eight

Footsie

In a world haunted by the hydrogen and napalm bomb, the football field is a place where sanity and hope are still left unmolested. ~Stanley Rous, 1952

At home, the play-by-play shakes
as beating feet and screamed-hoarse throats
shake the televised Toronto stadium
the long view of a North American soccer league
including thunder sticks and confetti in team colours
while your shrieking extends from living room
to dining room, your reach from my leg
to my outstretched hand (the wrist showing
your seven-tooth tattoo even hours later)
because where I stand
is where you stand
in the held breath
between you and walking.

You quiet as I stalk the few blocks
to the park where slowly loosening muscles
and the coarse sweetness of pollen
informs me and the shiny-suited men
arriving in ones and twos of spring;
the kookum who followed the five-year-old
to the edge of our blanket squints
as their feet begin to caress the early evening
also three four soccer balls
for the white man
responsible for your blue eyes.
(In this careful time between egg yolks
and whole milk I watch
as you eat dirt briquettes and tender blades
with black-tongued abandon
add to the confusion
by fathering yourself on strangers
with the outstretched pudge
of your pointing finger:
da-da! da-da!)

As the warm-up ends, avenue aspens
loose fluffy Christmas drag
from drooping catkins
into that slanting photogenic sun -
making all our smiles wider toothier
but the black man so glad to be running
after the simulacrum of a boyhood elsewhere
his face is an architecture
of tooth and cheek
while the toddler scoots among the muscled legs
and quick feet of Saturday night.
Amidst the hum of traffic
and the accented patter of old friends
you ignore me, clinging to the spokes
and struts of the stroller
as we all find some semblance
of balance.

seven

substitution 12

The green infestation of inchworm
arching after newleafnewleafnewleafnewleaf
for the white slivers of nail
you won’t let me clip
as you reach for me again
andagainandagainandagain

Agoraphobia

It's safe in here.
Away from eyes and ears
or fingers.

It's warm in here.
No cold blasts of air
or rejection.

It's solid in here.
No expectations to fail
to fulfill for myself
or others.

It's comfy in here.
Cuddled up under covers
or fantasy.

It's smooth in here.
No bumps to stumble on
or miracles.

wee friday poem

blossom


blossom is a word
that can be tucked
into your cheek
and held
until the moment
you’ve finished
shoving every sock
into the far corner
of the drawer
and decide
to flood your mouth
with summer

Yves and Andy

Perhaps you’ve heard the story
before. Yves says

he’s not fond of canned soup
prefers bistro to beast, sips red

wine at room temperature, thinks
car crashes are best

avoided, stages words that worm
past Andy’s rose-coloured glasses

until he snaps like a blue roller-blind
in a square window—

casts a can from his intricately
inched demonstration,

flattens the cigarette, strategically
sloped for an entire year,

from Yves lip. And once
the pissing match starts,

without wind’s wetting help,
they two-step closer to an artist’s

angry duel: rock, paper, scissors.
The parable being

not how fair you fight
but never leaning in to the hot air

of heart-heavy hands
when they both pick scissors.

French Fries

Shaking salt into the cardboard cathedral,
or smearing ketchup over last week’s sports page—

skinny, crimped, soft, crisp—no matter
what denomination, I’m a sucker for rewards,
especially when they’re deep fried.

Nothing like grease on grease to get me through
a rough patch, a mixed basket with mayo.

Sometimes I want to feel worse,
before I feel better.

No caloric overload compares
to the French fry turned host,
washed down with a pint on a Friday afternoon.



---
This week I've been struggling with poetry. Everything I try to write feels like a practice poem without heart. Oh well. My goal for next week is to write about small moments of joy. I've written enough cranky poems for a while. Wish me luck!

Elegy for a Soldier

In fields of grape vine and hot white dust,
where houses built of mud,
and cloudless skies, crack
with sun and combat;
fear, virility fuse new definitions
of what it means
to be.

Far from the lazy roses of summer,
the lake, the deck,
the case of cold beer;
far from parade grounds of ambition,
the soldier wakes
exhausted, takes a piss, tucks boredom,
lonliness, fear,
into jacket pockets,slams down
his last supper.

