Light in Dark Objects

Light in Dark Objects

by | Dec 31, 2000 | Books

Ekstasis Editions, 2000

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Sample Poems from Light in Dark Objects

The Moon

The Moon , the moon,
her bone song is
on the edge of hearing.

Bats can hear it,
and voles, raccoons,
a soft whirring, calling
her creatures
into the room of milk.

She throws her sheets over
the old furniture of my life
and I want to awaken
as one of her own:

a moth whose pale green
shimmers with the borrowed device of owls—
and sees;

a barred or great horned owl
whose shadow is the dark eye of moonsnow drifting
soundlessly over the beach,
acute to the gorgeous music
of the tiny hearts.

The leaves turn over their hands
and are washed and
washed and
cannot imagine an end
to this caressing.

I go on
living, burning
in the long milky flame.

In the moon’s tongue
the word for end or
empty is new.

Letter, 21 May

………………………………………….(for Charlene)

Hello Miracle, Sundazzle, Hunger,
this letter is following you to Florida
because it wants to overtake you.
I am Aztec with love for you, and
laugh to learn that I am only food.
I will feed you forever.

Here the surf is tearing at the beach
with its myriad animal mouths,
it shines like metal.
There the water is shining with your breath.

I miss your mouth tasting me,
I miss the way you move,
I miss the sky-blaze of your eyes,
the fine chaos we make
finding shared rhythms,
a little mako glide here, maybe wolf lope there,
the hyena of our laughter, or the snowy owl
of silent wings, cobra of
looking…. If we could live on words
I would never stop, the paper
banners unfurling
their New Years Eve, the detour of my life
bringing me to Memory Hall,
where the candles emptied little gates in the darkness.

I had married someone with a passion for need,
someone who feared the facts, and found
something else instead, I had married the fishes
swimming against themselves, and
then stepped out of the river.

And there you were, you
who were becoming someone else
with the poise of the dazzle of loss,
sliding away from who you had been,
from who you would have been,
and kissed me on the mouth,
and now hunger is everything
and I fast for you.

Year Zero

Year Zero

by | Dec 30, 1995 | Books

Brick Books, 1995

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“[Year Zero] explores with extraordinary depth and intimacy the boundary line joining the creation and loss of life, affirming the ‘insistence of things’ in a language that transcends the differences between thought and feeling, word and thing.” -Glenn Wilmot, The Journal of Canadian Poetry

 

 

Sample Poems from Year Zero

Earth Ward

          (for Kyra)

Unfinished, the centre still gathers
to scatter

Bees unzip the tropic of afternoon

and through weaving heat lines
the ear thinks space: worlds
wavering in and out, urth-
ink: hot colours

pushing from inside the seventh month,
August, and I am listening, listening
at the door of your house,
my ear to taut skin

The whirl of the heart, your thinking
beginning now to bud, as I
grow down to wood, to bone

You spill toward your human hearth
with the speed of darkness, a whir
outward, earthward

Already
I can hear you
readying your shining cry

Bulbs

Bulbs of lungs that do not breathe,
huge saurian head, fierce

with Jurassic time, you rehearse
the archaic, invisible, unseeing

or looking inwards, you are
parasitic in the floating world

you’ve created, with enzymes
you’ve dissolved tissues to get bloodfood

The brain glimmers through
translucent skin, the delicate tree of veins

Organs migrate through you
you’re imagining
a different order we have already
placed ourselves within
and are busy being changed by

Tail, ribs unfurl, condense to bone
you raise a big head

Who can recognize you, already
remote, already human, your heart
a balloon on a string
oh little one?

               (For Adrian)

Smoking Mirror

Smoking Mirror

by | Dec 30, 1990 | Books

ECW Press, 1990

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“[Smoking Mirror] is certainly a poetry of a magnitude and import similar to, say, Don Domanski’s or Louise Gluck’s…. Very accomplished… and elegant to read aloud.” ~ Phil Hall, Books in Canada

Sample Poems from Smoking Mirror

Voladores

When you approach this mirror it throws you back to yourself like a refusal. When you approach this mirror reflection and fear gather like armies: banners and dust and blood and arrows. If you can see anything in it, it threatens you by its establishment of distance you cannot overcome, but always, somehow, recognize, as if it had been traversed when you were in some other form, a red-tail or sidewinder, an arrow flying from Mixcoatl’s bow perhaps. You know both more about it, and much, much less than you’ll ever need. You wonder how you could have gotten over there to become who you are, and wonder, in fact, if you’re really standing here, on the edge of the Lake of the Moon, looking west, into the cardinal direction, knowing that behind you Quetzalcoatl is turning to flame. It’s an image which vanishes with a celerity that makes you blink, like the hearts of the teomicqui. Perhaps you waver on the edge of consciousness, cascade over the lip of the temple into the future that speaks another language. You are always joining the wound of the image in your perpendicular fall, and I, now, am your rebound of swallowed, lost light.

Awaited, You Are Always Everywhere

Coyolxuaqui, goddess of silver fire, the night becomes you, and begins here: words of the threshold. The body is a pilgrimage through it, a river that reads us out. Out of the flowing darkness, stars are drawn. Out of the body, blood. And out of the life, the journey. The fume of frangipani marks the fluid air with air’s own invisible movement. The darkness hesitates, and never becomes complete. It welcomes us and despises us because we are not really strong enough to live in its embrace. Your heart is an hibiscus whose shed radiance it absorbs. Often though, I think I myself am the darkness I travel through, a fish in a smoking mirror. And this, this is the moon door, on the other side of which we are in a room, breathing the dark, urgently awaiting our own arrival.

Migration of Light

Migration of Light

by | Dec 30, 1983 | Books

General Publishing, 1983

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Sample Poems from Migration of Light

Third Migration, Second Series II

The difference is spreading, said Gertrude
Stein. But there is nothing but difference
There is you and your love and your lover
and you; there is the eroticism

of her shirt, her skin, against her body
and your mind being on her, always

Being so close to something, like this
the body of language, or time, or her —
her prime opening out in her, more
generous than the red warmth of hibiscus —

opens that gap in me that doesn’t know me
that forgets everything I do

It’s a mouth, which though mute, speaks
the sentence I’m always about to hear

Dream Garment

Kimono, collapsed on a power line
shed skin, or a bat stale with blood
fruit of the night

A hanged woman
dangles the warning of her body
for all the possible critics
of the regime

This kite, whose memory of blue
has been stolen, sleeps
in a nest of wires
nightmares Orpheus
jolted on the electric lines of his lyre

Lost angel, whose wings are the whole unfolded city

O Lucifer, tonight, golden threads
are pulled from my back