poem set in Melbourne and Gaspésie

lady florists across the city tend to me

as if I’m their son, and not long-lost

but theirs forever and inviolate –

they let me mist the indoor arrangements

of cacti and I postulate as I spray –

sadness being so earnestly

recrudesced, what is it

if not the tragedy of tragedies

that memory finds the composition

of happiness so troubling, ice so wont

to phase change to nostalgia as to water

and finally to melancholy as to vapour

because, while we don’t celebrate

the passing of great sadness

we do shed quiet tears when happiness ends?

in all the poems overnight

composed without sanction, without

catharsis by my metronomic mind

this nauseating pathos was master           

and as the twenty-third morning since

I left my home dawns, it visits me

but brighter and yet more reclusive

such that for hours I sit with chin in hand

and pen in mouth

and even when the pages start to fill

the words seem constrained

by feelings, left to fester unappreciated

now spiteful, now ebbing out malignant

and always perfectly wrong.

were I to reach the east coast

in such a state – kindle the woodstove

built at the centre of my borrowed yurt

listen to the breaths of the flames

and the breaths of the incoming waves

and the breaths of the outgoing tide

and the voices of those women on the beach

and the breaths, maybe the voices, of myself

long after the Quebec sun makes good

so wonderfully late, on its promised down-going

all of it would spirit me towards

actions thought of later as grave mistakes

and the point on the coast at which

my face would be most pelted by the winds

and ashed by the sand like faded chrome

that looks as though all the metals of the world

have been ground down to micro filaments

and left, softer than rabbit fur, to decay –

then the train would steam across

the cliff tops and I’d have boarded

and all the sleeper carriages would be

locked and economy dark

save for a few pale reading lights

dotted like channel buoys over black

seas and economy silent –

wind turbines would appear

near the famous precipice on the bay

where the rails are hardly metres

from the edge, and dizzied

by their spinning and the blinking

of their beacons, I would tumble

into the only spare seat

laid out by vertigo

and the full moon would enter –

a perfect double image at the corner

of the window, such that I’d need to shift

to confirm that the planet I was on

was indeed Earth, and the city

I was to live in, Ann Arbor –

and by that dumb structure’s firelight

and concurrently the flicker

of the candles in her new apartment

still without power, I would think of her

miles away and beside me equally

twitching with the drama of her dream

hair transformed overnight from black to blonde

like the colour of our half-shared hemisphere

and I would write tomes of poetry

in Gaspésie, fall asleep in Melbourne

only to sleep in meter like a madman

all for the sake of making tangible

the one relationship forever formless

middling incorrectly in that corridor

full of other errors born as happiness

a phlogiston I’d somehow like to safeguard

because memory has the most trouble with it

and for my memory to fail is for me to fail.

now, alone, I leave

the last of the flower-filled sanctuaries

heading east as far as Canada allows.

Fountain; Along the Parallels; Music

********************************************

Fountain

compressed like baker’s yeast

the brown serviettes

sheaved beneath the shortened

bench leg come loose

at my wrecked collapse –

and in that trot-like tremor

I see the stars of blood loss to my brain

and almond number six

jag like a stalagmite

from the squirrel’s whiskered jowls –

this is the pond in which the baby drowned

and parents, holding their Juliette

& Chocolat take-away cups

many in complete Hasidic garb

go warily to the shallow water’s edge

where a reactively laid fence of stones

insurmountable for those it was financed for

holds what turgid perils there are

back from the summer grass –

stars once seen

turned now to darting insects

I wonder what it is

clogging the apertures of the fountain –

cherub leaning back against a fish

festooned with marble seaweed

cherub’s head hung over the plinth edge

water dripping from his eyes and lips

as if in the imminence

or aftermath of throwing up –

that causes such a hierarchy of streams

and swarms of mist

and clenched-knuckled waterfall.