In fields of grape vine and hot white dust,
where men/women's eyes commit
to memory, terror, tedium
courage, the comradery,
"shared deprivation" of the hours
- this is no camping trip -
the soldier falls into place,
climbs slowly, slowly-
slow as grainy videos of beginnings,
his tread into mother's outstretched arms-
his final, careful steps

one fated, mud-caked,
white dust stair
at a time.

do-over

one year


your first trip around the sun
you may not have known you were traveling
an ellipse, though you’re familiar
with elements of its geometry –
parabola of breast correlated
to the concavity of your small, warm mouth

now you’re rounding out your orbit
beginning your second loop through
the same set of seasons,
three hundred and sixty degrees of green,
tomorrow you’ll begin to see pattern
in the stretch of light through summer days
and its elastic snap back in fall

you already know so much of the moon’s routine –
forever filling and draining, how the sun can shatter
into a thousand stars on a cloudless night
only to be repaired while you sleep,
and you’ve learned your family’s phases,
that a face may wane – a moment, an hour –
but will always soften approaching perigee with you

homing


you always want to be lost
in tangled trails along the river,
travel snagged on scrawny poplars,
mud-ruts, overgrown green

bike tires doodling through
city parks and paths, tracing arabesques
in suburban warrens and cul-de-sacs

i couldn’t follow
even with my finger
greasing routes onto the map –
straight lines only in the track
of sweat sliding along your sideburn,
breath direct to lungs

no matter how you wind
you can’t shake your sense
of direction, homing strong –
eyelids lined with atlas pages,
flavour of north too large
for you to swallow

Yves Klein’s Trash

is clichéd—treasures I salvage
early one morning, flea marketed
fantasies I find in green
monochromatic plastic,

once famous blue
pitched in polychromatic
fashion. What is leftover

wasted like underwear, another
pair of Klein’s found tucked
under the bed at a new apartment
then properly chucked.

But you were always unique—
your roll-your-own roughness
a Frenchman’s foreign maleness,

those butts unfiltered in ash-trays
littering the rough-smoked museum
of facts, the undeniably erotic
images my fingers reach for

in automation, the desire
to own something of the past,
like the bird that builds a nest

from garbage on the metal ledge
of a don’t walk light,
the red blinking sign half blocked
by twigs and what’s left

of life’s little bits balled in to strings.
And after I’m done my raid
the air reeks of refuse,

bag-slapped by wind’s palm
my own words turn colour-
blind, the most abstract
junk of all.

six

Sun. Traffic moves with only the suggestion
of one-passenger-per exhaust
arms gritty with sun crooked out
of open windows
while cyclists converge on corners
touching tips of tongues
to sweaty upper lips.

In the park, trees bring out leaves from storage
shake out their folds over sticky hems
wriggling with spring’s nervous fingers.
Birds in canopy condos built entirely
of dyed hair and cigarette filters
bide their time
before skies turn sticky with suggestion
and people pick small green scraps
from each other’s shoulders
instead of shaking hands.

Under the trees the shadows move
like the moon through the cycles of the hours;
a busker rehearses, his fingers busy
then his throat
opening
accepting the half-thoughts of elm seed
that breeze the long moist exhale
of everyone out.

Tornado Alley

We're packing up the car,
heading right to
tornado alley
for a whirlwind tour
only days after
a killer whirl
left a path of
broken homes
and death.

We have been through our own
tornado alley --
destruction, mayhem,
power out, electricity gone,
tender trees uprooted, stripped bare,
the water that sustains us poisoned,
our home divided
into two.

Clinging to gratitude that
we haven't been killed yet,
we keep coming back
for more.

As if this time
we'll be able to handle
the rising pressure,
this time our cheap trailer
will stand up to the winds,
this time our vow to rebuild
from the mess left behind
by the last vicious storm
will be fulfilled.

five

When I peeled off the white shirt
ketchup-stained from the hot home fries
in Beasejour I found the red creep
of a wood tick picked up in Giroux
on the collar which I killed
using a shed button from a shirt
I got you for your birthday
standing in the Downtown Bay fingering
Arnold Palmer's seasonal stripes
(green gray blue) and thinking
of the long cool slope of your back
the set of your shoulders and also
how nothing stays clean

heightened


in the dark your whole body listens –
fine hairs along your forearms
attentive, eager to catch
the smallest speck of sound,
eyes and nostrils widen, ready
to receive, your skin picks up
the racket of a thick flock of stars,
maudlin giggle of spring,
and the small sounds:
shallow breathing of moon,
an idea chiming in thoughtful orbit
around your heart, a single bud
groaning to open

I think

...that this isn't quite ready to share, so I'm sharing it. Perhaps another's brain will work better than mine today. I had some trouble with formatting--it took awhile to figure out the line break stuff and I think I've ended up with a different font.

The Blue Revolution

“blue recalls, if anything, the sea and the sky,
the most abstract elements of touchable
and visible nature” Yves Klein


1

Klein knew it was not just staged
squares of IKB so much as the white
      walls behind that sets the mind’s
      placement of scene, and how it is not
presence that orchestrates an endless heart,
one single note continually performed

but absence that eternally holds us in place
and time. Maybe the wind
     works the same, presses in to ample
     open spaces, yet hides some nights behind
horizon’s co-ordinated curtain, softly snags
us in frames half filled with prairie then sky.




