Holiday Downpour, Slocanada, 30 June 2018

Tourists who had planned this weekend,
Some since last year, many for months, jam
The sodden campground, cram the quartet
Of small sandwich shops and cafes
That serve the lake villages, park diagonally
Along the usually all or mostly empty streets.
Not a tenth of them would have come if
They’d been certain, absolutely certain,
Several weeks ago it would rain like this.
Another breakdown in the anticipation
Machine. Time for a little postdiction, a bit
Of retroactive clairvoyance, of hindsight bias
Unavailable until after the fact. I knew it.
I knew it. My joints ached. I saw this coming.
I felt it in my bones for days, and I felt afraid.
Heaven always meant to rain on our parade.

Small Porch at Random, Slocanada, 29 June 2018

You could feel it again, the world descending
Like a veil over itself, a nictating membrane,
And, as before, as always, you couldn’t be
Certain whether it might be defending itself
Against irritants or just obscuring an ending.
The monster dragon of random occurrences
Blinked that vast, sleepy cat’s eye. It would
Be different this time, this time again, again.
But would it also be more or less the same?
Hmm. Any storm would be simpler than such
Uncertain weather. Largely the same, largely
The same: what does it mean for something
To be largely the same? If every point made
Were, like every point passed in the change,
Unique and never exactly the same, wouldn’t
It be the case as well, that nothing was ever
Wholly not the same? An absolute change in
Anything would entail the end of everything.
Thus extinction had always remained,
However dreadful, always local and partial.
The dragon sleeping below your feet, below
The mountains, could be beaten, had been
Beaten by the sky gods, knights, and heroes
Of human imagination, again and again, and
Yet was never, never could be, extinguished.
You could wonder, if you wanted, whether
It only slept, like any living thing it spawned,
The better to feel real hunger when it woke.
An occasionally screeching dog somewhere
Down the block, voices from an open shop,
A motorcycle leaving, a chainsaw whining
High in the woods, a thrush singing behind
The small porch of another borrowed house,
An indecisive thunderhead, and the ghost
Of a siren far down the winding highway
All spoke to the heart of this random dragon.
Blink if you must, but wake up, wake up.

Cold Pond, British Columbia, 28 June 2018

Out on the water, three women in red lifejackets
Floated in a rowboat with their fishing poles,
But nothing but the wind was biting today.
The frogs and the tadpoles were in hiding,
As were, presumably, the lethargic snakes.
Clouds concealed the higher mountains,
Leaving the scene lusher, greener, not so stony,
Which was mildly ironic, given the chilly reason.
Another moody midsummer in the Kootenays.
All that moved in the grass by the pond
Was the grass itself, a girl dancing for herself,
Narrating fables and twirling sticks as she did, and
A cluster of wildflowers that should not be named,
Since the names would evoke too much for some
And nothing much for others, and also
Since none of the names for them belonged to them
Anyway, not even the word wildflowers, which was
Already perhaps too much, taking us too far
Away from the pond to the stock footage in our heads.
The voices of the cheerfully unsuccessful
Women fishing floated through what moved as they did.

Attended, Slocanada, 27 June 2018

This village, like any community, any body,

Created so many minor-seeming epicycles

Of maintenance, things needing tending,

Things needing attention as to when to tend them, 

E.g., the numerous bear-proof waste bins in addition

To the recycling dumpsters and trash collections,

Also the open-pit outhouses placed strategically

Near trailheads and near but not too near the beaches.

If it’s not quite fair to say that life began in waste,

It’s only because waste began in and along with

Life. The simplest metabolism depends

On making waste to prime the pump, reduce

The local entropy, define the acts of maintenance 

That define a living system. Efficiencies are fine.

The organisms that reuse their own or others’

Otherwise useless leftovers most often thrive,

Although severe efficiencies are costly and,

Therefore, creators of fresh forms of energy waste,

While the creation of and separation from waste

Is one of the great gifts, if not the great gift of life.

