The Ice Man
In 1991 he was found inside a glacier of
the Alps. Seems he had been out walking.
An x-ray found an arrowhead in his
back. He was 5,3
00 years old.
If he had known his stroll by an alpine lake
would be his last, how the arrow
from behind
would thud into his daydream,
how the lake would claim him, harden,
how anthropologists would pore over
his Neolithic self the way his own kin
hovered with stone knives over a kill,
ready to skin, dismember, eat…
If he were fast-tracked five millenia,
would he say, what are you looking at,
what do you want to know, where fire
comes from? Or, hey, where can I
get some of those sneakers? Or, I am
no source, I am an omen. The way one
of us, blindsided, mangled by a muscle car
running the light, might face the Maker
calmly, nothing more to prove, might say,
I don’t want in, just want you to know what
I’ve been through in case you want to learn
something. You gods, such know-it-alls.
Most of all, would he have wanted
a word with his mate left that morning
by a hearth? What tenderness, what worry
might have furrowed that big brow?
From Straddle, Salmon Poetry, 2015.
Poem nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Walking Thought
Who are we when we sleep? Are we more
or less ourselves? Sleepwalker, are you pulled
mindless on hidden wires or do you chart
a chosen path? What I fear or who I want to be?
Never mind. Never that mind. Let me find another.
The body’s mind that feels the ground it travels.
Second mind, that knows about mirrors.
No telling if waking sleeps or sleep awakens,
but I love the rise and fall of music, the fading shore,
beauty new and old. I walk in wonder’s thought,
alone or blessedly with you or you, the blazing
surprise of morning, its graceful daily demise.
From The Somnambulist and the Good Life, Salmon Poetry, 2020
Tail Wind
At my back a broad, invisible hand. The pedals whir
almost on their own. Their fast, perfect circles trace
a forward path of fast, perfect circles from here to
fleeting here. I’m showered by twirling maple wings.
Leaves flash bright undersides and strain against stems,
just barely held back on bent branches. Long grasses
bob and dip. A blackbird struggling the other way
flaps hard in slow motion. I’ve been that bird.
Up ahead on the lush sloping ridge, the long
white arms of turbines rotate from tall towers
like gleaming, elegant prophets. I’m blessed
today by this unseen power. So much riding on it.
From Cycling in Plato’s Cave, Fomite Press, 2014
Waitress I Never Knew
Harelipped you were beautiful,
loon-lonely eyes and lithe
shape split by the veering, renegade
lip. Asymmetrical, utterly
stirring. After the surgery I wasn’t
even sure it was you, so nearly
regular your mouth, just a hint
of up-pull, so flashing
your look. You seemed younger, less
sad, less sure, too, as if you
had become your own little sister.
How I wanted that wildly rising
line still to be there. I had no right.
I know your life is better now,
hear it in the loose swing of your chatter.
But your glance -- more flit
than flash. Something has been smoothed
away I loved. At least one self
wrenched from bed by thugs you never
knew, hustled off, never seen
again. Now it is left to find out
what was lost in that line
you were born with, what became
of the disappeared, what grace
resides in that thin river you
no longer have to cross,
and where it may be found again,
and why I worry so.
From Falling Body, Salmon Poetry, 2009
It’s So Much Like Missiles
One day you hear they've been fired —
the missiles I mean — you imagine them
curving like so many Golden Gates
between a hundred cities, serene vapour trails
with some message you cannot imagine,
and don't have to, for you know
you have one half of one hour.
And everything's suddenly simple,
like the time you heard your father had died,
long-distance the phone clicking
softly as a heart while you felt everything
free/e in your tiny kitchen, altered,
and impossibly unchanged.
And the funny thing is not that they've gone
up — the missiles I mean — but that they remind
you of something you didn't do, some words
you didn't say, just didn't take the trouble
to say, like the time you were leaving town,
and a friend, and you never told her how much
she meant to you, and you never saw her again.
Now missiles are flying, and it's just
like when your father died, and the visit
you'd put off became a dream-train you lived
on nightly, dark train pounding on smoothest
rails of guilt, never ever arriving.
The thing about what's unsaid is
you can never take it back.
If you had made that final visit
you'd have fought with him, most probably,
over Trudeau, or disarmament, something
not too close. And it would have been
furious and futile till it hit you
that this time he was dying,
and you'd have stopped, and so would he,
both of you sheepish, feeling
each other sheepish, awkwardness
your last strange sharing.
But the thing about not visiting, not
loving enough to say or fight or apologize
or see something new between you –
the thing about not saying is
it's so much like those missiles
up there, on the way, on the final way,
so undone, so unsaid, and so impossible
to take back.
From The Middleman, Salmon Poetry, 2003