Conceptual Poetry
That’s when you pulled
out the Sapphic quartet—
reminisced bitterly on the
subject of women who
reverse their direction
seasonally in response
to root systems.
‘It’s fine’ is what you
said, finally taking up
the harp of your father
‘I can harvest emoticons
for their personal value.’
Yet the whales drone on
and pleasure amends history.
You’ll learn—functioning
badly in a large dream
is an even larger
version of time travel,
a marvelous application.
Slower than oceans, less
firm than nouns, deep
in whose depths great
mammals display the sonorous
we-shall-inherit-the-
earth melodies that deny
you wait. One day
you’ll feel the holes.
Tropes Left By Forebearers
No one snuffs the world out but your eyes
Or calls the objects they see slight—
Somewhere under a sky that has been broken
By knowledge and understanding
There is a pattern brewing in the logic of the day—
Can you yet see how far we've come
In the withering length of time stretching?
The milieu today is confusing, yes
But that might just be the heads we had once,
Or the spring we once lived in, where everything
Was possible and we were excised and new
And the world didn't have a sky
We could understand yet, just the one that was
So terrific to stare at and sparkle and work.
And now, with our hearts heavy,
We have reached something.
This is how we scratch our heads now.
With a trowel. I mean with the word “trowel.”
In our pretty landscapes there are angles of birds
Swarming across the colors we procure:
Moss and horizon and toad and thrush, a
stylistic reminder to be youthful and procure.
As now as we look at paintings by
20th Century masters we are shocked
By what we imagine as a decline of humanity.
It isn't difficult to feel that slippage away from
The smallness, away from that which is ancient and mystical,
Shot in black and white against an archival backdrop
We are now something shiny and bright and bewilderingly huge
That surrounds us in the present. The cleanliness
Of our moment, made so crystalline by the ease
With which we access recognizable information,
This is what echoes through our time timelessly:
More and more and more trouble with the obvious.
How Light Pours from the Darkness
Sometimes you can actually see a poem.
Say you are floating in a canoe along
The Humber River one evening
And you notice you are alongside a
Cormorant who is eyeing you—
You feel a series of words
That will capture this moment
Perfectly, a moment you and the
Bird are sharing in the stillness
Of the growing darkness. And you
Feel these words until you can see them
Almost like type on a page, right there
And your son in the back of the boat
Sneezes and the bird disappears
beneath the surface of the water.
Watching the ripples expand from where
The bird vanished, you have an epiphany—
It probably wouldn’t have been a very good
Poem anyway, there would have been
Too much artifice to it, it would have
Been too precious, a perfect example
Of a Canadian nature poem. So you
Paddle onward. Further downstream
You look up and notice all the cormorants,
Hundreds of them, perched at the tops
Of the trees growing along the shore.