A wasteful human thought this, walking past

The neatly maintained, shady gravel parking lot

With its picnic tables, trailheads, access to the shore,

Tidy outhouse (hand sanitizer and toilet tissue

Provided), and regularly emptied, bear-proof

Waste bin. Around the base of the bin, also neatly

Arranged, stood a colorful variety of dead soldiers,

Beer cans, pop cans, and bottles that had been placed

By people too indifferent to carry them to the nearest

Recycling bins, but who didn’t want to waste them.

Femtoseconds, Attoseconds, Zeptoseconds, Slocanada, 26 June 2018

Experience of the locally inconsequential day
Contracts and dilates. The rubbery awareness
Of passing events would be so much more
Delightful, think the thoughts, if the experience
Were under thoughts’ control. The swift hours,
The slow half-seconds, who would not prefer
To orchestrate them to taste? Let these blur.
Let these extend into glassy detail. But no,
The busier and the distracted pass quickly,
The peaceful slow towards boredom, and then,
Most unfortunately, they reverse their roles
In memory, the eventful passages remembered,
The peaceful vanishing under the waves of days.
And while the imagination taxes itself with these
Fantasies of directing the phenomenology
Of experienced time, what passes is another
Day in which minor good and bad all mix together,
With more or less added to give the particular
Flavor, and while little of it seems surprising
In retrospect, almost nothing was exactly
Expected. The wonderful details, the faeries
Of the real, continued to swim into the light
And sink away again. Imagination, that oaf,
Continued to fold in on itself and its memory,
An inwardness forever taking the smear
Of what passed and blurring it further, trying
To make a world more vivid than the world,
That primal addiction that fails and fails and fails
But can’t ever prevent itself from trying again.
The very term, event, derives from the Latin
Evenire, meaning, "to come out, to happen.'
Imagine all the dystopias you can imagine.
Imagination all the utopias you can imagine.
You won’t imagine what actually happens.
Heaven and hell themselves can’t fashion
One thread of the fabric of what passes, passing.

The Fainting Pill Bug, Slocanada, 25 June 2018

Poetry should not be reportage, but forever
The mundane craves attention. An empty
Afternoon in the village, after a morning storm,
Then sun before an evening storm. Daughter
Played on the front lawn and porch. A neighbor
Slowly cycling past called out a greeting, “Whatcha
Doing?” “Nothing much.” Daughter experimented
With a toxic, brilliant yellow mushroom, mashing
It for a witch’s potion, then testing which creatures
Were resilient. Ants cared not at all. A few tadpoles
Scooped from the dozens growing in the pool
She maintained for them nibbled the fungus
And seemed energized rather than dismayed.
A sow bug had a more adverse reaction, tumbling
On its back and lying still a few moments
Without rolling into its usual tucked cannonball
Defense, before righting itself and wandering off.
“The fainting pill bug,” daughter called it, trying
Repeatedly to tease her father by offering him
Draughts of her brew. He refused. She took
To playing with black lengths of PVC pipes
Lying beside the greenhouse, narrating
Adventures involving insects and amusement parks.
“Why did we, um . . . Remember?” she asked
Her father. “I don’t know,” he answered,
Teasingly. “I forget why we remembered.”

622 Hume, Slocanada, 24 June 2018

What had been a tarpaper and plywood
Shack now looks like a rather pleasant cabin
Covered in cedar siding with window treatments.
Outside there are at least seven raised boxes
Of garden beds with room for a wheelchair
To navigate between them, and a large map
On the south fence to elucidate the plantings.
There is a blue-tarped gazebo constructed
From recycled lumber and a jar of peanuts
For tossing to Spot, the handsome Steller's Jay,
One of a foursome that snatch and cache
And chase the observant squirrel away.
It is brilliantly sunny and all is forgiven of us
And the universe. Spot tilts his head
And chooses where to hide his latest prize,
But there’s no sign of that damned squirrel today.

