grandmother

death burdens questions with a weight unfair

as with a scramble about a ship's half sunken deck

we wander through desparate questioning

abuse rationale and cling to ladders unbound

to any universe but this. at moments like these

we reside with time meaningless and never enough

though powered by pink rosary and mother mary

years were a film to which there was no projectionist

or door to where hers rolled. the last thirty were

without her John L yet never was joy outweighed

giving unseated or throws left unknit by hands astute

two nights before the first snowfall

her breaths were puffs of delayed summer

pushed from beneath doors of two rooms away

her eyelids moved as dropped feathers

through a windless silence and still

she mouthed my given name hello

she entered the black wood the day after

so in time we can. long after grief's quieting

her scent: roses and life

yes even now

her lantern: bright

the same raised by her mother

sixtysix novembers past

this gait of hers: courage

practiced and for us

twigs' soft crackles

leaves' sweeps

we will follow

and without fear

her release to the beyond

was a sun's reminder

for crocus awakenings

and geese returnings

and we thank her for waiting so long

souls imbalanced

how long does water's memory last

what drops will remember me

when i lose it and marry my bones

should we hope it's not a shallow seive

a camera with a stuck shutter

it might be too much

from up here i can feel

rhythm of the breeze hear its rise but

nothing from the place that knows

less sun than a Buffalo winter

the deep it's lost its chorus

voices who've been given

over to life veracious and finless still

i want to see echoes of scaled bodies

dance with glint in the saline spray

life begat life and is now with us

our fire indifference shrugging most else

jellyfish replace sharks as things of terror

plastic is the new black krill 

we eat existence

breathe ice deliver volcanic excrement

and answer only to feckless distant gods or

the next beachfront vacation rental orgy 

in the next town over

the allyoucaneat buffet closed

it learned of thresholds and supply

fueled with myth that's come

like onehundredyear locusts:

rebuild the fruit cellar where

they crawled out the ground

find shade fill bags with

sand and blood.

the great entropic scale

will redistribute souls

will itself balance

and the water

it will watch

fog

the fog it rolls arriving nowhere

from here we watch it a short film

stuck in a loop with stops: the clearcut

boundary creating wilderness where forgotten

delivering walled comfort where

none ever existed

it is night cold

arriving before sun setting now

the drop of seasons into one
of dropped leavings

at least in our memory of the east:

hills stamped a red giant star's palette
of warmth

another last breath of life

our mother she once deserved respect

never for beauty but for fear earned

unless unless
that boundless slope beyond:

a sea for mills and you a life turned silk

deep earth bought privilege

and privilege bought this luxury

to bring it to art and object

and destination on a park-way

but hardly art will it be still

when the wilds reclaim

and the fog rolls back and on 

remembering clayoquot, 1993

big big trees this way during day
salted meat wrapped in tin
stickered fruit picked
from a different season
days ago. plastic jackets
in case the blue recedes
decides to hide in deeper
than night fog. here
humbly stands stands of columns
cedars grotesque and beautiful
and infinitely reverent
amongst a crowd of others

drinking ruddy tonics living
along the currents from
these mother lifegivers
pulsing silently underpeat.

there are potlatch peoples left
near here beyond the kelp
peoples who have never been visitors
and with peace enfold meaning

and symbol of trixter raven
of spirit bear and each sentient the

collective life. each know but a soft walk
where streams begin where salmonberry
can forever be thinned. they

who with their oral tradition have
and still notch millennia with harmony.

these fog islands have always been 
since the last great freeze
a nurse log puncturing the cold
crystal currents. hairy coniferous mounds
in a monstrous slumber
waiting for all of us to decide
to commit to its ways
or to our modern ballast foreign.
the local anywhere will have us
not just here
and freely
but the thickening of life

the embrace of timeless rhythm

is of it and not for it to choose.

it is one and we are disconnected. 

there are things you cannot buy back

there are still places alive not yet

wholly sold. consumptive indifference

that is what bides time with more

that are tankers and pipelines

and disappearing bees.

there are potlatch peoples left
near here beyond the kelp
peoples who have never been visitors
and with peace enfold meaning

and symbol of trixter raven
of spirit bear and each sentient the

collective life. each know but a soft walk
where streams begin where salmonberry
can forever be thinned. they

who with their oral tradition have
and still notch millennia with harmony.

