The city never lacks poetry
- only my eyes to see it.
I have come this way for years
without ever noticing how
diamonds dissolve
in the January cold and
speckle the dawn they way
they do in this moment
at the corner of
of Churchill and Byron.
I can almost hear them
falling from the eggshell sky
as the wind paws in
from the Canadian Shield
and whacks the ass of
the old brick laundromat
billowing steam  
in gusts across the
frozen chimes of winter.
Clouds evaporate
over the avenue
as cars go coughing
down to Richmond and
diamonds swirl like vodka
up the scarf and over the face
of the woman with
pretty mittens who
squeezes with a bulging basket
through the shining frosted door.

© 2010

It is a time of rust,
of stain upon the land,
this shining continent,
this realm of all my
sparkling days and waters
where I’ve lolled
in golden strands of time
and slept in seasons
soft and sonorous
as the anthems that have
swelled my heart and
held me for the asking,
all so dimmed and
darkening now,
the winds distressed
upon the fields,
the pale air frayed
with clangorous sound,
and the flowers so few
and no birds along the lane.
Yet who among us
dares confess or pray?
Who has the right to weep?
Oh, how I have longed
at the end of day to
look to the heavens and
hold the stars in my gaze
to pour out my gratitude,
and to feel them fall
like fireflies to my hand, and
to know that I have loved them,
oh how I have loved them,
and how I thirst to
hear them say say well done
thou faithful servant,
enter into the infinite joy.
I look, I look, I look
in vain, I strain to hear
the smallest sound,
but not a chipher stirs
and not a twinkle glints.
There is only the beast,
unseen, and the breath,
rising and falling on
the vacuum of my soul.
This is the song of desecration,
a lullaby turned backward,
withdrawing one by one
the remembered lumonosities,
of each incandescent hour,
retreating with the bison
over the plains, fading
to the blackend pines
and the snow that lies soiled
against the mountains.
And I was here when
this came to pass and
I bear this terrible witness
and await the raw
and ominous reckoning.

© 2010

Let us honour
the limits of radio.
It is good that
we do not
see the loud man
each morning on the air,
good to be spared
the wattles that
whip the words,
the saliva
sailing over
the microphone,
the big hands,
the stewed eyes…
good not to witness
the yellowed teeth
chase yet another
minnow from
the righteous sea.
It is enough to hear
the unkind voice,
the bully words,
and twist the dial
to cut off the sound,
to let the sky flow back
through the windshield,
and the sunshine settle
once more into the
coutours of the day.

© 2010

The Truro I remember
was Prince Street
on nearly any night
muscle cars cutting
out of the corner Esso
laying rubber that
hung in the lights
and curled the air
long after the noise
and smoke were gone,
the Lincolns playing
loud rock at a place
on Young where
it was said the town’s
first dope was smoked,
egg rolls at the Ho Ho,
cop cars prowling
the Esplanade and
Helen putting extra
whip cream on banana splits
at the White Spot.
I rode with Jimmy McCunn
on a red Honda bike
through old town streets
on black summer nights,
racing dimlit freights
to dimlit crossings,
and took the company
pick-up home on weekends,
thanks to John Murphy
who gave me a job
fresh out of high school
at the Daily News,
and waited for
a reporter to show up
in my young distracted eyes.
I can still see snow
swirling over the marquee
of the old Royal Theatre,
feel the wind on my neck
as I smoked Export A’s
and wished I was
Steve McQueen
in The Sand Pebbles or
Gordon Lightfoot
in the morning rain.
I remember stumbling
with a mickey of rum
through a summer night
that hung on my heart,
trying to get home
to Elizabeth Street,
and that was
a metaphor for
the next forty years,
for I have always been
trying to get home
to Elizabeth Street
home through all the streets
and all the Elizabeths and
all the rum that life can
fling like junk from an
old scarred suitcase into
the blink of time that
we get on this swirling
delicious earth where
pain and hurt and loss
combust with such fury
that I have never been able
to hold it inside, and
must freeze or die
or shoot up to wake up
and start all over again.
I have touched a few things
in the streams of time
and been touched in turn by
love and hate and politics,
the way Helen used to
tousle our hair as she’d
pass the table and say
play Nancy, and we’d
drop a dime in the
juke box and watch her
return with mischief eyes
and snapping fingers and
boots that were
made for walking.
I left one day in early spring
ravenous for the times
desperate to touch
something of anything that
was tumbling from the sky,
the astronauts and Vietnam,
race riots and B-52s,
black days in July, tears
for King and the Kennedys,
rebellion, poetry, Queen
Anne’s lace, and those
flip-top lovers all in a row,
waiting, surely waiting
just beyond the edge of town.
I joined the church
of any place else,
which in those days was
a tank of gas and
the Trans-Canada west,
and the radio full blast -
hey, hey LBJ, how many kids
did you kill today, and
here’s to you Mrs. Robinson
heaven holds a place
for those who pray.
And it was many a man
and many a maid that
rose in the mists and fell away
before I could see that
all churches are one
and all towns are Truro
and no one gets out alive,
and an honest man
breaks all the rules,
yet keeps them too,
and that is the trick
and that is the joke
when the deal goes down
and we all come home
to Elizabeth Street.

