It balanced there, hung-up by its crotch, straddling cement.
Front and rear wheels gasping, gripping only air.
I had seen a river of sparks through the windshield.
A final solution of iron on rock.
We had slide backwards until the hand of friction
forgave us our weight and impulsion.

The Greyhound bus had crossed a line—so it was said.
It was raining, the highway was slick.
Baron swerved to miss the bus, I saw stone
cliffs and dark sky, cliffs and dark, cliffs and dark,
a drunken-go-round—then
a crow-bar thrown into the cogs.

Balanced on the rail the world rose silent.
Ken threw open the passenger door.
Below us, small, tucked in and asleep, Golden, BC.
Abe, sleeping under a blanket in the back of the truck,
startled up, wet, and quizzical.

We stood on the highway, shoulders up against the dawn.
Keeping lit a shared cigarette.
Baron said, I could have killed you all,
and waited—hoping for the police.
But we did not tell them of the tank of gas, stolen
from the Shell on the Shaganappi.

Or how the evening began without a plan,
in a slumping house by a hospital.
How there had been music, and tales of perfection elsewhere.
We did not say how fevered memories paint
pacific suns over beer joints,
or how kitchen table imagination does not equal experience,

and deliver its flagrancy to the lap of Lotus Land.
One taken, three left, we squatted—our backs
against a cinder-block wall—wordless, waiting
for the Apache’s verdict, while the rod and staff
of a noonday sun anointed the glacial air
and we slept as though beloved.

Days later on Douglas, making a turn on View,
the Chevy Apache went straight.
A tie-rod end had fallen the infinite distance from shackle to asphalt,
leaving the truck free to wander.
The day fell off like a scab.
I laced up my shoes and hitched to a ferry.

One night it rained.
I put on boots and left the house.
I walked until morning.
On a hill I sat in wet grass.
I heard a people of strange tongue.
My heart became a dove and flew toward the valley.
My feet became a deer and raced to the water.
My skin stretched over the brook and I became a drum.
My head became strings that my hands played.
They played the move of sun across my back.
I sang sparrow songs into the evening.
The dark came and I stood.
Grass pulled at my feet.
My boots were worn.
My house was very old.
The rain stopped. 

The occasion: One early morning in Kokura, Japan, while my son Michael was still asleep, I got up and walked downtown. The streets were still quiet and the alleys with all the markets were empty. There was only this old lady (above) bundled against and amidst the fading canopies, bright paper lanterns and patches of colour. I took the picture quickly, not wanting to upset her. She is blurred. When the coffee shop opened I sat down to a Psalm about change and impermanence. Things that are eternally with us. Things that fetch sadness, and things that allow flourishing. The crooked mercies of life.

In April I wait for the ground to become springy under my feet. Do your bare feet recall that cool spongy feeling? You would have been younger. Or old and wise.

And isn’t it a kind of healing when the thoughts that grasses have are released and come to meet you when you step out of the house.

But April, like many months, except perhaps those of winter, come with dependable disappointments.

Having come from cherry blossom festivals and bright plum blooms and the extreme red of Japanese roses, the chill and marrow-stiffening wind comes like a midnight wrap on the door.

And of course, as I write, misplaced by a continent of time, wide awake at the wrong hour, I’m aware that my thoughts here are a kind of burlesque. If I could keep myself to a dissection of April I would be safe, above the grotesque.

But a mind is a slippery fist. You will spar with some buried regret, some aging lament—shadowbox with a barely made out shape on a horizon of fog until it’s Goliathized in your gaze. And you turn your blows upon yourself and go frozen beneath the covers without so much as a pebble of defence.

A hole in the night reaches an impossible depth.

But the mind, too, is an open hand. A magnificent paradox. And will, in a crack of time, forget the strength of its own weakness. And in that clearing you will promise the morning that you’ll rise to the advantage of loss, and see in every frozen fibre of April the calm warmth of summer.

But then I’m not the first to find that clearing. A clearing, says one poet, that you only find when you are lost.

Kokura, Japan, in the middle of April,
there are cherry blossoms, like faces,
eddying in alleys, swirling on pavement
and in tight spiral trails behind bicycle tires.

The faces fall sad, their time, too soon.
The wind, greedy, plucks them off branches,
and sails them out over the water.
The Purple river is covered, calmed by blossoms,

You can walk on this river,
your small face held above the current,
until you reach the delta,
and your thin time of standing ends.

Blossoms part, undone by wide water.
Then a day comes when all the faces,
gathered in by moons of tides,
are thrown up by waves that break and slide.

And the sea’s purple rivers run backward,
in the secret fullness of night, carrying thoughts
that roll up roots and are pressed out, pearled
and bright, waiting, and made for the sun.

