*
i phone. let my sisters
know that Dr. Kanashiro tells me
they are now at risk, in that strange
mathematics by which
my illness has made them more
vulnerable.
yes, yes, one sister says. i understand.
and the other, i’ll book a mammogram
and the third, well, my friend had a
mastectomy, and she’s just fine.
my neighbour visits. do you
want to see, i say. do you
want to show me? yes,
yes i do. i want to show you,
i want to scream naked
thru the streets and run
and run and run, one breast
flapping.
then they’ll see, won’t they
then they’ll see.
Pinhole Man
At Pinhole Cave, another grotto pun:
a crook-backed man with erect penis
scrimshawed haphazardly onto
the side of a thick slab of rib –
the hard bone mammalian armour,
now playfully turned to an après dine
canvas where in thin cartoonish lines
a lone dancer carouses in his mask.
Our liminal Adam, first root and seed,
and all that untimely, unimagined woe
to the woolly, hairy beasts of field.
Our Black Dog Who Disappeared
Sits at the back door and barks to be let in.
He offers no explanations,
but looks well fed as a cucumber
and guilty as a radish –
that little traitor – I wonder where he has been.
He follows me to the garden
and watches as I dig potatoes.
I make a show of stuffing them,
eyes and all, into burlap sacks
and dragging them to the root cellar.
He settles in his old spot on the back deck,
his eyes water bowls skinned with dust,
the kind crows might drink from
or drop corn seeds in to watch them sink.
Second Sight
A bomber’s navigator charts a glittering river
visible now and again through clouds below,
a ribbon dropped by his daughter
unwinding over rolling green countryside,
beaded rhinestone, head filled with flowers,
May in Amsterdam after Anne Frank. A woman,
faceless under her Breugelian hat, crouches to plant lettuce seedlings.
A robin lines a nest with hair plucked from a skeleton.
There’s so much we must be witness to. Soon,
chimney stacks, roads, a factory, an assigned target,
but, then again, maybe not.
Perhaps, like a lost man, the pilot has circled back
to where he began. Men wielding two-handed saws between them
cut trees down in a forest that has never been logged.
The trees fall without complaint. A stump is a lonely thing.
The bay doors open. Bombs drop
as if they’re sleepwalking.
Baldspot
Because it is utterly open to heaven and all its blessings.
Because when consciousness escapes my body at the moment of death no clinging tendrils will deflect its homeward flight.
Because of the seven cakras it is the crown, the thousand-petalled rainbow-coloured lotus.
Because Don Juan told Carlos Casteneda that a warrior wears death on his right shoulder but I wear it every day on the top of my head.
Because while age shrinks the rest of my body, it alone continues to grow.
Because without it I might believe I will live forever.
Because it is a beacon to our little friends from outer space, showing them where they can safely land.
Because in seventeen tongues in seventeen lands it signifies virility.
Because it is the size and shape of a yamulka, reminding me of all the minyans from which I absconded.
Because it could be innocently mistaken for a tonsure.
Because I always wanted to pass for a Christian brother. As I have always wanted to use the word tonsure in a poem.
Because I need not ask for whom the bathtub drain clogs. It clogs for me.
Because in growth and shape it is both circular and incremental and thus echoes, eerily, the incremental growth and circular shape of this poem.
Because through it my body is attuned to Gaia, and I grieve for her losses even as I grieve each falling hair.
Because it waxes with the ozone hole of Antarctica and wanes with the rainshadow coastal forests of my island home and its mountains Tuam, Maxwell and Bruce.
Because it is both map and memory, keeping score of my wanderings like the rings of an ancient tree.
Because even as the deserts spread through Africa’s grasslands, it devours my remaining cover.
Because it provides me daily practice in renunciation, and prods me to gradual progress in the arduous spiritual discipline of letting go.
Because its presence is that of absence and thus inclines me to the metaphysical.
Because it removes all impediments and interference, releasing me to write without restraint off the top of my head.
The dreaming
On the pages of winter, horses gallop through the darkness that is our heirloom, here on the grasslands bent and whispering under the hibernating season. Invisible, those ghost hooves raise the dust of summer, the sweetness of heat while thunderclouds stockpile the fervor of broil. A snowstorm tempts us to remember July, its sweltering grandstand thick with beer and cotton candy, blurred clamor of the announcer through a babel sound system, the cries of hucksters, the stripe of fireworks. Stampede coming. A certain anniversary that will arrive despite resistance or annoyance, despite the strange thrum of “until.” Not tomorrow, but always in the seventh month, the off-centre pivot of the year turning on its axis, saturnalia biding its time. Who counts the days to Stampede? Caterers, accountants, special events coordinators, straw bales, beer bottles, window painters. And who leaves town? The curled lip, the shoulder-shrug dismissing this déclassé debauch, this faux fiesta, with its ragbag history and bricolage of excess. The sniffy contempt: primitive. As if that were an insult. Some say you’re not a true Calgarian until you leave town to avoid the Stampede. Let’s admit it. Joy gets no respect. Popular jubilation and unfettered diversion are suspect, not to be trusted. Never indulge the instability of the mob, its desire to kick the traces, massing the streets in that social deformity known as fun. Am I trapped in a synthetic documentary? Do I breathe a brief trace of what Stampede might have been or what we will remember tomorrow? Am I artist or patron? Or just someone practising disguise? Is this the west then, legend or performance, the old west, the new west, the wild west, the faint west, the dusty west, the wicked west, the uncultivated west, the dishevelled west, the tempestuous west, the unkempt west, the turbulent west, the tousled west, the complaining west, the anarchic west, the restless west, windswept, rumpled and unironed and messy, its depiction as wildly unpredictable as its chaotic generation, a shambles and a jumble and a pandemonium of hope. Stampede or else.
