Racer

 

Tell me something different

Tell me what the world has forgotten

Tell me where you have been, what secret

places touched your long and fluid belly,

what dark mysteries drew you to the hole

where I found you

 

But of course, I didn’t find you –

you allowed my presence so I could

look into your eyes and wonder how

the plates of your skin were constructed –

no welds that I could see

 

You allowed me your image, the one

I didn’t ask for, but the one you granted me

so that I might shout the glory of

of your yellow lightning

 

 

Winter Tree

walk in the cold stillness
where the white silence burns with memories
of frozen hands useless against zippers
and snow angels falling under our shadows

wander, recover simplicity and lay down
everything that doesn't matter,
make friends with the flickers drumming you home
and hear the one song in your weary head

Watching Bees

come down to the clover
with your bumblebee memory
and sip the purple blooms

come down to the clover
with your bristles and buzz
and heal a world that cannot be won

Dandelions

my father paid us boys
twenty-five cents a bucket
to pull them plenty
and now the neighbours are out
with their stomping tools
sucking them out by the roots

and of course you cannot forget
the careless old fools with their bottles
of dreadful herbicide, on their knees
along the sidewalks

to call them weeds is an error,
outrageously human - much maligned
and I'll never know why

to see them out on my lawn
like yellow stars against
the green firmament,
and later the tall puffs of them
light as air

Saskatoon Berry

All bloom now, arriving like new snow
and a surprising sweetness
carried on the valley wind

I feel all right when the flowers come,
a certain spring in the green hills
They know that I count on them,
their radiant light after a long sleep

They never fail, so patient
for the sun and eager for the bees
to plant the summer fruit

The blossoms will fall in a few days,

absorbed into memory, these passing things

that hold up my world

Stairway

what is my music - but a driving rhythm,
the timeless imprint of a singular moment when a song,
a band spoke my name, called me out to hear
Dazed and Confused, and a man possessed
with an incurable guitar, the thunder of drums
and that wailing on centre stage
that led me away from everything else, saved me
from the ordinary, made me want to be more,
kept me stretching, longing, moving,
always the music with me, never deviating
as they grew older, grey and wrinkled,
beautiful men who understand the full glory
of their history etched in the hearts of boys
now aging with them

The Deep

a wilderness vision shouts

from the marrow of a man,

carries a message of himself

into the mountains

and into the deep

listen to the life

murmuring at your feet,

there are no possessions

into the mountains

and into the deep

not a thing to own

but a purpose, a will

and a song

into the mountains

and into the deep

Icefall

The hard colour,

ribs of slow shivering

and glacial stone

It does not  move,

such a still and unshakable presence

as if time rested a while,

a breath to take in winter

It is unmoving for the eyes,

for the senses that become ice-bound

and arctic

I could not move my boreal limbs,

no will to look away

It wanted me to know its presence,

its moment

But how could that be?

And then the ice broke away above me,

fell, tumbling shards – a sound of beads

on a tile floor

Then I knew what is existence,

what is a moment

Nothing lasts - snowflakes die in the wet streets

and the sun bursts above the horizon

 in a singular instant for Chris Hadfield

above the Earth

Nothing lasts

Nothing lasts but the awareness

of ice and the thawing days

January

for Mark



All is raw and cold slices,

uphill against a distant sun

There is no respite from the pagan dark

but the seeker will not be idle

I have found the secrets

in the coastal gardens, snowdrops

shivering in their daring blooms

and flowering cherries undaunted

and reckless pink

I know where they are, old friends,

 hazel with its yellow tassles

 and nearby the wooly grey heads

of willow inform the waxing days

You see, there is life, ever present

pushing a common will

We are the steady ones born under

a heralding spring, early perhaps,

but someone  has to break the good news

November

for Scott

The Earth pulls back now,

braces against the shake and rattle of limbs

 when leaves gather thick along the fences

and salmon with their cold fungal

sores drift spent in the sheltered gullies

Know that life lets go before renewal,

feeds itself on the grey days and heaves

the splendid memories, always the cycle

of things spinning in your eyes

You are the closest to the restoration,

arriving in the world when Spring’s promise

was asleep in the brooding woods

A Gentle Rain

the rain settles like hands
upon you, cold fingers
remembering your face

there is no one in the street
but the washed few who think
that it is for them

there are small voices in the rain,
no one talks, and you can think
without the urgent sun

and the melancholy drift of it,
the grey and insipid pouring
that allows you to shrink back

we can rest there,
a moments withdrawal
from the world of face-time

look at the solitary crows
and how the rain boils
off their ungodly capes

they cackle with their jaunty hops,
pleased, i would say, to be so ridiculous
in the carnival of wet and shivering

but not too much of it
under the dripping leaves
listening to the drizzle and sizzle

i once sat in the woods as a boy
when a thrush told me stories
with its rusty-hinge song

and when it rains now
and the sky falls black and brooding,
i take his hand and wait for the music

The Scorched Earth

the scorched Earth
and the rivers run dry,
my tears are salted stains
and still I hope as flesh clings to bone

so I look for the aspens crowded gold
in the high coulees - there is peace
in their trembling songs

it is my imperative, as necessary
as anything worth living for,
to understand their language

what can I say to the ravagers
among us, the man in the suit
with his wealth and swagger?

he does not believe in Life, does not see
what is vanishing - that what is seared
will burn him too

the future has been written, some say that
Crimes Against the Environment
will see his name soaked in oil

what will he tell his children
when the fires come over the hill?

