Snow-Globe

Finally, there is peace and quiet.
From a distance this city might look
like a giant snow-globe, freshly shaken by
some invisible hand, all the building windows
glowing yellow. From back here there are no
beggars in the street, no homeless children,
no girl shivering on a dark sidewalk waiting
for her next trick, no rock star playing God
to a dwindling audience. A fireplace roars,
tries to mute the whistle of the wind as it
lassos the house and pulls the rope tight.

It’s winter in Winnipeg
even the devil knows -
it's best to leave by the back door.

Night, Silent

I would have gulped the silver star
until the black hole of us became
bright; skin illuminated from the inside
like Christmas or a pomegranate reversed,
consumed back to what it should have been.

instead I kept it all on the outside
wished upon a distant star
just before turning out the lights -
I could hear night in all its finery
silent

getting ready to feed.

Un-Earth

It’s time I stopped digging you up -
only to contort you into some new position,
place a fountain pen in your hand, a cigarette,
a daisy with one petal, or a piece of granite
from the lake-shore.

It’s time I stopped digging you up –
to look at you, or tilt your chin towards me.
Once, I removed your tattoos, inked a new one
“He loves me he loves me not …”
I enjoyed watching; pretend it didn’t hurt.

I know you’re supposed to be sleeping,
but I swear I saw your number
come up on my phone last week.

Did you ever find that plane ticket in your pocket
dated a year from the day I placed it there?
Or the love poem I wrote before I knew you?
I wonder if you later read it to someone else, a lover,
her long dark hair splashed across the pillows
your mouth so close to the oyster shell she could hear the sea?

When I dug you up to ask you were turned
away from me. There was no note only a view,
the broad of your back. Only I was left, crouched
in a wheat field, earth clumped hard in my fists.

A First Poem, A Giving In

Under the chatter of stars
let us eat fruit, rotten or ripe.

Climb over me, hip to bone
measure the precise weight

of longing in a tent made of veils.
Your bloodlnes crawl inside me

ants to a hill, stones to a grave
a slice of moon puncturing night.

Scrolls of messages
lie hidden in primeval sands -

lover, dig.

Zoos

I always did detest the pant
the nervous gait beside a fence
perhaps because I understood

captive. An animal only senses
everywhere it needs to go.
Tonight I pace wooden floors

screens hold me hot.
Lightning. Exaggerated
distance. You.

Close enough to chase -
suddenly.

Fear of Flying

You are surrounded by brick
I am behind glass
there are wide marble hallways
somewhere
that we are not allowed to
walk down
I go through a scanner
nothing beeps
still the eternal pat-down
the unloading of pockets
until there is nothing left of us
we tried so hard to fly
above the clouds such realization
that all of this was just
too late

Still Life

Just blooming, Amaryllis. Hand sanitizer, a bottle of corked Chianti to be returned. A bottle of liqueur - Pomegranate. The sound of my cat eating dry food. In the basement the furnace kicks in, all that dry heat sucking moisture out of everything. In the corner, a dead TV, red curtains through the window, nothing but pitch black. Astounded, I catch a reflection, one tomato left in a bowl in the kitchen.

2010, A Space

So tell me, if we throw all of our skeletons
up in the air, will they morph into space-
ships, transport us to the next level? And
will we really be that more evolved? Perhaps
we need a Hal to give us the answer, as to
exactly how we fucked everything up;

how at the end of it, we are just tail-less
apes making bones about nothing.

Just More Sky

We could have walked together
under the Elm trees, arm in arm
along Champs-Élysées, laughed
about how the rich and famous
really aren’t that important,
about how music is secondary to
the rapid sound of a sparrow’s heart
as it sits in your hand after thinking
a living room window is just more sky.

Had the window been open, it would
have been different, the chance of
getting closer than a poem
to an expanded world of fantastic
reflection was like throwing a bread crumb
onto a river covered in ice, there was no
possibility of anything but reverberation.
At times, I think of her when I see a horse
standing in the early morning fog

breathing a memory of its first mate.
I remember how quickly she gave it all up
for the company of scoundrel(s) and wonder
had she known everything she knows today
would she have done the same?
Someone taps quietly, translating words
into deeds in the middle of the night.
I could have met her there, in Paris
if she hadn’t been such a bitch.

