On our silent way to the store
fist-sized bumblebees hover
the purpled boulevard clover
wings invisible, bodies aloft:
is it really an anomaly of physics?

Twenty minutes later,
we circle back, laden
with groceries.
Tomorrow we'll walk quietly
this way again. Our individual loads

too heavy to bear,
we remain upright.

Two different games

He's the farmer, chasing me.
I'm the horse, running away,
front porch to back, around
our symmetrical bungalow.
I pantomime a disguise— glasses,
floppy hat. Yeah, I saw the horse. 
He went that way.
The farmer's gullible, I can trick him
twice in a row. The third time
he catches me.

I'm a man with a new TV.
He's a thief, snatches the set
from my living room.
I chase him, back porch to front.
Twice my eyes deceive me:
Guy with a TV? he says.
Over there —he points,
and I tear around the corner
of the house. But the third time
I catch him.

Uncomfortable Shoes

 

The stores on Queen St. West are mostly different;

the giant CTV looms now,

though the headshop and The Silver Snail remain

the same--no doubt forever.

 

I bought beautiful red shoes

and wore them out the door,

learning how to walk in heels

again--there was one pair,

platform wedges, in university, silver

reflecting streetlights on Robson Street, the other

in grade six I used to wear to band concerts,

Christmas and June--

and strolled right to Spadina,

wincing with wonderment at

the little things--

people-watching for each of their

little indignities,

the heels wobbling higher than mine,

the sidewalk spit from the sidewalk artist's perspective,

the buskers and panhandlers versus

my expensive shoes.

 

At Spadina the building has changed completely;

I cannot remember which door it was.

The door used to be white. There used to be

a Roots store. And the Stem diner is gone.

The cafe across the street

where I bought pizza and lattes

is burgers now.

Long gone of course is the massage parlour.

It didn't take long to get busted--

they took out a classified ad--

and we'd been a bit worried by all the

yelling of the new tenants in languages

we didn't understand. I came to work

one day and the cops had already

come and gone efficiently,

but did not leave instructions

on what to do with the spattering of

johns who, their knocks unanswered,

wandering up the stairs and poked their heads

in, looking at us, asking, "Is this the massage parlour?"

 

University had not prepared us

on what to say except "no," with a mingling

of scorn and disgust and fear.

They were booking 2 weeks ahead, I think,

it stopped eventually, and I continued

bashing my head in, trying

to become an alcoholic, dreading mornings,

reading The Bell Jar, wishing I were dead,

having panic attacks on public transit or while

walking home further and further west, until arriving

unemployed in Winnipeg, but without

wondering who was standing behind me.

 

 

aftr th fall 9

if heaven had a season, it would always be May
      - Ella J Speckeen, my 15 year old daughter


daughter you hold my hand while we cross the road,
look left then right double-check, we step out
your grip on me tight,
as I held you so damned tight
when you almost slipped from this earth
fourteen hours after your anguished birth,
and the surgeon readied his scalpel,
silver life-giving knife
ready to bless your new-born skin.

it is you who watches over me
sweet little mother bird
I am fragile just for now,
my brain feather-dusted,
dropped, shaken, it tickles
as it regains and loses
words
thoughts
tears
is brave and grouchy and slow

love o love
your hand in mine makes a nest,
as you guide me safely across a street,
careful, carefully I am blessed,
my daughter, my one,
blessed as you guide me
gently home.

What the scale knows

Every year it gets harder

to lose weight.

Where once her body let pounds fall 

like leaves from a tree, 

like burdensome bundles 

from tired arms on arriving home,

now her skin clings to each oily cell, 

anxious, defensive, traumatized 

from the endless barrage of changes

that have made up this life.

Having just barely survived one too many fights 

where she was outweighted,

the body refuses to be at disadvantage again.