Just South of Nakusp, British Columbia, 23 June 2018

It was not a secret spot, being beside the highway,
But it had its secrets, like all middle ways
In the middle of the ways, one of them being
That all ways are in the middle of all the middle ways.
It’s a boundless universe, where we are the lives
Can’t be lived without bounds. Everywhere
Is equidistant from the nonexistent center
To the edges, nonexistent. We live as though
This were not the case, and so, for us, it is not.
But you were saying. Oh yes, the spot by the road,
Habitat of midges, garter snakes, dragonflies,
And toads. It had other secrets, secret lives.
The lynx that paused in a heavy snow, the doe
That did not pause and was struck on the road.
The middle of things meant always something
Was coming from nowhere, something had to go.

When It Rains, Slocanada, 22 June 2018

Even miserable, minor coincidences
Are winning lottery tickets: the particular
Coincidence, or set of co-occurrences,
May have been absurdly improbable,
But given the vast swarms of phenomena,
Of continuously happening events and atoms,
The occasional cluster of absurdity’s inevitable.
In the space of a day, a peculiar sequence
Of spills, any one of which would be nothing much,
Combined to create a dread of poltergeists:
The milk spilled into the borrowed blue sofa,
The red wine soaked through the pages
Of the borrowed, out-of-print book, the glass
Knocked backwards on the picnic table,
The can of pop swept sideways, the soup,
A big tub of the fine, locally made gazpacho,
Exploded in the canvas sack of groceries
Right as it reached the checkout counter,
Chilled red goop seeping everywhere, clinging
To conveyor belt, fingers, and fresh vegetables.
The temptation, the strong temptation, is to fear.
Rain was coming down, the roads and walks
Were slick, and if this could be part of a surge
Of spills and tumbles, drive slowly, watch your step.
The gusts that blew the squalls through town
Might be part of a pattern might knock you down.

Thunder Sunstorm, Slocanada, Summer Solstice 2018

It was hot and the sky was clear. Time for lunch.
By after lunch, a few clouds and a breeze
Crept over the lower mountains surrounding
The village half asleep even at the beginning
Of high season, when the boats and the bicycles,
The campers and the Harley Hogs proliferate.
A slow walk down Main Street to the white trailer
Sheltered in the heavy maples, and already rain
Had begun to spatter. Then the downpour,
First as sun shower, then with thunder,
A blue hole misaligned over the homes.
You may have philosophized, and you will.
You may have pondered the terms of fleeting
Existence, and you will continue to do so.
But right then you were glad to have reached
A sheltered porch with nothing more urgent
Than observation of the weather left to do.

Roadside, Creekside, Shade, British Columbia, 20 June 2018

The last afternoon of astronomical spring
Slipped away from the world of schedules,
One of those little loops like wormholes,
Not in time exactly, no not in worm-cored,
Moth-eaten metaphors of recurrence
And return, the fallen giants of the forest,
The rotten wood warming so many homes
Of little and medium and longer-lived lives.
A little loop in change itself, the church
In which time and schedules spontaneously
Generated, weevils in decaying choir lofts,
Yes, that was more like it. I was fooled
A long time by the faith of life in time,
Although not perhaps so fooled as some
Who thought to capture or escape
Their rhythmic, pulsing, measures. I thought
The measures were equal to the changes
Marked, not their peculiar siblings, cycles,
The vortices locally lowering entropy,
Clocks, schedules, worms, moths, trees.
In the church of change, life and time count
Among the many bastards there engendered,
Destroying as they were and would be destroyed,
Creating as all was and would be created.
Near the end of this one loop burrowing
Into the powdery soft woods by the road,
By the creek, in the shade, the carpenter ant

Poem trundled and blundered back into the light.

Narrow, Slocanada, 19 June 2018

Down in Texas it was Juneteenth
As the southern border patrol kept busy
Arresting the parents and seizing
The kids. Too much irony is dizzying.
North of that patrol's northern border
Shone a quiet, sunny day at the lake
Where schoolchildren sorted
Stones from a narrow beach by the bay,
Part of a classroom history project
To celebrate aboriginal peoples.
Which stones to choose, which to reject?
One girl, more interested in beetles,
Wandered outside the boundary
Set by the teachers to keep track.
An older girl spotted her wandering
And, just in time, led her back.

