I am haunted

I am haunted by the vacancies
her eyes made
the silent "O" in hung
mouth ringing
unspeakable gestures

signs (a poem for gestures)

disembodied hand
tracing circles
on a disembodied hand
so much
for deconstruction

skin of fingers
peeling 14 ways
toward fingertips
existential dilemna

one hand
pumping the heart
sounds like religion

fingers of light
beckoning

clenched fist
(1985)

Voice Annex

I need a voice willing
to stay here, even in scream
to hang like a beacon
come, see
I am here, do not
hurt me

a name in the book of uncertainty
still grows a deciding voice
circumventing everything

I have a way of shutting up
a frustration
the ambiguous feel of these corridors
going blind
with no one talking

I want to say something pointed
about pointlessness
"when space
is a button you lean on
accidentally" the voice
might rise
flicker a little dusty jazz
eager to stun you
(1981)

Those Who Love the Gods, Maria, Drive Themselves Mad

angular dancer in clumsy shoes
at the pivot of arithmetical distances
akimbo
dance for us on King Street
wave the rain over for a cigarette

there is a ritual for everything, she says
thing going into things
thing that can't be undone
the secret
of iron gates and sewer hatches
the pool player who tried to make
unbreakable circles around her
reading Camus to the courtroom
in her own defense
how it takes forever
to move her few possessions
one irate landlord further

I recall her saying
"there used to be a car here
there was a car!" by the curb
in the evenings
she would walk her path
back and forth
"for 11 years I haven't
killed myself"
and
"maybe I should nap
until I'm tired"

woman observing the war
from distance
dredging blackened images
of arms and legs from her hair
woman fear made
a genius
taken hard into reason

in a closet big as an apartment
a worn white blouse
crumpled on the wooden floor
last note of her dance struck
on a plate metal gong
covert tragedy of fingers touching
no one
there, not even forever

the final hysteria is not ours
I think, Maria
but belongs to those for whom
necessity and fact
are great twined tragedies
with us sinking

the fires are lit
we have have always loved
certain stories
in the red and dying light

legal mornings, marble afternoons
starry nights
running vast circles around us
(1987-88)

The Kind of Time

the kind of time it was
get written about
it was the kind of time years
follow from, years at a time
the mind's injured, going no further
dangled at the edge of speech, possibly
signing off, possibly convulsing

it was the kind of strained place
best suited to war photography's
drab demographic conspiracy
a sad rhetoric, grimacing
indistinct
from a thousand others
that never made headlines

by column inch
thre front lines of your boredom made
candor an evernt. simple and utter
as gunfire, the way you spoke
was fatal. your voice broke
across the schoolyard in the morning
like laughter. there was flame in your mouth
like ice, like
the impossibility of being human
lightly, no hope of disgrace
(1988)

Water Story

ghost ship of horrors on an ocean of space
the captain has shaved his head
he is thinking, perhaps for the last time
of land

deep in the hold, a stowaway plots their course
for the open sea

there is a woman in every harbour
in whose eyes twin ships are drifting
helplessly

there is a bed
where none of them will ever sleep
(1987)

Huron

I kept myself back from you like a wooden hand
stuck deep into autumn's wet pocket
going home among fields

roads have been dragged here to witness
the sky's execution
of one more grey miracle

trees are weeping
for the grain and the stone houses

a prisoner had hidden himself
beside an uncleared swamp that begins to sing
of lakes and forests inside him

night flares
rampant with signals
(1987)

Pacific

the sky fell
from language
the words fell out
from place

ocean's moon has withered
I had waves
I had the world and it slipped
from my hands like shattered women

in the belly of night stark
white masses sing
abandon, dream of escape

pacific's ungoverned desire
to drive us
underground echoes
untold wreckage of existence
(1987)

Hangman

I saw the wood
black rot, square yards of rubbish

steeples race to
the tempest, iron fingers
never chased, forever tempted

I saw the jinxed heart dangling
from its watches

by compulsive thread of sense
we are led
to games of hangman

word guessed
incorrectly was killing us
unsaid

a body now loosed in its cistern
(1987)

Ocean

his mouthful of body pleas
from the sea's trenched throat

dupe of respiration, tricked into breathing
the liquid delusion, his last

through sleep-shot clouds
his iron-necked heart craned
an industrial drain
hauled from the brown basin

came down with something bad
in tow
a disgusted hole
bitten into his foresighted dread

a different ledger drumming all night
statistics into his relentless head

(for Hart Crane, 1987)

allies of a sort

You don't believe it, and I don't believe you. That makes us allies of a sort.

You go through motions. They become you. Walls, furniture, windows, music, people you live with go right through you. It has happended, you say, I have become their small ghost. They go through you and through you. (It is not graceful.)

In a co-ed jail, we comfort each other with the knowledge of the dolefulness of man in all endeavours but one.

Once, talking to you, I felt my body covered with ants, but nice ones. Or was it just the memory of you leaving that time, when the oranges leaves hung close about the white benches in the park, in sweater-time, in the afternoon.

Good-night my tired loves, you say. I'm off. And the plastic wraps, ashes, dirty socks on the floor bed down too. Good night to sleep right through, if you do.

The great fear is what end looms when there is nothing left to say.

I waited also in the quiet excavations while seaward your stone face closed for good. I imagined your imaginary therapist, a kind of wide blue momentum. "Maybe you'll be my new one," you said once, but I knew better.