*********************************************

Along the Parallels  

when the salvia smoke leaves her

it lets go all obstacles

to my awareness of the stomach muscles

formed upon a female body laid

on its back between fence and grass

and plaintive sun and centre of the earth

in exchange for bandits

shape-shifting in the giant cedars

rhythmic gymnasts ambling down the bike paths

laughter to wake the dead in the cemetery

just across the Boulevard Sainte-Anne.

then she’s amnesiac and I smell onions

burning, and only at the mirror-image

holes on the heels of my striped socks

do I feel my skin is naked – all the rest

arms, face, hands, legs – under some gnomic

coverage, spurning the breeze’s overtures

all radiance seems to be ebbing out of being

and, I’m later told, I cry

in so violent and yet unperturbed a way

that it appears the very opposite of hallucinatory

behaviour to her, as if I had merely reverted

for those ninety-odd seconds to my authentic state.

to feel the mist begin

to form in the unburnt crevasses

dividing one abdominal from another

and where the pressure of her bra stifles the skin

is to want so desperately to fuck

that I say I have to go and walk a while

allay her sublime confusion with some words

I quickly forget, and admit to myself, when I come

I’ll see the face of that other girl

not in hallucination, it might be argued

but in my authentic state

and it’ll set back my recovery to the start

it’ll leave me like a puff of magic smoke

as I resume my grudging metamorphosis.

 *******************************************************

Music

hardly has more blood arrived

to fuel his fingers as they start to pluck

than they are there

one in a lilac dress with rhododendrons

whose hair is black, Japanese like her mother’s

one in an orange dress with another flower

perhaps a posy, in the midst of dark ringlets of blonde

and he is playing softer

he is singing to his own daughters

and they are dancing

as they watch each other dance

they are dizzy

and one’s hair tie has come loose

and from across the park

four parents watch and think

they are learning what it is to be alive

by degrees, and that music is the highest

because it moves us everywhere

and I can see that all parties

find it beautiful beyond compare.

poems for two albertines

she draws back the elastic

while holding steady

the blue-black tartan blanket

on her bare rower’s legs –

deposits the book –

a garish paperback

that could be science fiction

shifts her body to forty-five degrees

knees against the garbage bags

head against the window

and sleeps.

*********************************************

small enough to nestle

all her body on both seats

lissome enough to curl into a ball

and sleep comfortably

or, at least, with a veneer 

of that elusive property - 

the checkered pants she wears

show nearly a third of her legs

still smooth as her breathing rate

but scarred unusually

as if by machine or her own hand - 

her blue headscarf placed

over her eyes, tied

at the back of her short red hair

glasses taken off and stored

with the brown leather sandals

underneath her bed - 

knitted sweater used as a pillow

other belongings scattered by her hips

where the skin is ribbed

with elastic waistband marks

transitions starkly from Okanagen tan

to a fairer hure more fitting

of a pureblood French Canadian - 

and then she seems at peace

until we stop for washrooms

or to eat - while I think 

how superior is hers to mine, sullied

with trail mix crumbs and crumbs

of feelings I can't lie with.

ode to a passing bird

the itch I have is like the bird I see

in flight, for beginning on the ground

of my forearm, in the grassy hairs

it rises into the arbour of my chest

the concave sternum I wish that she

were deep inside, studying its dimensions

like a room warmed hydronically

by the blood my heart issues

and recalls after so truncated a journey –

then to the shoulder branches

I scratch as a breeze might

ruffle its outer feathers

through a canopy porous with holes

between its sunburnt foliage –

up to the heights of my neck

the tip of my nose, a nodule

a meridian the tree made some attempt

to overtop, but had no leavening left

until, from the crown of my short hair

it takes to the gloomy skies

and I take up my pencil.

Wreck Beach

how strange it is to swim in a warm sea

to swallow water almost free of salt

as you dive, only to surface

and sight the snowbound peaks

beyond Vancouver, almost miraculous

beneath a pale half moon!

drink the ocean here and you’ll survive

to turn and face the beach

the kites handled expertly by old nudists

toddlers gyrating to djembe jazz

mimicking their mothers and fathers –

watermelon platters passed around

with a little weed, a little of something stronger –

sandy aisles of tapestries for sale

fluttering like hippie sails on winds

no longer atrophied by the inlet 

a liberty shared also by the waves

you’re wading away from

on a sandbar that seems to span

from shore to misty horizon –

to turn and face the ‘clothing optional’ signs

and staircase spiralling up through the forest –

the tree log seats on which men meditate

women sunbathe – ashen sand

the colour of hair left to age in peace

as many bodies here are and many aren’t –

to turn and face the human huckleberries

ripening on their bush, prickly with bark

the beaks of gulls thrice the size of those at home

the corners of Eckhart Tolle books

buried like joyous children in the thicket

of leathery, dreadlocked decrees

that powers have thought expedient to allow

like poisonous fish, to flourish in a pond

so as not to infest the nearby ocean –

do those mountains make you shiver

when you see them, or are

you warmer inside for not being up there?

both, but at different times, perhaps –

what is true is just as true when reversed –

wouldn’t that be what all these trippers

have stuck up on their eco-friendly fridges

and retro, gas-guzzling cars?

climb the stairs and you’ll see bumper stickers

and the University of British Columbia.

you won’t see alps or water until

she rounds the bend with the mansions

and gets onto the scenic road again –

that’s the psychic interplay making life exciting

and the beach, whatever your creed, so inviting.

