wandering far off the marked path of logic. Only
the Real Estate Man with his locks and his leather
might drag you back. Something’s building,
some kind of craving, thirst that starts in the treads
of your sneakers, sets you searching long miles
of coastline, trail thinning out like a vein.
First time in years you’ve got something to lose.
The way to survive: unscrew your heart
and swallow the contents each hour.
MAKING AN OFFER
Dead Man’s Pond, above St. John’s:
how the lights from the city drop,
pieces of clothing we flick off and shiver
away from, exposed. How the water pricks
our skin, reminds us of its name. If only
a house stood just for itself; had only one window,
one clapboard wall, a single door opening
in. If it were simple as signing a form,
awaiting a stranger’s reply. If only our hope
was not that loon, calling out once,
disappearing. We are divers, deep-down explorers.
We’re back-of-the-mind diviners.
Missing home while running from home,
we are black towels, wrung out but wet, heavy
with waiting, with weight. How it feels to name
desire, how little we have to give back.
We’re a first mortgage, a second. If only
after achieving the goal, there wasn’t this dip
of regret. House, loon, lights blinking
out: look: they were here. Now they’re gone.
ANXIETY DREAMS
The day plumps up with what’s undone,
rises like dough. We punch it down.
We save our kisses in a safe that’s fat and pink
but void of coins, and so we make
a run for bed, pull the blankets
over our heads. It makes the darkness
no more dark. The pet we don’t own
nuzzles her face into our choice:
stay put, or don’t. Nothing moves,
until a shadow lifts a finger, as if in thought.
I think, for a minute, our problems are solved.
Problems, you ask. What problems?
TELEPATHY: Living Across from the Church
The steeple bell breaks open
the hour – two parts, four,
a head-aching twenty,
a mind-splitting forty, a migraine
beginning just when you lose count –
a pause. The street flicks back into focus,
parked cars stunned and holding
their tongues. Eternity flutters,
caught in the gutter like some discarded
church bulletin, and you too, darling,
pause at your desk, a deadline looming,
staring you down.
You’ve not slept for days.
You raise your pencil over your notebook,
maestro before a momentous
beginning, conductor’s baton
aloft in the air, a signal some angel
spots: on cue
the bell recommences its bold brassy band,
breaking the hour more fervently now
like bread for the masses
who stream from the church to slam
their car doors and shout at their children –
there’s no need to speak, my love.
I hear what you’re thinking.
ROBIN
She must have thought this cabin empty (which, for weeks at a time, it is) to set her cup
of twig and twine, like a glass of pricey wine,
a golden goblet, gently down in the eave above
the door. It seemed enough. She plucked its warmth
from Easter’s closet, fashioned it from fleece and leaf
and in it laid her regal prize, out of reach of porcupines
and other probing eyes. Our wheels up gravel:
sad surprise. She refuses, first, to yield and stays, puffed up,
all huff and flush, ensconced next to the “Welcome” sign –
a sulky host – but as the car is unpacked, slow, (as though
a complex line of thought), and as the door keeps slamming closed
an inch away from her abode, some base instinct
makes her leave her nest for good and save herself;
makes her swoop, a blazing breast, over to the maple’s safety.
Beady gaze stays glued on us. Human will, says Augustine,
is poised between a kind of hell and good that looks
like feathered flight: the heart’s sharp urge to rise and hover
over nature’s endless picture. Yes, to love it all. Now (the trunk relieved of beer and snacks and sleeping bags)
we let the digital camera help: tippy-toed, we reach its eye
above her hearth too high for sight, then bring the slim box
down and crowd around its wordless snap. Selfishly,
we hope to see the absence left by winter’s death;
that hollow nest, deep and tough, and from it, thrusting up,
the root of spring returned as form. Three blue eggs.
Three perfect globes. And in the morning, once we’ve risen,
three round dreams, eyes closed tight and beaks agape,
dashed in shells across the deck. We stand, astonished,
coffee cooling, all around us sun and breeze unspooling green
between the maple’s flip, indifferent leaves. Robin’s gone.
Her brood’s been eaten. Though it’s resurrection’s season,
I don’t wish for them to rise, but, for once, for words that find
some meaning I can get behind: oh yolky blot. Oh yellow
slick. Let me stand and take their place, be this mess
I’ve helped make; be broken, spilled, forgiven.
ASCENT
Forgive me?
No.