Poetry Anthology

Check out this link to the book "Lilith", A Collection of Women's Writes in which I am featured.

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/lilith/7923763

It's exciting!

only the weather

I often wonder did anyone
really walk on the moon

and who named it
Sea of Tranquility

perhaps it should be
Sea Now Disturbed

honestly
who tees off when they reach

something like the moon?
Could the first man

not have written his name
in a brick of cheddar cheese

and left it to petrify
sort of like a joke or an R.I.P.

carved in a tombstone?
The Eagle has landed

scripted and announced
in a soundstage in L.A.

Osama Bin Laden and George
Bush reminders that Elmer Fudd

hated Bugs Bunny, or how Wile. E
in pursuit of Roadrunner faltered

while an Acme weight fell so slowly
on our heads

while inside an unabandoned house
in New Orleans a man believed

it was only the weather -
a hurricane never lies.

Jeremiah Johnson made his way into the mountains
Bettin' on forgettin' all the troubles that he knew
The trail was wide and narrow
And the eagle or the sparrow
Showed the path he was to follow as they flew.
A mountain man's a lonely man
And he leaves a life behind
It ought to have been different, but oftimes you will find,
That the story doesn't always go that way you had in mind.
Jeremiah's story was that kind. . .
Jeremiah's story was that kind.
The way that you wander is the way that you choose,
The day that you tarry is the day that you lose.
Sunshine or thunder, a man will always wonder.
Where the fair wind blows.
An Indian says you search in vain for what you cannot find.
He says you'll find a thousand ways for runnin' down your time.
An Indian didn't scream it, he said it in a song,
And he's never been known to be wrong.
He's never been known to be wrong.

Still

So much to say before the air
begins to turn

bells cease to ring broken
promises, steeples empty now of wings

only ghosts glimpsed in tatters
turn blue corners, in quick flutters

they dart in and out through portals;
elusive as minnows flickering through

gaping nets lost to the sway
currents fraught with undecided

still

11/01/09

Again, the geese are flying
South, a flutter of words on
a blue page –

For a second, the world is full
of nothing more than black and white
wings that flag and signal

a start, a change of season.
I think of you on the other side
of a windy world

where waves lick at sea-scummed
rocks that have guarded shores
since before we were born.

With the instinct of a migrant
you will return and take root in dreams
in the roll of luminous waves reflected

in the sweeping eye of a lighthouse
as clouds puff up and grumble
shooed away by fair-weather winds.

I grin to think that we are so tiny -
grains of sand that spin pearls
into the mouths of oysters

split open on a beach at dawn.

Between Gasps

In the grandness of edits I live
in gaps and shadows; between
footsteps I walk to feel land’s beat.
To find a place in this air, I breathe in
taste wild cherries, autumn apples, dance
drunk as a bird lost in the sweetness of ferment.

At night I lose count of my sins
in the blackness between stars; my dreams
scale fortresses to find me. I burrow for them
overturn every stone, grapple suns until my
hands are burnt, follow them down into
silvery gasps between gills of a grounded fish.

Sometimes, I hear stories in the silence
just before wind moves through the leaves,
and my heart trembles like a paper lantern
strung between the trees. The bones of a fish
rattle on the shore below as high in the hills
a sound of chimes can only be heard as longing.

Over The Brim

Birds devour summer's last
insects, too sluggish -
escape not an option.
Overnight, a green world
turns white, chimney's offering
up smoke like peace pipes
to an indifferent sky that only
yesterday tipped its hat to
tomorrow; brimmed with blue.

Snow

winter has arrived

from the top of the blue spruce

junco's toss pine cones

Parallels

If only stars were not

formed of ice and storms

centuries captured stare

through lifeless eyes of night -

But born of soft wishes

uttered from mouths

unclasping dreams

like open velvet lockets -

If only stars were closer

casting into open hands

ascending as they descend

rising as they fall

Small (fret)

Water painting rocks
in wet smooth laps
clouds turn to dogs
and back into clouds
again comes the train
whistling for something
long and low puffing hard
over a land that elastics
itself around

you are standing in a field
playing air guitar
lost in the beat of a track.

In

The clock drips 10:
17 lights below the door
begin to tremor

soon his footsteps
outweigh
she walks from room

to room switching off
everything that once held
light tenderly in

small -
small hands.