Night Letters #13 L

lazy words

lust, light, 

love (the laziest of all)

won't appear

in these letters.

"liar",

he says.

Shadow Puppets

Deep inside the structure
of it all
sits a little green man
figuratively,
as a green man has to be
no one have has ever seen one
we all know little men
there he sits. Green.

He is chained
by the gentle gesture
of a held hand.

The hand of the amber man
the amber man has no special powers
his name (the name I have given him)
(we don’t know his real name)
(does he have a name?)
(he must have a name)
but I digress. He
has a nice sounding name.
We like to have the amber man around
reassuring and cautious
this mellow yellow fellow.

His head is yoked forward
gently, like an egg.
He does not see the red man
whose hand is in his.
The red man is symbolic.

Evening, (vi)

.
boughs bend in the wind
casting nest to dark dank earth;
did the songbird sing?
.

A Kind of Shelter

When twirling wind tongues
in hail-kissed lips of the storm
changed direction,

a flower drunk wasp flew
all electric wings and wire legs

inside an open window and got lost
in a green rapunzeling
spider plant, baffled by the potted
dirt lure lying about
what’s in and out,

misleading like a sea siren
leading ships to rocks,

the wasp banged
against bright lights
long after sunset, trapped
while clouds funneled.

instinct


you thought survival instinct
was a given, an organ
ticking quiet deep under skin,
but in the ring you realize
you’ve only been lucky –
never had to react, decide:
run or duck, hide or fight

fists land on your face
and you don’t even try
to move, to stop them
with your gloves,
just stand and wait
to see what happens

Green

Walking the trails, I used to see green.

Now it’s cottonwood, birch, the bottle brush
of Douglas fir, hemlock’s hangdog mullet.
All the identifying features pop out with jazz hands:
look at me, I’m a--

Look up, you tell me.
Not for nests or wildlife trees
with their cavities and loose bark
but up. Blue sky overlaid
with leafblot. Edges rippled
like a potato chip.
Alder.
Dammit.

How can I turn it off?
Get back to shape, colour?
See moss on rotten logs
without thinking step, haircup.

Look beyond name, container,
to the energy that rests there briefly
before cycling on.

Shield country, pine & scrub. Stone.
Rutted, tread-singed roads. Beer caches. Bear.

Ditches burn bare.
Shadows cross the road just past the limit
of certainty. Frogs spawn in truck ruts. In mixed forests
of green & black & brown, birches are inverted
strikes of lightning, scratches across
the negative. Bits of paper
wing towards the clearcut, the countryside
a Christmas tree farm where
nobody’s buying.

So what if the ditches burn?
A generation reduced to matchsticks,
machines, newspapers folded
into manageable
plots.

night letters #12 K

 

Kalium

 

القَلْيَه‎   (al-qalyah)

 

 

scatter new furrows

let last winter’s ashes grieve

a minute, an hour, a few days—

this is proper—

then fill your hands

seed the generous land with

your wheat, her/your/ body bare feet,

the snow has receded, the rose hips bright,

spring turns the fertile earth, 

listen to it, listen to it,

when she comes.

how to tie a knot

Loveknots plaited in gothic hair gone
by. Celtic knots - impossible to
untie. Slipknots to keep horse and
boat secure but none of these
rope twists were twists for

her. She unpinned hair and
put her things away, tidied her
desk changed passwords on
that day. Went downstairs and tied one on

the rafters. And that knot bound us all
unhappily everafter

Evening, (v)

Fingers scroll your body
explore its furrows
in search
of you
...memorizing
the crinkles that
frame your hazel eyes,
and find the boa concealed
in the fedora that
form the lines of
your lips,
paw the pleats in
your neck, such an
intimate
resting place,
making
their way to
the center of you
...filling your
swimming pool
with fine red wine,
my lips
go for a dip,
get lost for a while
in your navel as I
contemplate
other
secret
hiding places
.

hook


once a national champ,
but he can’t tell you
how to throw a left hook,
to crowd the bag
close enough to clinch,
forehead nearly resting on leather
then sudden twist
wrings out waist, shoulder,
drives glove
to the bag’s ear

he explains
with perfect tight arc,
devastating fist,
move he can only describe
as bam

Star Lake

Sunset calm. Lake is scarlet,

steel-blue, silver.

