Three Poems

MILE END, IN THE END

 Low on love, we fell for a five-storey walk-up.

A livid slice of global warming sky sold us on the view.

At night, the celestial caterpillar once spied by an astronomer

Who was herself in the midst of a mid-life metamorphosis

Only illustrated how glittery confections could never outshine

Our lassitude. Riopelle dropped by, along with eight of the nine muses

Thus history’s dilated cervix and the unctuous denizens of Montreal

Implicated themselves, each in the other’s funky drunk otherness.

We could have killed for one more circular argument

With which to distract ourselves from the news of all

The bogeymen-socialists’ mouths having been sewn shut.

Then dawn arrived just as a congregation of sparrows jostling

The length of our neighbour’s granite window ledge failed

To rebut our theories—that the equivalent of personal integrity

Is to be completely alone, and that true vision

Is nothing less than radical inwardness.

 

RAT BEACH

 

Tiny Ophelias in blue plastic urns

Were taking their toll on nature’s littoral estates.

Nowhere was the stench of burning dry cleaning bags so

Blissfully ignored. Not bells but the dolorous

Coughs of propane lighters had begun to echo the sea

Beyond the gravesides’ violets’ twist of fate. I remember not feeling

What I was feeling, as if I were hollow and lit from within—

As if the part of me that wasn’t me looked at the part of me that was

And saw only the darkness upon which the flickering candle

Fattens. So I awoke still asleep as the creature came screeching

Like the Dane himself out from a mass of trash washed ashore

And into the seaweed’s rivering hair—that sound

I immediately misunderstood and spoke back

Into the air.

 

VERITIES OF THE YUKON

 Where was New York when I found myself living

In a nylon tent between the Yukon River and Dawson City

Beneath a sky veined with birch limbs, and barely surviving

On booze, bad luck, and the summer sun’s everlasting light?

Among the crows and the ravens—which I took pains to describe

As “obstreperous” and “grandiloquent” respectively, noting

How they juddered and strutted and distained one another

Staking their ritual turf—in the midst of such pseudo-religious

Skirmishes, I wondered: where was that infallible fact

The one I might find locally distilled as a cheap perfume

Or intoxicant? At once too dense and too clever to believe

A mere cordial glance might plug a cigar into the maw

Of the local job market, I slithered, slowly and with a blurred

Sense of purpose, in and out of my tent of hebetude.

How I possessed and caressed my hebetude! I owned it

Like the Oxford Dictionary owns the collected works of every

English poet. (Even these lines are written there, and were

Written there first, pre-incarnated, in another order

And another form.) Thus, to flip randomly through pages

Was to bear witness to providence unfolding in a series of integers

Dressed up as words. Soon I was counting every miniscule hole

In the stitching of my tent, adding up each mosquito bite

Of light, halving the sum to account for my whiskey-

Split vision, then subtracting the magical number

Nine exactly thirty-three times before blacking-

Out. God, was I really so far north, and alone?

The following day I looked up “hebetude” in my pocket

Oxford Dictionary and discovered I was too slothful

To turn the requisite number of pages, let alone read

Never mind comprehend. I decided then that I fervently

Loved New York, and longed for all of its bedlamites

As they scudded and skidded through tunnels and across bridges

Without me—even though, at this stage of my peripatetic career

I’d never laid eyes on that city, except for the ten thousand times

It had appeared on TV. Hence my sense of direction was nothing

Less than an apathetic landscape, boasting one skull-shaped

Hill like a distant and barely protruding monument

Amidst an otherwise perfectly flat horizon which was

The ever-widening space of summer’s north. You could say

I was a permanent resident here with a near-perfect excuse until

The sun fell frozen into the river and obviously it was time

To go. But first I dreamt of a murderous murder

Of crows flensing and feasting on a raven’s carcass

(Thus dawned the misfortune of my self-awareness)—

And at the base of a serpentine-limbed birch tree

I awoke with the all the eloquence of a stone.