Good News From Duckie

Your tiny mother and tall
dark eyed aunt with laughter
long as her hair read the note
you left at the doctor’s office

the funny picture
you
drew with your wet dance
and pokey limbs
sans penis. You are unchanged

a girl from orgasmic start
to this long-distance calling day
funny zygote demanding
naps already in
the ocean of the woman who
grows you giving

dreams to small crowded rooms
where time passes with each
thump of your shared blood rivers
demanding every morsel of food
to turn into yourself

pushing against the confines of the
warm
pool swishing
while you dog-paddle your way
into being here.

5-20-05

Circuit

When I was called
come speak
to women far away as the buffalo
on hip broad plains beyond my
squint-eyed comprehension even
with a well mapped plan
I went and spoke and saw
that I carried the plan
for their passion, the small
seeds I carried so
lightly between my full moon breasts
were just
the nourishment they would
need in the coming blizzard
of invasive control howling winds
blowing through their rust complexions
peach soft bodies piercing their very
seed dormant wombs
with false orders –
reproduce
beyond the needs of the planet
or the race, multiply in their
shades of pale resignation
supply workers consumers soldiers gravediggers.

Speaking only made my voice
carry old truths
back to the women who had
always known them
guarded them
and merely needed to be
reminded of their own gardens.

5-19-05

Notice

I will be away from computers until late Tuesday and will post the weekend's poems at that time.

In the Wake of the Locusts

it is as if
God Himself

took His hand
held it flat

passed it over
the land

& breathed
in

<{[(:+:)]}>

inside the pain he thinks
maybe wants
to believe there
may be a spark dying somewhere
to live in that
positively absolute
lonely dark

but his eyes starving
are just metaphors
amputating his body
from both hands
(those brutal mirrors of
empty gestures like
"each other"
cupping a two-faced kiss)...

...then he remembers when his mind
used to bleed smiles from wounds as wide
as the very thought of a brain

humorrhaging

The nineteenth day of May

The old men
one in each of the first two rows
finger full sets of keys
during the lecture
on the grand hotel
they worked on as young men
that was torn down
during their middle age
finger full sets of keys
as if they were harp strings
their metal song
reminding them
of all the things they own

rain haiku

raining the water
comes down lie still the water
wants to cover you

Damp Sestina

Through the door frame comes the rain
Bounces in small pebbles on the grass
Which tries to remember how to grow
after the long winter where nothing flowed
except the ever-loving ever-moving sky
where clouds turn this way that way, fly

If only I could do that, fly
Run away from this brain rain
Soar up into the grey-white sky
Look down at the trees and the grass
Note how the ice pushes off, flows
How the river pushes and grows

Fear over my inner riverbank grows
As I cant seem to stop the way time flies
The way it darts and flees and flows
Instead of gathering in puddles like rain
Instead of rising up like verdant grass
Instead of stretching out like endless sky

Time shrinks instead of grows
Evades escapes finds a way to fly
While God from who all blessings flow
Sends us the pain the gain the rain
Sends us the beetles in the grass
Sends us secret messages in the sky

And through it all the spirit flows
Spirit of wonder of joy of sky
Through it all falls eternal rain
So the weeds and flowers grow
And soon come bees and baby flies
Soon come worms writhing in the grass

And when theres no room in the grass
To the river the worms will flow
And when theres no more room for flies
They will escape up to the sky
And when the clouds can no longer grow
Down they fall in endless rain

Now the flies gather on the grass
Now the rain in the river flows
Now the sky shows us how to grow

Sciku

All is lost, my friends
From fire, a Dark Lord rises
Until New Hope dawns

just lying, there

life is a tupperware casket of donuts
looks like truth
tastes like chickenshit

you've urned your bed
now lie in your ashes

kill anything resembling
birds
or rising

bridges were made
so suicides could
reconsiderately
enjoy a productive life in arson

if it isn't dead
where is its ghost of a chance

crossing over

to end that perpetual
why did the poultrygeist
(do what it did to)
the road

because it could never remember
the side it just came from

& its brain,
only big enough to believe in
two-sided theories
massacred all the others
lest it lose its deathgrip
to something more
personal

like love,
or lovelike

Drops of Day

Awaiting midnight on
the cusp of Thursday
I hear the flow of water
rippled like a soft gargle
clearing it’s throat of faded crumpled
lists caught in the day’s
passing. I can’t imagine
how the flow goes on
in such dry air, where do
the heavy drops fall from—
where do they land? What time
will they wash over
the edge of twelve strikes
and produce a clean
new day with it’s own
throat song full of fresh lists
waiting to bring liquid melody to
another turning?

The eighteenth day of May

For G...

