—

Barely 18 when I left a winter job working for Saskatchewan Parks,
clearing scrubland for new campgrounds at Good Spirit Lake,
earning $1.65 per hour and a pouch of Players tobacco
was less than a buck and Zig-Zag papers were a nickel,
and coffee time in the Atco trailer was full
of smoke rings and the swelling longing to be elsewhere—
exchange a horizon of frozen grassland for a horizon of ocean
with gulf islands, where the water didn’t freeze,
where swaths of coastal conifers replaced the Palliser’s Triangle,
and 80 acres of barley gave way to a lumber mill
in Port Alberni, where I made $4.75 an hour;
on to Nanaimo where a ferry ride got you to Gastown
and Water Street took you to Stanley Park and the Be-Ins
and an amphitheater surrounded by fir and cedar, where
The Collectors and The Dandy Trippers were playing, finally
falling asleep under the all-night lights of Lions Gate Bridge,
our sleeping bags wet with dew and steaming in the morning sun.

Hitching to Buckley Bay, then Denman to Hornby Island,
watching the holidayers come and go and by the end
of the season we’d built a driftwood shack on Tribune Bay,
that perfect ‘U’ of beach that we felt would become our primary
home, and a short walk to the cove with the naked bathers,
welcoming, inviting—our bodies young and lithe
and quick to learn the paths of the sea,
the tireless waves and the rhythm of tides,
and the tumbling sun giving rise to a sacristy of large stars.

And we ate macaroni and matriculated in cooking
oysters in coals, and we swam at midnight,
the phosphorescence outlining the our limbs, tracing
the shape of our spirits, the campfire dying, the moon
stretching over the sea, that thousand-mile, white-silver highway—
imprinting—and like goslings, we followed, and like sparrows,
we took no thought of the morrow,

or of the RCMP escort off the island, giving us a head-start
to Parksville, an Econoline van to Victoria, to sleep
on the floors of communal friends or below the cliffs
along Dallas Road, where I brushed in a few words
on a scrap of packing paper—and it was my very best poem,
for everything that could be said, was said,
by the call of a distant gull against a great wordless ocean.

This morning, my 70th year looming, I step out onto the deck
of our small condo, the foothills piebald under a faint late-fall snow,
the city lights shining halfway to the coast, halfway to the plains,
and in an instant the same feelings flood back: the same awe,
the same startled gratitude, the same vertigo of longing,
the same plunging wonder.

All this, and I haven’t even told you of the lioness
I love, or how I bow at the coronal flights of five kids and
a granddaughter, and break at the news of anyone’s dark night; all this,
and I have yet to mention the deep-red, heart-shaped mole,
on the wee back of my great-granddaughter.

 

 

To write a poem standing up, I hadn’t thought of it, but these days one must be vigilant, as everywhere, there are drones with rows of eyes and ears like vampire bats.

No good to lap water from the stream on your knees; instead, use one hand as a dipper, and stand, like those fabled warriors of Gideon.

But this is not a poem. It’s a curse. Catapulted into missile factories. It’s a fevered-prayer, for the words, “justice” and “truth,” to be excised from the mouths of blighted men in their war rooms, and the politicians who stand by.

It’s not a poem, it’s a wish, that wishes for peace were needless. It is a call to recall a sermon on a mount. It is a bell, for people of faith to heed their faith.

Not a poem, but a prod to awaken the souls of angels grown lazy.

And a salute to the subverters of digital colonialists—tracking and prescribing our days—the new oligarchs of Moloch, redeeming democracy by buying elections; saving the planet by putting a price on it.

No poem here, just an old (almost said, quaint) idea: paint what is true, not because it’ll travel the world—quite likely it won’t—but because it’s right.

Well then, it’s also my confession: for repeating Pilate’s obfuscating question, and my complicity with the joyless myths of security through acquiescence, and peace through silence.

This is not a poem. But I am reading the poems of Palestinians, Jews, Lebanese, who are calling out the cowardly gods that water their violence with ideology, and their vengeance with theology. Poems that weep, until they see hope, seep, through the page.

I write as one meeker than most, but I see the signs. The curtain has lifted on our capacity for inhumanity.

This is not a poem but a plea: for the poor in spirit, the mourners, for all who thirst for light—to enter the temple of mirrors and overturn the fables and fictions employed to divide us.

 

 

I am gone like a shadow at evening;
I am shaken off like a locust.  -Psalm 109

A father sobs. His shoulders shake.
It’s still early in the night. More thermite,
more incendiary loss to come. But
his loss is already too great to bear.
And I’m trying to write the words
equal to the despair he feels.
For the abandonment one body feels
in the contorted absence of another. Words to equal
the panicked hands of a mother digging at rubble.
Of a child kneeling in burning magnesium.
But there’s nothing but blue shadows.
There are no words that adhere. I see the face
of a sister through a small screen and see how
grief breaks free and flies away on its own;
then plummets, falls deeper than any words
can reach. Leaves the body excoriated by sorrow.
No words can absorb the weeping.
No letters to act as hand towels to dry the eyes.
No spaces between the letters of words where
a tear might be tenderly held. Everything’s
too tightly wound; there’s no stretch left.
Now, only breaking of the highest possible note.
Like a coyote that mimics a passing siren,
where its voice finally cracks and trails off.
Now, only more collapse to come, no detente,
no easement, no going back now. When
what’s left for a band of lost children,
is the irradiated grief of hope’s end,
there’s nothing to lose.

 

Denim woman reads a garden
Wounds heal in fragrance of forest
Skein of sea under silver wash of sky
Sleeping soil beneath eucalyptus leaves
Rush of winged elm seeds
Saskatoon pie, cooling 
Shout of sunrise over a lake, elohim shalom!
Small boy bringing home milk cows
Allegro woodpecker in a symphony of hemlock
Orb-weaver swinging off glass tower
Sweep of searchlight in starlight
Silver fringe of eclipsing moon
Kiss of chrysanthemum
Flicker of candle in clay jar
Sharp dart of love to the ribcage
Woodstove warming winter cabin
Mountain bluebird on palm of Mary’s son
Eight hours of deep sleep
Children at play in bluestem meadow
Children at peace in Palestine
Children at peace everywhere
Wars drown in the sea
Sea welcomes new rivers
End and Beginning