Which comes in time, stronger than wind,
to all the resurrected faces, not one missed.

I don’t know when the cherry trees were planted.

I have a notion these trees are forgotten for 51 weeks of the year. Then suddenly, they explode onto schedules—and into the Kokura dawn, steeping the air with their delicate perfume. In a few days a garland of white-pink blossoms wraps the castle.

Cherry florescence (sakura) drapes the motes and bejewels the slant rock base of the castle. They sprawl above the worn grass and blue tarps and drunken business parties. They look down upon pink-faced children and parents who point and point.

There is a young woman on a plywood stage in front of dusty rows of chairs. Couples and groups of teenage girls stroll by, a few people sit and listen. She croons American pop tunes—Billy Joel is added to the blooms.

And my camera is at my wrist. Everyone takes pictures. And in case there weren’t enough pixels spent on the efflorescence, the castle gift shop will sell you postcards of cherry-bloom close-ups…along with brown bottles of rice wine, Shogun figurines and plastic samurai swords.

But this effulgence, this cherry tree promiscuity, will not be downgraded. I brought my eyes here, but many pause with their hearts. Especially at the Zen temple down a stone path, a short walk away. And especially the old ones—whose ranks I’m joining. They pause wordless under the sakura, between castle and temple.

The man with sleigh bells and teddy bears
tied to the top of his walking staff,
his striding dance and crimson coat
flare up over the dark-faced city.

The woman bent over bunches of bags
beside the galvanized can with chained lid,
her bare head and grey-string hair and open coat,
a sinkhole secretly waiting for love.

And you, bright blend of Tiny Tim and Zappa,
your rainbow tights, broomstick and bindle bag,
your white knee-socks and chimney-sweep hat,
clogging along sidewalks wet with light,

so full of love, spilling it all out like nard
at the feet of Christ—Christ how I love you.

Dusk on the Cornwall coast, close to Ronald Duncan’s hut

The impulse toward spirit surrounds us, its mystery is open to us daily. But sometimes it takes something more to prime our capacity for mindfulness—a dangerous capacity that needs constant tending.

Sixty years ago, when Ronald Duncan sat composing The Mongrel, in his stone hut, high on the Cornwall cliffs, he wasn’t thinking of hikers coming in from the trail reading his words and leaving changed, or at least momentarily arrested and marked for later. He was inscribing his own transformative arch, a kind of seeing, an experience coming to him from beyond his own fulcrum.

The slippery illusion that there’s no slow magic left—which is too easy to do in our methamphetamine culture—burned out, as we are, by just keeping up to the headlines. Burned out by food that comes from too far away, by fast medicine, speedy solutions, all forms of exhaust, and lack of things green and growing. Burned out by believing that everything has already been explained, and anything unexplained will be explained tomorrow because of the parameters established yesterday—which leaves us so starved for mystery that crop circles seem worthy of our singular devotion.

There is an inexorable Spirit moving below the crust, mercifully breaking up our categories and controls, working with us when we choose love, and working around us, leaving us to our isolations, when we choose envy and indifference. But never leaving us alone for long.

She stood blinking. Sleep had been erratic and she awoke with a certain gloom at the plexus of her soul. Her prayer seemed stillborn and fell to the floor. Work would wait. She needed to dispel this dark decree, find footing beyond creedal comfort. And now, as if on autopilot, she was here, hoping to recall and reclaim the sanctuary and freedom she had known high under the cover of a mulberry. She re-imaged the tree as best she could: Queenly, majestic, strong. The dense crown had been a roof over her head, shelter from the heat and rain. The heavy screen of leaves had hidden her from the rage and vexing moods of her late step-father.

It flooded back now. The death of her mother, one year to the day, was a bitter loss. Her mother had brooked misfortune, but had found her path—found faith and resiliency. These, she knew, were her mother’s gifts to her.

Kneeling on the soft mat of leaves she now saw what had been unseen. A meek, yet bright, mulberry shoot. She remembered a Latin word her mother taught her; reviresco—to become green again. It was an allusion to a Psalm which her mother would paraphrase with a sparkle and a wink: "In old age I still produce fruit; I’m always green and full of sap."

She smiled, breathed, and walked back to her car.

if one petal falls

an afternoon of art, poetry and music  featuring the launch of a new chapbook by kelly shepherd and sunhyung kwon

with laurie macfayden, amy willans, mandie lopatka,  stephen t berg, karen donaldson shepherd and monica grove

When:  Sunday, March 25, 2-5 p.m.
Where:  M~Space loft gallery, 10331 – 106 Street, downtown Edmonton
3rd floor, Buzzer #2929