Surface of water sharp against ankles,

backs of knees, crotch, small of back—

then plunge, kick, and it's warm,

it's molten metal the color of flame.

Arms reach forward, sweep back.

Legs pull up, spring outward.

Water's different at sundown

warmer against the cooling air,

less foreign against my skin.

Near the floating dock I stop,

stand tiptoe on the bottom,

my gaze level with the surface.

Whirligig beetles dart and scurry,

helter-skelter, their bodies

polished droplets, perfect ovals

catching the light.

(this one feels a bit rough to me. There may be another version to come.)

Black Hawk, Down

Danger Day

On a day when blueberry smoothie
flies across the room and lands
purple on all the wrong colors

on a day when even jazz riffs
and cartoons make me cry
as if my cat died

on a day when vivid stir-fry
burns the roof of my mouth
and half the strawberries are mush

there is little left to do
but head for an unmade bed

leave the windows open
in spite of storm warnings

and just try to nap it out
before I sprain my ankle.

Inclusion

We walk the strip between the marsh’s gangbang
frogsong and the chandelier smash of lake
ice and, despite consensus, dunes
have overrun the boardwalk.

You squat at the waterline with its causeway
gulls, ignoring squawk, birds positioning
and re-positioning, and fill your palm
with ever clearer chunks
of nothing. One tooth of quartz
is so clear we think it has a rare blue
inclusion and then we realize it’s sky. Behind us
a truckload of ice shrugs into the water. Vapour lifts
off the warming sand and the warming water and
even deep breaths.

Take a deep breath. Maybe the impressions retreating ice
made on sand, the broad footprints of pelicans
that end in greenish scat, even the pattern my rivets
and seams made where I sprawled: maybe they’re all just fossils
waiting for their catastrophe.

Maybe we’re the catastrophe, tacking up warning signs
all along the road where saplings should be,
parting grasses that anchor dunes
with short cuts and flip flops. But as I heft
gooey frogspawn from its puddle and freeze
so you can photograph all their profiles
all at once, I don’t believe it. There will be a few more choruses.

There will be a few more choruses. And in the meantime,
inclusions are important. Vapour from mouths
is real.

* * *

I'm not entirely pleased with this one but am posting it anyways. Hopefully there'll be more and better over the next few days...

Night Letters #11 J

          . _ _ _

 

 

he built a tower

lasoo’ed air above the house with wire,

late at night, netted all the dying words he could—

rare butterflies, moths, bats of dots and dashes

over and out, over and out, his eardrums hammered

with static and little pleas from old, lonely, men

spread across the blue planet.

“I’m going to bed, wake me when you come,”

 “Juliet Out," she said.

 

he looked up, half-smile, eyes windowed,

his index finger kept on tapping.

Essay: to try

brindille dans les braises

ashes for easter

les souris dans les citrouilles

no seeds for next year

Arboricide

The gingko should have been spared
when the yard man came and wiped out
all the peonies, iris and columbines.

When the wisteria was pulled
down
from the lower limbs
of the sugar maple
and the mystery lilies pencil thin leaves

were mowed down and
lost the places
where blooms would have
erupted
in August,
the gingko living behind
the slanted house held up by honeysuckle
the untended home with empty window-eyes
should have been left alone

to grow its fan leaves
shaped back in
dinosaur days,
hardy as ever
with no need to evolve,

should not have met the chainsaw
should not have been slashed

left like a fence pole
at the edge of the bloodroot

still surprised to have it’s silent growth
interrupted
by so much ignorant noise.

trophy


your dad turns
the boxing trophy
in his hands,
tells you about his – long-lost
summer camp memento
sixty years ago,
never mentioned
as you’ve talked and talked
about your jaunt
around the ring

your first question –
his to you – safety:
headgear, mouthguard,
as if you could, would scold
photos of him grinning
in black and white, age nine

he doesn’t remember anything
except his introduction –
intact to the word:
the winnipeg walloper,
manitoba mauler,
canadian clubber
he must have repeated
every night in his bunk,
and even later,
someone’s faith in his strength
seeping into his body,
living there quietly
all these years

Crow 6

I would lift the tablets of your laws
but they are so heavy
and so dull


that even the crows, who feast on corpses
even the crows
refuse them