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.

fire & nothing

helens hood rainier adams all cued in jagged succession

and here below only thanks to the

clear thin winter permanence that is this flight ceiling.

it is a classic ansel gelatin. black brindle puncturing

skin perfect white and patterned by rises and falls and

a single source spotlight. the untouchable texture is palpable.

black moloka'i shards nested in shifting sands. i hover

just above my hands and navigate their peaks with 

the swingset slight of the waves. feeling sharpness with thought.

there is nothing of the void between us but the void is.

it is water still it is air still. galaxies and atoms are

mostly nothing either but we found them and named them.

we found them with magic. the magic of light focused

as vertical streams of fire the very fire that once birthed these

dormant for now family of four. peaks.

wry grin

all that tonight stood
still in the restless wind
was the moon. full and naked
in the cloudless black. the dirty
three still in my ringing ears. warren
he conjured these whips
with those hips and danielson kicks
and let loose the lipstick
and whiskey stains on our
starched white shirt of a city.

monarchs

this was the primordial sleepless city
where the crickets never quit
under bright sun bright moon

on they sing accompaniment to
willow joy by great lake breezes
like a thousand crosswalkbuzzerboxes
chirps here deliver mannahatta shame

orange and black and orange
and orange and black
these living leaves they fall
upward and against the wind
to make mention of gravity
of journeys greater
than any anymore might take

the waves here lick
muddy hard lake sand
to wash the runny shit out
brown in
and delay swimming
for another day
instead they gift
bleached plastic shell things
left heedless to sway
with the flows they are buried
under black paste cattail humus and
in white gulls stopped guts

twice yearly they stop here
in subdivision and thicket
coached to rest then flutter
by timeless calls of the cricket

erecting roofs in a park in the rain

the rains went and 
the temperature drop dug deep
for the thickest of late season fabrics
from blackness inhabited by dusty gear.
pumping the propane sucking the batteries
igniting the chords of wood. buying more
and more ice to pack animal product bits
until the last brunch. we deliver
home to the woods. we take without
asking borrow without knowing and
embrace the feigned perpetuity
of hope. we deliver home to the woods.

about a pile of white grey ash
three wet squares our tent footprints
this here is how we left no trace
amongst the moss fern rusted ring
and swollen picnic table permanence
unknowing of the theres
that gave up their creatures' breath
their deep buried sunlight
their plastic polluted labor hours
to bring us a setting less touched.

we drove other fuel here
under open clouds and
blinding pouring bearing unease
of what to do if our arrival found
no relief from the elements
our conditioned rooms humbly shrug
for us. there, rains always stop.
there, spacestation city habitats
create voyeurists of us
in prepackaged safari zoos
with inch thick safetyglass
only permitting looks at things
we did not make.
if rustic and real are synonymous
what then are parks?

the rains went and saved us
from an arrival inconvenient 
for having to acknowledge all this life
responsible for that convenience
of restoration in ours.

waiting for victory rose

flat. and in pain i quit cities
and their failure to own
their secrets. hope in change
rides on the contrails of
dragonflies born yesterday
and the sun keeps setting.
i dreamt of Great Lakes
and dunes i haven't yet walked
from canada or from one divided state
it is no matter. the world is
this canada
finally shrugging
american hemmed handmedowns.
the world is this canada
buying flying weapons
grasping for Northern sovereignty
digging deep holes of austerity
to seek the false throne
encrusted with mineral extraction
and the ice keeps melting
and the bears keep swimming.

damn these dreams only
dreams of land
where property has no meaning
trees fall on their own
and souls are redistributed
to nonbipedal things.
damn our stalled
momentum and the
incapacity to keep it.
we are too many
and the dandelion
cannot weed itself.