© 2010

Train whistle blowing
on New Year’s Day
across miles of 
falling snow,
soft, clean through
silent maples.
I stand with a shovel
breathe the good
crisp air,
no geese today.
The ice has come
the cold is deep.
It blows again
an old voice
over the fields
and through the pines.
I like it. Makes me
think of Woody Guthrie
alone on the plains
Dylan departing
the iron range,
Pete Seeger, John Prine
rough hands, hobo songs.
Can’t say what it means,
Nothing probably,
just a freight train rolling
down the long white earth.
Good is good, God is god.
Happy New Year.

© 2010

On Christmas Eve
my father got his axe
and we walked out the road
to the woods where we
searched along the brook
for not one but two
two evergreen trees
and cut them down and
carried them home.
Thus the ritual began.
The first, always
a little rough
and less pleasing,
was presented first,
my father propping it up
by the window
in the living room
for my mother and
sisters to inspect.
Invariably
they circled it
like birds from the sky
until one by one
the flaws began to appear
- a thin spot here,
a poor limb there,
too spindly on the top -
and a concensus was
swiftly reached that
this tree would not do,
whereupon my father with
a certain practiced sadness,
carried it back outside
and waited just a little
before returning
with the second.
It never failed.
Invariably it was 
deemed a big
improvement on the first
and granted wide approval,
some years
judged so highly that it
was still being praised
on New Year’s Day
when the lights were taken down
and the tinsel was put away
and we pitched it out
with the first one
on the snow behind the barn.

© 2007

They are not men
but ghosts in orange with
surly mouths and cornered eyes
shuffling in sixes to
the tune of guard boots
down corridors that
go nowhere,
forever and ever in this
world without end, amen,
ah men without world
such as men are made
by Canada in this
21st century of our lord,
here in our great white north
of born-again government
and human rights for all
except the right to be human
behind these walls.
I see them come
I see them go
when the hour is done
and ponder the sadism
of identical orange, this
vulgar brew of red and yellow
red for ritual election anger
yellow for the cowardice
of penal politics in these
pious poisoned times.
There is nothing here
but the nothingness of
two and three and four to a cell
eight by eight by twelve feet long
bad feel, bad words, bad dreams
the sweat, the heat,
the stench of animals
shitting microwaved food
down foul steel toilets
and never a glimpse of sun
or an honest inch of air.
Beasts live better than this.
Lights glare and cameras stare,
doors whir and click and clank.
Some nights I almost
run when it’s time to go,
guilty for washing my hands
guilty at noticing how beautifully
the moonlight falls
on the razor wire.

© 2009

She was a scarecrow
after the harvest,
there in her unrocked chair,
Indian summer falling
like a mist around her,
so old, so silent
   the fields cut bare
   the cattle gone
   her cane asleep
   against the doorknob
obselete flesh in a black dress
waiting, waiting
for the final page to turn.

© 1974-2009

I was taken to a place where
I could stand inside the sky
and watch the lights at evening
assemble in atonement
over Gotham,
and they came in tiny billions
through the heavens
- from the north and from the
west and from the east -
points of lustre sparkling
in their multitudes,
bearing signs and
bearing wisdom for the feast,
and they flashed as fish in water,
tinged with grace and
touched with power,
and fell in shimmering currents
upon a billion hands below.
There was sound
within the silence
and heat within the void
and light - so bright it was
unbroken - poured like lava
through Manhattan to the sea.

© 2009

Is there a God? I wouldn’t know,
unlike so many who have
no doubt and march with
such assurance to their fate.
Religion comes and religion goes
but saved are always with us.
I am rarely sure of anything,
and rarely pine to be.
My guess is that all religions
contain some degree of error
- how could they not, being
made by men, and passed down
through the centuries? - and that
flaws may in fact be necessary
to allow the sinners through.
Is there a God? I wouldn’t know.
But I am wary of deities that
require harsh austerities and
stress children in their dreams.
I saw a man with fire in his eyes
at the crossroad of the night
and the wise who passed
declared him crazy and
ate their white ice-cream.
I saw a man with fire in his eyes
at the altar of the sun.
They held their arms
across their eyes and
hailed him St. Augustine.
The wisdom of the desert
is amiable and kind,
silent in the arm of time,
alive with emptiness.
I hear rivers in the sky
I sense a golden shore.
Holy men with baskets
come to barter. They offer
alms and adoration,
and therein lies their
rapture and their folly.
Is there a God? I wouldn’t know.
I see horses in the moonlight
and wolves upon the ridge,
white bones to eternity
and travellers passing through.
My heart brims 
with infinite nothingness.
I touch the glimmering stars.
There is no fear, the abyss
holds out its hand.
Give me this desert, if it be thy will,
and this koan I need not solve,
a refuge from the apocalypse and
the indelicate conceit of the saved.

© 2009