Every now and then I recall
the man who was not there,
though he arrived each day
in cobweb clothes and sat
in a certain awkward splendor
upon his paper throne.
His voice was disembodied
as if a stranger to himself,
his handshake oddly linen
as if taken from the morgue.
He had no gaze most days,
no life beneath his skin.
His words were little noises
that scraped along the wall,
his laugh a kind of subterfuge
withdrawing down the hall.
He lived somewhere outside
himself and rarely
came to visit or seemed
to care for anything
except to check the mail.
His hair hung like a hedge
about his shoulders and
his shoes were two erasers
passing on a page,
removing any evidence
to show that he’d been there.
I saw him stand at parties
near the copier by his door
as if expecting someone
or something unforeseen.
Now and then he’d steal a look
and as quickly look away.
There was no current in his face
no shadow there at all.
His eyes were empty ice cubes
and his mouth a twist of lime.

© 2010

I believe the blue cross
that glows at night
as I walk up Long Island
in the summer air and feel
the breath of all I cannot know
upon my face and flesh.
I believe the colour blue
and the scent of cedars
and the song of grass
and the satin sound of midnight
falling from the pinpoint stars.
I believe that every soul is blue.
I trust the longing of the night
and the small blue prayers
that stutter through the spruces
as I pass along the path.
I believe in grace.
I feel it sift across my shoulders
as I turn back along the
river toward the church.
Blessed is the window of the night.
Blessed is unknowingness
and the journey of the current
through all blackness.
I believe that blue will never lie
and that the way is
forever set before me
and the wanderer that I meet
will always be myself.

© 2010

After all these seasons
I still close my eyes
and walk the ridge
where grasses grow
and blossoms sigh
on summer winds,
and the graves of men
as good as I sing psalms
of all that might have been
from depths piled black
beneath my feet.
I was new and I was young
when these mines
shook the last time,
the earth convulsing
in an autumn night
a mile below the maple leaves
and the town fled
cold with fear to the pithead
- doors flung open, TVs
flickering in the dark -
to gather and wait and stare
at the menacing hole,
and everyone knew in hours
what would take so long to concede.
The newsmen came
and cameras strained and
the radio went on for days
as priests said prayers
and widows wilted in the glare,
and even the draegermen
wept at their impotence.
Only eighteen were saved.
Seventy-five died in that
insatiable methane tomb.
And I who was young and
spared such work am old now
and lined with years,
and I stare in turn
at the plaques that stand
by the miners’ hall and
speak with moss and silence
of all that was left below.
Everyone knew
it was coming of course
- they had always known,
for it had always come,
the fires, the explosions,
the final hideous bump -
but they went down anyway
as generations
had gone before them,
because a man will always
die for his family
and the companies know that
and there are always
more men than coal.
And so they live
in an unquiet way,
frozen in old photographs
and sorrow fresh as snow,
bound without end
to the brumal coal and
the moaning hush of time.
I taste the wind
across my mouth and
ponder the price of flowers.
Who can fathom
the miseries of earth
and the infinite schemes of God,
and how long can ghosts
torment the living
before they consent to die?

© 2010

This is where they came
in the name of the father,
here where sunsets
with red eyes
sink into black pines
along the Canadian Shield.
Here the rocks
bear witness to
unmarked graves, and
pigeons with crayon eyes
stare out from
cracked chimneys
to the river where
the currents still hear
the murmur of the
Bedtime Prayer.
“Oh, my God I adore you …
Protect me this night and
may your grace be
with me always…”
Here the winds sift softly
over paint-peeled walls
and ache upon the absence
of each unwanted one,
unkissed, unclaimed,
weeping in loneliness
in the name of the
father, and waiting
for the hand upon the door.
Here time still crawls with
the crimes of men in robes
and women in white and
mounties who never came
in the name of the father.
The earth holds
every strangled cry, and
shelters the abandoned bones,
and here, at the going down
of the sun, and in the morning,
it remembers them.
And nothing
in the name of the father,
not even the river
with all its eternity,
can bear the stain away.

© 2009 - Photo Blog: Residential Schools - In the name of the father

The girl I knew too soon
and left in the blue-eyed
mists of summer
receded with raven hair
and dancing eyes down
the sunlit Fundy shores,
where waves rolled in
like gin and tonic and broke in
a billion silver coins along the sand
and ran in aching melodies
to the piano rocks and died.
And sometimes on the winter air
in wisps of wood smoke
sharp and clear, a million miles
and all these years away -
beneath stars too young to know -
I sense her fragrance in the dark,
her breath along the treeline
and I hear the wistful
half rung bell of all that was,
and all that washed away.

