As dusk approaches like
another evening walker smiling,
an unplaced neighbor strolling,

after pruning dead wood
from a skimpy rose hedge,
mostly avoiding the painful kiss

of hidden thorns, it’s only sane
that I should wander
down by the lavender mounds
and pull weeds from the feet
of fragrant feathery orbs
growing up pale purple—

hovering over the gray green fronds
tangled with ephemeral weeds—

offering no resistance, bowing out
for the lavender to hover—
pretty porcupines of blooms

sturdy living mounds
merely looking delicate

but holding aroma enough
to put clean tranquil visions
into dreams, leaving scent
from working hands in
my damp hair when loose tendrils

are brushed back from
my sweat washed forehead
and a few wands carry the
scent that is a color
back to perfume an evening.

Soaking

After watering the gardens
and watching wet fall
in so many patterns—

sprays and snaky diamond blobs
when I whipped the hose
back and forth over the startled herbs

I let myself down into the water I drew
inside the house, rushing water
making a mini waterfall, beckoning—

big pile of peach soap bubbles,
filling the tub like whipped cream—

so delicious to my hungry skin
overheated from the afternoon,
starting to show sun’s blush—

just a hint of luster from oil
and sweat, dusted with potting soil—

needing the slide into clean water,
needing to float drained limbs
in whatever pond
I can make for myself
and three yellow duckies,
my skin drinks it all in.

la fiesta


clink lean, lime-choked beer bottles,
match mouths to the round, cold lips
and leave them panting, sweating
perfect circles onto the plastic tablecloth

make a toast to spanish laughter,
to the red-banded black fedora
and the singer wearing it, to salt
and pepper and paper napkins

kiss the evening on both cheeks,
lip-prints of chilies and heat, love
leftover from the day

clap after each song, every bite
of papusa and tortilla soft
and warm as an open mouth

let your voice off its leash,
pass your hands around and let everyone lick
the spice from your palms

then, drink again, this time to the lilacs
you'll twist from branches on the walk home,
the tune you'll shoo from your lips and
the chain link fence you'll drag your hand along

nocturnal


where do poems go
on days so long and lithe
sunlight lolls all over
the sidewalks on lenore street,
stretches through mismatched fences,
meanders the verandahs until nine thirty

they must hole up, play solitaire,
wait out more flattering light --
streetlamps, porchglow, moon --
then lift their small heads,
nightcrawlers surfacing

Somebody’s Someone

The old stick lady walks the halls
pacing for memories she knows
are just around the next corner

but she keeps running into
walls when she thinks daylight
should be in the stars.

Not even an extra dose
can calm her search or help

her find the way back
to herself.

Searching for the right flower

It’s not a beginning I’m after—
my fetalled memory mimicked
each evening in heated bathing rituals.

(Tonight I cut my right knee
twice with a fresh razor, triple-
bladed for improved results).

Nor is it an end—
flour-beetles spent in spelt
cursing a kitchen coated

with little legs and bleach—
every cupboard cleared like a beach
when someone yells “shark”.

Tonight I’m looking for the middle—
some well-fashioned spell near
an already centred crust

similar to the common petunia’s
flawed shadow echoed in my mirror—
a light-weary shape steadying me.

My umbrella-body sprawls
chin up, head flush with porcelain
nothing holding but a knee.

Office Work

Come cubicle talk and paper cuts,
credit card interest that is your inbox.
Copiers and their fickle relations
with faxes and PDF’s.
Come paid coffee breaks and benefits,
stale air and industrial carpet.
Come dressed appropriately for well-oiled boredom.
Come patrons, come clients, come users
who empty their anger like a mail bag onto your desk,
who expect you to say yes, and thank them
for their business. Come willing to be scripted.
To hoard small tasks in order to feel important,
like putting the magazines out or changing
today’s date on the calendar.
Come carpal tunnel and bad posture.
Come missing a friend’s birthday
only to celebrate a co-workers.
Come ten years in, mortgaged,
and feeling like you can’t get out, can’t do any better.
Come resumes on file by the dozen, of those who would
take your place. Come inflation and 0.0.0. pay increases.
Come scissors with your name taped on them.
Come willing to stay for the pension.

good news!

Hey all,

My poem, Seven months: the navel-gaze, has been selected for The Guardian Review's Poetry Workshop's April Shortlist.

Though the poem technically isn't a part of the May Day festivities, having been written and posted in April to my blog as well as another group on-line poetry project called Taking the Brim _ Took the Broom, I believe it was the first in the All Knocked Up series I've been writing of late...

Anyways, the way the Poetry Workshop works is this: "Every month, our poetry workshop is hosted by a different poet who sets an exercise, chooses the most interesting responses and offers an appraisal of them. That's the hard part taken care of - all you need to do is start writing ..."

