A morning outing

Wishing this was Florida, I got up early today in the already rising light and went out to clear the snow off the car in the driveway.

It was bone-chilling cold because of the wind which also played a positive role by blowing almost everything away so I had very little work to do and had time, before driving my wife to work, to warm up the engine and my aging sinews.

Somehow, it entered my head to drive around the block while waiting.

Everything was silk-smooth, the bushes bent by the accumulation of seeming weightless powder.

All was quiet except for the crunching sound of my tires and as I rounded a corner into the sun, the glare put into stark relief the silhouette of a bare tree, the kind that reaches up more than out.

The angle of the rays made it seem that the whole tree was glittering like a hard jewel, as if the tree itself were a strangely shaped dark crystal, delicate and sparkling in the early morning.

I held my breath as if such fragile beauty would crack with the slightest movement and missed my camera.

Driving right by as the sun shifted across my field of vision the tree showed itself, up close, made of solid, dense and darkened wood and bark, a few patches of ice stuck just in the crannies and the angles where the branches bent.

My wife came out just a I pulled in to my driveway, thankful after all to be out on a regular winter work day in Ottawa.

Paths in the snow

My large backyard is like a snow-filled field
Two feet deep everywhere but the middle.
A hill’s piled higher there, a proof of wind,

Like the long streaks across the white surface.
Of footprints no mark or slight impression
Except where boots have walked out to the shed.

My son is standing at the edge, bundled,
Gloved and booted against the freezing cold,
Sent out to get the shovel for the walk.

This is a pause as he’s considering
Which way to go, and looks both left and right,
Noting the tracks his father’s feet have made

Before, an easy route and quick to reach
His destination. He turns that way and
Takes a step, then stops in contemplation.

Is the cold too much? Adjusting his gloves?
Should I knock on the window to ask him?
But then he sets out, snow up to his knees,

And heads for the middle and the hill,
Snow on his thighs and mounting higher still,
Goes through the crest, and halving the smooth

Plane of that unmoving wave like a scythe,
Sows his own foot impressions in the yard
In an L-shaped line toward the shovel

In the shed. In he goes and gets the tool
Comes out and smiles, sees me in the window.
A fist pump, he returns the way he came,

A new path in the yard, not made by me.
Two routes now graven in the shifting snow
To vanish with the next strong winter’s blow.

Through my heart’s prism

The thick white snow looks like your soft caress
And gives each object gently rounded edges.
But its icy feel freezes my hands so much,
The opposite of your warming, tender touch.

The sun heats my cheeks like your glance
When it falls on me as if by chance
But the hardened winter palish glint
Reminds me not at all of your eyes’ tint.

And so it is no matter where I look
Whether outside at a tree or car
Or inside at a table or a book,
I think of you and how you are.

This is the cosmos through my heart’s prism:
Every thing is you – or it isn’t.

Suburban walk in fall

The blue above is where clouds paint white patterns,
The sun and shade shifting as my feet advance.

The wind blows the blood red leaves to ground
To join their brown and yellow friends.

One squirrel bounds quickly cross the grass
Like a moving sinusoidal graph.

Some trees overflow with green leaf fountains,
Others are but bare and twisted bony frames.

One squirrel hops aside almost slowly,
And aged just avoids my striding legs.

A blonde boy says hello, an orange T-shirt,
With white skull and cross bones for Halloween.

Just a four year old who smiles with missing teeth
And me, a looming grizzled chap in grungy coat and cap.

Where’s your mom, where’s your dad?
I’m going to a party and sometimes grampa holds my hand.

Are your parents in the back or in the house?
Aidan rides his bike but Tristan doesn’t, on the street.

The car door stands open on the drive
A man could come and steal a child away.

The mom comes out a witch and smiles
The boy smiles too and waves his hand.

I wave back and go my way and laugh.
The crow high on the lamp post sees and caws.

The seagull glides above and screeches
At such funny happenings on suburban streets.

Before the story starts

The flying skies are blue then black,
As clouds pass like sheep beneath the rod of heaven.

Eyes open up their mouths to drink the light
That floats like liquid gold into their wells.

