One

Some things are never true,
like finding god.
Some things become true over time,
like finding god approximately,
and some things are true from
the exact moment they hit the earth,
like Johnny Cash’s voice
in I walked the line. It still
fills my head in the same way
it crackled from the old black radio
in my father’s kitchen
the same hard box that said
JFK was shot and
Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston.
That radio was true
but not as true as Johnny Cash
in I walked the line.
Nothing was ever just that true again.

Two

Alden Nowlan came close
and he’s not finished yet,
though he’s been dead since 1983.
I still hear his post-cancer voice
- like truck bolts falling down
a pipe at night - true in a
hoarse and rattling way.
Poems could have hidden in there
whether he wrote them down or not.
I hardly dared turn when he passed
in the Telegraph-Journal news room,
too shy to ask for autographs
of the books I bought at
the little store on King Street.
If truck drivers ever read poetry, he said,
they would start with his.
I never drove a truck but
that line runs through his poems.

Three

When Alden sat with John Diefenbaker
in the basement of the Hartland Observer
in the 1950s
and listened to the great man
read his own words aloud
from a back issue of the newspaper,
I think he saw what I did
many years later on Parliament Hill,
a vainglorious trembling man
with a handshake like a shark’s mouth
and eyes so blue they drained the sky.
Dief was his own god
and everything else was props -
one Canada, roads to resources,
the buffalo head in his office.
He was riveting - I’d pay to
watch him in the Commons again
but he was a man with no pure line.

© 2011

This morning, early,
as traffic stirred on Bridge Street
and currents slid in darkness
through silent rocks to the sea,
I dreamed of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
in the way that good dreams rise
like syrups up through light
from snows and copper boilers
when winters die and
maples weep with joy at the
break-up of all rivers and
the raging conception of spring,
his voice that lovely
essence of many years,
gilding gathered shadows on
a curtained Manhattan evening,
gracing a continent that
cracks forever beneath itself,
and goes on cracking,
eyes twinkling on the
crest of long applause,
survivor of all Hoovers and
the long dead hand of state,
absinthe in the glass of night,
mysterious and full,
descendent of Rimbaud,
father of Hibbing’s child,
shepherd of Ginsberg
and all the holy city lights
of San Francisco by the sea,
breathlike as the birches
along the Merrimack where
Kerouac weaved at dawn
and was laid inside the earth
by old brick smokestacks
next to farm girls who
fell exhausted into looms
and fed the awful sins of America,
sins recalled at North Beach
and in the flickering clubs
and on all the Coney Islands
where poets climb to high wires
and leap to the arms of jazz club girls
with bad teeth in the morning.
He inhabits haunted turnpikes
that hack at the hearts of men
and bring good women down,
holding pens and brushes high,
exhorting all, forgiving all
but the crime of not bearing witness.
I saw him walking up my street
in the palest hue of morning,
inhaling gentle ethers
and cradling the alphabet.
He threw a paper on my porch,
filled up with his best words,
and walked on through the park
and over the quivering dam,
vanishing in a black beret
by the old stone mill
where waters slide
across the sacred earth
and wheat spills down like honey
and is made to dance upon the chaff.

© 2011

We drive a hundred miles
through fields of corn and
soy beans rich with rust,
mute across a land that
seems to sway and bow
and hold us in its hands.
Windmills white as aliens
bruise clouds that hang
unfinished and know
not what to make
of such intruders.
Hydro towers recede
in graceful strands to
horizons that lay mute
and thin as dimes
along the sky. We pass
as though awakening to
a notion that we knew
this air and soil long ago,
when horses turned at
dusk to tired barns
and women slept with men
exhausted by their labors,
the sense of hymns in
sturdy church pews and
the taste of summer apples
in orchards lost in time.
The highway breathes like
a beast not quite awake,
inhaling space and slumber
from the hills, exhaling
signs and exit ramps
to places out of sight
down sighing roads
where memory ferments,
and currents swirl in
glasses bright with spirits and
blind all who would look back.

© 2011

Why is it I feel shame
for small things long ago?
Things I have not even done?
I stumbled on a neighbor
in the woods, saw the blood
upon the moss and heard a
strangeness in his voice.
I knew at once he had
shot a deer out of season,
the carcass barely dead
somewhere close
in the under brush.
He sat on his tractor,
gripping the wheel and stared
at the gun in my hands.
“Seen any partridge?” he asked,
and I felt the ice in his eyes.
“Not yet,” I said, and turned
toward the abandoned farm,
almost ran down the path
through the fragrant fir
and birches. And still,
after all this time, the man
long dead in his grave,
those eyes burn after me.