As if holding this weight

is the only way to preserve who she is, 

keep some part of her intact,

create a region of stability, 

begin her secret campaign to ensure 

nothing else will ever be lost again.

letting Go

Grief, unforgiving

begets grief; unrelenting

the spirit screams for a surge

of tears, that truest of tempests;

relieve, release,

This is not how it was meant to be

This is not how it was meant to be

let go. I don't want to let go!

Basic Instinct

The neighbour's first impulse was to bag and bury
the fresh corpse, his wife
talked him out of it, she said in a hushed
whisper. "We've been waiting all day
for you to notice."

My son's first impulse when he noticed
our pet cat lying on the lawn
was to hide it from his father
(who had just dropped by to pick up
a birthday girl.)

The birthday girl's first impulse when she heard the news
was to cancel the visit, but
not explain why.

The driver's first impulse, after the brakes
didn't prevent the sick and sudden thump below,
was to speed away into the night, anonymously.

The cat's first impulse when it was struck by a car
was to come as close to home as she could.

Her shadow slinking away sideways with the sunrise,
hiding rigor mortis truth from sun's first rays

as ineffectively as dawn hides from day.

flashback: it’s good to keep busy

They are known as the quints--a set of triplets and conjoined twins. In the summer they breed peas--unusual coloured pods and flowers are their speciality. They have created a strain with pink flowers, red pods, and purple peas. Apparently, they are a little mealy, but no one seems to care. Every fall, cash-stuffed envelopes in currencies they'd never have the privilege to spend arrive from collectors begging for just five or a dozen precious seeds. They keep the money, but every year they send out just one package to the outside.

In the winter, they custom embroider wedding dresses and christening gowns for fancy families in the cities. They work communally on the wedding dresses, all five huddled together, heads bowed as if in prayer, humming a melody they are certain their mother sang while pregnant before the twins were born and sliced their mama dead. When they mail off their gowns and dresses, they request photos of their work worn on those holy occasions, but only handful have ever bothered. This troubles one of the triplets, the others shrug if off. But what can they do? Just work, just work.

Feathers of Toronto

 

Toronto is a hotbed of waterfowl,

no joke; and shorebirds too, and birds

that just like the shore--

lunch gulls, hanging around patios

too large and club-like, scaring away

the softer cooing pavement birds of no brain.

The long-necked designer cormorants

striking poses in the late afternoon,

sun setting flatteringly behind them.

Long-tailed ducks no longer called

old squaws, keeping to themselves

far off in the water. Mergansers

flipping their hoods back confident

in the uniqueness of their bling.

Streetcars and cowbirds screech.

Stealth blackbirds rush you

for you are in their territory now.

I was from Alberta, once, and did not know

what a spit was. A spit jutting the city out

and keeping it still at bay,

a station where we stop a moment

to pick up quintessential inessentials,

feathers and hats, cashmere tufts to line

our nests against the concrete.

 

Learning How to Fly

She wanted to train the fish to fly,

To abide, form a line.

                   In her mind

They would fly from side to side

Of the pond's perimeter

Behind Barclay's stable, where long

Before she was born, the lake had been

Damned for a daughter unknown.

Hours she spent every day

Cajoling them with stolen bread

From the maid, while wheedling

Her fish with sweet wishes;

And little by little they came to her trusting,

Ate from her fingers

On the man-made shores

Of the pond built for love long ago.

Three days it took for

A line to be formed.

            On the fourth

She fed them barely,

Rationing bread, her provisions paced carefully

And waited to see what her fishes might do.

But it wasn't until she left that day

That they understood the manner of things.

And so, on the fifth,

They flew to and fro for the pieces

They claimed as their own.

It came to be that upon her daily return

The fish flew above the pond for the girl,

For her food and her love;

For true she would be to the creatures, you see,

That once tamed would require her own conformity.




now in possession of (another!) new computer and worked thru the formalities of new technology!... i hope to be visiting more often now;-)

Portent

Fresh lilacs at our wedding,
they'd been planted by my grandmother.
As though invoking the dead might
resuscitate what was already dying
in us, taken by cancer. Who would believe
what we saw, the next weekend:
two scorpions on our backyard picnic table.
I scraped them into a jar.
You suggested they'd been left by a guest.
I prayed to a God of signs and wonders,
watched the tails poise and swing
through the water-specked glass.

