Nixon ruined me and for that
I will always be grateful.
Was there anything about this
duplicitous, dissembling,
pasquinade of a man,
this tin of high office tuna fish
that I did not hate?
I don’t think so.
We were all so young
and sure then, tossing like corks
on the champagne sea of the times
and oh how he united us,
Tricky Dick
that dark malignant force
born in a Hallowe’en mask
and passing in perfect eclipse
across our fermenting skies,
Richard the red baiter,
Milhous the Jew hater,
Nixon the nemesis of nearly everything.
I blew it all in those baited years
and was never the same again.
He sucked the vigor from my bones,
the craven McCarthy stooge,
the Quaker who bombed Hanoi
- on Christmas Day no less,
the ghost on every tear-gassed campus,
and the fraud at the beach in a suit and tie,
he was the sphinx forever rising
from the ashes of all things holy,
and nothing could touch him
until that moment
when he stood in the eye
of those ancient cameras and
declared, “I’m not a crook.”
After that only Watergate remained,
and the long sweet season
of worship at the altar of
The Washington Post,
and Woodward and Bernstein,
and the blessed Deep Throat,
and Cronkite, and the way it was,
until finally the old coot quit,
and like a crow with thrashing wings,
went jabbering to San Clemente.
I could never hate that way again.
He cooked the fertile poison from me
and took it with him
– and  clear winds blew again.
When he eventually died I realized
it had been years since I wanted
to kick Nixon around anymore
and if I could have
I’d have gone to Yorba Linda
and put flowers on his grave.

© 2010

A sunset purifies
     all it touches,
cities crumbling
into ancient hillsides,
quarries gouged
from the eyes of earth,
old freighters
out on the great lakes,
tenements that stink
in the noon-day sun,
big highways, bad bridges,
graveyards that ache
with the bones of
too many soldiers,
   and every prayer
   thrown after it
like petals to the sea.

© 2010

The work of a poet
is to collect the
wind on his skin and
the blue from the lakes
and the gleam of the sun
as it jumps from
the bows of winter pines
to the exact place
on the crystal air
where fireflies
wait for nightfall and
men humbled at last
by their labours
melt back into
the earth to die.
Poetry is not so much
a shaft of light
as a shadow that
declares there is one.
It cannot be spoken
without consent
or even heard
except in passing,
and it can never be
captured upon a page,
though now and then
it may sift like a
sweet mirage among
what we take for words.
Poetry is a promise
we are doomed to
believe even when
it seems to lie, and
the work of a poet
and of all creation
is to kiss the dew as
it melts with the morning
and takes one hand and
flings us into infinity.

© 2010

Blessed are the poor in spirit:
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are they that mourn:
for they shall be comforted.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are the meek:
for they shall inherit the earth.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness:
for they shall be filled.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are the merciful:
for they shall obtain mercy.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are the pure in heart:
for they shall see God.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

Blessed are the peacemakers:
for they shall be called the children of God.
  So many Christians
      so little Christianity

© 2010 (from The Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5:3-9 – King James Version)
- Photo Blog

Before we knew
what we know today
and spoke so freely of it,
there were kitchens
with wood stoves
where the air lay still
on pale afternoons
and men like my uncle
sat in old chairs
that creaked with time
and smoked pipes
that were packed
in a certain way with
tobaccos no longer
made or remembered.
And it was winter,
or one of those
settled seasons,
when new eyes
beheld old ceremonies
of murmured small talk,
beneath clocks imbued
with permanent patience,
- and light crept
in collaborative shafts
across the dwindling of the day.
I remember matches
flaring in the silence,
flames like honey
to the leaf, and vapours
sifting in supine dreams,
- and men who were wise
and unadorned
and did not fear quiet
or the hour they might die.

© 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