Toast and Jam

The aspen by the lake
filters the morning sun
gold upon his lovely cheeks

His coffee cup trembles
as he sips and tells me the same old stories
for the first time

I nod and bear
the significance like a custodian sworn
and consider the meaning of my own pallid life

What does it mean
to leap from a bridge
shamed and impoverished as the land lay wasting

And tormented for quilted coats
and shoes wrapped with desperation
and binder twine

Or light a cigarette
for a friend torn and bleeding at your feet,
a farm boy who would die a man?

He argues with my mother
over toast and saskatoon berry jam
about things that do not matter

Yet their banter is a comfort
that I have known all my life,
back and forth like woodsmen sawing

They have lost everything
except themselves and a tender love
born from the grace of elders

I listen to him in the evening
and watch my mother
serve up a second piece of pie

Walking With Water

A boy walking with water
and the day opens its white eye
to a cracked and ruined earth

All is used and dust
and he walks on stones
to sup the old ones
breathing still

Born there when leaves
moved one breezy spring
and nothing now but voices
of children laughing
before their brief lives

A boy walking with water
under the killing sun

Posts aslant in the hard clay
and the dying left to rest
in the thin shade
that moves without them

A boy walking with water
to drizzle a measure to wooden tongues

A boy walking with water
until the night sounds
takes them home

A boy walking with water

The Salish Sea

I could sit all day
on the beached bones of this exiled tree
drinking bits of shattered sun
caught in the chop of the bay,
there where the red knots huddle
in their plump grey suits stitching the new mud

Such peace in the inaccessible waters,
a tonic for the fever of rancor and ruin
Breezes sighing in the grasses
then softly in my ear, the language of mystics
And herons cloistered like monks
over the brackish pools musing the virtue of voles
A sundry of beating hearts and rustling blades

All is well in my world
where the only voices are my own,
extolling what my eyes conceive
I try not to judge the starlings exploding
from the blackberries,
on queue, I think, keen to swoop
down and roust the flighty knots
to dump their purple shit

Ladner Harbour

They gather slouched as herons by the big seine drum to recount a salty death. A brother in plaid and 80's hair slipped into the black abyss. They remember the whites of his eyes looking up as he tore at his oilskins that sank him quick.

Someone says the cold killed him before his breath gave out. Others wonder if they will fish again.

An old man they all know trudges down among the boats to greet their sadness with the lore of durable men who knew their place in the world, men ordained to live by river and sea.

He says, to fully live, boys, is to know that birth is a covenant between God and our souls. We do not know the terms of the agreement, but what we do know, is that from that day on our flesh and bones are going home. Silver fish run free and crimson to their deaths.

A spare smile and he turns away as he remembers that same talk from the old-timers when a March gale snatched his father from his life. Just a boy who stood in awe of the beauty in his lilt and swagger. His mother wailed and ripples danced in the harbour and gulls cried hurry, hurry.

There is a Boat

There is a boat
that rests at the bottom of a pond

Someone gave up on it, did not tend
to the leaks, thought it
unworthy of resurrection

So it laboured to stay afloat
and soon was overcome with
its failings, limitations

Now it sits in repose as tadpoles
bump along the silted seats
and dragonflies consider such mysteries

What a fine shape it has,
dead in the water waiting for me
to take up the oars and head for home

There is a boat
that rests at the bottom of a pond

Stewards

The hedgerows fall like weeds
to a constant eye,
pulling the unwanted to
make room for a vision
that will kill us all,

there where the grasses
hold the secrets of the world,
old bones and the ripening of life
flogged for no other reason than we can,

and the children know this somehow,
put away the blades and your dominion
and go to the edge of the fields
and plant your heart in the green light

Just a Gull

I've seen this one thing that children do
At the verge of a school ground
where a road curves and buses sway

I've seen this one thing that children do

Tossing crusts of bread to gulls
Tossing crusts of bread onto the road
where buses sway

I've seen this and did nothing
Passing by like a coward before such
children who made a game of life and death

I've seen this and did nothing

Walking by with my head down
Walking by with a prayer for children
who have made a game of life and death

And then the pop of a game fulfilled
A death to answer unwitting ends
The children crouched in mute surprise
to stroke the breast and bloodied beak

One girl cried and a little boy gawped
Another shrugged and said, just a gull

And I did nothing and crossed
the road where buses sway