Streetcar Madeleine

A whole time of my life


collides head first with the streetcar,

splats on the windshield

gooey and green.

This car, the driver says,

has been short-turned at Roncesvalles.

The reanimation of many small angers

that the first car I should get on

on this trip to Toronto

should short-turn me.

 

--

I've been AWOL a few days while writing a conference paper. But I'm at the conference now, so expect a few more Toronto Moments in the coming days.

 

aftr th fall 8

i said, "my garden is lovely in winter"
though I meant to say "spring"
winter just butted in

and all the other season words,
parachutes packed
in a row ready to jump

just got the hell out of the way.

Shy

First Hallowe'en, age five. My mother and aunt
conferred: would I even say Trick or Treat?
So I went, escorted, around town,
cardboard sign hung round my neck.
*

Grade four: girls in the washroom,
always the same three, filled the cramped passage
between doorway and stalls
with their hair-brushing and gossip.
A few mumbled words required to get past:
'scuse me. c'n I get through.
That, or the deft use of elbows.
Entering unnoticed is out of the question.
*

In grade nine these things are impossible:
Saying actually my name's not Joan,
making eye contact,
calling out Fresher! in a game of Prisoner's Base,
calling people by name,
saying yeah, so? you're ugly too.

It's the young mother we'll remember

before silver stole her youth,
sewed a seam around her face,
time and worry puckering her skin
skillfully as the broadcloth darts
and pleats once formed under sparrowing
hands. She, she does not grow
old, as we that are left grow old: age shall not weary her,
nor the years condemn, at the coming up of the sun, in the twilight, at the fraying
of a hem. At night, surprised
by sunpocked moon,or in winter, yearning
for grass-threaded ground, it is her we seek
in the space between inhale/exhale, between blinks,
between silence/sound. This stone, instead, holds her place
suspended timeless between these dates.

Oak Hammock Marsh

On the way home, we squashed stowaway
mosquitoes against the windows & picked
burrs from our socks, dropping them onto the mats
& if there were any horseflies beating
against the windshield
where it narrowed
to the thinnest
slice
of sky, we ignored them.

And there were gutted things on the highway
& I was glaring at the roof of the car
when I saw the tick
on your neck
& when you lowered the window
& tossed it out, its legs
skittered against the dry ridges
of skin on your thumb.

As we watched, the sky grew:
we could see all the things that floated in it
& the effort
it took
to remain aloft,
dragonflying & dying across the glass.

A view streaked with wings.

piece of thesis

what I'm mostly working on...until I give up and come here

Boyhood on the coast, Vorsa was always close to his mother. Sickly as a child. She was forever bringing him to the urtekvinne for a cure. In the dark he can still conjure up the smell of the medicine hut, dank summer rotting from the roof in slips and cuttings. The fevered dreams and visions that visited him in the deep night brought on by poultice and tea. Something for his stone-jawed mother to grieve besides his father’s constant leavings. When he was well enough, stories and songs, each word a star in the night sky, mapping a constellation lightpoint by lightpoint.

Trolls were true.
Witches had names.
Every tree was Yggdrasil.

Trolls var sant
Hekser hadde navn
Hvert tre var Yggdrasil.

Horse of the Hanged

each nail hammered in as a hoofbeat
heard from the cell, your final mount being readied
you will take one last ride
and it is you will do
the bucking

black hood slipped over your eyes
-- did he really say this is for Thomas?
your feet slip out of the stirrups
and the lariat loop finds purchase
spurless heels digging into nothing but
air

this stallion has no mercy

flashback: our guilt stays with us

The man with the beard of bees is dying.
Supine on his bed, a blue gingham sheet
with coffee rings that confess
its previous life as a tablecloth,
rests below his sternum.

