that spoiled his view of the ocean:
the tree had the last word,
ending its considerable life
with the Chekhovian grin
of a hole in the ground
that shouted and shouted
until my neighbour
running, heard.
Here’s the only poem I have not yet posted from my chapbook “Irresistible”, available from Finishing Line Press or Amazon.ca or Amazon.com.
In the newspaper, a photo of a youth
taking the picture of a young couple
standing in front of the once beautiful
Ghazala Gardens Hotel:
the man, shielded
from the sun by dark glasses,
arms loose at his side,
the woman, lion-maned,
her tawny bare belly sliding out
from a spotless white pleated skirt,
both smiling those postcard
“Wish You Were Here” smiles
as if the building behind them
had not, overnight, been destroyed
by a bomb,
as if lives as innocent as theirs
had not been lost,
as if, when on vacation
one must go on
having a good time.
Or as if, having safely emerged
from the shadowy remains
of a Red Sea resort
that lived up to its name,
behind the shining columns
of the bared teeth
of their smiles,
they cannot hear
other carefully constructed
worlds collapsing.
Known as ‘the city of peace”, Sharm El-Sheikh was the unfortunate target of a terrorist attack aimed at Egypt’s tourist industry in 2005. The Ghazala Gardens Hotel has since been rebuilt. This poem is included in my chapbook “Irresistible”, available from Finishing Line Press or Amazon.com or Amazon.ca.
Early morning
with the precision of birds
the fishermen go out,
slickered and keen-eyed,
hands on the rudder
of the rest of their lives.
Every day, kings
and drama queens get
pulled from their kingdoms,
gasp against fiberglass,
get bonked on the head,
don’t know what hit them.
Early evening, the beaten
and the just plain beat
line up on the long dock
until the last rod-wrestler
weighs in with his picture
perfect catch,
hanging from
that stainless steel hook
a stilled, still shining body
whose open eyes stare back
from a height never imagined.
Sweet Jesus, Jack!
Another poem from my chapbook “Irresistible”, available from Finishing Line Press
or Amazon.com or Amazon.ca . The photo above is of the original lodge there. It is now
the site of an ecological observatory and marine field research. You can read more
about its new purpose here
My poem “Lovers In The Lobby” is now up at Blue Heron Review. Many thanks to editor Cristina Norcross for including it in this themed summer issue: Aspects of Love. My poem is second to last, so there’s a lot of scrolling; you can read it here.
Along the way, please also read my good friend Mike Lewis-Beck’s poem “Purple Love” – wonderful to find ourselves in the same issue! And there are some stunning photos accompanying the poems too!
Photo by Julia Caesar on Unsplash
My poem “Shine” has just been published in Arc Poetry Magazine 86, the Summer 2018 Issue, available only as a print issue right now. Shine didn’t win Arc’s Poem of the Year award but was shortlisted for it. You can read the poem and the judge’s comments here. I am very honoured to be among the finalists and to have this poem finally go out into the world and what a beautiful journal to make its first appearance in!
I’ve been off the grid for a couple of weeks, away boating where there’s no cell reception or internet or papers or TV! I hope to post more frequently, now that I’m back and almost completely moved into our new house (on a very large island no less!).
as an abstract painter in my neighbourhood,
“Yielding to Transience” the theme of her
current exhibition, according to the pamphlet.
It’s that simple, the only life we have we’ll lose
in a neon nose dive or the drift of gradual surrender.
My Jane, who briefly entered and briefly spoke
in poems—having it out with melancholy—
said Let evening come and it did, under cover
of leukemia, far too soon. Wish it were otherwise.
A moody harvest, those notes from the other side.
Now there’ll be a conflux of Janes when I see
one’s art, read the other’s poem. A conjuration—
open sesame into the chambers of two hearts.
The amazing echoes, bone’s signature marrow
waving its wand again, sweet Om on the tongue.
Another poem from my chapbook “Irresistible”, available from Finishing Line Press here and also from Amazon here. And do check out this link to the artist Jane Kenyon’s site: here. She also has a Facebook page, titled Jane Kenyon Art Studio. Of course I had to write a poem about this synchronicity – what’s in a name anyway?
A searing yowl from the rocky shore.
Again. Again. Stops all conversation
in the dinghy and we motor closer.
