::Spezzato::

RIP, Mahmoud Darwish

"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."

(Mahmoud Darwish)

character/place: manitoba

Alice loves to rise early and plunge her sleep-hot feet into the cold pool of the floor, kick for her slippers and warm the stiff leather with her toes. Their own surfaces like the crackle-dry membranes of a forgotten, sliced orange. Alice goes and puts the kitchen radio on one hair above a whisper, then sits in her chair by the Eastward window, looks out towards the larches, and carefully works Bag Balm into her knuckles, palms, wrists, and still-clicking left elbow, even after all these years, as though someone has tipped a tiny spoon of sugar into the crook.

Afterwards, Alice stands immediately, tightens her robe, clears her throat, then lights a smoke and thinks of Abner. Her smoke lasts seven minutes and enlivens her tongue like a kick wakes a dog, at which point she abruptly stubs the butt with one hand, opens the window with another, and forgets everything but the birds.

She puts a saucer of sunflower seeds out for the stellar jays each morning, even though they're noisy. She sets it onto the greyed-cedar porch rail; a quarter turn in the glassy frost makes it stick. She usually catches a seed in her fingers as she rests the dish, to crack between her teeth as she watches her breath rise white with the sun.

storied

My cafe neighbours read their coffee grounds in guttural and fabulous voices. They toss fate from demitasse to demitasse. There are people who draw curiosity to them humbly as flame draws moths; they are garbed in archaic adjectivery as quilts in cloth. I could go on and on. And as I bring them to the page, it is as though they are mine. More and more. How long have I been this way, with the brimming loneliness of a dispossesed storyteller? Forever. I record people and the worlds they fill, lamplight-like; I record the shadows they cast into and against each others' light.

snippets

The smell of leather shoes
in a journeyed canvas bag.

Hammersacks!

Someone drinking orange pop
on an afternoon bus ride south.

solstice haiku

My love as lithe and
slender pale as a blade of
grass in August sun.

epochal

Onwards, creeping
verdigris, crumble,
crust and entropy.
Descend, my ferric
tapestry, to thread;
salt down, my era,
into the innate red.

RIP, Utah Phillips

"Is that the sun coming up on the eastern shore,
Or just the coal bed glow behind the firebox door?
I know she's gone, whatever I say,
But it won't be long 'til I make up my mind
And go away.

"Other storms may blow and the wind may rise,
Still I long to go where the fast mail flies.
I know she's gone, whatever I say,
But it won't be long 'til I make up my mind
And go away."

( Utah Phillips )

Preserving

This life is key
to what we'll open
looking back
from old age.
We live without

the throatless teeth
of past or future
at our feet, kept on
by liberating joy:
the rows of jars

sweeten with time.
There's always
more to be saved.
Pen and strophe,
key and note. Echoes

and echoes of days.

On the Ferry

The salt of looking
out scrubbed dull windows,
polyurethane framed
and rusted bolt shadows,
pinning muted sounds.
Double hulls and coloured
pulleys, unnoticed dancing
porpoises. Cold. Chalky crusts
in vending machine moon pools,
the smell of vinegar on chips.
Hot coffee. Liquorice stairs
to the car decks, marbled
with oil and smoke. Panting
dogs wait in the keeling hold.
Men are folded into newspapers,
sleeping dreams of cedar.

the Violin Case

Bring it to me, your violin, that great black case of silence
and potentiality of song. I was careful in my choice of this gift
to you, made sure the thing was fit, the strings were tight.
Its grain is fine and red and live with unremitting rosin, waiting
to be plied by song after future song -- an Eastern-scented
dust of melodies undone. You haven't learned to play it yet,
but that's all right. Some mornings I release the hinges, and
bathe it in the light.

Observations

The sky smoked peaches,
a dirty lake, discarded rags.
The weather windless and
the air, still with ash. Places
where your nights have been
spent from a great distance,
sewn close by the needlepoint
of neon lights, of lost insights.

Objects of Art

Few things are as beautiful as reindeer moss,

glittering and drenched with frost; or the rattle of caramel

chestnut leaves against the fall blue. Or the full lit moon, casting

fleet slip-away frostbows like wonderful dreams; or my sister

hydroplaning in a midnight storm and wrecking her car.

D�j� Bu

The coffee breaths in its glass press, aluminum feet crooked from the time we took it camping. Boiled water poured in over a river stone table. Porridge and the scent of pines; a shimmer of lichens, your hair in the morning Northern light. The coffee still breaths this way for me, here in the city in an old apartment's room; I open its windows and wipe its sills against damp mold, to the smell of letter keys, grit wind, paper and pen. The coffee breaths still in its glass press, on my desk; today, a friend went into labour at dawn. I drink hot coffee and wear a talisman; bound and boundless, for bindings, craft, paper and tree. The coffee breaths in its glass press and films the inner surface, but I can still imagine what it looks like: the turning grit, a shimmer of oil, the texture of the grind.

Method

We drank the silver
off a moth's wings, drowned
in the tea. Bergamot and wing dust,
blood orange and love lust. Feed me
the secret way out, life; teach me
your most delicious antidote,
bitter essence of hope. . .

the orange sun reminds me

A burlap covered crate of potatoes; the musculature of an Arabian horse; the taste of well water in the spring time; a willow basket of wool and spindle; the ocean steel-blue blood-orange and white; the sweetness of meadow grass; the perfume of stone; the ocean blue of boiled anise sweets; the frost on the lichen on the north of a birch, against which we made love.