Category: poetry

This popped up this morning, evidence that I don’t need much inspiration for a poem:

From the yew-grove to the valley of the fallen
I shall travel with my bow, my knife, my faithful dog
Under the light of the ancestors, bright now,
Dancing the heavens, I shall walk with my thoughts
And my shadow, cast green along the snow,
Until the tale of all my deeds is told
And Freya gathers me into her field at last

So, there isn’t just Valhalla. There are two other places the dead go. Freya has a field called folkvangr (pronounced folkwongs, just to mess you up) where she gathers half the dead. The Allfather gets the other half of the noble dead in Valhalla.

 

pale green
pale grey
mushroom beige
one can wake to a drowse, just a tiny bit
of consciousness
and know you’re in hospital

He breathes in six to ten second gouts
and I watch
family & friends    the doc     the nurse    the housekeeper
come and go

Sometimes we sound him
for how he’s doing
& sometimes he replies and squirms like a sleepy toddler

in a bed too small for him
he shrinks
and next to him
just there
on the other side of the window

another place for people to go to die
and get better
and fight death to a draw
is rising
under the watchful eyes of the crows

while his son speaks softly and rubs his back

the time that passes is modelling clay
the time that passes is silent pictures taken of a dying man
as he rests in the arms of his son

Here ya go.

The writer is always a fantasist, because words are not the things they describe.

One can wander in the far lands of the extraction of etymology, but nothing gives the picture like the exploded view.

Therefore one must diagram, and in making a diagram, you fall in love with the diagram, you make excuses for the state of the diagram, you tell people that this diagram is the best, you have nightmares that this diagram is the worst, but nothing can prepare you for how little the diagram is like the processes and states of matter which exist in real time.

One makes maps.

This map tells me distances inside the ‘lower mainland’. This map helps me gauge how many kCal to pedal a bicycle up that hill. This map tells me what geology I will encounter when I dig. This map tells me about the snaking tubes of metal and concrete, plastic and glass, that run under the surface. This map tells me what mammals are common to this part of the world. This map tells me what the odds are that my home will experience earthquake damage. This map tells me about the airspace above my home. This map tells me what stars are above my dwelling place and how far they are from me. This map shows me where the highway traffic cams are. This map shows the arrangement of the planets and major bodies in the solar system. This map shows what languages were and are spoken on this land. This map shows a picture of every house on every street, but not the alleyways. This map shows every street including the alleyways. This map shows the tallest trees by species. This map shows the strangest architecture. This map shows the location of an abandoned cemetery. This map shows the heron rookeries. This map shows all the known external locations for the CW show Supernatural. This map shows buried treasure but the raccoons already dug it up and ate it so imagine the nine year old coming back and seeing a hole in the ground where the candy was. All of these maps beg you to imagine. And there are thousands of people for whom a map is an affront, for nothing in their brain works that way. None of these maps are connected except in my mind. They never will be connected. They will never be overlaid. They exist together, floating one on top of another, only in this poem; for a moment you too can hold them up there in your mind, having been given this sketch. Then the paragraph finishes and this time tomorrow you will not remember that it happened.

One writes because it’s in your head and has to come out. One writes because there is something breathing in your ear; there is no control, between the impetus and the page, merely a hint of directionality. One writes because the variation between the imagined and the real is a big play-space and most of it has not been explored yet. One writes because one wants to rid English of its colonialisms and make it the one true argot of freedom, breaking its chains, filling in its scandalously tiny trove of words for relations. One writes because how else is one to demonstrate how vastly different one is from everyone else; and simultaneously how dragged-through-drains dirty and boring and pedestrian one is, although if one is hosed down and buffed up and stood under a certain light one might pass muster at a public gathering. One writes because it’s always personal. One writes because it’s always political. One writes because there is a special someone waiting for your words, if your words survive. One writes because the past made you do it. One writes because the future is begging. One writes because no matter how grey and recondite the subject, the words are not the things, and even that most noble academic is a fantasist, though her choice of words is not lightly made, is not an accident.