A lone seagull is waiting for its prize,
flanked by a dozen seals draped over
the surrounding rocks. The gull flies off
at our approach and the seals slip frantically
from their posts into the murmurring sea,
leaving one black cigar shape well above the tideline
still breathing in the bright promise of another day:
it’s a seal pup, eyes oozing oceans
of green and yellow pus. He lifts a flipper
as I tip a bucket of saltwater gently over him
and then, lips curling, sausages himself
between two rocks. I try pouring the water
over the rocks to drip down on him but
unable to wriggle any further away,
he turns his head, teeth bared.
There’ll be no mothering for this
fast-aging, whiskered face:
he will live unassisted
until the life he was given is taken back,
until the blazing August light becomes a second skin
and the lapping sounds of rising water carry him
off into the salmon-glinting sea of his birth,
until death, not taken from him,
death is all his,
rendering the blurred shapes that swam
once beside him—nothing more
than an unfinished dream.
Another poem from my chapbook “Irresistible”, available from Finishing Line Press here
Is it a miracle
that I found the worm in time—
having gone into my den much earlier
than usual, to turn the computer on—
and saw the dark, exhausted thread of its
body lying in the middle of a desert
of beige carpet, picked it up, barely moist, and
laid it outside on the wet grass, and watched
until it finally waved goodbye at one end,
easing itself into the darkness it knows?
Or is the miracle
that the annelid slid
through sealed doors and windows
to get inside my house in the first place,
that it became a finger pointing
from the Buddha’s hand,
laying at my feet its five paired hearts
and the power of intervention—
of life continued
or of death without comment?
Is there a day without its miracle,
for doesn’t one follow the other
because of a vast accordion of worms
playing now the soil’s anthem, now its dirge,
burrowing through millennial darknesses
so plants can breathe and grow, and
become the planet’s green lungs feeding
the body of this world, each inhabitant
still part of that first inspiration:
the good air of life lived, wholly inspired.
This poem first appeared in North Shore Magazine and later in New Millennium Writing’s 25th Anthology as an honorable mention before being included in my recent chapbook “Irresistible”, available for purchase from Finishing Line Press here (always in stock) or from Amazon here .
Unlike other guys
who reach a mountaintop and leave with it, move it
under the hut of the body
so they can breathe its rare air at will,
see themselves later through anything,
Guy Waterman got stuck on one craggy point
that jagged heaven: it put the bit in his mouth
he could speak to God only there,
called it his kind of prayer. And so his rosary
of left foot, right foot began, decades
of climbing the same mountain, breaking
out of the fog and cloud into a brilliance
of mind and sky. Each time harder to take
lucky boots and crampons off, wear ordinary
shoes: where they tread, a son leaves, is
never seen or heard from again; others die.
Each son lost thickening the Gordian
knot of unspeakable sorrow. How possibly
deter him from wanting to freeze in time
a transcendent moment of no return?
Love stayed his wife: at home, knowing.
Praying for a below zero night. And so
he stepped onto the Old Bridle Path,
nodding his last hello at Agony Ridge,
a few hikers headed down before the sun set.
Had a canteen half-water, half-alcohol.
Had a wind that took his breath away.
Not turning back, instead turning his back
on this world, he struck his father’s
wooden alpenstock into the ice five feet
off the trail and curled up beside it,
placing a period where the small comma
of his body would be seen. Three days passed
before friends muscled him down on a stretcher
for what felt like forever. Finally was.
This poem was a finalist in IthacaLit’s 2015 Lauren K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Contest and is included in my chapbook “Irresistible”, available for purchase through Finishing Line Press here or Amazon here. I came across the story of Guy Waterman’s life accidentally and was moved to write this poem; he was an accomplished author with a complicated life. For those interested, here’s a link to his story: A Natural Death
My father had the good fortune
to be visited by six women
last Friday: Carol came to clean
his house, do laundry, get the mail,
Sue to bathe him, then cook lunch
and dinner, Ann to cut his gnarly
toe nails and massage his feet, Barb—
a nurse—to check his vitals, Louise
to tame his dead wife’s garden, and
Lynne, his daughter from three thousand
miles away, to make sure he was okay.
The door kept opening, we came
and went, and the golden October
light wandered from room to room,
like us, not in a hurry to leave. And he
glowed with the attention, feasting on
a cornucopia of witty conversation
through the rise and fall of our busy hands,
we, the chance wives of widower row.
But come darkness across the sheets
of his bed, we were all forgotten as he
patted the spot beside him, whispering
“Night-night, love”—as he always had—
to the irreplaceable one.
This poem, first published in Calyx Journal, is in my new chapbook “Irresistible”, just out and available from Finishing Line Press here and also available for purchase from Amazon here. Any customer reviews are especially appreciated on either site!