now

i was an x and a y
joined abed with clover
the sky fell upward
in that way it does
when you haven't stared into it
for a time unrecalled
it did this and my eyes had to
shut to find movement
parallel to me
perpendicular
to the northwest where
there never once was a city
when does a city stop being a city
and a park become a meadow
and hope something
to reminisce?
this sky risen is the same sky
that held green kites
and gave the sun full trespass
that season i thought i always knew you
when i forced novelty into a two-leaf
clover and smiled only with my face
if i was lost then (i am sorry)
i have no idea where you are now
when the ride left

you were not there

summer starts

the cottonwoods are snowing
soft against an eaglet screech.
see the mountains trying to melt
spitting slight puffs upward. they are
reaching with arrows pointing to 
pure white dollops of wet whip
reminding they'll make rain again.
smell the cottonwoods.
they waft as their seedpods an airy drift
aimless like beachgoers like sunbathers
hoping work never finds them
hoping the great fire only rests to
give their taught skin sleep to heal.
weave this cotton and join them
the sun sets every day yet
it is not always this beautiful.

wreck beach

please tell me when does the balance swing
in favor of the strollers the beach combers
seeking for disposal: polymer chains
much longer than their own? this is the farthest
west they can come over land. they and
their yellow lab mastiff bernards
they and the unwashed other theys
that exclaim this their church
with penises flapping towards setting sun and bonfires
started too early with aid of wine worth
less than its bottles. talk mixes cosmic delight with
transitfarehike defeatist bitchings
a struggle unconscious against the imposed order
forever unnatural to their wiring. where else
can they go than here
to deliver carnal musings 
atop and within this ravaged ecotone.

styrofoam crumbles as cupcakes with too little fat
nestled between cedar stumps that knew life 
ten generations before this urbanity
barkless rootless stumps nearly as dense
as the tumbled basalt its base. but i know not the number
of Earth Day branded cleanups needed to tip the
sacred gestalt back to a wilderness palette.
less feet equal better trails but too few steal access
that too too many need these days.
these here are the limits.
around the bend
past the graffiti decommissioned
lighthouse you can see the city:
the anchor and the stressor
the electric warmth and the choked air
home and beautiful and forever foreign.

the agricultural land reserve

i smelled them as dust as they limped past
with a gait that told the story of lives who
once knew long muscle in place of stone

into the curtain of dusk beyond
the room of singularity they left left no sign
of how they came from anywhere

this snapshot of the Deas Slough wouldn't 
know them anyhow: its shores they have been
eaten by northern ice its peat by dad's 
backyard beefstakes and Cherokee purples
their stilted home by moorings and escape boats
for the haves not us

we should drink to their ability with 
gravity and time and drink to the infinite versions
of them under the slivers of laneway stars

it does not have to be trees winter to see 
the eagle nest there three metres of perfect chaos
floating in the hydro line truss elbow
but it is winter
and summer has grown too large
fringing too much the edges of its own allure
for this season to remain any answer
trades now happen: plastic swimming pools
and sprinklers for more than just lawn
for carpeted basements and disney

and cherry pop and more stories called news

those of dust their place is only with

the electricity behind the brow

and not with any of us right now
breathing. it is with this highway shoulder
and the space beyond mine that slumps like
the paired arcs of a bull's horns stumps
succumbed to emotional blood and 
finding final home against
this quiet steering column

the meadows

all that remains wood are the ravines
too steep for building on no shoppingmall
prospect flooded every year now soon
every season. hills without valleys we
raise and raze and grade. second and third
gen temples to the economy almighty
always hungry for more worship.

our heart was once a donut shop sunday stop
now anew with full plastic fluorescence
over the counter for external use only safe
and unsafe for consumption. without 
sidewalks we still boast suburbia. we
have the cul-de-sac collection we have
the marks of modular paving pattern
disease growing every three years (or so)
it cloaks our seated and buckled bloat
anew. enamel and tint. to keep rolling
out the fat whilst we keep birthing
angst sponges with mart access to guns
we keep birthing sporting sheep and
bear hope in mascot pride that our team
this time will kick the ass of yours. to
its cheer we drink fizz and beer to
positive blips in the nightly news 
and followed by an otherwise
inevitable impotence we gulp.

maybe this time tonight we can drive
past our exit. this quarter tank at least
it will buy us some emotion as it will
not find a farm or its food or the ghost
of peoples that knew the wood lo[s]t.