She made my mother
write handle with care
across her breast
with the thick black
tongue
of a permanent marker
when she came to drive her
to the operation
that morning

She told the doctor
staring at the exclamation
marks that spread down
between her breasts
one healthy
one suspect
that she was single again
that she needed her tits
just right
now

The doctor nodded
and sent the nurses to tell her
to take all her
clothes off
as if she was on
a suspect First Date
where the man you thought
was healthy
tells you what he wants
and assumes
that you
can
give it
to him

She’d stowed her clothes
her two intact breasts
still in the cups
of her bra
in a locker on the ward
but when she woke up
on a different stretcher
in a different room
they’d escaped
their bonds
and were heaped
next to her
as they would have been
on her bedroom
floor
if she’d been alone

It took her a long time
to paw through her clothes
her bandaged breast
beating
but her underwear
didn’t shake out
of the long creased legs
of her pants
and when she told them
all the legs in the hall
all the charts and chimes
and calls from different rooms
different stretchers
a nurse slowed down
long enough
to say
maybe you didn’t wear
underwear
today
as if a woman
facing
6:30 am surgery
and a suspect
tit
might
go without

She stared the woman
down
it was brand new
hot pink underwear
she said
and sat back
as people scurried around the ward
saying
have you seen her
underwear
her underwear is missing
until an intern found them
puddled
on the bland floor

Later she says wanna
see my tit
and whips up her shirt
before I can say no
to show me a bandage
as big as a handkerchief loaned
out by a black and white man
to a crying woman
not knowing herself
how and where they cut
or if the doctor
took the time
to wash away
handle with care
before he set
the knife
to her

Planning the Shot

The light will be coming down here

It will fill the room bleed through the walls

Everything will be light a shroud will be over the camera

A white shroud and through it we will see only light

When the cloth lifts there will be a small child pale almost
a ghost

He will run from the camera

Run hiding behind others from figure to figure down the tunnel toward
the altar

The camera will come after him slow but sure of itself sure of
his eventual capture

And then when it reaches the boy

There will be light

Everything will be light again

film haiku

the camera moves
the whole world is changed and then
the camera stops

The seventeenth day of May

Assiniboine Park Zoo, Enclosure #41

In the dark the white-tailed deer
tuck their tails under the long lines
of haunch and hip of shadow
and roadside sound
and settle out in the open
while the American bison as boxy as bales
of straw intact bales of hay broken
sleep at the edge of the chain-link
barbed-wire enclosure
but it is the charge
of the camera on the far post
and the headlights of a car coasting up
the service road that hurries us
to the other side
where wild white-tails kneel in grassy beds
between birch bur oak
and the bedside posts
hung with emblems
of leaping
deer
and cracks are filled in with tar
and the treads of suburban cars
where there is the passing thump
of stereos
and the whites of eyes
scanning the far distance
the curving line
of road

In the dark of the long bike lane
between the tilled land of the Tuxedo golf course
and the thin-trunked trees
of the forest
we are susceptible to the long thrill
of frog-song and star-light the sky
intact the sky broken open
but it is the sudden thrash
of limbs
in the dark
and the stuttering clutch of our throats
as a flock of roosting birds
startle out of sleep
into the wet ditch
and away
that makes us trade the return trip through the trees
for the lit edge of the forest
where the pulled curls
of nightcrawlers
on the smooth sidewalk
only
mimic
the curving line of dark

Never tried a Limberick before...

There once was a girl from Winnipegosis
Every where she ran people yelled "Whoa sis!"
She found they yelled lower
When she became a slow boat rower
That strange sweet girl from Winnipegosis.

---

Here lies a boy who loved Star Wars
He thought he could walk straight through bar doors
They took one look at his shirt
Man that pummeling musta hurt
For that poor poor boy who loved Star Wars

Enough For Me

The simple soup warm glow—
belly not empty—
comes every time
I get to pay the house note
or the water bill,

Other utilities keep
continuing
sure as sunshine,
small bits of jewelry
for my peace of mind,
so lately well adorned.

Water like liquid diamonds
falls from so many taps—
gratitude and astonishment
continuing.
I know I have the only
Blessings I need.

5-12-05

-found unposted in Word-

Dusk Ablaze

When day has slipped its foot
into the bath of night
and stars call down
to whatever bits of light are left
pooling at the edge,
then the ground shimmers
and yellow rises flashing

as if each
petal of the dandelions
has taken wing,
the blinking

lights rise bright
against the darkness
dancing a quest for life.
Some stay moored to the earth,
blinking back, twinkling
like tiny candles
showing the direction home.

The sixteenth day of May (a day late)

Assiniboine Forest, May 16, 2005.

Spring in Assiniboine Forest
this year
means everything green below
mossy urns teetering on bright stalks
no thicker than the orange stubble
that picks
its way across your chin
and green above
deer-lipped shoots swaying on black branches
still brittle from the bud-freeze-thaw
and the drowned
roots the rot below
means both of us tying woolens
around our waists kicking up enough
mud to weigh down our cuffs
and colour
the days

I was looking forward
to clutching your long cool fingers
as we walked through the balloon-rub chorus
of bull frogs from puddles and ditches
the heady amphibian lust
of last year
to crouching among the millions of mushrooms
both of us enveloped by the swell
of spores
on the fallen-log-sodden-mulch spawn
of the year before
but it seems
I must satisfy myself
with what there is
the glitter of everywhere wet
the pinpricks
of newly-hatched predators
humming the tune
of this year

Bowl

bowl
glazed burgundy clay
mixing holding rising
bread dough fills the round vastness
vessel