Tag: yearning

For Instance, the Geese

There is no name for that song.
There’s no strength that holds happiness.
There is no promised land of sadness.
The fields are gold with Fall,
they are silver with Winter.
The car is trailed with the dirt that led you here.
You note the windshield paintings
of your ancient figures, antelopes of ice melting into lakes,
arms of blue rivers white with the harvest of clouds.
There was some mission.
About the mystery, you had come to
an understanding. For instance,
the circling of geese forming wonder —
so why stay so long with them into winter?
Why not fade south with the others, like tears?
What was the sound that we made,
if not a cry?

December 26, 2018
Wilmont Township, ON, Canada

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Bone Dry

The closest I ever came to a river
was thirst. It’s ok, love, I was always sad,
more or less, yeah,
from the beginning,
before there was even you. Sometimes
the river isn’t a river, but a flood deserted
by a storm. You get to know the taste.
You know it as soon it leaves you with nothing
to fill it with.

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Wish

The wind plays
at being startled by my presence,
and rakes my body for wishes
my eyes have made, the silver cravings of
two coins. It is falling head
over heals to carry you over dirt,
follows as I walk across Macdonell’s Field
until peering into the Mennonite well,
I see into the neck of the heavenly earth,
and the bare brown trees circling
our extinct sun. And in each step, the ground waits
to feel what it must give into next.
What if a word could breathe on its own,
or swim in a pail which we would draw up,
and shining, coldly, let us drink from it?

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You are the Forest

I am lost in the forest.
There is no forest.
This will tell you something

of the birds,
drawing in the sky
like comets.

The earth has lost
another me. The sparrows
are the seeds,

My palm, the feather
in your hair, the lashes
fluttering

are the last things
I see.

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This is

This Is

the grey sky
pressing windows
with exclamations of birds,
the strength
of the free,
their loose hold.
I think
of you escaping
the storm, me
unremembering
as much as I loved you,
so you
become another,
this her, that she,
this wind,
the
birds
forgetting they
are not meant to break
through glass
made with
the blink of an eye
which sees
what isn’t, then
for a second,
is.

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ok

Ok,

love,
here I am,
so that you
will not
find me
missing
among the
missed
words,
explanations
for each
breath, each
other –

and yet
know
there is
still
beauty, that
you
will not
feel it, my
hand
in the breeze
of your hair,
the way
perhaps
you
feel
it.

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Hope

Maybe I am dirt. Maybe
I am dirt that buries you,
and it’s in me
to learn
to softly bring you water
that tastes something
like the sun.

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Coming in from the Rain

Rumination is made with a bell,
landing in me. Drizzle scarves
the shoulders. Dampness is not the opposite
of dust. Movement sticks to its illusion,
she said one night into the sound
of my name in her body. There are only steps, she said,
against the banks of things.
I make it back inside.
Shoes squelch the marble floor,
then plunge the hall. I move into the pulse of it,
up the dead river’s flow.
I can feel your heart in me, she said.

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