The pools are full of bolts
That flash along the gelid paths to wake

The sleeping unformed god that takes its shape
From constant shocks.

It sees a face.

A pang shoots through the long canal
That opens with a piercing push of air.

It feels the press of smell and flesh
Then receives a flow of sweet and wet.

The filling rush and scent press out
Until its full and rounded shape is stretched to stop.

The cold of all around gives way to warm
The safety of constraint.

The whole runs through like looping film
That repeats again, again, again,

Until the force of flow threatens to explode
And then ahh release like birth,

Both the shock of loss
And pleasant smile of full relief.

A speck of protoplasmic cells,
Its limbs extend and poke again the inward god.

The god becomes aware of all its parts
As surrounding air revolves and turns

The inward sky around to balls and dots
To myriad silver spots like spit

That coalesce into looming shapes
With rounded eyes like lamps.

The pungent smell and heat
Of blood and straw and beasts.

The tingling of the toes and lips
The tongue and fingers slip…

In a body in a room,
The story starts.

Still life there…

I

The rabbit sat with whiskers twitching.
I whispered “shh!” to Molly, stopped.

Granddaughter’s wide eyed smiling
Holding squeezing every breath,

The rabbit still and tense with staring eye,
The muscles bunched and ready,

The bright sun sent waves of heat
At the moment’s frozen green.

I stepped outside of time,
Inched slowly closer, nothing moved but me,

The poses held, I stepped again.
The poses held.

An aged pro, the rabbit sat,
He knew the danger distance.

I stepped again and Molly gasped,
The rabbit bolted like a bullet.

She gave chase and laughed
“Why’d he let us get so close?”

Thinking on his longer ears and
Long gray form, I smiling said,

“He’s older than he was,
And saving speed for when he needs it.”

“Perhaps,” a whisper came from out the air,
“Perhaps there’s less life there.”

II

The crow was wandering like a drunk
When I approached.

The other crows flew up into the trees
And called out their raucous warning.

The first one watched me pass,
The head just turning so an eye could see.

He judged me harmless
And went about his business hunting food.

I thought it strange he had not fled
But perhaps he’s older – wiser in the ways of man.

“Perhaps he’s just saving strength
For when he needs it more.”

“Perhaps,” a whisper came from out the air,
“Perhaps there’s less life there.”

III

Within a week I walked again
And stumbled on their bodies.

The crow and rabbit both in grass beside the street
Their corpses still and stiff.

The flies were flying, buzzing all about
The lidless eyes just staring

Were they hit by some passing car,
Too slow in their aged reflex?

Did they just lie down and die
The life just left them,

There upon the grass, frozen in the green
Beside the hard black asphalt?

Perhaps they saved their strength
Just once too much.

“Perhaps,” a whisper came from out the air,
“Perhaps there was no life there.”

IV

I walked this week again
Past house and park and sunlit green

The crows were out and eating carrion
But scattered at my least approach.

They took no chance on my intentions
And flew up to caw at me from branches.

The rabbit was sitting on my lawn
When I returned,

A smaller, rounder version of the one
I’d seen before with Molly.

He froze when I stopped at the driveway’s edge
Then shot away when I moved my toe.

The neighbour said he’s seen two or three
Of these younger ones.

I looked up at the red and golden trees,
And felt, “perhaps it is a time for things to die.”

“Perhaps,” came a whisper out of air,
“Perhaps, but there’s still life there.”

Rosh hashanah

The rain fell at my feet in drops,
Flecked my hair like foam from sea.

The clouds blew in cool across the bay
And marched the waves to shore in lines.

A mouth breathed mist above the water
And heavy silence pressed me down like air.

Today is when it started long ago.
Remember when you fell like dust to ground?

Remember your crumbling bones,
Your dribbling soul that leaks away.

Remember your check out time, we need the room.
Remember all the limits on your stay.

The leaves stick to the wet
But slowly melt into the asphalt,

Ground to mud on shiny black
By marching feet and turning wheels

Mere reflections on the mirror
That soon will disappear themselves in spray.