© 2010

All the soldiers
come to Coney Island to
say farewell and kiss the sea
and die the lovely lipstick death
of cotton candy vagaries
smacked across the evening sky,
and to taste one final time
those sweet ice cream illusions
that hang like fire in the
marsmallow wind and light
the infinite chasm of longing
that cradles the American dream.

I see them in the clam bars
drinking beer and showing off tattoos
and tickets for the Wonder Wheel.
They saunter down the boardwalk
in boots that whisper Gettysburg
and Belleau Wood and Okinawa,
and every Hamburger Hill on
the muddy, bloody road that leads
from Concord down to Kandahar,
marching, ever marching,
for one nation indivisible
with liberty and baseball and
Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs for all.

The feeble stars shine down
with beautiful bony fingers on
truths held to be self-evident
on the Thunderbolt and Cyclone
and every carousel that
ever whirled a purple heart
or laughing child
through the salted air of Brooklyn.

They fought for Dreamland
and Luna Park and the
Sideshow by the Seashore,
raised the flag for
Midget City and Donny Vomit
and every fool and waif
who ever threw a knife
or ate a light bulb or
trailed the red dress girl
with moonlit legs
across a midnight dance floor.

I hear them sigh beneath the sand
and breathe good night Irene
to half remembered faces
in the fireworks and
mermaids shimmering nude
among the silver waves.
This is where the patriots
come to say their final prayers
and make their peace as
Whitman passes with a lantern
and leads them back to Appomattox
and old comrades in the mists.

© 2010

David Blaikie Photos of Coney Island

On the street of empty faces
the lifers come and go
with burnt toast eyes
and old chrome teeth,
and box car dreams
across their back
- the weight
of every careless hour
crumpled at their feet.
They do not speak on
the street of empty faces,
there are no sounds,
no numbers on the doors,
just dusty steps to
old unheated rooms
where no one goes,
stale air, dead wires,
chocolate smeared
in the morning sun
and windows that look down
on gum wrappers in the snow.

© 2010

The miles are lovely lined with snow
where midnight calls and ice stars flow
in whorls of dust across the sky
that trace the hills and grace the eye
and pass in perfect requiem.

And I am washed on lingering strands
of light through holy winterlands
where silver glints and beings sway
and sugar swirls and fingers lay
along the infinite atrium.

I flow in velvet time and space
where darkness hangs in silent lace
above the woods, a shadowed grace
as seasons drift and wings erase
soft skeins of vaporous opium.

And I am one behind the wheel
where gossamer beings come to kneel
with comets in faint mystery
and sparks in pale trajectory
beneath the incandescent hymn.

© 2010

I see my father walking
in dusty boots from the mill
through piles of golden lumber
row on row in the butter light
of evening below the church,
and the air is cool and
tinged with words that flow
as fish in summer currents
and seep to the dark embrace
of the earth beneath his feet.
Love is patient love is kind
unto the hills amazing grace
for now and ever more amen.
I breathe the scent
of strawberries in a field
and salt on red rut roads
and hear hymns that flit
on swallow wings
to waiting nests against
the weathered barn.
This is where I learned
that truth is fluid and
sings along the hydro wires
from pole to silent pole
and winters with the geese
and lovely butterflies
and never wears a ring
or agrees to glint on
anything but bottles cast
by pilgrims into ditches
on their way to Santiago.
And my father was a pilgrim
in this village where he
wandered through his days
and he never knew a morning
that was old or came to
evening with an empty bowl.

© 2010

There is a hole in the day
where she used to be,
an absence in the light
that falls to the fields
and floats to the darkened
spruces along the fence line.
I hear the wheels
as I would not hear them
if she were there
- even in the dusk
of her final days.
The turns curve upward
over the hills and downward
through the underpass.
Shadows splay on
the dead spring snow
as fragments fumble
up from memory and
drag like a net behind.
Wherever I look
I see the dam
so hideously beautiful
in the long early rays
of that immaculate day
pressing through the treetops
and over the luminous ice,
and she was there
already gone to the blackness
and I did not see and
turned toward the bridge
and these are the shards
of a glitter that was
and this is the journey
of melancholy
rising from the void.

© 2010