The Precision of Our Presentations, Kaslo, British Columbia, 18 June 2018

The oldest known surviving intact passenger
Stern paddlewheeler in the world blew its horn,
Its mournful, pointless horn. Thirty years on land
As a museum, sixty years since its last passengers,
Six years since the seven year-old girl on deck
First visited it as a toddler, what could it have
To say for itself? Mannequins tended bar, typed
Messages, stood about in the kitchen among
Wax fruit and cakes. One mannequin peered
Out a stateroom window on the saloon deck,
Dressed in only slightly decayed Edwardian finery,
A glossy green jacket buttoned over her ivory
Dress that began at her ankles and ended at her neck.
That wistful mannequin had a mournful expression
Herself, and a damaged tip to her nose. The casque
Of a large, long-dead insect that had once crawled
Over her well-dressed, breathless chest
Hung like a papery pendant from her necklace.

After Memorial Hall, Slocanada, 17 June 2018

Down in the water at the lake, after the tranche
Of heartfelt performances played by the talented
And the brave, fragments of three families
Coincidentally gathered to play without talent
Or bravery for the sake of mere escape: three
Fathers, only one still more-or-less partnered,
The other two in the limbo of long separations,
Showed up with four children between them,
Three boys and a girl, to go swimming. The sun,
Which, to anyone’s certain knowledge, has never
Cared what goes on at the skin of the spinning
Pebble flagged with life eight light minutes
Off from its storms, shone down upon them
As they swam and invented games in the waves.

Shady Fairies Weave a House, Slocanada, 16 June 2018

Two girls, seven and ten, played with a frog
Under the flower boxes in the front yard.
Be kind to the frog, admonished an adult,
Mindful of all the tales of sociopaths
Who got their start by torturing animals, but
Also mindful of the snakes up at the pond
Only too contented to gulp down hapless frogs.
Nature green in shade and claw. Perhaps
It would be time to coax the girls inside
For something tamer, say a board game?
Their feet, shins, and knees painted in dirt,
They gave the frog “exercise” in the dank
Plants under the boxes of cultivated beans
And dark green edible things. Roald Dahl
Was right about the mind of a child. One girl
Dared the other to kiss the helpless frog.
A burst of giggling. Let’s build him a house!

Thunderstorm, Slocanada, 15 June 2018

The rain, which had persisted,
Gave off a heavy
Smell of fish and mud.

Sorry. Wrong place for that poem,
Which is the same as saying
Wrong tip-in in time.

It was a huge, gorgeous day,
White clouds and white caps
Down at the shore of the lake.

You could guess a thunderstorm
Might be coming, but who is
Ever absolutely sure?

Lightning split the sky
Into two skinny sonnets.

Museum Window, Slocanada, 14 June 2018

The head of an old bed frame, porcelain white,
Looked skeletal through the wavering window
At night. By day it just looked empty, no pillow
Visible to the compositor across the street,
Chin in hand, staring at it from his own window.
Heaven is murky. Heaven always was. Decades
Now since anyone had laid their head on that bed
And slept until that weird morning light by the lake
That doesn’t quite break dreams but lets them
Decay. The seething compositor sitting and setting
His type, adored that about museums, adored
That fact. Everything kept in them had to be kept
Away from former functions, from purposes.
Exhibits awaited, although not many of them
Haunted a window visible from the street like that
Headless head of an untenanted bed. Watching
It was almost like sleeping in its emptiness instead.
He looked down at his tray of letters, trying to decide
How to paint a ghost's absence with pieces of lead.