Remember your check out time, we need the room.
Remember all the limits on your stay.

Remember potsherds break, they’re brittle
Remember dreams that float away.

I step around the rivulets
That erase traces of my footsteps,

The rills that run around the stones
That act like rocks embedded in a river.

They stand against the rush – for now
But dissolve in bits as edges fray.

Remember your check out time, we need the room.
Remember all the limits on your stay.

Remember motes that swim in sunlight’s ray,
They sparkle, then are gone within the day.

Remember these words have flown,
They rose melding with the sky so gray.

Through fog and drizzle I trudge head down
And go towards home.

Is my house still there where once it was?
What remains unchanged as I make my way?

It’s your commanding voice inside that goes on speaking
To me and all of us both now and come what may.

You, projected power of our communal strength,
The living voice since that first day.

Where are we headed?

Compared computer fruit
A pear is just another apple
Alternate genetic app
Uploaded through the family tree
From a fragile branch in Eden,

Or coloured pattern
On a pewter plate
Enameled by a mammal’s hand
That reached for something higher
Filled with juicy wisdom,

Brought down through time
The cuttings that entwine
Our DNA since Eva’s bite
Replanted in the soil
That’s cleared of what’s not ours.

Electronic circuits
Spread roots where we’ve not been
In pairs and to possess and know
Ingest and computate
To tear away what once was picked.

The insinuated question
Snakes its way through months and years
And over ages since:
What fruit will guide us
Once the universe is us?

Far away

There are times when my table’s just a table
And resists my desire for it to be a ship
(So I could climb upon the deck, sail across the room and out the window
Instead of trapped below the ends of aprons of the tablecloth,
Which are themselves but billowing canvas that fills with wind)

Or perhaps a transporter that can take me instantly to you
If I just lie on the floor and slide along between the two end legs
And pass beneath the drooping cloth that has slid towards me from the top,
Covering my face and melting all my molecules
The way your image dissolves my insides.

There is a bird that is flying just above me
Which is really me and all my eyes on wings
With hands that seek to stroke your softest down,
Its feathers my million tongues and lips
That are reaching toward you like a beak.

I am as ephemeral as the breeze that’s breathing on your window
The darkness of my transporter but the night that covers your world like a blanket
As I myself am lying on sky, like mystic carpet
My legs bent backward as I move to you
Across the clouds as in a dream.

Ah but if you should not feel the love I’m sending
And with the smallest gesture of your hand brush off the wisps of me
I fear I’ll break, my legs fall off, evaporate like steam.
Or find myself alone in the dining room
Looking up at the underside of stained mahogany.

Oh, what woeful shape I’m in.
You are my twin particle that from far away infects my spin.

In that split second

In that split second as I’m coming out of sleep

I see a circle shape in shadow ‘gainst the dim but rising light.

It is like the ripples that spread outward

From the tiny centre where the pebble dropped in water,

The hole through which I’m diving into day

And break the plane between the worlds of dream and waking.

The misty visions stick to me like droplets,

As I move my head through the closing circle

That ejects me and my afterbirth into this life.

This closing sphincter that will separate the this from that

Like kosher beans upon the shelf

From two humped camels who are left on the other side

Unthreaded, uncaring as rich men.

If I had only held the thread as my father carefully pushed the end through the needle!

I would already have been saved.

Why was I not a tailor so that I could stitch my life together

Or keep my shadow on my feet, keep my soul within my body?

Oh where are my traces of bread crumbs to lead me home?

They have been eaten, like my memories, by carrion crows

Uncaring like rich men for the needs of others

And leaving me lost and wandering in the wilderness of earth.

Oh where are my parents, helpless poor parents

Left on some other side like

Abandoned orphans of their generation, the children of ashes and smoke.

Helpless survivors who I coddled in English and fed with my youth

And who are themselves but images and words, photos and tapes,

And the way I sip my tea, or purse my lips

And the essence of my flesh and bone,

My head diving upward but my legs planted like oaks in the ground,

Getting stretched mighty thin like old gum chewed too long and lost its flavour,

And feeling squeezed at the waist where the circle closes tight.