2.

Tonight I stroll the farmyard lane —
frogs and tadpoles long crooning,
     coyotes echoed bass
     in a nearby field. The unwavering
sound deafens a nephew’s
grinding truck as he follows me

in the dirt, his easy growl
assuming the role of motor
    as he screeches to a halt beside me.
    We stop in windless dusk
toss rocks at willows woven in water,
listen to another creature whoop

more vocals from reedy roots.
The dog dives at the muddied surface
     shatters an evening choir cloaked by stems
     and suddenly I wish I could sink
up to my knees, catch and hold frogs
and toads and tadpoles, keep

a year’s past uncertainties in glass
mason jars, confine disappointment as creatures
    rescued from a stationary pond
    hours siphoned in to the clear
jar, each tiny second examined
under secured scrutiny then quietly set free.




3.

Wind’s cease-fire stages each scene.
My own performance, the year’s shawl
    wrapped lightly around my shoulders, corners
    loosened by rehearsals. In the wind’s absence
I measure and re-measure the fit—
each day’s rough fabric against white shoulders.

Without the wind—what are we? Smooth
aluminium siding sidled next to each other.
    Neighbours nudged by blind fingers.
    The wind moves us, draws us in
dark ink, pushes us forward. Without it
we are silent, uninhabited blue.

Fences

He pounds fence posts,
drives them deep into rain-softened earth,
his sweat, his muscle, his ache,
each callus of hand and fingertip,
skin sacrifice to his land;

his fence, his mark, his tattoo,
his wolf piss around the four corners of his plot,
semaphore
—this is mine, these are mine
who live within these wooden walls—
fuck you, who dares breach,
fuck you who climbs,
fuck you who peers
into my sweet, warm world.

He builds fences—
a friend, a case of beer,
a level, some string,
a hammer, saw, nails,
a bunch of wood,
a small boy looking on-
Saturday afternoon,
while the world sleeps,
makes love, watches hockey,
writes poetry, eats;

he builds fences.

Less than Perfect

The Yankee pitcher is flirting with
the perfect game
and I can barely stand to watch,
to take on the responsibility of
Shrodinger's fan:
Does the mere act of my attention
affect the final result?

Meanwhile, on the next
channel, the Queen is at
the Kentucky Derby.
The announcer, casting about
for something to fill the too-long moments
before the race begins
tells us that seeing this race
has been one of her Majesty's
lifelong dreams.

I'm startled, bemused.
What's a queen doing with dreams?
What the hell else is on her to-do list?
You are already Queen!
There are shows for people longing
to be Queen for a Day,
and you're already there!

A perfect day I guess that means,
lacking only a trip to this horse race
or that.
Or for pitchers,
the opportunity to stand before
the frenzied masses
and focus only
on the batter before him
one at a time
until all twenty-seven are disposed of.

Rarer than queens.
There've been dozens of those,
but only fifteen perfect games.

I look away for a second,
distracted by the shout of
kids through the window.
From the television,
the crack of the bat.
It's over the wall.
It's over.

Street Sense comes in first,
Hard Spun just behind,
but there's no crown for second
or glory for those who took
a perfect game
into the eighth.


(Thanks to Bren for the hot tip!)

sunday two

waiting for leonard cohen


sunday night and you’re waiting
for leonard cohen to call –
like all those nights
you were fourteen or twenty-one
or thirty and you fell
asleep between blank pages
of an open notebook

leonard cohen didn’t knock
on the screen door
of your parents’ house –
his car broken down
on the suburban cul-de-sac,
or seeking shelter
for an urgent poem

he didn’t find your address
on a wayward scrap and follow
your scent from montreal or l.a.
to the stacks of a university library
to rest his palm on your forehead

but now you’re waiting
for leonard cohen
to read your name
in an obscure literary journal
and sweet-talk the local operator
into giving up your phone number



Maybe I'm feeling guilty for not posting yesterday, so here's two today. This L.C. piece is one of a series I started working on last May Day. I wrote the first stanza of this ages ago, but just rounded out the rest today.

sunday one

monday


sunday morning sleep
slowly relinquishes its hold
over your eyes,
lashes unraveling
and reknit
until you can focus
on open

moments out of the womb
of sleep and your first instinct
is to set the alarm
for tomorrow, and monday
seeps into our sheets
and clothes, chafing
all day, a fact
that won’t lie still