Main Street, Slocanada, 13 June 2018

The clouds pack in and break apart.
The clouds pack in and break apart.
The street’s in shade; the street’s in sun
With cars and pedestrians, or few, or none.
One container on the porch holds caterpillars.
One is a miniature tadpole pond. One is a deep
Bucket serving as a well for chirping frogs.
A dead swallowtail floats, open-winged, inside.
The clouds pack in and break apart.
A small girl runs up the street to buy apples.
The tadpoles and frogs and caterpillars are hers.
The clouds pack in and break apart.
She runs through shade; she runs through sun.
Two middle-aged men with paunches and beards
Watch from the sidewalk, gossiping about nothing.
They spot an older man who lives half a block
From the liquor store leaving the liquor store,
Clutching a sizeable bottle of fancy gin.
They chuckle. Who will win? The small girl
Running all the way up the street and back
With her apples from the miniature grocery, or
The old man carefully, diagonally carrying
His gin? The girl has five or six times as far
To run and a transaction to complete inbetween,
But she’s quick and she’s young. The shorter
Of the two bearded, paunchy, middle-aged men
Bets on the fleet-footed, sandaled girl to win.
The taller man demurs. “Never bet against
An old man and his gin!” But he’s wrong.
The girl wins, flashing past her porch of creatures
With a small sack of red delicious in one hand,
Leaping through her screen door with a wave and a grin
Before the old man makes it all the way across his lawn.
The clouds break apart and pack in.

Summit, British Columbia, 12 June 2018

The rural highway, mostly empty, cut
Into the stony cliff tilting over the pond
So that the few engines rolling past
Roared with echoes. It’s hard to imagine
Now that we no longer know, how quiet
The human world must have been a few
Generations ago. Across the pond, a loon
Tried to haunt the long withdrawing roars.
Nuthatches, siskins, and squirrels argued
In the gaps along the shore. I used to be
Someone I now think of as having been me.

Bear Lake, British Columbia, 11 June 2018

To the one side, a memory, first day of fall,
Hemlocks in color around the log-clogged
Pond, a decade ago. The other, this spring,
Two fresh wooden crosses, fake flowers
Garlanding both, one with a battered
Motorcycle helmet set rakishly on top.
Other scattered memories moving about,
Bars of sun and shadows of clouds between.
It’s tempting to say there’s a story here,
But that would be like gazing over the waves
And announcing that there’s a fish in there.
The catch would be worth a little, not much,
While the observation is utterly worthless.
You know what’s really there? The thing
That was never a story, not about fish,
Nor motorcycle accidents, nor bears,
The thing that was before story, that birthed
Anything but story, which had its own birth
A million years before any memory from here.

Blood Orange, Slocanada, 10 June 2018

Aranciata rossa and orange sanguine it says
On the can the girl purchases at the counter.
Blood orange is what the cashier calls it.
Outside the window, the lake is steely
And a steady rain staccatos the cafe roof.
The girl draws a picture of a sunny day
While she sips her soft drink at a two-top.
What would the lake light look like without
The words curled around that aluminum can?
What would the red and orange words
Look like without the shining lake beyond?

Old Ghost Highway, British Columbia, 9 June 2018

In a heavy mist and unusually vacant
Of wildlife, not a doe or a crow in the road
Much less a moose, bear, coyote, or eagle,
The narrow green ribbon unwound under
The wheels of the wavering automobile.
Time for mind to imagine things between
The lacustrine villages. Here’s a game
You can try yourself on a long drive if you like:
Start by imagining a plausible but unlikely
Event, any event, good, bad or indifferent.
Could be a comeuppance for an old rival,
An unfortunate accident for a loved one,
An opportunity for a romance or a new job.
The ordinary scenarios minds wander into.
Now pursue it enthusiastically in your head.
Add detail. Imagine consequences, follow-up
Events and conversations. Let it build
Into something of a narrative, however
Unstructured. Then stop at some point
Of rich detail and ask yourself, will it ever
Happen like this? Will it ever happen? No,
It won’t. You’ve just illuminated one corner
Of the infinite universe of what will not be.
Skeptical? Pull over to the side of the road
And jot it all down, the details especially.
Perhaps it’s not true that you’ve prevented
Whatever you imagined from coming true,
And people fib their memories to fit all
The time. But you might as well have done.
Carry your little story around with you
And contemplate the knowledge things
Will never, ever happen just like that. Try it.
On the steep and densely wooded slopes
The emptied cabins and mining claims
That once gave this road its nickname
Were now no more than dents and cavities
In the green. All those miners, all those
Jackpot dreams that never played out quite
As dreamed, and yet here, in another century,
Spun this misty world no one dreamed at all.

