(i) Heard, Said, Saw, Thought
Everyday people
don’t use semi-colons.
The heron obeys
the Emily injunction,
tell it slant.
The friend living alone
is the plant
needing the most water.
Hope
gets in
the way.
Watching your hands
in talk, I take
the temperature.
In the metro car
seventeen phones,
three books, and one
window stare
fixed on me.
Her heart’s
in the right place
but everything else isn’t.
The Seven Deadly Sins,
where did they go?
Long shadows,
that’s when
the deer come.
(ii) Island
Paddling past the wall of cedars, I looked for the pink tongue of granite that you,
the blithe spirit,
promised existed, a landmark that foretold a stretch of sand, of driftwood in shapes the river sculpted,
the prong antlers, hawk’s head, lunging trout. I guided the prow into shallows and shore,
the island
you urged I explore in this pandemic May. Flicking hair from your eyes, you said forget
what fate’s making you eat. You: the drinker of bitter tea.
I tied the canoe’s twine to a branch and stepped into a camp widowed by winter.
Two plastic chairs
tipped over, crushed cans of Labatt, a pair of work-gloves stiffened into claws
and a lavender
toy bike, all littered near a pit of charred wood. Thinking I heard a noise
I spun around…
only driftwood, arched forward, looking like characters coloured in grey, pale-blond
or tan,
lifted from the living to the dead – though not dead, their limbs smooth, Olympian.
The strip of sand
curved like a starting-line for moonlit, driftwood harriers of all species, river marathoners
racing from shore
to shore and back while we, the rooted forms, continued to slumber, dream, snore.
Island rhapsodes, the driftwood wanted me to slide a hand along its skin, touch the histories
into being, telling,
the government flooding the farmland for a dam whose bulk and iron-teeth shone
from downriver,
a concrete monolith, ruling the living and the ruined. Once, last year, you helped me imagine
the land
and animals hit by that rush of water, you took my hand, leading me down the on-land start
of a drowned road.
In deepening water, we walked until you swam above this road you named Proteus, believing
it will become something else.
The sun was at its zenith, heat pouring down like a potion…I stretched out in brown grass,
pillowed my head
on jean jacket. I dreamed of daring voices, half-hearing your whisper, work the awkward.
The gulls woke me. Their cries. Their swooping shapes, so familiar.
(iii) That Would Be Nice
Your signature phrase
so Britishly conditional,
the words cross-grained
with hope and irony,
the line spoken slow
and finishing on a lilt,
you powering the thought
with that certain smile,
the way your lips
curl at the corners
as if embracing
both my random idea
(Let’s drive to Whitehorse!)
and the bigger wish
you do not believe,
that our world
stops swooning
into doom.
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
