My friend, said, “Try to think in ways
you’ve never thought before.”
I said, “I am, who I am.”
“I thought I was who I was,” he said, “then I
found mould in my porch and felt on edge —
that’s opportunity.”
“No,” I said, “life for me is settled,
when someone approaches my house,
I know it’s Amazon.”
“Try this instead,” he said,
“when someone calls,
think of it as Hermes, or maybe Gabriel,
carrying a message from Easter Island,
telling you you’re forgiven.
Or when the mechanic at Canadian Tire
emerges to tell you
she’s fixed your wheel bearing, think of her
as rising out of a lake, her hair
as antlers full of golden bulrushes
and her smile as coming
from a million miles away, arriving
like a kiss,
the speed of love,
which is slightly faster than light.”
“I think I understand,” I said, “Every time
I start a poem,
it’s never what I thought I’d be.”
“Exactly,” he said, “when you’re hiking up
Maple Mountain and the trail ends at that cell tower,
think of it as a pilgrimage to an Ashram,
where Fr. Bede helps you find your
hidden stone of shame,
which is thrown over the cliff,
plunging into the valley of forgetfulness,
and your family arrives with
baskets of blueberries.”
“It’s true,” I said, “just
when I presume a closing line,
everything before it changes —
which changes the end.”
“You see?” he said, “Your poem
is just beginning to be
who it is.”

I wanted to know what it was like before I was
conscious and before I had a mind to steer me
toward ecstasy and smash me with mistakes and
before I had memories to guide me and mislead me
and anger and tears to help me over my feelings,
so I drove to the city graveyard and walked
through the snow up and down the rows and let
my fingers trace inscriptions on the stones
until I reached the old part and there was one
that looked like my mom’s and I knelt and pressed
my forehead against it as a foal or a calf would
into its mother’s side and the cold seeped past my cap
and through my jeans into my knees and I stood and walked
back and closed the gate behind me and looked
down the tree-lined lane over the river at the horizon
and saw my mother’s smiling face just visible
above the garden corn at the edge of the cottonwoods.

I’ve had mercy in places you wouldn’t believe, so much mercy that I sometimes get cocky about it. Like when one of those sand candles from the 70’s nearly burned our house down. That ramshackle on Saanich Road I wrote a famous song about. (No? I’ll play it for you sometime.)

Candle: squat, bowl-shaped, and at four pounds of industrial wax, it burned for days and nights — thought it would never die. It was the summer we lived in the basic detritus of a continual party. Pilsner empties (the odd Mateus), hash pipes made of tinfoil, blackened butter knives, ashtrays made of melted disco LPs (that’s what you did with disco back then), and sleepers — I mean us, six, eight, ten, depending, splayed across a crusted carpet. (I could give you names but they know who they are.)

Anyway, I don’t remember who started to cough, then started yelling, fire! But I remember running to the sink to get pots of water to throw at the corner of the living room. Walls scorched, our bed-sheet picture window curtain, singed; the candle, now, a greenish-black canopy caked over a charred speaker tower, a puddle of paraffin on the floor. We opened the windows, the doors, front and back, and returned to sleep.

A month or so later we abandoned the house and left for a smaller island. On the final night we had a house wrecking party. Sounds bad, I know. But listen, a week earlier the landlord showed up, “Sold to developers, you need to get the hell out before the bulldozers come.” “When?” queried I, “Not to worry,” quoth he, “you’ll know.” That was the longest and deepest talk we ever had.

Moral? as you predicted, there is none. I’m sorry. So I’ll just cut to the end: One fine day the following May (or May-ish), after wintering on Salt Spring, we returned to Saanich Road (we could be sentimental) and found, growing on the mound of that demolished house, a healthy and happy crop of cannabis. Some plants were already in bud, others too young, still, we harvested a large garbage bag full. And to think (stretching the thing about mercy), we used to curse the amount of seeds you’d get in a dime bag.

(After Psalm 81)

When everyone is saying it’s too late, it is you who must decide
it’s not too late.

Time is at hand. Raise a song. Sing loud with your voice
while it is day. Strike the cymbal while you have strength.

Go to the sea. Take your easel. Paint the wounded waves, the whitening
coral, give everything your best pink.

Paint long streaks of lavender in a scarlet sky. Turn to the east
and paint a field of wheat. Paint wrens nesting with falcons.

Show us a congress of crows lifting quick to the Morning Star.
Like galloping antelope restoring our rhythm and hope.

Paint bread and wine, a cascade of grapes, a chalice, every single thing
in form and function, created excellent in its own way.

Creator, who forgoes the cosmic halo and speaks in butterfly,
who rests in our heart’s atrium.

Who is a breathing Word, a black water strider,
exquisitely robed and floating on a shimmering creek.

Who answers in the secret place of thunder;
who says, Open your mouths wide, and I will fill it.

And we eat, supper after supper until we see our faces in the faces
of our foes. O bitter unveiling. O possible healing.

Shout a psalm! Get your Gibson, your Mel Bay chord charts, your
Neil Diamond songbook, your tambourine.

Blow the trumpet at the new moon.
Taps, never to be played again.

Imagine such peace. The lie of blood and soil exposed.
The law of tears revoked. Honey flowing from a rock.

It’s late. Not too late.
Speak with your hands, pray with your feet.