For April, the poet was Scottish writer Jen Hadfield and the exercize anti-praise poems.

Interestingly, in her treatise on how to write anti-praise, Hadfield cites Canadian poet Wendy Morton...

Anyways, if you haven't seen this website/exercize yet, it's well worth checking out...

(Yay!)

yesterday's poem.... again, having technical difficulties.

late may


summer knocks but kicks in
the door before we answer,
pyjamas at the foot of the bed,
we heat-dream of sleeping,
spread our fingers toward a mirage:
cool stretch of sheets, dry corner of pillow

trees mash branches
at the screen, push leaves
through mesh, into nostrils,
planting green so deep we'll have it
on our breath the end of september

a handful of breeze circles the house,
reads each piece of paper on the desk,
then huffs at the heat and leaves,
slamming the porch door

Lights Out

Sometimes you just have to leave
the dishes in the sink
and go on to bed
with no regrets. Bowls
will wait and not shrivel
for lack of water or soap.

New flats of perennials pause
in the warm night, parked on the porch,
dry soil soaked in cool water,
drenched as soon as I got them home,
but still dry out as mosquito air sucks

everything up into already soaked
stars lurking in the clouds. I’ll
need whatever juice I can muster

to rise early before the shovel of heat
hits me alongside the head
and sends me staggering back

inside. It’s a race to dig and drop
starter sets of salvias, thyme
and gaillardia – before
the sun begins baking the soil
into an overdone cake. My skin
feels hot as a done muffin. I spent

too much time in the melting
glass house picking only
what I need and can pay for—
sweat showering me in
lavender rivulets,
dizzy green swimming

through the offerings.
The living wins this round—
dirty can just wait.

Nine months: swelling and swollen

In the front street birds slide and pick at early morning
the whorls of my ears busy
with their spring fling song of staked territories
shreds of shell and exultation
remind me again that this is on schedule
like the cross-town wail of the first train
like yesterday’s strikes of rain and sun
that inflated my ankles
as though they were only ever slack inner tubes
waiting for this summer
for me to rise and resume this bloated ride

On the sidewalk the bus finds the dip where showers collect
the cobbles wetted down for a single mid-afternoon hour
spraying a confetti of dirty water up and down my legs
spring a currency none of us can spend
not the man rooted like a dandelion
in the gummy grit of spring
not the community cops that go jovial when they see him
remind me again how the cops had stripped down
bunches of lilacs
instead of guns in the small of their backs
the leaves wilting against the uniform belief
that something can be done that there will be more
than bare branches and suckers next year
and I’ll assume the solid cast of poured plaster
the soon-to-split ripeness
of another day

Slumber

Ride the crosstown bus everyday
and never see the same person twice.
Think nothing of it,
going to the store for milk
filling our baskets with more
value-added and bonus. We want
to read the paper and window shop,
have weekends off. Who doesn’t?
The first woman soldier killed in battle,
only there’s no war on. Signs
become the new landmarks, I love
hats, gas at 121.5, J76 Casualwear.
If you add up those minutes, weeks are spent
sitting next to someone on blue vinyl
saying nothing. Maybe this year we’ll write
a few donations. Get a tax write-off.
Maybe we’ll go farther into debt,
lanyards and security cards,
farther into slumber.

Well...

I fell off the poetry wagon and rolled all the way down to the bottom of the hill. In my defense, I've been writing a novel, but really there isn't any excuse other than, "ooops." I have been reading everyone else's poems regularly, however.


5 AM

The road and the sky
are the same slate grey. Everywhere
grey light, as though the coming sun
has woken the world to its own
potential for vision. We feel
very distinct, tired but clear,
our eyes wide open.

On the bridge, a man with a dog
watches the river change colour.
His shoulders are square. His
dog lays by his feet, head on paws. They could
have been there all night, they
indicate with their relaxed tableau,
they could be there all day.

It is fragile, this grey clarity. Even
as I come back alone from
the airport, the streets have begun
to lose their quiet. At the turn onto Portage,
three cars wait with mine, and at the
Tim Horton's drive through, a tail
of commuters are ordering muffins,
starting the day.

At home, I surrender to my bed
again, although I do not sleep. The cat
comes to knead your pillow and I watch
the light brighten behind the curtains,
I can't seem to close my eyes, I imagine
your plane lifting into the sky, slipping
between the sun's fingers, a grey bird
chasing night all the way to Edmonton.

Repeat Offender

A repeat offender with a radio collar,
we track his signal by satellite.
As roads tear the backcountry
into saleable morsels, corridor to campground,
he always returns, rooting about
for half-eaten hotdogs buried in ash.

Relocation’s a tricky business–
when the door to the cage slams shut,
and the bear pummels its weight
against the walls, who’ll volunteer
once we’ve flown upriver,
to stand and pull the 100m cord?
Watch the bear tear out into the scrub,
or turn, thump the ground, charge.

