January 2010

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
old brick laundromat
that billows steam
like chimes into the
face of the frozen 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
disappears with a bulging basket
through the shining metal 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 and clean through
silent maples
I stand with a shovel
and breathe the
good crisp air
no geese today
the ice has come
the cold is deep
the wind an old voice
over the fields
sighing in the pines
I think of Guthrie
alone on the plains
and 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
on the long white earth.
good is good God is god.
happy new year.

© 2010