Cranes

a clarion revelation
and cranes arrive stitched
to the dome of the world,
soaring over our urgency,
our condemnation, our waste

what are they thinking
when the thermals choke them
with indifference?

there is no greater loneliness
that I can think of - not to have them,
spring and fall,
not to see them as etchings
of millenia passing by

The End of Summer

the grasshoppers are full of summer life

how suddenly
they give up
their limbs
to the hard beaks
of sparrows
who hastily
carry them away
like pale cigars

the starlings hunt them too

up in the green pyramidals,
stabbed to death
with able chisels

all these deaths
and no one weeps,
no mournful regrets or tributes

we save that
for our own kind it seems

why is that we deny
the many signs
of our own mortality
leaping willingly
across the sun baked lawns?

The Day of My Return

Do you know what the sea has done to me?
Some investment that I made, a promise to return

So many things have happened since then,
a life moving like a riddle and the small discoveries
only revealed looking back
That summer when I splashed in the salted pools
and plundered the beaches with pail and shovel,
bursting colours in a child's hands
My mother lost me one day so that
I would remember

Do you know what the sea has done to me?
A love of what is real, the tactile and the tasted

I knew to spit out the salt and bury my legs
in the wet density of endless sand.There are more stars
in the heavens, Carl Sagan once said
It is new every day, that is something,
life eager to begin again with its eternal blessing,
the briny organic and the table is set

Do you know what the sea has done to me?
The shattering of light on the black water

Precious stones without the hard matter,
how the dying sun pours its copper and gold
then flings it all against the sky
There is always passing-by gulls,
boats going here and there, countless epiphanies
when you can't see the bottom

Do you know what the sea had done to me?
Showing me the otter in Oak Bay

Its lifted head wanting me to see the glossy
stretch of him, as fluid as any stream
And the driftwood heaved and alone
has a memory of wooded hills and storms
I watched children poke a jellyfish
along the tideline, and the curious crows
not too far away knew better

Do you know what the sea has done to me?
It wanted me to go away so that I would love it more

Meadowhawk

a community in the tule
and rank grass
where the wetted spring
heaved you out

you inched up a stalk
to split and shiver,
concealed from the world
to dry your gauzy wings

and when you paused
to show me your
cherry eyes and perfection
you did not mind my scrutiny

you must have felt my shadow,
overheard a father tell his son
about the truth
and seamless beauty of unity

The Great Bear Rainforest

The sparrows in the garden
lift the day with their stories,
a poetic rising of the sun

And aspens in the chalky groves
speak to us with the slightest breeze,
a community of a thousand years

The rainforest drinks from the clouds
and the white bear sleeps in the shadows,
a visitor to our oldest dreams

Stones along the ancient shores
have a song of heavy notes,
an enduring murmur in the cool waters

A salted pool pulses like a beating heart
and children answer with their fingers,
a vital cleansing in the shells and shimmer

There is only the expression of the One Life
trusting the voices who know,
patient for our blessings and remembering

Forgiveness

there is the innocence of love,
white as a sheet pulled
from a sun-kissed line

and shades of misunderstanding
that begins as a bruise
then runs crimson from the tongue

know that what is true
has held every error that ever was
and released them like doves

Evening Grosbeak

you fell from the trees like ash,
tumbled down in your dappled suit
and knocked at my door

I heard your cheery petition,
smacking that beak like a castanet
and all of your fellows near
with their yellow caps tilted
to show me that one hungry eye

you will ruin me with another bag of seeds,
hefting it out there in an unseasonable rain,
that dripping down my neck while you wait

the sparrows told me
that you are only passing through,
filling up for a flight north

shouldn't you have gone by now?

and they say that you have a reputation
for such things,
ransacking feeders up and down the valley

I wonder if you are alright,
that life is good and your undulating flight
will be there tomorrow

never mind about the seeds,
I have seen how the sun catches your girl
in the morning, a black white whir across the yard

Super Moon

I know its fat face, as round as my father's pancakes
bubbling with craters, open wounds

We all go a little nuts with it looming over
the rooftops working its ancient spells,

A woman knows such things when the tide
pulls her away from the shore

And men, we keep it deep down
until it loses its fullness

No one sees us shaving the ungodly hairs
that grew in the night