Portage La Prairie

Portage La Prairie

no A-frames although some of those eaves

come close to grounding –

they’re the warmer places, as it seems

to you in the freezing bus

they’re the Lorne – is it Lorne? – Avenue elite –

cedars, pines, cedars, pines, cedars

line the pretty, unpeopled streets

where the numbers are always higher

than they ought to be, as if

like my mother did whenever she washed

my hair in those shallow baths, they begin

at a thousand – a thousand tiny chimneys

hardly hint at the winter maelstrom

which hits the prairies – minus forty-five

not uncommon, nor death from cars

gone haywire, their bald snow tyres

adrift on icy asphalt in the blizzards

that sweep away all green as if forever –

driveways to the backyard all there is

to demarcate one property from the next –

no fence lines, no hedges, no privacy –

cheap blinds always uplifted on the houses

with a corner hanging twisted and askew

like a partially paralysed mouth –

downpipes all duct taped –

roads often spot-repaired, never re-laid –

power poles so crudely hewn, they seem

nothing but trees stripped of bark, branches and roots –

car tyres all dusty –

scarce citizens all smiling in a way

that grates harshly on wretches noticing

nothing but degrees of grey –

and though still seventy kilometres away

the level terrain makes Winnipeg look closer –

the Canada Pacific station has, at second glance

been defiled by a little spray paint –

the headstone store so dramatically overfull

it seems not to have sold much in while.

In Response to the Recent Decisions Made by the Labour Government

What is victory and what defeat

For Australians now

Asked to nominate their leader?

What is it for the candidates

Who eddy on the pinwheels

Of popularity contests –

Whose whirlpooling rhetoric

Seeks the former,

Whirpooling moral codes

The latter, but for every waking minute?

With the twin announcements

Of an emissions trading scheme

Set to save a handful of dollars yearly

For working men and women, while cursing them

To watch their grandchildren grow

In a world with ample dirty power enough

To be outed by fickler, darker skies –

In a world with coral reefs acidified white

In a world with no choice but to turn

In torrid, desperate, befuddled thrashes

Reminiscent of the death throes

Of a fawn with an arrow through its side

And the watershed agreement with PNG

Many of us searched within for the traces

Of hope once held for a better polity

And found instead a void that surely now

Only protest, protest on a scale

Of bitterness and numbers never seen

Protest not carried out, chiefly, online

But on the front line, on the picket line

Can attempt to refill –

The vote, as we well know, is not the answer.

But who will mobilise us?

What does it take to turn children

Of twenty-first century apathy

And terminal myopia

Into men and women still capable

Of raising their voices in a crowd

Without embarrassment?

No doubt that Kevin Rudd had analysed

Those points of political weakness in his armour –

Education, climate change, ‘illegals’ –

Long before reclaiming leadership

So that he might redress them

With death-defying speed and seize

Office for another infernal term.

Who now will match his enterprise

Of deed proceeding intentions

Held clandestine from us until too late

And bellow en masse

That he has defied nothing

But the pride of self he might once have had

Now buried with those outcast souls

Beneath the moribund seas?

Something hard to name is still inert.

A property that doesn’t understand

The meaning of ‘too busy’

The meaning of ‘too hopeless’

The meaning of ‘too hard’ –

A property only catalysed

In the presence of flesh and blood

Of collectivity’s strange and powerful frequencies.

Or are we just another sad refrain

Of the old proverb:

A nation gets the leader it deserves?

Ask yourselves, Australians,

What is victory and what defeat

To me, then act with a clear conscience

And a full heart as we roar our discontent.