© 2011

This was my uncle of the war,
all those years after Vimy Ridge,
after Amiens and Passchendaele
and all the other hellish places
where by rights he should have
died with his comrades of
the Fighting Twenty-Fifth,
L Cpl Harry Lee Blaikie
of Truro, Nova Scotia,
sitting in a Sunday suit on
long afternoons in our living room,
when church was done,
legs crossed, tie clip rising and
falling with each shallow breath
of the White Owl cigar that
burned oh so slowly in his right hand,
the smoke as low as his voice,
talking with my father
of the car and lumber business,
of the garage and mill and stock market
and the weather, always the weather,
when all else failed, as if that alone
could affirm the bond between them,
a code for everything left unspoken,
how hot it was, how cold, and
‘minds me of the time in Burnside
or those winters in the woods,
the two of them turning in unison
to stare at the pale curtain window,
as if to ensure it would still be there,
and my mother serving tea
and sweets on good china plates,
with pleasantries,
and never a word of the war
on any occasion in all those years,
not even second hand from my father,
and thus I knew my uncle not
but the quiet man with the town cigar
and the pale blue eyes
behind thin-rimmed glasses,
and the good felt hats and pastel cars,
and it was not until he was very old
and near death himself that he finally spoke
of the gas and mud and shells
and machine gun bullets
and the stench and din of the trenches,
horrors that even then he could
scarcely bring himself to mention.
“You did what you had to do,” he told
Dave Sullivan of The Weekly Record.
“I shot at people but I couldn’t say I know
whether I actually killed anyone … A lot
of them would be just as young as I was.”
This was my uncle of the war.

© 2011

It is evening and I have shared
too little in the current of the day.
All I have done is cast my vote
for the party of least greed.
No coins for the desperate ones
at the intersection or the
busy souls at the coffee shop,
for I have not been that way today.
No telephone calls or messages,
not even much thought for friends,
and my prayers of the morning,
so thin I scarcely remember them.
All I have done is read the news
and dry in dross of too many
thoughts of self.
Two blue jays come at dusk
to the feeder and call out to me.
But it is too late. I have shared
too little in the current of the day.
All I have done is cast my vote
for the party of least greed.

© 2011

On the day Gaddafi was
pulled from a concrete
drain pipe beneath
red and blue graffiti
and dragged bleeding
through the streets of Sirte,
just before they shot him,
the color of one whole side
of his head matched the
last leaves of the maple tree
in the park across the street
and the scene resembled
one of those nature films
in which hyenas tear red flesh
from their prey and swallow
great pieces without seeming
to chew at all - the way he
butchered so casually
throughout all his
decades on earth.
His death felt almost
ordained, and I thought
of the old woman
I knew so many years ago
at the meditation centre,
speaking of the long journey
of the spirit through rock and
vegetation to the animal world,
across who knows how many
incarnations, telling me as
though she absolutely knew
it to be so, that you can
look at certain people and
know at a glance they are
new to human life because
the aggression of animals
remains so visible in their faces
and inevitably plays itself out
over the course of their lives,
‘like that man in Libya,’ she
said, sipping green tea at a
table on the Sparks Street mall.
‘He has no blue. He is all red,
still almost wholly animal.’
(for Mukti Lok)

© 2011

The truth about all the work
I have ever done is that
it was mostly work
- not joy -
and the fear of how
it would be perceived
by every superior
I ever knew, for it is
the nature of all superiors
to be superior, especially
the unskilled ones
who lack grace and
carry fear themselves.
My sin is that
I gave up too many days
to drudgery and obedience in
return for money and security,
and the wish to be loved
by unloving people,
for I never in my life
wished to manage anything,
and because of this
and because men and women
are not yet kind by default,
I created an opening that
was almost always taken,
even by those
I looked upon as friends
and in whom I sometimes
confided my innermost
thoughts and secrets.
In the workplace,
if the only goal is to work,
we will always be betrayed,
and it will always be done
in the name of something
which has no life but that
which superiors give to it,
and I have wasted more time
than I wish to remember
lamenting this unchanging
fact of life, and thus feeding
the very fires that burned me.

© 2011

Absence is its own power.
I stand on Liberty Island
and look for the towers,
try to will them into view
through the harbor haze,
but they are not there.
They will not rise
and the wound aches on.
They sky is empty without them.
I cannot hear, I cannot see,
as I sometimes cannot see
the face of loved ones
when I close my eyes
and whisper their name.

© 2009

The death trucks roll
at night when it is dark,
bull haulers in the blackness,
no markings on the side,
just latticed steel and wind holes
and slaughter in the air,
so many trucks, so long the nights
upon this howling land,
the cattle call the wailing wall
of a thousand abattoirs
that crouch unseen
past the exit ramps
where no eyes turn to see.
The great trucks slow
like beasts themselves,
turning off in the urine light,
tail lights red as blood,
another load, another night,
the radio up loud,
hot coffee when it’s done,
and gone before the dawn.

© 2011