Water, Slocanada, 8 June 2018

A little wind, and the waves made noise.
A girl narrated her own game on the shore.
An insect so delicate it stunned the human
Mind to consider that the ancestors of these
Jeweled crystal paper wings and thin black
Appendages never failed, not in a million,
Not in a billion generations and then some,
To survive and produce continuity, strolled
Across a patch of imported grass infested
By paintbrush and dandelions, all also
Descendants of never-failing ancestors.
As were we all, although most of us would
Fail. A crow slid between dock and sun
And the water, accumulated, evaporating,
Accumulating, slapped against the stones
Without itself being alive, crying with life.

Wild Roses, Tiger Swallowtails, Slocanada, 7 June 2018

At or near the rocky shore deposited
By a long-since melted glacier, creatures
Gathered and chased each other: spiders,
Butterflies, small fry in the shadows,
Larvae in their glued-together tubes of mud.
A thick golden scurf of pine pollen floated
Around bits of driftwood and hunks
Of slippery rocksnot. Wild roses bloomed.
A boy with a net searched with passion,
If not much discipline, for a real fish to catch.
Walt Whitman might have been in the grass
As he promised, himself the grass, but he
Had not changed the grass, and that aspect
Of Walt that did change the way some of us
Saw the grass along this shore this June day
Was the part of the poet that went forever
Away from all of this, never to come back.

Loam, Slocanada, 6 June 2018

Someone dumps the dirt for Wendy
Beside her open green house
Of fresh-built cedar standing boxes.
Now where did she get soil like that?
It’s as dark and thick and creamily consistent
As a mound of chocolate pudding.
A plant that can’t set roots in that
Doesn’t deserve its ancestors.
A child who jumps, bare heels first,
Into the pile comes out looking smeared
With black cake icing, delicious midnight.
The guests who get their hands in it,
Ostensibly as helpers filling garden boxes,
Look as if they’d like to lick their fingers.
Only one layer of living between them
And eating such delectably thick dirt directly
And they know it. Berries and root veggies,
Iron-rich greens and pointless flowers
Will be coaxed up, executed, and devoured
With pleasure and no small spice of pride
Soon. Soon.

Nelson, British Columbia, 5 June 2018

Pass any ordinary sedimentary deposit
And likely you are looking at hundreds
Or thousands of layers that were deposited
Seasonally, annually, under roughly
The same conditions, within roughly
The same place. The place became
The sediments deposited and then
The deposits stopped and the place became
Remains. Today in Nelson, another June,
Another fine deposit, the search for parking,
The busker on the corner, the barber shop,
The Yellow Deli, more parking searches,
The children’s toy and game store,
The pharmacy, the RCMP officer pulling
Someone else over at an intersection for
Whatever. Little deposits of memory
On top of crushed deposits of memory,
Similar to a decade of deposits of memory
Silted into seams when not washed away.
The way it changes, the way the tiniest
Differences can’t be evaded, all the same.