5 poems - junkyard dogs; willow cleaning; the Okanagan; sauna; the Rocky Mountains

Junkyard Dogs

around the blue cherry picker

boxed in by rust-eaten Cadillac

side panels, knotty fibreglass

from boat hulls, trash bags

and blunt lumberjack’s tools

a machine of indeterminate use

with the John Deer colour scheme

two junkyard dogs circle

riveted in a perfect tandem

like the Rottweiler wheels

of a snarling black pickup –

holes in and under the fence

aren’t thruways to freedom

they’re for habit and hard training

to form translucent seals atop –

the stub tails can’t wag

can’t blow askew the paw prints

in the sawdust, which every footfall

follows, calloused pad adheres to

like tracery –

after the morning showers

came unseasonal sun, and

beating down on damp lumber

it lends to the air the perfume

of a sauna freshly steamed

not heady enough, however

to come between the sentries

and the notes of the enemy

(our crowded bus)

whose departure grants a piss

on the only tree next to the fence

its rhubarb-coloured foliage

glinting all over from the rain –

executed, again

in admirable

if tragic

synchronicity.

************************************************************************************************************

 Willow Cleaning

a women in fluorescents

spot-cleans the weeping

willow branches speckled

by the apricot-coloured paint

applied to the just-paved

road, steaming in parts

roller some way back

moved newly aside

in a gesture of completion –

persimmon-coloured cones

gathered into one

like a Russian doll, solar-

powered safety signs starting

now to juice up as the nascent

sun fans through a heavy drape

of rainless cloud, shut down

wheeled away to waiting trailers.

portaloos collected by a man

with a face that’s close

to beautiful, almost young –

one might only glance at him

to see the husk of boy

and a gait that’s been done in

by all that heavy lifting

and his actual age, betrayed

by how incongruous

the baseball cap looks, peak

the colour of kiwi skin, back

the colour of kiwi flesh, clasp

like kiwi corduroy gone rancid –

so small is the spray bottle

filled with a bluish fluid

and the microfiber cloth

like those for glasses lenses

so tender is the hand

with which she wipes

the woman looks to be

removing grime from the faces

of her children, who have

like these odd overhangs

strayed too far from home

picked up stains in the crossfire

of life’s hazy battlegrounds –

tomorrow –

motorists are advised –

lanes five and six

will open to full traffic.

 ************************************************************************************************************

The Okanagan

rattlesnakes and  black widows

replace the bears and whiskeyjacks –

what looks like ice is newly landed

dust, a settlement allowed

by the arid, windless hills

so as to deceive the snow-stunned

visitors from out west to the Okanagan

some for the wine, others the fruit

but most just passing through.

the stayers tell of hardship –

bitter divorce

paralysis from stroke

deaths of lovers

deaths of young –

one woman, forty-two with a grandson

is taking him to Salmon Arm

to see the folks who once were her in-laws –

another, seventy-three and transient

has holes in her Gap chinos

glass on her sapphire eyes

a whiplashed conversational style

inflected with despair –

manufactured homes

crown scrubby rises

a departure

from the Whistler cabins

with tigerlily gardens

worth anything

from one million to five –

coyotes here

eat all the outdoor cats

on ochre flatlands

not unlike those in Australia

somewhere between

The Rockies

and The Sea

to Sky Corridor.

 ************************************************************************************************************

Sauna

In this triangle of flesh I’ve made

the hairs on my arms

conform to the clouds in colour

and shape, such that they seem to unspool

into the sky busied by Canada Geese, and

kaleidoscopic dust from the wildflowers

or that it spools back into me –

arms about my head

a timber jetty bed

shut eyelids aglow

like dual nightlights

lulls of every kind coast over

carouse with thoughts

like water with damaged wires

of stratospheric voltage

of the keenest inertia

and flame-like contingency

short-circuiting some, freeing others

while my body lies neglected

a barge with no helmsman –

maybe I can hear the wake of lasers

racing to scattered buoys across the lake

maybe I can hear the provincial flag

of British Columbia, instrument and maestro

as one in temperate winds on the island

maybe I can hear a tidal wave, a fall

from the forehead of the Chief down to the highway

until the spool comes in

and I can hear nothing

except the hiss of water

transubstantiated by hot coals

for the sun on my wet body

and it on the wooden planks

has perfumed the air

with sauna.

 ************************************************************************************************************

The Rocky Mountains

crevassed cascades run white

with rocks or else are frozen

but not a single tree

has died or fallen infirm in this forest

of the tallest pines, broken

only by the road

for as far as my eyes can see.

gargantuan wholeness

to the mountains and their pelt

shadowed underneath like plush

green pile caressed to one side

by the fingers of a child at play –

bless it all

with sacred sunlight, and

bless me, that fragment of the whole

which is darkest.