An angled reminder,
your two-letter answer, a rock in my boot,
a cramp. The hike now steeper
and clearer in scope.
Please?
Silence. A sky full of gulls –
there’s some dying thing on the beach
they’re in love with. They circle,
circle. All at once,
plummet – ripping the ropey red life
from its wound. We’re pulled apart
at the heart of our natures,
hinge between water
and sky. Gulls stitch the gap,
dragging our insides
up through the gape between bowls of blue,
ocean and air, that infinite
absence. The high shrill squabble
of hunger. Forgive me, I ask you.
The winged gods are feeding.
Heaven? An echo:
Forgive me.
WRITING POETRY
She sewed him a boat out of birchbark
and thread. A gift in the flow
of her steady affection, one moment freighted
with many. Perfect
and useless, it sat on their shelf,
unfit to weather the rising of water.
Too small to stand up to anything
real. Now it seems
a magical vessel, able to travel
upstream, back in time. A tiny
reminder: the heart slips its anchor.
She’s glad she has something to keep.
THE HERE AND NOW
Stuck on an island of unmoving hours,
forever is ours for the keeping. The present:
a glut of perpetual pleasure, gladness we gather
from each grain of sand, from beach-glass and seashell
and every pale wing: the hawk floating out to encircle
the dusk; even the horsefly that lands on my forehead,
fulfilling its fate – that sting. Red rise
s up
from campfire light and hovers, the twin
of a sun that can’t set. Stranded in time,
the tide slips away like an unwanted guest
at a wedding. We marry the moment and promise
our faith. You heap me with sand, right up to my neck.
The game binds me tight to the here and the now,
the itch on my forehead, sun’s fiery
match. Too late, I realize the sting of nostalgia,
my hands buried, cannot be scratched.
ACQUAINTED WITH THE NIGHT
Longing hurts and pleases.
Two more months of snow. Streets
crawl under blankets again; eyes closed tight,
empty storefronts are children waiting
to be tucked in. Nobody comes. Storm after storm
releases loss into slightly deeper banks, and quiet
flakes through streetlamp light brings to mind
the bedtime story of my oldest love returned,
at last, from all those years. Once, drunk,
dating someone else, you held my hand in a cab.
I want to go back to that kind of wanting
and you not wanting me back.
DOG-EARED
I fold down the tips of my memory’s book.
The page where we sat on the porch before dawn,
listing the guests for our wedding – marriage
remote as a tropical country, one we would never
discover. I mark the humid Guyanese dusk,
my hammock strung between two trees, a heat wave
hung, thick and building, there between
our bodies. I came to your window,
your mother asleep, and mark your bed,
bed of your boyhood – not the kissing, but pressing our faces
together, the shield we would make. Remember?
Holding our hands up to keep the world out.
The radio rustled, low in that dark. Waterloo nights.
Nothing could stop us. No wall of pleasure
would get in our way. Pushing and tunnelling
into each other, trying to puncture the bliss.
We knew we would need to break it to keep it,
to barrel through into the real, the adult –
to ruin our artlessness, squander our luck.
The last place is dog-eared before we knew pain.
Then, the pages of unruly scrawl,
sentences struck, the pen tearing through,
tear-stains, pleading, my unmeant cruelty,
your unmeant cruelty. Then blankness.
Waiting for years for what we had earned
while time’s bold parade passed us by.
The final installment – I wish I could tell you –
the rest of our future, unwritten. A crumble
of petals between the last pages.
The red rose you gave me.
The remnants.
TALKING OR NOT TALKING
SCRABBLE
I’ll tell you a secret: I’m making this up
out of the letters I drew. Everything written
is just provision, the word now sprawled
across the corner of the board:
a triple-word score. Still,
the wine cannot conceal the little failures
we both know: the X in hex – just been played –
falls short of expectation. Let me say I love
the way you lay your tiles with such abandon,
slapping them into their slots
like signs accepting
meaning. Because, tonight, the game implies
that things may be the way they seem,
that spelling out the lack in language
won’t result in less. Less, well-placed, makes liver
sliver, conjures up that slip-of-a-moon, the one
that dangles from the sky
as image hangs from speech.
The way your glance makes more of me;
slide your R in next to my E. We’ll build
a ladder of consummate
pleasure, one long vowel at a time.
THE OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN
The nuns live on the edge of town
overlooking a lake. They take
turns cooking, dress in slacks.