Nothing Doing, Slocanada, 4 June 2018

It’s amazingly difficult to live out the conviction
That one’s choices of activities are largely
Irrelevant in the long view. For most people,
Who would never sign on to such a perspective
Even in the abstract, the difficulty is all
In getting oneself to persist at whatever it is
One feels is important and noble, or at least
Acceptable and not embarrassing, to be doing.
Everything has a purpose. God works
In mysterious ways. The Earth must be saved.
Think globally. Act locally. Take out the trash.
Exercise. Donate. Read the scriptures daily.
Don’t pick your nose. Don’t overeat. Above all
Don’t waste, well, whatever it that one defines
As waste. Time. Bread crusts. Vegetable rinds.
The opportunity to be a witness for Christ,
For the forgotten Americans, for the downtrodden.
So much to waste, so many ways to waste it,
So little agreement on what is too important
To waste or not important enough to worry about.
And then there’s this oddball who is convinced
That the choice of actions, of what to waste
Or not to waste, makes little difference to change
Which makes differences all the time, which
Lays waste to everything. Against this peculiar
Conviction, the socialized, enculturated, parasitized
Human chimera fights mightily. So a day
With nothing necessary to do, no one chasing
The wasteful down for ostracism or punishment
Is in fact amazingly difficult to waste. Nothing doing.

Fish Lake, British Columbia, 3 June 2018

Back for more toads, the following year.
It is hard to overstate the weirdness
Of this, the determinedly unexpected return.
In the usual sense people mean, the end,
Yes, is nearer, but only if we agree, and we
Do not agree, that the end was always fixed
In place, with us swimming toward it
Like the tadpoles that swim into the jar.
Sometimes, we think so. Sometimes, we
Think not. Actually, that’s not right, to say
“Fixed in place.” If we can only approach
A predetermined expiration date, then that
Would be a uniquely temporal target, not
At all like a fixed destination that sits still,
Or close enough to still, while we approach
Or recede. Today that latter scenario seems
Somehow more likely. This body shimmying
These words in gelatinous lines like strings
Of eggs, full of potential but mostly to be
Squandered, felt a lot, lot closer to the end
A year ago, and now it feels a bizarre reprieve
To be here again more or less. A toad clucks
In the hand. A proof, a sure proof, that toads
Somehow, despite the depredations, sent
Fresh generations into this year’s pond.
There is no sameness, never sameness, but
There is, for them and us, a kind of continuity.

203 6th, Slocanada, 2 June 2018

One friend dropped in, distraught by a bear
That banged and leaned on her door
The night before until her tiny cabin shook.
She wanted to talk about the bear, about
Bears, but she was not ready to talk about
Bears. She took an offered book of poems
And left to buy a new bear horn at the store.
Another friend dropped in with two boys,
The boys wanting to romp with daughter.
They played outside, charging each other
And raising forts from scrap in the little yard.
Another friend dropped in during this play
And stuck her fingers in her ears and said,
“I just can’t bear kids shrieking so loudly.”
She had never had any kids, needless to say.
People who have raised children always
Pretend to be immune to their shenanigans,
Although one notices the twitching hands
And that cracking note in their voices telling
The children of others to behave, behave.
Then, one by one, everyone left. Calm
At the corner table in the sitting room, body
Considered how it felt to be struggling
With language to make it confess itself,
Which was like wrestling an angel to make it
Answer why a supernatural demon should
Serve as no more than messenger to clods,
All while being visited by this series of other
Clods trailing their own same or similar angels
Hanging like golden, floating, hungry hagfish
From each gasping neck, everyone rasping
And gesticulating in the throes of language’s
Demonic possession. A bear. A shrieking child.

Bonner’s Ferry, Idaho, 1 June 2018

Wait. The unexpected mercy, a small one,
But still to be doubly valued, for being a mercy
And for being unexpected. Consider, carefully,
Imaginary reader of these torn, partially
Dislocated phrases, how many times
Can you remember being surprised that were
Not in the form of a sudden misfortune? You see?
I’m not sharing my happy small surprise with you,
The coincidence that correlated snugly
Enough to pass for causation, that caused me,
Then, to pause in Bonner’s Ferry to get the job
Done. It doesn’t matter to these lines anyway
Why it was a mercy for old animal me. What
Matters is that you imagine, that you free
The torrent of images and language, as language
Within your own awareness as you stumble
Over this damned peculiar excuse for a song.
Think very carefully and articulate, if you please,
The moments when you turned a corner
Into such unexpected convenience you felt
Blessed. Can you lift the mist on any of your bliss?