Shirtless, his chest tattoo stares out:
an eye in a palm in a beehive,
on the back of an elephant
circled in indecipherable script,
with rays of words like a child's sun.

His hand outstretched he speaks,
but with the buzzing we can't hear. One of us
grabs his palm and he shifts to his side,
the bees move as a group and the beard
now rests on his shoulder.

A squeezed hand and he whispers again.
His body is shiny and pale, a misshapen candle.
He tells us he needs to find a home for his beard,
his bees need a host. Will we care for them?
We shake our heads. No, we will not.

Cyborg Manifesto Erasure

Iron intimacy, monster mate, organic apocalypse.
Quintessentially, they are everywhere.
The chip. The 1950s. The news. Advertised sunshine:
light and clean, eminently mobile pain.
The potent Alice.
Market. Disassembled and reassembled code.
Predatory reproduction.
 Dream of the embodiment of taboo fusion.
The tools are stories. Pollution.
These are the couplings which subvert forced mirrors,
the fall into writing in the bosom of abstraction.
Take irony for granted. Take pleasure.

How to Treat Boils

“Tip #1: Apply a slice of a raw potato to the affected area. Raw cabbage leaf is also very good for reducing inflammation and promoting healing.” – How to Treat Boils, wikiHow.

1.
Good-time god of fields, groves, and wooded glens, Pan was half-man, half-goat. He’d eat anything. Grumpy goddess of parking lots, golf courses, and managed green spaces, I’m half-woman, half-gout. Leery teetotaler, I gulp water like wine and gnaw seeping handfuls of woody berries.


2.
Sperm swarm an enormous, indifferent egg.

A full club. Badly-lit bodies besiege the bar, bills bristling from outstretched hands.

Buckshot launches at a doe’s rumpy hindquarters, her head buried in the brush, her mouth working.


3. 
The body shows the work of viruses and bacteria as if it was a canvas, was an entire gallery full of canvases:

Boils, cat-scratch disease, impetigo, mumps, prickly heat rash, rosacea, scarlet fever, swimmer’s itch, thrush.

Ugh. These are our grandmothers’ infections. Where are the post-modern papules, the faddish fevers? I mean the ones that rash you up but let you go, of course. Nothing lethal.

Skin is a thin shield.


4.
When treating mumps, custom decrees wrapping the face, jaw and jowls with linseed poultices.

If cloth bandages are unavailable, strips torn from your petticoats or the drapes (or even petticoats made from drapes) make for acceptable substitutes.

(Likewise, hot toddies and rum punches can be spontaneously swapped for freshly squeezed milk and thin broth.)

Tie the poultices firmly. Your knots should resemble meaty chestnuts roasting on a hearth. They should be a comfort to the afflicted patient. (Jaunty knots are for self-obsessed Frenchmen.)


5.
When I am so run down that it feels as though my eyes might bleed, I get canker sores the size of overwintering ladybugs on my gums.

When I arrive home after a trip, I usually wind up in a doctor’s office, showing her a weepy rash. Look what I found in my armpit!

My favourite thing, mid-infection? To make people palpitate the tender lymph nodes under my chin. Ow. OW! (See?)

Vectors include white-footed field mice, deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, weasels, foxes, shrews, moles, chipmunks, squirrels and horses.

I once had a pebbly rash that almost completely covered my back and stomach and breasts but once I slipped on a t-shirt you couldn’t tell.

I get hives from budgies, cats, chinchillas, dogs, ferrets, gerbils, hamsters, mice and rats. Anything furry. I once went to a Christian horsemanship camp and spent my week in the saddle with a runny nose.

Over the course of the infection, I manfully gargle hot salt water and touch the sore with my tongue tens of thousands of times a day.

I deeply appreciated the doctor’s shocked inspiration when I carefully took off my shirt.

Fly away fly away fly away home.