I stay for a week, descend into silence
which soon overflows with what it refutes.
In bed, my breath writes notes to the night,
small puffs of steady contentment. Drifting off,
I bask in the inkling of pleasures piled up
like layers of cake; I open wide into a dream
about the sullen retreater beside me
whose sulky demeanour takes shape in the wall
between his room and my own. The same lake
lies east of our windows – nevertheless, our views
diverge. Morning arrives, a stamp on its corner,
an airmail letter slid under my door.
Rain shimmies down its thin silver pole.
I stroll the ambit of my mind, gathering gladness
like seashells and whelk, and find
the man inured to angst evokes in me
a giddy thanks. The wall between us
joins us – I count on him for my existence.
THANK YOU FOR NOT SMOKING
On the seventh day Solitude comes to my door
with a bottle of cheap scotch
and matches. It lights an inferno
and banishes me in the fashion
of Plato with poets. So much for use.
So long, you beauty. Outside,
I trample a path to the pasture. Cattle,
untended, their udders distended,
moo at the honey-and-milk
of the moon, that monocle leaking
lacteal light. Suddenly blinded,
I wander afield, fingers outstretched
like ten small antennae
and find myself back at the site of the fire,
one I can sense but not see. Solitude
smells like an unseemly lover,
cigarette smouldering deep in the blankets,
a lover I wish that I’d never
invited. But how to assert this considerately?
I practise, repeating, I need to be alone. Solitude, it isn’t you, it’s me
Friday shucks off
work-week shackles,
busts out of its prison.
Booze on your breath,
you press me up
against the bar
and force me to choose:
life, or art.
I’m whisked by taxi
back to my room
and fall on the bed,
head reeling. I swallow
the moon like an aspirin.
Lit from within with liquor’s
speed I need you
in my bloodstream.
Addict’s bargain:
I’ll choose life
but only if you
choose me.
THE METAMORPHOSES’ METAMORPHOSIS
It would be easy to call me the violet,
to say my face shadows you
morning to night
as Clytie’s was said to shadow
the sun. Let’s take Ovid for his word,
follow his myth across the horizon
the way a jealous, lustlorn girl might
dog her heartthrob’s every move,
refuse to take her eyes off him,
to shift out of his steady heat, and so
sprout roots, a flower’s face. Petals
plucked out one by one, the story wobbles
on its stem, meaning changed
in every telling: loves me, loves me
not.
LANGUAGE TRAVELOGUE
Words bleached white,
hollowed out. Cups,
the steaming stream
of time, how we hide in the
heart’s
excuse. The truth: we know
the secret code but keep it
to ourselves. We cross our legs,
take small sips, smiling, our lips
pressed together. Nervous passengers
boarding a train, pigeons
above in the station’s arches,
a brilliant flapping
in back of our eyes. We squint,
say nothing, clutch our passports
against the emptiness
under our ribs. Someone steals
a last goodbye, the briefest kiss,
there – the heavy doors
are bolted closed – there’s no guarantee
we’ll survive. Farewell to tea
late in October, a loved-one’s
parting words. Farewell, farewell to
everything looted: the empty
jewel-box. The mouth.
WINTER LANDSCAPE: Reading Gertrude Stein
As I say a noun is a name of a thing, and therefore slowly if you feel what is inside that thing you do not call it by the name by which it is known.
Topsail beach, early December, all of the tourists long gone –
move out past the man-made stairs, the lookout’s bruised black eye.
You are a stranger whose bumbling comes from the fat lip of trying
to name: the ocean isn’t a mirror held up to the damage of sun
in the pines. A hiss in the underbrush up on the cliff and the trail
lopes sideways, down to the rocks – you’ll need to hike in several
kilometres past your craving to get it all down. First thin crust
of winter’s glass, the same encasement as language: a shine
so bright you can barely see through it. The quiet popping
of ice in spruce. You can’t hear the trees’ real names.
SILHOUETTE
The words of the elms have fallen.
Loss speaks in frost, that careful lace,
white-gloved fingers
reaching. All the selves you couldn’t hold
come back to your window now,
frozen children wanting in,
voices loose in the dusk.
Snipped from the clouds, the day drifts down –
grief is the shadow it casts.
You turn away from the one who calls.
Her mittens pressed to the glass.
DEONTOLOGY
The fledgling ethicists, forced
to school, fold their hands at their desks.