to be devoured in a place
where your mind has no purchase
inverse of a location

you find yourself here
anyway

the place goes away and the feeling
of it, a question mark in pyrotechnic smoke
most literal
continues

there is a trope in screen delivered content
a figurecomestoyouinadreamandtellsyou
content
(by which I mean
whatever the plot device is)
is a lie

the movement of maggots is not proof of life
unless you’re speaking of the maggots
and only a corrupt culture
will sell that viewpoint to you

the ground shakes with
their nagging vicious drumbeats
so it looks as if the maggots dance in time

whatever happens after humankind is gone,
a token will persist although it will not live
this tooth of mine (she points, grimacing)
the set point for a stalactite

don’t forget, as bad as things may be
to leave things to confuse the aliens

Darkness of self-satisfaction
Extends further than my small hand can grasp, or warm
I feel beyond the veil of my misunderstanding
Not one possibility but six hundred and more, dampened
and stifled
and scuffed but nowhere near dead

Like a cat with poor vision, twisting its head
Around and from side to side
I try to fix eyes stark as coloured glass
On the correct impressions

My spirits, various and needy
fly about with tarot faces
Or lie about, complaining of misogyny
There is no medicine in the argument

I’m tired of hearing about it he says
I’m tired of hearing about it he says

Did he hear it once
Hearing
was it all he did

I need to clean my ears
Close my mouth

Of the nations splintered when Columbus came
He says but they enslaved
An NDN voice’s response on social media
-Angry- Cite your sources, you stupid white man
&
Of the nations pummelled back from the coast
He says but what are they doing now
And I say language revitalization
And he says where is their standing army
Can’t have a nation without a standing army
And I’m literally reading the Icelandic sagas
And not only did the Icelanders have their own goddamned country
They did it without an executive branch AND no standing army
And produced the greatest literature of medieval Europe
So go fuck yourself on that point
&
Of the nations who never ceded land
He says how do they expect to take it back
And I think to myself
O love your tower of books is now a prison

Words boil up, the well-loved face goes hard

They, they, they, and not
we, we, we.

I have responses, gleaned
From a longhouse and a glass pipe
Buried in the ground,
Right through the bones of dead Indians
How ‘nice’
Academics and dancers
They have told me what to say
But I said nothing.
I don’t want the fun of my visit to go away

There’s no such thing as race he says.

If you’re smart
You don’t say that when you’re white
And that pulls down more ire

I dreamed a grandmother, wizened
Wearing a blanket and street clothes
Came into the house
(Which the bank, independent of
the Musqueam and Sto:lo
said that I never owned)
And asked me
Am I not welcome here

Dreams are full of muffled silences

You can’t know how long they’ll last

And genocides, if no one calls them by name
Are best distributed; a little death here
A little dislocation there; days in the skookum house
And nights with fentanyl, hiding in the hit.

Clouds have heft in this town, no-one thinks
they’re insubstantial, however they hover,
dance, slide by each other at different speeds
each one as heavy as an elephant

In the weeks of our cloudless summer
We gaze above our toothed horizons in puzzlement

The herds that graze the sky have all migrated.

 

 

does it help that I called you on your birthday
yes
that is a ‘yes’
but below that tidal crest of astonishment

that it is only accidents which provide me with
my shine
not anything I do

and I let go of the designs of things
moving backward through understanding
into confusion again

I wanted to speak to you, and there, I have

but that’s not ornate enough
for my mood

I’m thinking of you
putting your game face on
to send me a chapbook

what is a book but a tree
given speech

what is a friend but my heart
given another home

Can’t have biscotti without nuts

not in my estimation

although of course people do it all the time

the peak expression of the twice cooked gem

breaks like a wave over happy teeth

and that is why I have ordered nuts today

 

 

a pome

So I read this and I immediately thought of Slider and Jesse.