Evensong

Good shepherd and sheep glowing red,
jewel colors in the east windows muddied
by glow from revolving lights.
Low voices, a shuffle behind the back pews,
blue uniforms bend over a woman on the floor.
The small crowd of watchers defers, giving room
to the skilled, but poised to fetch water,
clasp a hand, whatever's asked,
faces speaking their helpless concern.
Attendants murmur: can you hear me?
can you speak? Along the nave
the bent heads in rows, the call
and response: Hear us. Deliver us.

Terminal.

Headaches, or a spiralling dizziness. There
will have been an MRI, the diagnosis is so
certain. The specialists have thrown
darts at calendars, given you
a range to work
with.

There is light at the end of the tunnel.
It's a train.

You could bring up sex, politics,
religion. It's the rare person who will meet
your eyes. Some friends disappear altogether,
"to give you privacy at this time." Grave consideration.

There is light at the end,
there is an end.

The sky is the bluest it's been for a week.
How do you prioritize now? Time is no longer
money, if it ever was.
Time is time.

There is light.

after th fall 7

Pero yo digo:

sólo por breve tiempo,

sólo como la flor del elote,

así hemos venido a abrirnos

sobre la tierra.

Miguel León-Portilla

Fleetingly, we, like strands of corn silk, meet, come together, only for a moment—brief, our season—like strands of corn silk on ripening heads of corn in a mountainside field, red earth, red waterfall the strands of silk.

We are the waterfall, la cascada, a billion raindrops made one, if only we can hear this field, the red earth, the sound of feet, the sound of a hand sowing a kernel of corn—each kernel a daydream, an imagination of tall stalks, a season, a tending, a ripening, a reaping, the ritual of corn, the feast.

If only we can see this field, feel this red earth, our eyes open not only to the greatness of mountain, but to the greatness of the single, the tiny—a raindrop clinging to the leaf, a quietude, a star, perfect form within, a star, perfect form within us each.

News

I am quite excited to have just launched a chapbook called Crossings that includes several poems that appeared on May Day in earlier versions: "Saskatoons" from 2009, and "Departure," "Two days and a night," "Ontario," "The Island," and "Repetition" from 2010.

after the fall 6

clara si, clara
clarity

a mountain
a path

a step, one step
I step

up up up
slow

slow, the mountain
stride step

a stick, a broken hand
a rhythm click

a mountain
path

duff, scruff
y soy soy soy

alive from sleep
weeks lost

alive a step
a stride a click

a white
a granite

summit
clara clarity

alive
amigos, ami

alive.

Daylight Nocturne

Curled cat in a soft-bristled porcupine ball.
Grey-splashed noon. Rubinstein on repeat.
Black branches frame porridge-bland skyline
like a negative of midnight.
Last night, the super-moon was obscured by clouds.
Today, an ordinary sun makes the same wan complaint.
Vague as a rolling Chopin bassline in murmuring sixes.
Even sforzando dusk is robbed of glory. Can only deepen
what was foreshadowed sostenuto at noon.
Whisks clatter in the kitchen. As if
there is a recipe to stop the rain.
To un-do the day that has too much fade
to fade away.

we won't visit again

We've lost a few over the years. One lost her hands
fixing a bomb and drowned herself. Two died in battle.
One crushed under a train as we hopped cars,
another shot during a break-in.

But Lois,
Lois was the only one who left on purpose,
who chose domesticity, an urban life, adulthood,
lured by the clatter of keys.

We were marching near Omaha and felt compelled to look her up.
One of us remembered her married name and tracked her down.
The new girl and a few others went shopping for knives, but most
of us crammed into her little kitchen. Sunshine yellow and tomato red.
She baked cookies while we visited and let us cram our bags full when we left.

Lois wore lipstick, but her hair was a mess. She wore a gingham apron
with little embroidered flowers on the corners. Her arms were too skinny
but the rest of her had bloomed into the body of a mother and deflated dough.

No one wanted to hold the baby.

She said she was happy, that she loved her life, her boys, her husband.
She cried when we said good-bye, and when she hugged,
her nails dug in like fishing hooks.