Thanks once again, Ariel, for pulling us together, and thanks to everyone for your poems and comments. It's been good to have this virtual writing group as an incentive to keep writing new stuff. Now I've got a nice stack of drafts to work on, and am hoping some of that May energy will carry on. See you all next May, if not before...

June . . .

Well, it's a June day now, but in Manitoba no one can tell it apart from a May or April or March day. My heat was turned off weeks ago despite some below zero nights that have me sleeping in layers of flannel and blankets. Fortunately, despite the near-daily rains colouring my mood, I don't have to fight the flood waters like so many Manitobans must this year.

Thank you, Ariel, for once again taking good care of your annual visitors! Au revoir, chers poètes ...

I’ve always been steadied by the fraternity of birds.

Feasted with waxwing, shoulder to feathered shoulder, on banquet of fruit from the highest branches. Mouths too full of berry mash to speak, but – beak or lip, crop or gut – saskatoons stain all throats sweet.

Let warblers clip my whiskers with their busy nibs, align lustrous recitals to the portal of my ear. Twitchy in their hospitality, they showed me their careful carpentry, proud of their sniveling, ugly young.

As men will compare extent of cock, capacity of liver, I measured wingspan against osprey, inseam with heron. (Stifled my grin at their unblinking awe.) Soared so far aloft we happily spat cloud from our faces, watched the crowd below pinch cricks out of necks, try to wince us from sky.

The End of Poetry

Or at least the end of May. Thanks or the great month and many thanks to Ariel for setting this up. I feel like I kept to my goals for the first two weeks, but then became more selective/lazy, especially with commenting. That mid-May hump is tough! But I did write a lot more new poems than I otherwise would have in the month. Here is one last, lazy found poem to finish things off.

Selected Tweets, search: "poetry"
May 31, 2011, 8:38 PM

Comin' in hard from the windy, #remember
they jammin' in this poetry joint, beautiful
like a sunset on a warm summer night.

Saw lips today, thought of you.
@8BLEED_SINS #CONFESSION FREECASH 101

Bedevilment instrument,
showing hashtags for whom pale horses, sharp fine foxes
blossom. My game

Was Never That Tite...But My Poetry
Made All The Panties Wet!
These poets killed it.
I used to write poetry.
I'm about to start writing poetry again.

http://www.pxlpl.us/hcab

Closure

I'm here to get closure.

A rescue mission -

in and out -

grab the stuff I left behind

in my rush to escape.

I want to close the circles

fill the gaps

say my goodbyes

seal the boxes.

But I learn on this trip

that's not the kind of closure

I'm going to get.

I'm diverted

from the path I've always taken,

flooded by the epic weeping

of a springtime river.

There's a breach in the road

that used to be so easy

to get from me to you.

There's a breach in the road

and there's no bridge to cross it.

So all that's left is to drive

in a new direction

even if it takes all night

because I won't risk

getting bogged down

or being washed away

completely in the flood.

----

Thanks all for the month. I wasn't as diligent as I'd hoped, but just participating got me to write down some snippets that I plan to work with over the summer, which is a huge step back toward writing again, so I'm grateful!

All the best to the other wonderful poets here - I've really enjoyed seeing the world through your eyes. I hope to see a version of some of these creations in print sometime...

Routine

Fridays: take the boy to school,

ride the no. 10 downtown, walk

to the Y. Locker in the second aisle.

Stow backpack and coat. Smile at her.

Weird today, isn't it? Who are all these people?

Is there a holiday from school?

(she means: good Lord, these chicks

make me feel old)

I'm sure glad to see you here!

(she means: at least there's one face I know.

I have not told her my name. She says

she doesn't remember names.)

She tells me— voice lowered—

I have to take these pills four times a day,

or I'd die (a solemn nod, blue eyes wide)

I had a seizure and it damaged my brain.

Once she tells me: It was so hard

when it happened, I couldn't go out.

I couldn't remember where I lived.

She's in gym clothes. I go to the pool.

You're such a speed-swimmer,

you and that other guy!

and I can't tell her otherwise.

Just smile and shrug. I'm glad

to see her, too.

Friday the 13th: Leander of Seville

If I believed in anything, like I would say it here!
I keep my beliefs closer to my chest, unless
I’m answering the Belief-O-Matic™’s quizzical call.
Some days I believe all you need is love,
and others in the power of upper-middle-class incomes.
I would like to believe in the healing properties of plants.
But plants are too slow for this. Plants whisper away the day
when healing sometimes TO SHOUT.

Some might say: perhaps if I’d professed a bit
I wouldn’t hurt now. To that I say “pshaw,”
for one gets so few chances to say it.
If God is that God,
He can see your fingers crossed behind your back,
with, on the back of His head,
His mother’s eyes.

Cutting

Solitary, even among the herd,
calf’s loneliness shows more
than its limp.

Stutters out of step, slips
skittish glimpses side-to-side.
Feels your flintknapped eyes
pierce its hide, but plays blind.

Your horse chips in to the fold,
slowly cracks cattle wide,
pries the calf loose.

You rive calf from its kine,
wait for its fear to ease
into defeat.

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.