Three strikes, he’s out.
No life sentence or rehab,
just the long cylinder of the rifle
tracking its bullet towards the head.


----
This is Tuesday's poem, posted in the wee hours. Not sure about the narrative structure in the above poem. The tone, the use of we. I'm struggling a bit trying to get emotion into the piece. Any thoughts? Also, in lieu of missing Monday's post, here's another poem that I'll dedicate to Anna who is already a few weeks into her season in the fire tower. Somethings I don't miss about the job and 3-6 is one of them.


Domestic

Snug elastic, the afternoon chafes.
Those hours between three and six
when the radio plays nothing but jazz
and you’re stuck inside a fire tower all day,
peeing in a jar. What you’d hoped to do
won’t get done, but it’s too early to give up
trying. In German, there’s a word for
men who iron their underwear,
but you’ve long since forgotten it.
Few things are certain: without floss
all roads lead to gingivitis. Most people cheat
at crossword puzzles. Cotton shrinks.

The latest rash of babies turning up
in dumpsters has hit the city news
and made me sick again. I am losing patience
with these women who can’t take the child
to a church hospital fire station or
just an old fashioned basket at a neighbors’
door. What’s wrong with this mess that

it’s being repeated over and over
while the anchorwoman reports—Baby Doe
found yesterday is still in serious condition
but is expected to make it.—Make what?
A happy holiday in some foster home
that won’t mind if the plastic bags cut off
oxygen and hope from a new brain needing

to find a way out of the trash,
some kind of receiving blanket besides
old newspapers and banana peels?
I’m trying to keep my compassion up,

trying to imagine the vacant logic that
even for a moment though it was a good idea
to treat some little person who had so
recently emerged as garbage.

hangover


the weekend is nearly asleep
but in the fissures of monday morning --
seven-minute snooze between alarms,
a red light, empty coffee cup --
you can still find heat stored
on your skin, garden under your nails
and gripped in the folds of your mind

you wither at the thought of socks,
the plot of office, you sit at your desk but can't
open the door to your work -- a key
broken off, your brain snagged
on sunday, memories of sunshine
barging in like dandelions in the lawn

by now the storm you're watching will have breached
the screens, all the windows in the house
left up, leftover from a time before rain
was born, just yesterday there weren't clouds,
the only grey found in the shade of elms,
chest feathers of sparrows, uprooted worms

you spend the day pinching your blisters,
your patch of sunburn, trying to hold
at the surface the person you are
in barefeet, under a blue sky

Tell-a-phone

Not my number though, a relative's.


pansies


arthritic old men
hunched in white plastic chairs, their eyes
squinted, too many years
smoking

heat, watching
days go by

I’d given up on her arrival when dusk
fell in the slow-motion way of May,
sun digging it’s heels in to slow it’s descent
wanting to stay up for a glass of water,
but I was able to rise from my reading
and head out for some weeding, once
help arrived. We tackled the ring around
the tulip poplar, pulling wild strawberries
from the grass pie and tossing roots like
centipedes with hundred of hair legs
flinging composted blackness into the
coffee night air dripping around us.
Dirt climbed under our nails and gave
us honest hands, no denying the work
we were brewing, passing time, ripping
roots, flinging rhythmically to the
noise of night bugs—none biting by some
magic of weeding fury that wrapped us
in our devotion, our kneeling in dirt,
our preparation for flats of color
coming to adorn this place of communion
between growing things with hands and those
without, wormy things blessing the ground
before heading back to their work, lady bugs
flying home to eat aphids and kiss rosebuds.
Two hours we weeded and never once felt the sting
of anything besides the bite to get things planted.

toofer won

pardon the long-weekend backlog... here's two day's worth of poems, which makes us square. not that anyone's counting.

*
heliotropes


we fall through a sunlit crack
in the afternoon, four of us gathered
in a sling of oak and poplar,
a warm, green lobe pinched off
by the assiniboine

tree roots knit a nest
the depth of a sunday hour,
of sitting and breathing,
eating fruit and almonds

a pale, overgrown species
of woodland sunflowers, we track
the sun with our faces, unable
to untangle ourselves
from the young ferns, lift
our roots from the moss
and walk back to the car


*
slake


leonard cohen is lounging
on my verandah, the flat
of a glass of wine pressed
to his chest, waiting for me
to finish the weeding

i open the screen door,
remove his jacket,
slip my fingers between
his pages and let the words slide
down my throat

escape

Apologies, I've been away from the boards preparing an application for a screenwriting program. Lots of words but none of them here!

Taking the inspiration, here is a phone poem (# is family friends from my youth)

Escape

Wasn't always like this
I was young once like you
But things change
Life goes quickly on
Though we beg it to throw on the brakes
Barring that, jump
from grey vans hurtling down the highway