A good-bye like the stale scent of empty cupboards. Your hands were sweating, but not into mine. Outside, someone was kicking leaves, a kid running, his mother behind. A brown station wagon rolling by. You were like birds already.

A black sack in a dream threw something white into your eyes. The headboard cracked. Had the room always been this canted?

Later, red sunset lava flowing over stone walls and cement walks, grass softening darkly, wind's last moist mouthings, a dated romance heavy in the cells, and fingers on fire from touching.

Old music and coffee, a kind of bookstore perfume. A dress folded over her sleeping figure, like a larkspur collage, warming perceptibly.

To seek understanding - same as - terrified of misunderstanding. The archetypal flood - madness, no control. (I thought this when I visited you, more out of morbid curiosity than compassion, while you were undergoing a course of ECT.)

No posse comitatus will ever find us. They are cold and isolated and could never spot the truly fugitive heart. They think the fugitive heart is a political coup.

This nutty spirit of mortality, or rather morality, humiliates them in their hibernation, mocking them with true stories of themselves. Better to go into the blizzard and find a way just by going.

Half frozen canvas flaps at our approach - smudge of black ink on white paper.

falling continuously

falling continuously
you carry an education on your back
we, on the other hand, prefer to dance
a little above you, on pins

Reports kept coming: you were sad, you were normal, you hardly existed. The parts of your story fell to pieces. We started repeating ourselves, the dark rhythmic conspiracy in which we say we are trapped. The many ways of continuing and this one great distress are after all indistinguishable. Broken acres of violence - that's all this world is.

Weather! Not that it's going to rain. Forecasters are calling unanimously for a sunny, hot day. Not that a new war is breaking out in some place we know only through newspaper accounts and tales of allegiance. Besides, these tragedies do not yet return to us here. But the breeze disturbs something from years ago, pale sand at the eastern edge of the city, feverish trees vibrating.

Have you ever noticed the mythical city Calandria around us unspoken and clear as a bell? We are flash points on a continuum extending from our heads straight up trillions of years to our feet. Some station ahead finds all phenomena familiar, if somewhat dangerous, but don't hold your breath. It is still some way further on.

(It was one of those places where, if you had light thoughts, you floated, and if you had heavy thoughts, you stayed on the ground. Do you know I believed this true of our world for the longest time? And the only thing my friends could see in it was something patently, unforgivably literal!)

A new land opened before us, for the curtains of sleep had parted like two continents, revealing the groundlessness of our despair to us again in almost histrionic relief.

This bright corner of weather and the patience to have it, for which I envy you - that and your easy appearance, that noted generosity with utterly private meanings, the conjectured persona. I wished it, well, well. I wished it well.

the view here takes in general degradation of control

The view here takes in general degradation of control. I am sitting on the long beach of retired playthings, recalling her last visit. It seems we slept in the middle of an eternal conversation, insubstantial together, alone among the wind and rust, we. I was thankful for the sand in my clothes and the discomfort it brought.

Misunderstanding defines this isolation, and in distance we might be living in factories, surrounded by blue smog; unmoving, unaccountable and compulsive. Whatever summer means all summer long, when summer is a sphere of endless brightness, and deeper darks, it surrounds us and the factories too, and we can hardly make out these geometries, these insistances.

How do we become such instances of isolation? I dreamed I saw the blue van abandoned in a bush off concession eight, east of London, Ontario.

If I am of several minds, one is here, then, another always somewhere around, lurking, a third is high above the sun, and a fourth is never found.

A transparent silence assaults the barricades of our wintering. Twenty floors of the city glitter like late night movie sets. Random actors pace soft lyrics across the airwaves, suggesting as they can the possiblity of our final conversion.

What is not ancient in me is what dies first, I thought. I don't know, startlingly, what a significant act is, let alone whether or not one can ever judge their effectiveness. I once thought posterity was the elimination of the useless, a kind of recreation in all senses of the word. After all, it only happens after the fact, all that means anything is really just commentary, the rubric that follows the axe falling.

Facts are also ways of doing nothing. Sooner or later one acted. (This too is a strategy for withdrawal.)

The unknown is closed when the known is terrifying, and the unknown promises a dream-like conjunction of act and intellect. (The terror of love, when one can't think oneself out of it.)

There is no charm against indifference, no breaking of the cycle.

Convinced she still wants the quiet of lasting friendlessness, she see twenty floors of the city on top of one another in a liveable fashion, apartments erected in a flood of isolation and dread.

Tragedy begins by passing up opportunities to kiss her with much repressed passion.

The old stories cannot affect us here. A wealth of graphic detail will not change our purest motives toward stasis.

All I am capable of… I mean, there is a tone there and I seem to be of that shading. I don't seem to be wanting anything in particular. Breathing is hours. The worlds don't collapse, the very air does not suffocate me. Only one thing is certain. You will not come.

Something gave up ghosts. Your body shook with lack of faith, writhing like a found politician, an eyed darkness spinning in its plasma. This is the imaged you'd made yourself in, like a criminal.

Do I know these murderers, any of them? There seems to be a lot of them. Would I remember their faces, match them to the posters (if there are posters), the particulars?
In this severe surviving, my eyes do not stray. I do not recognize anyone. I've never seen them before in my life.

Not walking endless factory and residential neighbourhoods, as if someone would appear in the long shadows to tell you we are all this way now. Not wandering as if there were no one to tell your significant heart to. Tell your significant heart to me, I want to say.

I believe, you say, reaching for the hammer a book said wields the world. I believe, you say, reaching for the gun.